HEADLINER SESSION

Dr. Allen Hightower

Rehearsal Techniques: Setting Goals and Improving Efficiency

This session will focus on how a choral conductor formulates both long and short term goals for their ensemble, and offers rehearsal techniques to help accomplish these goals.

Marilyn Mason

Classroom Management through Relationship Building and Restorative Justice

Discipline - Classroom Management - Redirecting Behavior No matter what term you use, we need tools to navigate the management aspect of our teaching positions. Upon reflection of my teaching career, it has all come down to relationship building for me. This session I will share strategies that I have implemented and developed over 30 years of teaching Middle and High school choirs. Our time together will include scenarios that can be discussed so that ideas can flow from participants as well. If you are at the beginning of your teaching career or a veteran teacher, this session can allow for open sharing of questions, concerns, experiences, and supportive dialogue.

Dan Baker

Cancer, COVID, Choir, & Coping - Strategies for Healing, Motivation & Self-Improvement

We are real people, and things happen both to us and for us. In this age of COVID, choral musicians have become masters of overcoming and adjusting. What happens when you are at the end of your "rope" and cannot take anymore? From my personal experiences citing expert teachings, I discuss coping techniques and self-care that can be vital to keeping your love of choral music.

Hersel Cremeans

Rehearsal Techniques Throughout the Show Choir Season: Keeping Your Group Moving Forward

Rehearsal tips and strategies for the Beginning, Middle and End of the season. Let’s discuss ways to improve your rehearsal time and possibly reduce some of your work load.

HEADLINER SESSION

Dr. Allen Hightower

Choral Tone: Maximizing Your Singers Potential

This session will focus on building choral tone through both warm-up exercises and through rehearsal techniques which build ensemble sound.

Dan Andersen

Voice-Charting Your Young Men Why, How, and What to Listen For

In this session we will discuss why voice-charting is imperative to a successful choral program. With the help of some young men, I will walk you through, step by step, how I voice chart the men in my classroom. You will be able to hear, first hand, what to listen for as you are voice-charting the young men in your choir. You will also see how I use the Chart as a tool to help your young singers advocate for themselves as musicians.

Matt Gerhard

The Choir in Contemporary Worship Services

We will explore how the church choir can be an integral part of the band-driven, contemporary worship service. We will look at solo repertoire, ideas for congregational praise songs, and reasons why the church choir is still a viable ministry avenue no matter what the worship style.

Chris Boveroux

Everything Old Is New Again: Using Free, Online Resources to Find New Performance Materials

The Choral Public Domain Library (CPDL) is a boon to choir programs in need of accessible repertoire that does not require a large budget. However, the sheer volume of music on the site, combined with its open-source platform, can make navigating its resources difficult. In this presentation, I will discuss effective search techniques for using CPDL and review curated lists of printable music appropriate for middle school, high school, church, or community choirs. I will also discuss editorial practices for evaluating scores and creating your own new editions.

Garrett Breeze

The Choral Director's Guide to Self Publishing. Current trends and new technologies are transforming the ways music is created and distributed, creating opportunities for composers to work directly with ensembles at all levels like never before. This session will offer suggestions of best practices that will help conductors find and evaluate music from non-traditional sources—including how to engage with and support composers directly. It will also provide information about self-publishing, copyright, and business practices for music educators who wish to self-publish their own music.

Joshua Pedde

The Artist Within: Rehearsal and Conducting Techniques for Elementary/Middle School Choirs

During this session we will look at the role of the conductor and how our conducting plays a pivotal role in our rehearsals, their effectiveness and the overall sounds of our singers.

HEADLINER SESSION

Dr. Allen Hightower

Choral Tone: Maximizing Your Singers Potential

Phrasing: Score Study and Application

This session will focus on ways in which choral conductors can empower their singers to perform more musically through the shaping of text and musical line.

HEADLINER SESSION

Dr. Julie Yu-Oppenheim

Planning and Executing the Choral Vacation

Choral directors are some of the hardest working folks in show business. When I have the opportunity to observe rehearsals, many times the directors are doing most of the work with students giving the minimum. Directors are exhausted, and students are not tapped of their full potential. Through thoughtful planning and efficient guidance, rehearsals can shift to where the students are doing all the work with directors enjoying the fruits of their labor. (Beachy drinks with umbrellas not provided.)

Melissa Ai-Ling Walsh

Strategies and Tools for Assessment and Engagement

Have you wanted to regularly assess the progress of the musical skills of individual singers in your ensemble? Do you want each singer to develop personal accountability for their preparedness on the choir's repertoire? Do you want every singer to be invested in the process of learning and growing as a musician? Do these goals seem overwhelming given the number of singers you would need to individually assess? This session discusses strategies and activities for accomplishing those goals. Although it is geared towards classroom choir instructors, other choral directors may also benefit from the ideas shared.

Kayla Smith & Milo Ellis

Culturally Affirming Pedagogy in the Choral Classroom

Culturally affirming pedagogies have seen a huge leap in development over the last few years, and the choral field is no exception. In this session, we will explore how to develop students’ identities, how to build connections to themselves and each other, and how to do that all while preparing for their next performance. Choral music is a beautiful place to dive into the things that make our students global citizens and lovers of themselves and of music.

Elly Moore & Lynne Woolsey

Small but Mighty Choir

Often times the small choir can seem limiting to the choral director and singers. We will discuss practical ways to embrace leading a small choir without compromising musicianship, community, and opportunity. Whether stepping into a small choir setting or re-starting a choral program, we will offer insight and encouragement into effective tools we have used in the school, church, and community choir settings.

Lauren Southard

Young Exceptional Singers: Beginning Choral Techniques and Shaping the Young Choir Experience

This session will equip participants to go beyond curriculum and strategies for teaching the basics, and move forward with the vocal technique, the engaging classroom environment, and the artistic experience in the beginning choir classroom.

Kyle Karum

Vivaldi Meets Vygotsky: The Student-Led Sectional and How to Make Them Meaningful

Breaking an ensemble up for sectionals rehearsals and small group work is a strategy used by many choral directors. These breakout sessions can be hugely beneficial for both musician and director alike. However, this is an area not often studied from a theoretical perspective in our field. In this session, we will look at various theories and approaches that can help today's choral directors facilitate and run a successful sectional rehearsal and small group program. We will find and apply practical solutions to enhance this area of leading a choral program.

Chris Albanese

Masked and Distanced": COVID Protocols as a Vehicle for Enhancing Choral Musicianship

In this session, I explore this phenomenon while presenting ways in which the seemingly "limiting" factors associated with choral singing during COVID-19 can actually facilitate more expressive singing and heightened musicality. The session will focus on the following items, while revealing techniques for incorporating each within the "post-COVID" rehearsal.

1. Use of the facial mask as a vehicle for developing singer's resonance

2. Physical distance: developing independent musicianship and balancing the reference/feedback ratio

3. Breathing with the arms: gestural expression for the masked conductor

Reed Spencer

Place, Space, and Song: How the Pandemic Helped Us Recognize Our Communities

While the pandemic, in many ways, forced us into a virtual space, it also gave us the gift of looking at our very local communities. Our specific places all had individual gifts, needs, restrictions, and opportunities. This session will explore the unique ways we can engage communities and their needs through creative programming, cross-discipline collaboration, and innovative use of space. How can we thinking differently about the concert space, the method of communication, and the content of our repertoire. How did the pandemic teach us to use creative spaces to our advantage? How were we encouraged to see what is unique about our communities and places? How can our programming continually speak to our specific communities during a time when we need connection with those around us? How can we broaden AND deepen our collaboration with those around us? This session will offer examples of how this took shape in one place, and will also involve creative brainstorming for participants to think about creative use of their spaces, people, resources, and programming.

Madlen Batchvarova & Galina Stanisheva

From Bulgaria With Love – Choral Music Intercultural Pedagogy

Live Streamed from Bulgaria with the "Dobri Hristov" Children's Choir

The practice of musically educating students in music as a cross-cultural endeavor is gaining speed in the choral rehearsal room. This session will offer a culture bearers' practical approaches to the principles of teaching and learning that are becoming essential for all contemporary conductors. Those principles encompass avenues for building musical skills using intercultural music material, acquiring cultural knowledge, and developing a sensitivity to music from a distant land.

HEADLINER SESSION

Dr. Julie Yu-Oppenheim

Teaching Aural Skills at Any Level So It is an Addictive Process

In addition to teaching choral music education courses and directing ensembles a course I absolutely love to teach is Aural Skills. It is surprising to see the varying levels of proficiency of aural skills in students who attend the university setting. It is even more surprising to see how scary they find the process. This session will show how we can teach aural skills at any level (especially K-12) so that the hard work feels like something joyful that the students will look forward to engaging in.

HEADLINER SESSION

Dr. Julie Yu-Oppenheim

Music: What You See in the Microscope in Response to and as a Forecaster of Social Justice

The arts have been a method of communicating the experience of society within and reacting to social justice. Music has a historical record of representing all sides of the aisle. In this presentation we will identify examples of this as well as studying the predictable nature of how we grow through the process of making and consuming music.

GUEST HEADLINER SESSION

Dr. Cedric Dent

New to Vocal Jazz?

This session is designed for choral directors with little or no experience with vocal jazz. It will provide ideas on how to introduce vocal jazz techniques into the traditional choral music tradition.

Mark Yount

Choosing the Best Jazz Music for Your Choir

Almost all choir directors have a good sense of how to pick choral music for their choirs. Picking out the correct music for your jazz performance may be more difficult. This session will discuss figuring out what your students likely can, and can’t do. It will also discuss how to choose a jazz “set” of music for ISSMA contest or your school's jazz/pop performance. Concepts will be compared and contrasted to the choosing of choral music in order to make it more accessible to those that are newer to jazz, while being helpful to those that are more experienced.

Melissa Garcia

Motivational Techniques Aimed at Musicianship

In this session, we will cover warm-ups and engaging activities to keep the kids engaged and singing.

Sarah Kavanagh

Community, Connection and Collaboration: Communication Strategies to Promote & Expand Your Choral Organization

Explore ways to identify and optimize opportunities to build a community presence for your choral ensembles. We will spend time evaluating how you are currently connecting and collaborating to build a community presence, reflecting on areas of potential growth, and exploring tools and strategies to consider as you make plans for the fall. Examples from school, church, and community ensembles will be shared.

Victoria Sofagoes

Entering Uncharted Territory: Re-Mapping Our Understanding of the Female Voice

In this session we will study the changes the female voice goes through during puberty, pregnancy, menopause, and beyond. We will discuss the impact that hormones and the pelvic floor can have on singers and how to address these changes in healthy ways with your singers/students of all ages.

Rex Rund

Who's Afraid of Gregorian Chant

There has been a resurgence in interest in Gregorian Chant in the past decade or so, and not only in the Catholic Church. In a world filled with all things fleeting, discover how the timelessness of chant can open up a whole new palette for your choir, whether in concert or in worship. We will explore choral singing of both traditional Latin chant and choral Psalm tones in English, using resources from St. Meinrad Archabbey, right here in Indiana.

Ruth Dwyer

Elementary Choir Reading Session

This session will focus on reading through various music for the elementary choir.

Eric Schmidt

Choral Singing & Wellbeing – Healing Capacity of Music

Choral singing is the most accessible form of communal music making. Therefore, choir directors have a unique potential to make a difference in many people's lives. This presentation will discuss the inherent capacity of music to help maintain, improve, and restore emotional and physical health. Knowing about this capacity can not only help choral educators to employ music in their teaching in order to achieve non-musical outcomes; it can also provide effective arguments to further emphasize why – in the words of John Rutter – "choral music is not one of life's frills" but rather an essential contribution to our schools and communities.

Nate Hayden

Pathway to Success: Helpful Hints for the Civic Arts Pathway

Choral singing is the most accessible form of communal music making. Therefore, choir directors have a unique potential to make a difference in many people's lives. This presentation will discuss the inherent capacity of music to help maintain, improve, and restore emotional and physical health. Knowing about this capacity can not only help choral educators to employ music in their teaching in order to achieve non-musical outcomes; it can also provide effective arguments to further emphasize why – in the words of John Rutter – "choral music is not one of life's frills" but rather an essential contribution to our schools and communities.