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iRooted in the experience of a professional choral conductor, this book provides a guide to practical issues facing conductors of choral ensembles at all levels, from youth choruses to university ensembles, church and community choirs, and professional vocal groups. Paired with the discussion of practical challenges is a discussion of over fifty key works from the choral literature, with performance suggestions to aid the choral conductor in directing each piece. Dealing with often-overlooked yet vital considerations such as how to work with composers, recording, concert halls, and choral tours, A Practical Guide to Choral Conducting offers a valuable resource for both emerging choral conductors and students of choral conducting at the undergraduate and graduate levels.ii iii

Classical Recording: A Practical Guide in the Decca Tradition is the authoritative guide to all aspects of recording acoustic classical music. Offering detailed descriptions, diagrams, and photographs of fundamental recording techniques such as the Decca Tree, this book offers a comprehensive overview of the essential skills involved in successfully producing a classical recording. Written by engineers with years of experience working for Decca and Abbey Road Studios and as freelancers, Classical Recording equips the student, the interested amateur, and the practising professional with the required knowledge and confidence to tackle everything from solo piano to opera.

An outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 infection occurred among church attendees after an infectious chorister sang at multiple services. We detected 12 secondary case-patients. Video recordings of the services showed that case-patients were seated in the same section, up to 15 m from the primary case-patient, without close physical contact, suggesting airborne transmission.

The Recording that Changed Everything One summer while I was in college, I worked at the Jacksonville office of the Army Corps of Engineers. Meeting William Dawson I was so excited to attend my first ACDA National Convention in 1979, now a young choral professor at Winston-Salem State University. [...]he looked at his watch and announced, \"It's getting late!\" I was being thrown out of William Dawson's room! I was 6'1\" when I walked in, but I might have been half that tall on my way out. Dawson in Residency I sat on the Winston-Salem State University Lyceum Committee, the group that oversaw large event cultural programming for the campus.

The commonly recognised image of a choral conductor is of a person who stands in front of a group of singers and uses a set of gestures to direct them in performance. In order to arrive at this moment of shared musical experience, however, there is a long journey of preparation that must take place, from devising an artistic concept, to formulating a coherent and stimulating programme of repertoire, to realising such a programme by engaging in an extended period of rehearsal that encompasses vocal, musical, expressive, linguistic, and emotional facets and gathers diverse individual singers into a unified choral instrument with a common expressive purpose. In this article, two experienced choral conductors present structured reflective exegeses on artistic projects undertaken with their respective chamber choirs. Drawing on reflective approaches aligned with practice-based/artistic research, and on leading voices in repertoire programming and choral studies more broadly, the authors articulate and analyse their creative processes, highlighting considerations and goals for choral conductors both in designing programmes as a basis for impactful collective musical experiences and in enacting these experiences in a spirit of co-creation with choir members and other artistic contributors.

This paper presents Macalla, a practice-based research project investigating how architectural spaces function as co-creative instruments in Ambisonic choral composition. Comprising four original compositions, Macalla employed Nelson’s praxis model, integrating creative practice with critical reflection through iterative cycles of composition, anechoic vocal recording, and site-specific re-recording. The project explored six contrasting architecturally significant spaces including a gaol, churches, and civic offices. Using a stop-motion stem playback methodology, studio-recorded vocals were reintroduced to architectural spaces, revealing emergent sonic properties that challenged compositional intentions and generated new musical possibilities. The resulting Ambisonic works were disseminated through multiple formats including VR/360 video via YouTube, Octophonic concert performance, and immersive headphone experiences to maximize accessibility. Analysis of listener behaviours identified distinct engagement patterns, seekers actively hunting optimal positions and dwellers settling into meditative reception, suggesting spatial compositions contain multiple potential works activated through listener choice. The project contributes empirical evidence of acoustic agency, with documented sonic transformations demonstrating that architectural spaces actively participate in composition rather than passively containing it. This research offers methodological frameworks for site-specific spatial audio creation while advancing understanding of how Ambisonic technology can transform the composer-performer-listener relationship in contemporary musical practice.

The purpose of this study was to examine whether one aspect of conducting technique, the conducting plane, would affect band and/or choral musicians' perceptions of conductor and ensemble expressivity. A band and a choral conductor were each videotaped conducting I-min excerpts from Morten Lauridsen's O Magnum Mysterium while using a high, medium, and low conducting plane. These six videos then were synchronized with an appropriately corresponding identical high-quality band or choral audio excerpt. College ensemble members (N = 120; band, n = 60; choral, n = 60) viewed all six videos and rated the expressivity of both the conductor and the ensemble. Through the use of a forced-choice task, they also provided one brief comment about either the conductor or the ensemble. Results indicated that conducting plane significantly affected ratings of both conductor and ensemble expressivity. A significant interaction was found between conducting plane (high, medium, and low) and ensemble type (band or choir audio excerpt heard) with regard to conductor expressivity ratings. Participants found the choir conductor conducting at the medium plane to be slightly more expressive than the band conductor conducting at the same plane. Conversely, participants rated the expressivity of the band conductor slightly higher than the choir conductor at both the high and low conducting planes. Participants' written comments were directed predominantly at the conductor rather than the ensemble, and the high-conducting-plane videos elicited the most negative comments.

Polyphonic vocal music is an integral part of music cultures around the world. For studying performance aspects and cultural differences, the analysis of recorded audio material has become of increasing importance. This thesis contributes several computational tools for processing, analyzing, and exploring singing voice recordings using methods from signal processing, computer science, and music information retrieval (MIR). First, we develop an approach for applying time-varying pitch shifts to audio signals based on non-linear time-scale modification (TSM) and resampling techniques. We show that our method can be used to adjust intonation (fine-tuning of pitch) in vocal recordings, e.g., in postproduction contexts. Computational analysis of polyphonic vocal music typically requires annotations of the singers’ fundamental frequency (F0) trajectories, which are labor-intensive to generate and may not be available for a particular recording collection. As a second contribution, we present an approach to assess the reliability of automatically extracted F0-estimates by fusing the outputs of several F0-estimation algorithms. In this way, our approach enables the analysis and exploration of large unlabeled audio collections. One major challenge for computational analysis of polyphonic singing constitute stylistic elements such as pitch slides and pitch drifts, which can introduce blurring in analysis results. As a third contribution of this thesis, we present computational tools for handling such peculiarities. In particular, we develop musically motivated filtering techniques to detect stable regions in F0-trajectories and compensate for pitch drifts. Furthermore, our tools offer interactive feedback mechanisms that allow domain experts to incorporate musical knowledge. Development and evaluation of computational tools for analyzing polyphonic singing typically require suitable multitrack recordings with one or several tracks per voice, e.g., obtained from close-up microphones attached to a singer’s head and neck. However, such recordings are challenging to produce and thus of limited availability. As an additional contribution of this thesis, we introduce carefully organized and annotated multitrack research corpora of Western choral music and traditional Georgian vocal music, which are publicly accessible through interactive interfaces. Furthermore, considering these two culturally different forms of vocal music as concrete application scenarios, we evaluate our interactive computational tools and demonstrate their potential for corpus-driven research in the field of computational ethnomusicology.

This case study explores ten undergraduate music education students' experiences with reflective self-assessment using web-hosted materials in a choral conducting course. To provide participants with opportunities to engage in reflective self-assessment in a web-based environment, these participants were given web-hosted materials in order for them to: (a) view and edit videos of their conducting to describe their performance, (b) complete self-assessments after reviewing the videos to evaluate their conducting performance, and (c) write and share peer feedback to experience different perspectives. Each of the three steps was documented in a web environment. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews with each participant and the instructor, open-ended questionnaires, and notes from the author's research journal. Through several processes, the study found potential benefits in using web-hosted materials to promote students' self-reflection and assessment in a choral conducting course. These processes included having participants describe their experiences (criteria comprehension, determining conducting strengths and weaknesses), evaluate their experiences (determining the benefits of a single-location platform/website, reviewing conducting in the future), and learn from multiple perspectives (sharing ideas in a safe environment, improving vocabulary and critical skills).