This is Part One of a two-part series featuring interviews with Jeffrey Brillhart and Zebulon Highben, summer clinicians for the Augsburg Fortress 2013 Music Clinics. This week, enjoy some of Jeffrey Brillhart's thoughts on questions we posed.

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I find warm-ups to be essential to any choir rehearsal for two major reasons: 1) they are an opportunity to teach musical concepts in isolation that will be used later in the rehearsal on the choir’s repertoire; and 2) they help transition the voice and the body from a day’s worth of speaking and slouching, preparing them for the very different set of demands placed upon the singer by the act of singing.

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Some of my conducting textbooks spend numerous pages on how to structure the choir rehearsal, covering a host of factors to consider. Personally, I don’t bother putting that much thought into it. It’s already all I can do to spend time getting to know the music and make musical decisions about it, let alone think about a detailed rehearsal structure. So I’ve resigned myself to simply what seems to work, which, for me, is this:

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Think liturgical music for your choir. Arrangements of the psalms abound. Sing an appropriate psalm in addition to the appointed psalmody for the day. Opportunities for attendant music are the gathering, offering, and distribution of communion.

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So you have a choir of 12 or 8 or 5 or all women and one male. The list of variations could go on. What are you, as director, to do about it? Carl Schalk has said “The smaller parish can be an exhilarating place for worship and church music, but it requires creativity and resourcefulness.” (Cross Accent, Journal of the Association of Lutheran Church Musicians, “Getting More for Less”, November 2012). Now read the same phrase substituting “smaller choir” for “smaller parish.”

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Maybe the choir’s scheduled to sing on Rally Day and you only get one rehearsal the week before…
Maybe it’s that first Sunday after Epiphany and half the choir can’t make it out of their driveways…
Maybe it’s a Sunday where nothing in the library fits and you’ve spent the choir’s budget already…

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Children have an incredible capacity to mimic sounds, so there is no reason why shaping good vowel sounds and giving detail to some consonants should wait until children are in upper elementary school. I have become a firm believer that we should model our best diction and be intentional about teaching and reinforcing good diction with our youngest choristers. I introduce diction awareness to my PreKindergarten singers the first day of rehearsals in August. We make choir fun, but infuse good diction training throughout everything we sing: warm-ups, singing and counting games, hymns, anthems.

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This is the second half of a two-part series on planning a successful Youth Choir Tour. This segment addresses places to sing and serve, daily details and how to make the experience meaningful for all involved.

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If you are fortunate enough to lead a youth choir, then the words “youth choir tour” may have been uttered to you at some point. These words may have come from a hopeful youth, an overly anxious parent, or that pesky, subliminal voice that urges each of us to keep trying new things to enhance and develop our music programs. These words may fill your heart with fond memories, or they might incite deep fear: “Is our group really ready to go on the road?” you may ask. In this two-part series, I will share some insights into planning a successful youth choir tour.

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In last week’s blog post, I tried to make the case for the use of movement in children’s choir rehearsals. In this blog post, I have included a variety of resources to help even the most unsure of movers to get started. This list is by no means exhaustive; it is merely a jumping-off point to the great wide world of musical movement.

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