SCVA Newsletter (on-line version) - January 2009
===================================================================================
Message from the President - Sheri Nelson
I hope that you’ve all had time to relax and recover from the busy holiday
season. I know that for many the
spring will be just as busy as December as your choirs participate in
festivals, competitions, tours, spring concerts and auditions for next year’s
ensembles. SCVA will also be busy
as we provide our membership with a variety of activities. We begin with the Vocal Solo
Competition, Diva Day, Young Men’s Harmony Festival, Vocal Jazz Festival, Show
Choir Competition and then end our season with the Junior High Middle School
Honor Choir. Make sure you check
the SCVA website (scvachoral.org) for information on all of our activities.
One of the great things about professional organizations like SCVA, MENC,
and ACDA is the opportunity we have to network with our colleagues. We walk away from events with a few new
tricks in our bag that a presenter suggested during a workshop or a friend
suggested over lunch. We can also
learn from each other through the newsletters. In that regard, I would like to ask for your input on
successful techniques you use to recruit new members and fundraise.
In a time of great economic instability there are more families
struggling. With our state budget
in crisis our districts are also struggling to provide. My own district has put a spending
freeze on the ongoing visual and performing arts grant until they see if it is
part of the state’s midyear budget cuts.
Have you discovered some creative fundraising ideas that don’t involve
selling candy? Share your success
stories!
Each spring I take several of my choirs to our feeder schools to promote the
choral music program at our school.
What do you do to recruit students? Each year more schools are finding they are losing kids to
double blocking. Those students
with low standardized test scores are being enrolled in a second Math class,
English class, or study skills course.
We may not win the battle with administration when their goal is that
API score, but what CAN we do to help promote our programs and increase enrollment? Please share your ideas. I am sure there are directors out there
who would love some fresh ideas.
Please email me (sherinelson@hotmail.com)
your recruiting techniques and your fundraising ideas so that all of our
singers (and hopefully some new singers) are able to have a rewarding,
memorable experience.
===================================================================================
TO GO TO THE FESTIVAL!
~ SCVA CHORAL FESTIVALS
by Jennifer Stanley, VP of
High School Festivals, and Maria Fritts, VP of Middle School/Junior High
Festivals
As music educators, we are in a
very unique position for assessment because of festivals. No other discipline allows teachers to
have their students assessed by experts in their field and receive instant
feedback. Choral directors who
attend festivals have positive experiences with adjudicators who understand
their teaching situations, and the adjudicators actively work to reinforce
their teaching. Attending
festivals is an excellent way to expose your students to great choral
literature, and for them to see other students working on the same choral
concepts you are teaching. Since
it is a positive experience for everyone involved, make sure that you ATTEND A
CHORAL FESTIVAL THIS YEAR!
Thank you to all the directors who
are hosting festivals! With our festival hosts, we have been able to schedule
40 festivals in many different locations throughout March, April, and May. The
festival application follows this article. Applying early will increase your chances of being accepted
to your first choice festival. As
a courtesy to others, please do not bring more than two choirs to one
festival. The application deadline
is March 2, 2009, and
late applications will not be accepted.
Please check your school’s testing schedule and spring break when
scheduling your festival. Please
be aware of the location of your festival so you can begin planning for
transportation.
The SCVA website has information to
assist you and your students in your festival preparation. The schedule of festivals, festival
application form, PayPal payment system, festival adjudication form,
adjudication scoring scale, festival code of conduct, festival listening guide,
festival host guide, and list of recommended choral literature are there for
your use. Please let us know if we can post other useful information for
you. For more information or
questions, please contact Maria Fritts at MFRITTS@temeculaprep.com or (951)
926-6776; contact Jennifer Stanley at jstanley@emuhsd.k12.ca.us
or (626) 258-5292.
Festival
Listings
Festival
Code of Conduct
Festival
Application
===================================================================================
2009 Junior High Honor Choir - Tony Azeltine, VP, Junior
High/Middle School Honor Choir
By now, all of your
students interested in this year’s honor choir should have registered on-line
for auditions. Now, all of us need
to assist our students in preparation for the audition day fast approaching. Maybe include the skill sets in your
warm-ups, including triads, major scales, and tonal memory. Many of us find it useful to teach a
Spiritual, Folk Song, or one of the Twenty-Four Italian Art Songs by rote. Tonal memory becomes part of students’
learning processes and overall musicianship rather quickly with this method.
Another way you can help make this
choir special is to let us know if any student needs financial assistance. This not only means assistance in
payment of fees, but transportation to any audition or rehearsal. Would any of you be willing to assist
your students once or twice with transportation to these events? This would help ease the burden on the
parents, who will be driving long distances four times over the course of the Honor Choir events. If any student needs assistance, please
notify me directly.
This year, with massive district
cutbacks, I have had trouble nailing down rehearsal sites for little or no
charge to the choir. Some
districts wanted as much as $3,600!
Other venues are unavailable because of construction. It’s great that so many of us are
finally getting good facilities, whether new or refurbished! But thankfully, Debbie Montpas has been
able to procure her site for the first rehearsal. It will be the March 28 date on your SCVA calendar, at Mesa
Robles M.S. in Hacienda Heights.
Check-in will be at Noon, downbeat at 12:30 P.M. Hopefully, by the time you read this
letter, we’ll have all the other locations confirmed. Times, however, are firm. Refer to the SCVA website for details.
Below is an updated list of
audition sites for the Junior High/9th Grade Honor Choir:
January 24 January
31
Mark Keppel HS, Alhambra Mesa
Robles MS, Hacienda Heights
Matilija JH, Ojai Manhattan
Beach MS, Manhattan Beach
Segerstrom HS, Santa Ana La
Habra HS, La Habra
St. Jude Episcopal Church, Burbank Arlington
HS, Riverside
Granada Hills Charter HS
Thank you for all your assistance,
co-operation, and encouraging e-mails.
But most importantly, thank you for keeping choral music alive in
Southern California. We at the
high schools so depend on you for any success we enjoy. Be assured that we take none of you for
granted. I hope to meet each of
you at the performance on May 3.
ADJUDICATORS FOR 2009
If you haven’t been contacted
by me to adjudicate, your email address may not be correct in my file. Please email me and let me know you
would like to assist with adjudication this festival season: Chris Hall (kristinnag@aol.com). Thank you all for
assisting with making our festival season an educational and rewarding one for
all students and choral teachers.
===================================================================================
2008 High School Honor Choirs Concert: They Were the Music - Rodger
Guerrero VP - High School
Honor Choirs
An absolutely magical night…
Absolutes have never been
more appropriate than when used to describe the thrilling performances by the
2008 SCVA Men’s, Women’s, and Mixed Choirs at Santa Monica High School on
November 22nd! The 6th edition of
the Men’s Choir was by far the best ever.
From the dulcet, double-choir tones of O filii et filiae to the
profoundly passionate The Awakening to the outrageously vigorous sounds and
choreography of There Is Nothin’ Like a Dame, the men demonstrated complex
musicianship skills and musical awareness exponentially superior to any of the
past five SCVA men’s ensembles. No
SCVA Women’s Choir in recent memory has ever demonstrated as much resilience,
moxie and progress in the face of as difficult a program as this year’s women
did. From the gorgeous simplicity
of How Can I Keep from Singing to the lush but demanding and intricate Hosanna
to the vocal agility and clarity of Dancing Song to the astounding tonal
variety of the Witches’ Chorus, the 2008 Women’s Choir performed with
mesmerizing excellence and consistency.
The program for the Mixed Choir was by far the most challenging I can
recall listening to, and the singers handled it with astonishing ease and
expressiveness. From the complex
meters of the Alleluia to the pristine beauty of I Am Not Yours to the
ferocious text and rhythms of Daemon Irrepit Callidus to the unbridled delight
of Rejoice, the Mixed Choir performed at an unheard of level. It was like listening to an All-State
Honor Choir, for sure! And I must
add that there has never been a more remarkable group of male voices in the
Mixed Choir, especially in the Bass Section! Wow! What a
performance!
It was truly an honor to watch the
magic and artistry of each of the three conductors, Dr. Christopher Peterson,
Desiree La Vertu, and Dr. Jo-Michael Scheibe. It was fascinating to watch every singer consider each facet
of the music as presented by these master teachers. All of the individual, musical reflection and intellectual
analyzing metamorphosed into profound, unified music-making. Yet as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
once wrote, “We may affirm absolutely that nothing great in the world has been
accomplished without passion.”
Thanks to the efforts of these three exceptional choral educators, every
intellectual thought could be viewed through 269 pairs of intensely vivid eyes. The joy expressed on the face of every
singer was truly indicative of the overwhelming meaning and value of the Honor
Choirs experience. If “Man’s main
task in life is to give birth to himself,” as Erich Fromm once so eloquently
stated, then the three conductors just succeeded in creating and inspiring an
entirely new generation of lifelong singers. These kids LOVED the Honor Choirs experience, were
TRANSFORMED by it, and will NEVER forget it.
Continually thanking, thanking, and thanking…
Tammi Alderman is an
incredibly fast thinker, splendid problem-solver, natural-born leader, and
gracious and giving human being.
Besides creating, formatting, and updating all of the computer-generated
lists, schedules, etc, she also took care of the T-Shirts, stepped in to help
out at rehearsals, ran an endless number of errands, and kept communication
lines open with the California ACDA Board. She never offered anything but a wholly positive attitude to
every menial task, despite also having to handle an immense amount of
additional responsibilities as a result of her husband’s serious accident this
past fall. THANK YOU, TAMMI! Mark Freedkin is a selfless,
stick-to-it-and-get-it-done website genius. He has made life so much easier for all of SCVA. THANK YOU, MARK! Jeffe Huls is a tireless worker
possessed of the patience of Job.
His willingness to host the Honor Choirs weekend and selflessness in
making sure that all of the details were covered were both amazing. He is the perfect Site Host. THANK YOU, JEFFE! The SCVA Board is replete with
supportive, helpful, caring, and visionary conductors. Many of them helped out with multiple
aspects of the Honor Choirs even though they have their own SCVA
responsibilities to complete.
THANK YOU SHERI (especially for the laughs and sanity), CAROLYN (the
fastest bill-payer, check-writer in the choral world), LISA, KAREN (especially
for your Newsletter patience and great emails), TONY, JENNIFER, CHRISTINE, and
MARK! And to John Byun, our
Rehearsal Site Host, Brian Dehn, Scott Hedgecock, and Rich Messenger, our
Rehearsal Conductors, all of the audition site hosts, adjudicators, sectional
rehearsal leaders, accompanists, T-Shirt “hander-outers,” check-in table
monitors, ushers, errand-runners, etc, THANK YOU for doing the sometimes
thankless and indistinct jobs which truly enable the Honor Choirs to
succeed! A Successful Honor Choirs
experience could not have been accomplished without any one of you.
All endings are simply new beginnings…
The concert part of my term
as SCVA VP in charge of the High School Honor Choirs is at an end. I only have a few articles to write,
some bills to pay, Concert CDs to deliver, and recommendations to make, both to
SCVA and ACDA. I have honestly
enjoyed every aspect of this job, from the endless hours of planning, organizing
and menial labor, to responding to the countless emails from directors,
students, parents, and administrators, to the tons of sensitive conversations
and decisions, to the wonderful music-making. I enjoyed serving every participating director and singer to
the best of my abilities. I hope that
I have served you well. While I
have never expected more from my choral students at Harvard-Westlake than from
myself, I do expect excellence from each one of them. I’ve always believed that as a teacher I must act as the
pacesetter, the lighthouse for excellence in my students. Or as Peter Loel Boonshaft so
eloquently stated in his book, Teaching Music with Passion, “Excellence is the
result of caring more than others think is wise; risking more than others think
is safe; dreaming more than others think is practical; and expecting more than
others think is possible.” The
Honor Choirs experience has been an excellent one for me, so much so, that I am
now officially addicted to it. I
hope that many more of you will feel this same way next year.
Tammi Alderman will take over as
SCVA honor Choirs VP #1 next year, and she will do a phenomenal job. However, in order to help her improve
upon the process, I wanted to, like last year, engender some feedback from all
those directors whose students participated in and/or auditioned for one or
more of the Honor Choirs. As
before and thanks to our aforementioned SCVA “Web Genius,” Mark Freedkin, an
online Honor Choir survey has been created in order to help you in this
endeavor. Each participating
director will again receive an automated email announcing the posting of the
Honor Choirs Survey as well as a link to the survey page. The survey is inclusive of nineteen
topical questions for which you may indicate your agreement or disagreement
with on a scale of 1-5. You may
also post specific comments for each question. Two final questions will hopefully enlist your suggestions
for future Honor Choir conductors and sites. When you have completed your survey, both Tammi and I will
receive an automated email message with a link to the Survey Administrator
page. There we will be able to
view, categorize, and combine the results. Tammi will then post them in a future SCVA Newsletter
article, so keep your eyes and ears poised.
I have also included a copy of the
survey for those who are still uncomfortable with online technology. Simply mail it to me at my school
address as listed below. Last
year, less than 25% of participating directors responded, despite multiple
attempts to elicit replies from participating directors. This response was simply too small in
order to gauge the general sentiment of SCVA members. I am hoping that more directors will respond this time
around so that SCVA’s efforts to continue to meet the needs of its members are
met. The SCVA Board always
welcomes input from member directors.
All SCVA members have a voice.
Please help us by communicating with us today!
Please complete the survey online
or mail yours to me at the school address listed below NO LATER THAN
FEBRUARY 13, 2009.
MAIL COMPLETED SURVEYS TO:
Rodger Guerrero, SCVA VP,
High School Honor Choirs
Harvard-Westlake School
3700 Coldwater Canyon
North Hollywood, CA 91604
On-Line
Honor Choir Survey Form
===================================================================================
Other Important Information
On-Line SCVA Membership Application