Greetings! I'm very excited to share this issue of Melisma focused on gender issues in the choral ensemble. Riikka Pietiläinen-Caffrey, Delaney Hanon, and Lorenzo Silva offer an insightful article that raises our awareness of the implications of the language we use in rehearsal. Ben Riggs's article discusses the potential for mentoring relationships between men's and boy's choirs and offers repertoire suggestions for joint concerts. Charlette L. Moe has compiled useful tips for working with women's choirs and ensuring that singers have enjoyable experiences that lead to a lifetime of singing. I hope these articles spark new ideas and provide useful information.
WHO TAKES CARE OF THE CONDUCTOR? Rehearsals are underway, concerts are coming up, and nearly every choir director on the planet has something big in December. Concerts, special events, and worship services typically take place outside of the 9-to-5, Monday-through-Friday workweek, and many people work a full-time teaching job and also direct a community or church choir that rehearses in the evening or on weekends. The life of a choral conductor is alternately exhausting and exhilarating, and though we live for those exhilarating moments, it’s easy to get so wrapped up in what we do that we neglect ourselves. It’s the nature of what we do and the job requirements aren’t likely to change. So what are YOU doing to prevent burnout, to carve out non-work time, to replenish and…
Choir screams gender. From the traditional to the modern day, from choir dress codes to vocal parts, from the hypermasculine fear of singing to the choirboy image. A great many changes are needed to make choral spaces more gender-inclusive, and one of the first steps is to use language that will include all singers. Recently, many studies have been conducted on how to better include transgender singers into choirs. While many transgender singers fall under the gender binary (the classification of sex and gender into two types, male or female) and therefore under traditional choral terminology, the growing number of gender fluid or non-binary singers in our ensembles require choral directors to give significant attention to non-gendered rehearsal language. Gender terminology and awareness has rapidly changed in the past five…
Growing up in rural West Virginia, there wasn't a wealth of musical opportunities for a young man like myself. I was fortunate to be enrolled in piano lessons, but the school I attended lacked music classes and ensemble opportunities. Singing was especially mysterious and unapproachable—I was absolutely certain that I could not sing! When I was fifteen years old, my newly lowered voice cracking and croaking, I was encouraged to join my adult church choir and my perspective on singing changed forever. Being mentored by adult singers and making music alongside them as an equal member of the choir nurtured my confidence and opened the door to a lifetime of choral singing. A few years ago the Minnesota Boychoir’s Allegro ensemble and the Twin Cities Gay Men’s Chorus (TCGMC) joined forces to…
