A new way to stay connected

Hi guys,

Greetings from Oklahoma City, where it's 80 degrees and there are 3000 choral conductors assembled for the national convention of the American Choral Directors Association. Because I'm here, I wasn't there on Wednesday night, so thanks to Mark for filling in, and thanks in advance to you for spending some time with your music this weekend!

This morning, I attended a session on "Technology for the Choral Conductor" given by my pal Philip Copeland, the Director of Choral Activities at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He's a techno-whiz, and he shared lots of fascinating, cutting-edge things to help folks stay in better communication with their choirs. His biggest piece of advice was to establish a chorus blog as a central clearing house for information relating to the choir. So, since I do everything Philip tells me to when it comes to technology, here's our blog: http://washingtonmenscamerata.blogspot.com. Now, instead of your having to log in to the member section at camerata.com, you can visit our blog to read important communications from the conductor, download mp3 files to aid in your studies, read program notes, translations and other tidbits about our music, etc. If you'd like to see Philip's blog for the UAB choirs, you can visit here.

For those of us not on the cutting edge, perhaps a bit of explanation is in order. There are now more than 50,000,000 blogs! Blog is an abbreviation for web log--basically, an online journal. You can access blogs by visiting them directly, usually by creating a bookmark in your browser, just as you do for your other favorite web sites. But the really cool way to stay connected to a blog is by using an RSS reader. You've probably seen those little orange square icons on most web sites, and you might have wondered what they are. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, and it's a way for the content to come to you, rather for you to seek out the content. If you subscribe to the Camerata blog's RSS feed, then whenever the blog is updated, you'll receive an email message, telling you that there's something new. Confused? I was too, at first. Here's a short YouTube video that will explain how this all works.



We'll see how everyone like using a system like this, and if it seems to work better than email blasts and downloads from the member site, then we can use it more.

In the meantime, I send you greetings from Jim Marvin (Harvard Glee Club), Pat Gardner (Rutgers Glee Club) and Scott Tucker (Cornell Glee Club). I just attended a fantastic concert session that consisted entirely of male choirs--a first for an ACDA convention. The first group was technically a treble choir, from the American Boychoir School in Princeton. They were followed by the St. Mary's Varsity Ensemble, a 24-man high school group from Tokyo. After that, the Cornell Glee Club sang a great program, including the Hoiby "Last Letter Home" and the Biebl "Ave Maria." They were rewarded with an enthusiastic standing ovation. And to close out the afternoon, we heard the 120-voice Vocal Majority from Dallas, Texas, one of the finest barbershop choruses in the world. You haven't lived until you've experienced 120 barbershoppers leaping off the risers into a fully-choreographed barbershop version of "Luck be a Lady Tonight." 'Nuf said.

Please do take some time to review your music this weekend. Our performance for the Organization of American Kodaly Educators is this coming Thursday, and we have some work to do yet before we're reading to sing!

Enjoy the warm weather this weekend and I'll see you soon.

Frank