Journal articles on the topic 'Choral leader'

In response to Iolaus' cry for help, the chorus in Held, enter at a run (βοηδροµοντεс cf. 121), and the Parodos takes a form appropriate to that. Instead of choral song-and-dance, what follows, after an exceptionally brief non-strophic ‘entry’-passage, is an amoibaion first between the Chorus-leader and Iolaus, then between the Chorus-leader and the Herald, musical only as featuring some ‘half-chanted’ sequences in the Chorus-leader's utterances.

Abstract Attention to the ways in which Homeric epic is shaped by its engagement with choral lyric reveals continuities between epic and tragedy that go beyond tragedy’s mythical subject matter and the characteristics of tragic dialogue: both poetic forms rework the circumstances of choral performance into fictional events. This point can be illustrated through the figure of Penelope in the Odyssey who, like many tragic heroines, is in effect a displaced chorus leader. Penelope’s situation and her relations with her serving women, especially with the twelve disloyal maids whose punishment takes the form of a distorted choral dance, anticipate the circumstances of the tragic stage, in which individual characters act and suffer in the constant presence of choral groups.

The article discovers the issues which are a part of a complex set of training future music teachers to manage artistic and creative ensembles, in particular, vocal and choral ones. It is emphasized that the dominant place in the process of training future music teachers to guidance these groups is occupied by aspects of conducting and choral training, the study of which is impossible without understanding the unique phenomena of native choral performance and features of working with vocal and choral collectives. To solve these problems there are the disciplines of conducting and choral cycle, the main task of which is to educate students in professional skills and skills of singing in the choir, as well as managing the choir based on mastering the methods of working with the choir, didactic principles and knowledge of psychophysiological process which a person has during singing. It is noted that the reserve for improving the quality of professional training of future music teachers to manage vocal and choral ensembles is the intersubject relationship of special disciplines with socio-pedagogical and music-theoretical ones. Modern performance and analytical requirements for professional training of future music teachers to guidance vocal and choral groups are analyzed, in particular, the ability to achieve the required level of knowledge and skills on condition that students master each subject of conducting and choral cycle with awareness of their interaction, high level of singing and conducting competence of students and their deep knowledge of vocal and choral repertoire, the art of mastering of not only performing vocal and choral skills, but also organizational skills by the future manager of the ensemble, the unity of erudition in the field of vocal and choral art, methodical training, pedagogical activities based on interrelation of knowledge and practice of working with an artistic and creative collective. The specifics of the professional training of future music teachers to lead vocal and choral groups is his singing and conducting competence, deep knowledge of vocal and choral repertoire, the art of mastering the leader of the vocal and choral group not only organizational skills but also performing vocal skills. For effective professional training, students need to constantly and purposefully develop their musicological and performing qualities in conjunction with conducting and choral and methodological training.

Problem statement. One of the most important directions of modern choral studies is the research on the life and creative path of outstanding choirmasters, while understanding their performing experience, pedagogical approaches and taking into account their aesthetic and artistic beliefs. One of the most honorable places among artists is occupied by Viacheslav Palkin (1935–2008), who contributed greatly to the development and prosperity of both, the choral culture of Slobozhanshchyna and Ukraine. The relevance of topic lies in the necessity to study the creative experience of the remarkable choral conductor V. S. Palkin, to understand the contribution of the luminary of the Kharkiv conducting and choral school to the development of national art. Theoretical background includes the articles of O. Batovska (2005), H. Parfonova (2008) and the thesis of H. Savelieva (2012), N. Bielik(2007), which examines Palkin’s pedagogical approaches, his achievements as the head of the Choral Conducting Department of the Kharkiv I. P. Kotlyarevsky Institute of Arts, as well as the performing style of the Сhamber Сhoir led by him as an artistic director and choirmaster. Other sources of study embody the materials of the national conference, methodological works and articles by V. S. Palkin collected and published in I. Palkin’s book “Viacheslav Palkin. By the roads of choral art” (2011). The objective of the work is to define a periodization of Palkin’s life and career to identify the stages of his professional growth to the crowning achievements at the height of his creative career. The research methodology lies in the application of the principles of historicism, phenomenological and acmeocentric approaches, biographical method and the method of typological analysis. The periodization of the life and career of the distinguished choral conductor, teacher and educator V. S. Palkin is presented for the first time in art studies. Conclusions. The analysis of V. Palkin’s life and career resulted in the periodization. The following criteria were taken into account: biographical, geographical, evolutionary-performing and age-specific. The first period (1935–1951) covers childhood, the second one (1951–1960) represents his years of education. This period is characterized by his desire to comprehend and embrace all the subtleties of choir conducting. The third stage (1960–1978) is the accumulation of choirmaster, pedagogical, and life experience. The fourth one (1978–2008) is the culmination of the master’s life and career, his finest hour and acme phase, when he created a chamber choir, which reached the highest level of choral art under his leadership. It was established that choirs led by V. Palkin reflect changes in his artistic career path. The four stages reflect the evolution of the artist as a conductorinterpreter, organizer and leader of numerous choral groups, teacher and educator.

Background. The last quarter of the 20th century – the beginning of the 21st century, marked in Ukraine by significant social changes, actualized the necessity to turn to eternal spiritual values of national culture, among which Taras Shevchenko’s creativity takes leading positions. During this time, a number of works appeared in Ukrainian musical and stage art that supplemented the domestic “Shevchenkiana” (a total of the works devoted to Shevchenko): the operas by O. Zlotnik, V. Gubarenko, H. Maiboroda, L. Kolodub). The tradition of embodying the image of T. Shevchenko was creatively developed by O. Rudianskyi. The significant role of choral scenes in his opera “The Way of Taras” led to their involvement in revealing the leading idea of the work: to show the main periods of the life of the great poet. Choral scenes are peculiarly organized in the time-space of the opera, gaining symbolic meaning. The disclosure of this symbolism becomes the key to understanding in the modern context of the historical role of T. Shevchenko’s life and work. The purpose of this study is to identify the symbolism of chronotope in the choral dramaturgy of the opera by O. Rudianskyi. The following events from the life of Shevchenko are presented in the opera «The Way of Taras» by O. Rudianskyi (1992, 2nd ed. 2002: the libretto by V. Yurechko & V. Reva): his arrival to Kiev from St. Petersburg after the graduation of the Academy of Arts, the activity in The Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius, finally, the arrest and the exile. The composer uses the choral factor in full – almost every stage of the opera has choral episodes, which receive various functions depending on the development of the dramaturgy of the opera. O. Rudianskyi created the images of the Ukrainians peasants, young men and women, children, members of the Cyril and Methodius Brotherhood, prisoners, soldiers -- by the use of male, female, children and mixed choir compositions. The opera includes: the "Ukrainian world", which obtains its characteristic precisely due to the presence of choral singing; the "Kazakh world", which is represented mostly by solo and dancing episodes; the "Russian world", which is presented through the spoken dialogues, orchestral fragments, choral recitation. The radical contrast in the depiction of Ukraine, the Kazakh steppes, and the St. Petersburg world creates to the chronotope changes in connection with the plot: Taras Shevchenko is free in Ukraine, he is not free in Russia and Kazakhstan. The opera-biography “The Way of Taras” almost for the first time at the Ukrainian musical stage emphasizes in the image of Shevchenko, who was a poet and a painter, the versatile of his creative personality. O. Rudianskyi introduces the method of artistic documentalism in revealing the events of T. Shevchenko’s life path, but along with the real people (Kostomarov, Petrov, Veresai), there are also fictional characters (the caretaker of the steppe – «Berehynia stepu»). Each of the pictures of the opera highlights a certain episode of the biography of the hero. The fragmentary character inherent in the opera by O. Rudianskyi makes it similar the opera “in four novels” «Taras Shevchenko» by H. Maiboroda and the opera-phantasmagoria «Poet» by L. Kolodub. Two female characters in the opera, Oksana and Zabarzhada, presents as a symbol of Taras’s unrealizable love. The image of Oksana – the first love of the poet – is created due to choreography, that makes it possible to define a ballet as another genre component of the composition. The development of the female theme involves both the women’s and the mixed choirs. O. Rudianskyi found a new approach to embodiment of the personality of the artist and poet in the first picture of the opera. This is the moment when T. Shevchenko is painting one of his picture on the bank of the Dnieper, reciting, at the same time, the lines of his immortal verse «Reve ta stohne Dnipr shyrokyi» («The broad Dnieper is roaring and moaning»), which became a folk song. In the fifth picture of the opera it is being sung powerfully by the choir – all Ukrainian people. So, the poet is presented as a prophet and spiritual leader of the people. Inspired by the Poet, people spoke out against the tyranny of the authorities. T. Shevchenko’s prayer with a mixed choir «To me, O God, give love on Earth» («Meni zh, mii Bozhe, na zemli podai liubov») is the reminiscence of the first picture, where the Poet created his immortal verse (its reciting with the vocalization of the choir basses). Conclusions. Thanks to choral scenes in the opera “The Way of Taras” by O. Rudiiyansky, a single space-time is created, in which the composer gives to the choir a symbolic meaning. In the choral presentation, the song about Dnieper River sounds as a symbol of freedom of the Ukrainian people; the effect by choir “church bells” symbolizes the conciliarity of Ukraine; the Marche funebre is the personification of the soldier serve, and the words-symbols “path”, “movement” embody Poet’s fate, inextricably linked with the fate of the Ukrainian people. The symbol of the opera whole is the word-image “path”. The semantics of the path, the moving is revealed both on the stage and on the mental levels: the Dnieper waves are constantly moving, the peasants are going to work, the path of prisoners is endless, and human life itself is the Path...

This article reports a qualitative study investigating the factors affecting confidence levels amongst adult amateur choral singers. Three focus groups (involving a total of 18 participants) and 16 individual interviews were carried out with experienced choral singers, and over 40 hours of recorded verbal data were collected. The research aims were to explore the lived experience of choral singers; to examine the main influences on choral singers’ perceptions of their voices and performance ability; to identify factors affecting their confidence as choral singers; to extrapolate confidence-building strategies for amateur choral singers. One of the major emergent themes was choir configuration, which encompassed the spacing between singers, the layout of the choir, the position of the individual singer within the choir, and the position of the choir within the venue. All of these elements reportedly had effects upon the confidence of choral singers during rehearsal and performance. These findings have practical implications for leaders of amateur choral ensembles, as choir configuration may be used as one of the tools for building collective and individual choral confidence.

In 1844, Serbian patriarch Josif Rajacic served two central annual Liturgies, at the feasts of Pasha and Penticost, in the Greek church of Holy Trinity in Vienna; these were accompanied by the four-part choral music. The appearance of new music in several orthodox temples in Habsburg Monarchy (including this one) during the first half of the nineteenth century, became an additional problem in a long chain of troubles that had disturbed the ever imperiled relations between the local churches in Balkans, especially the Greek and Serbian Orthodox. The official epistle that was sent from the ecomenical throne to all sister orthodox churches, with the main request to halt this strange and untraditional musical practice, provoked reactions from Serbian spiritual leader, who actually blessed the introduction of polyphonic music, and the members of Greek parish at the church of St. George in Vienna, who were also involved with it. The correspondence between Vienna and Constantinople reflected two opposite perceptions. The first one could named ?traditional? and the other one ?enlightening?, because of the apologies for the musical reform based on the unequivocal ideology of Enlightenment. In this article the pro et contra arguments for the new music tendencies in Greek and Serbian orthodox churches are analyzed mainly from the viewpoint of the theological discourse, including the two phenomena that seriously endangered the very entity of Orthodox faith. The first phenomenon is the ethnophiletism which, from the Byzantine era to the modern age, was gradually dividing the unique and single body of Orthodox church into the so-called ?national? churches, guided by their own, almost political interests, often at odds with the interests of other sister churches. The second phenomenon is the Westernization of the ?Orthodox soul? that came as a sad result of countless efforts of orthodox theological leaders to defend the Orthodox independence from the aggressive Roman Catholic proselytism. ?The Babylonian captivity of the Orthodox church?, as Georg Florovsky used to say, began when Orthodox theologians started to apply the Western theological methods and approaches in their safeguarding of the Orthodox faith and especially in ecclesiastical education. In this way the new cultural and social tendencies which gripped Europe after the movements of Reformation and Contra-Reformation were adopted without critical thinking among Orthodox nations, especially among the representatives of the Ortodox diaspora at the West. Observed from this extensive context, the four-part music in Orthodox churces in Austria shows one of many diverse requirements demanded from the people living in a foreign land, in an alien and often hostile environment, to assimilate its values, in this case related to the adoption of its musical practices.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how amateur choral singers experience collective group support as a method of learning ‘art music’ choral work. Findings are derived from a grounded-theory based, socio-musical case study of an amateur ‘art music’ Bach Choir, in the process of rehearsing and performing the Mass in B Minor by J.S. Bach. Data collection consisted of participant observation, qualitative interviews and a paper-based survey. Findings indicate that in the process of learning a challenging choral work, participants use peer-learning as support and form supportive groups within each voice part, with ‘informal leaders’ supporting others (‘followers’) who are performing the work for the first time. On the other hand, performing a challenging work can also seem ‘intimidating’ for those less experienced singers. Findings also indicate that whereas followers (and the conductor) benefit from this group support, ‘leaders’ may experience a certain lack of musical challenge.

This essay on worship and creation provides images, hymns, scriptural references, poems, prayers and practical suggestions drawn from the congregational context of the author's life. Many of these resources will help stimulating worship leaders to think of creative ways to divide hymns into litanies or how to use hymn tunes about creation as the setting for liturgical dance. The author encourages adapting children's books about creation into choral readings and finding images of the natural world from Scripture texts for the preparation of a communion table. Most of all, these reflections will inspire worship leaders to think about how everyone has something to bring to the worship experience.

Статья представляет собой обзор сочинений для хора a cappeLLa, созданных Родионом Щедриным в XXI веке. Произведения рассматриваются в хронологическом порядке, многие из них вдохновлены творческими контактами с Камерным хором Московской консерватории и с его руководителями - основателем коллектива Борисом Тевлиным и его преемником Александром Соловьёвым. Среди хоровых сочинений композитора есть и произведения на стихи российских поэтов - Андрея Вознесенского, Владимира Маяковского, Велимира Хлебникова, и опусы, написанные на библейские тексты, - «Эпиграф графа Толстого к роману “Анна Каренина”», «Месса поминовения»; последние можно отнести к области духовной музыки. Ряд сочинений отмечен гражданским пафосом (Диптих, «Два последних хора»). В партитурах 2020 года, созданных в период пандемии, в самоизоляции, автор размышляет о смысле бытия (Триптих). Щедрин постоянно экспериментирует с жанрами хоровой музыки. Ярким примером его изобретательности в творчестве последних лет являются Русские народные пословицы. В более ранней Серенаде (2003) традиционный жанр трактован новаторски: текст произведения целиком основан на междометиях. The article is a review of compositions for a cappella choir, written by Rodion Shchedrin in the 21 century. The works are viewed in chronological order, many of them are inspired by creative reLationships with the Chamber Choir of Moscow Conservatory and with its Leaders-the founder of the collective Boris TevLin and his successor Aleksandr Solovyov. Among the composer's choral works, there are music on verses by Russian poets-Andrei Voznesensky, Vladimir Mayakovsky, VeLimir Khlebnikov, and opuses written on bibLicaL texts-“Count ToLstoy's Epigraph to the NoveL ‘Anna Karenina'”, Mass of Commemoration; the Latters can be attributed to the fieLd of sacred music. A number of works are marked by civic pathos (Diptych, “The Last Two Choirs”). In the 2020 scores, created during the pandemic, in self-isolation, the author reflects on the meaning of being (Triptych). Shchedrin constantLy experiments with genres of choraL music. A striking exampLe of his ingenuity in the current oeuvre is the “Russian FoLk Proverbs”. In the earLier Serenade (2003), the traditionaL genre is interpreted in an innovative way: the text of the work is entireLy based on interjections.

On Sunday, October 23, 1983, a notable event occurred in San Francisco. A celebration of music, word, and prayer commemorated the five-hundredth birthday of the great Protestant reformer, Martin Luther. Leaders of the Episcopal, Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, Congregational, and Lutheran traditions took part in the service. Representatives of many other denominations marched in the processional singing “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.” Choral settings from the Greek Orthodox service framed the liturgy. Most remarkable, the Roman Catholic archbishop of San Francisco opened the ceremony, and the event took place in St. Mary's Cathedral. Reformation-rooted Protestant Christianity thus was recognized by a broad panorama of world Christian traditions that had lived side by side for well over a century in the strongly Catholic City of Saint Francis by the Golden Gate.

AbstractIn 1827, George Wilson Bridges, the outspoken proslavery rector of the parish of St. Ann, Jamaica, published a pamphlet of music that he had written to be used as the choral service at his church. The Bishop of Jamaica condemned Bridges's musical innovations on the grounds that they were not suitable to be heard by “a congregation chiefly composed by people of colour & negroes.” On the Bishop's orders, Bridges's music stopped, and by 1828 he reported that his pews were once more empty. The congregation of St. Ann parish church was almost entirely enslaved Africans and Afro-descendants who could choose their place of worship. However, in Bridges's own household, the people he claimed as property had little opportunity to escape his ministering. In 1829 Bridges came to the attention of British abolitionists for his brutal flogging of Kitty Hylton, a woman he claimed to own. This article uses Black feminist approaches to archival materials to explore the relationship between the music promoted by Bridges, conflicting views held by white religious leaders about what music was appropriate for African and African-descended people to listen to, and Bridges's violence towards enslaved people; in so doing exploring the inescapable entanglement of religious music, race, and violence in colonial Jamaica.

AbstractFrancis Hall Johnson's (1888–1970) work to preserve and promote Negro spirituals places him among the twentieth century's most influential interpreters of African American religious music. Johnson was most closely associated with Marc Connelly's 1930 Pulitzer Prize-winning play, The Green Pastures, for which he served as musical arranger and choral conductor. His participation in this production, which became a lightning rod for discussions about the nature of black religious thought, made him sharply aware of the complex terrain of popular culture representations of African American religious life for the consumption of white audiences. This article examines Johnson's 1933 “music-drama,” Run, Little Chillun, through which he hoped to counter the commonly deployed tropes of African Americans as a simple, naturally religious people. Moderately successful on Broadway, the production did particularly well when revived in California in 1938 and 1939 as part of the Federal Theatre and Federal Music projects.Most critics found Johnson's presentation of black Baptist music and worship to be thrillingly authentic but were confused by the theology of the drama's other religious community, the Pilgrims of the New Day. Examining Johnson's Pilgrims of the New Day in light of his interest in Christian Science and New Thought reveals a broader objective than providing a dramatic foil for the Baptists and a platform for endorsing Christianity. With his commitment to and expertise with vernacular forms of African American religious culture unassailable, Johnson presented a critique of the conservative tendencies and restrictive parochialism of some black church members and leaders and insisted on the ability of the individual religious self to range freely across a variety of spiritual possibilities. In doing so, he presented “the secret at the root” of black culture as not only revealing the spiritual genius of people of African descent but also as offering eternal and universal truths not bound by race.

Background. The article is devoted to the study of the personality of the outstanding Chinese composer Zhu Jian’er (1922–2017) – the leading figure of the national musical art of the twentieth century. It is proved that the presented problematic makes it possible to most deeply and accurately explore the musical heritage of the artist. In order to better understand the meaning of the composer’s creations, it is necessary to consider his environment, the stages of creative formation, the characteristics of character and personal qualities, his civic position and the characteristics of his worldview. Most of Zhu Jian’er’s life was in times of great turmoil associated with the Sino-Japanese liberation war, with the rigid ideological line of the Communist Party, with the excesses of the Cultural Revolution, etc. Consideration of the work of an outstanding composer through the prism of his personality became possible only in the twenty-first century, when Chinese society was completely freed from the pressure of ideology, which had long been felt after the policy of the Cultural Revolution in the country. Objectives. The purpose of this article is to systematize the historiographic information about the life-making of Zhu Jian’er in the context of the general trends in the development of Chinese musical culture of the twentieth and early twenty-first century. Methods. The methodology of the research is based on the scientific approaches necessary for the disclosure of the topic. The integrated research way is used that combines the principle of musical-theoretical, musical-historical and performing analysis. Results. The composer’s youth passed in Shanghai, occupied by the Japanese invaders. Great importance to the young man had a twenty-four-hour musical radio program, through which he became acquainted with European classical music. In 1945, the composer became the leader of the musical group of the Corps of Cultural Art of the Suzhou military district, and then the director and conductor of the orchestra. As soon as the country was liberated, the composer returned to Shanghai with many musicians from the military orchestra. He was appointed to the position of the head of the musical ensemble of the state film studio. In the summer of 1955, at the age of 33, Zhu Jian’er enrolled in the graduate school of the Moscow Conservatory. Returning to China in the summer of 1960, Zhu Jian’er was full of ambition and a desire to serve his homeland and people. However, the subsequent years of the Cultural Revolution for a decade deprived him of the possibility of full-fledged creativity. Own feelings receded into the background, the collective ousted the personal. In his music the composer presented the Cultural Revolution – with its false goals, ugly human relations, distorted values, unjustified sufferings. This idea formed the basis of the First Symphony. Many outstanding masterpieces of the composer have won major awards at home and abroad, bringing glory to Chinese music on the international music scene. People close to Zhu Jian’er noted that the composer was rarely seen among friends or acquaintances, he was silent and did not like to talk. He was very thin, and it was not clear how a fiery passion and great creative energy lived in such a weak body. The composer had a mild temperament, he never became angry with people and was careful in his statements. However, even such a kind and conflict-free person, faced with unhealthy trends in the music industry, was embroiled in legal proceedings related to “violation of rights” and was forced to fight for his reputation. But he was not afraid of reprisals, his energy and strong enthusiasm gave him strength. Despite the fact that Zhu Jian’er was always an ordinary person, immersed in his own affairs, he was not indifferent to the events in his country and the fate of the national culture. In addition, he was also worried about the international situation and the influence of China outside. The composer has always been interested in politics and collected information about musical culture abroad. He had his own understanding of the world, and he tried to hold an independent opinion, although, as a real creator, he was often visited by the spirit of doubt. Despite his painful body, Zhu Jian’er was a very tough and courageous man. In the years when China was shook by events that he considered as the national catastrophe, the composer retained loyalty to the power. It was not conformism, the musician sincerely loved his homeland and was ready to die for it, his position was that the mistakes would be corrected and the country would gain strength. These inner experiences deeply touched the composer’s mind and feelings, and were subsequently reflected in his music, being formed the unique musical style of his works. In recent years, as an elderly and painful man, Zhu Jian’er continued, in his words, “to pay off debts” – writing articles for various Shanghai music publishers, editing symphonic, orchestral and piano music, and writing a monograph. In most cases, this was underpaid or completely unpaid work. However, the composer was doing such work, considering it his duty. Conclusions. We can observe important milestones in the life-making of Zhu Jian’er, which radically influenced his multifaceted musical creativity. The outlook and civil position of the musician was formed during the years of the Sino-Japanese war of liberation. This enforced his ardent love for his native land and his people. Since he himself was physically unable to be in the ranks of the army, the desire to defend their homeland was expressed in the military songs by Zhu Jian’er. The critical attitude of the musician to the policy of the Cultural Revolution did not change his positive attitude towards life, but only made him think about the meaning of the artist’s life and purpose in society. The activities of the composer in the team of the military ensemble led him to realize the need for further professional development. The passionate desire to gain the highest stages of composer skills prompted Zhu Jian’er insistently to possess by this knowledge at the Moscow Conservatory and then at the Shanghai Conservatory. The composer honed his skills in the field of vocal, instrumental, chamber and choral music, however, the genre of the symphony in which the musician expressed his civic creed and view of the world became the pinnacle of his work.

The notion of leadership competencies is a much-debated issue. In this article, we propose that how the leader makes sense of his or her competencies is key to leadership practice. Specifically, we look at how leaders reconcile discrepancies between the self-perceived proficiency of various competencies and their corresponding importance. Empirically, we study leaders within the music domain – how choral conductors make sense of their competencies in the shaping of their professional practice. We investigated how choral leaders in Scandinavia ( N = 638) made sense of their competencies in the face of demands in their working situations. A mixed methodology was used, comprising a quantitative survey with qualitative comments and in-depth interviews with a selection of the respondents. The results show that when choral leaders shape their practice, they frequently face competency gaps that compel them to act or adjust their identity. The key to this sensemaking process is how they move competency elements they master to the foreground and wanting elements to the background. The concept of ‘sensemaking affordance’ is introduced to account for how various leader competency categories are negotiated to safeguard overall efficacy.

Choral conducting is a complex and multi-faceted leader role. Leading music is a particular kind of leadership through the prominence of gestural communication, and it is a ubiquitous phenomenon across a variety of social settings, musical genres, and ensemble types. Despite the variety, colloquial writing as well as academic research implicitly assumes that there is a common underlying competence base. Most research on conducting looks at a particular aspect, such as gestures, error correction, or rehearsing approach. What is largely wanting, is an overall view of how the competence elements come together and their relative importance. This article is an exploratory study of 17 competence elements, viewed by conductors in the context of their own practice. The study is based on a survey of 294 choral conductors across Norway, with a wide spread in terms of formal education, experience and working situation. The study supports previous research by how the role of conducting gesture takes a seemingly contradictory position; emblematic of the role, but still scores low in terms of importance. Our analysis shows that the views on key competence elements, such as gestural skills, vary with contextual factors, whereas other elements, such as error detection and rehearsal organisation, do not. The two contextual factors that explain most variation for several competence elements are the length of the conductor’s experience and the level (amateur/professional) of the conductor’s choirs. Conductors’ views on the importance of each competence element are closely related to their own competence level for the same element. This suggests that the prominence that competence elements are given in conducting practice is highly adaptable, as conductors cope with the situation at hand. Although an academic degree in conducting has an impact on how conductors view the various competence elements, practice and experience seem to rule over education.

The article focuses on the necessity of introducing innovative approaches, methods, forms and means of training using informational and musical computer technologies into the educational process. The analysis of the main researches and publications on the given problem was made and the positive influence of training motivation on the quality of the professional training of future teachers of musical art is highlighted. It is shown that the use of modern computer technologies, synthesizer, multimedia and special musical software contribute to activation of future music teachers in the study of the discipline «Choir conducting». The article deals with the interdisciplinary connections of choral conducting with informational computer technologies, analysis of the concepts of «note editor», «note-program», «Musical Instruments Digital Interface (MIDI)», «music computer technologies». In choir art motivation is a cognitive interest of students to the specialty of music teacher as the organizer and leader of the choir, promotes the desire to actively study and improve themselves, to seek new ways for self-realization. An important internal factor is the personal mood of students for a qualitative result in training, self-improvement of methodological competence, improvement of pedagogical skills and purposefulness for further musical and pedagogical activity. Also effective is the application of innovative teaching aids, which include multimedia (educational videos, audio players, choral music recordings, electronic boards, hardware) as well software and methodological support for computer technologies (electronic textbooks, manuals, electronic libraries, electronic courses; professional music programs and computer programs-notebooks; tasks for independent work of students; tests).

Germany is a country with a proud musical heritage. Music making in community is Germany’s largest civic activity and there are a vast number of active choirs and choral organisations. Choral singing is valued as a cultural asset and national export. In this article I survey the recent history of choral singing in Germany, a civic movement that is expanding and changing beyond traditional understandings of what it means to be a “choir” and with evolving organisational structures supporting its growth. This article summarises findings of a larger 2014 study undertaken for the Australian German Association (AGA) and the Goethe Institut. It offers a number of suggestions for colleagues, leaders, and policy-makers who work in choral music in Australia, a country with a vibrant choral music scene but with much potential to improve its supporting institutional structures. As a community music research project, it may provide wider context for music therapists with an interest in community music therapy in particular. This article was first published in Sing Out (Vol. 32, No. 2, 2015)[1] and is adapted here to share my experiences and findings beyond Australia’s choral music community.

This article describes some of the collaborative processes that take place within adult amateur choirs, and demonstrates some associations between group dynamics, peer learning and the development of choral confidence. Three focus groups and 16 individual interviews provided 40 hours of verbal data. The research aims were: to explore the lived experience of amateur choral singers in relation to their confidence levels; to identify some of the factors affecting singers’ confidence in their vocal skills and choral performance ability; to use the data to extrapolate strategies designed for managing confidence issues amongst amateur choral singers. Data was collected during semi-structured interviews and focus groups with amateur singers. The superordinate themes, which emerged from the data, included collaboration and teamwork, reciprocal peer learning, and the contribution of unofficial team leaders to effective learning and performance. All of these factors were reported as increasing individual and collective confidence levels. The findings highlight the role of peer interactions and social learning in developing the confidence of choral singers, and suggest ways in which conductors might optimize these interactions to build confidence during choir rehearsals and performances.

Introduction: Socialism – from Eternal Reality to Passing DreamThe Year of Revolutions in 1989 presaged the end of the Cold War. For many people, it must have felt like the end of the Twentieth Century, and the 1990s a period of waiting for the Millennium. However, the 1990s was, in fact, a period of profound transformation in the post-Socialist world.In early representations of Socialism’s end, a dominant narrative was that of collapse. Dramatic events, such as the dismantling of the Berlin Wall in Germany enabled representation of the end as an unexpected moment. Senses of unexpectedness rested on erstwhile perceptions of Socialism as eternal.In contrast, the 1990s came to be a decade of revision in which thinking switched from considering Socialism’s persistence to asking, “why it went wrong?” I explore this question in relation to former-Yugoslavia. In brief, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) was replaced through the early 1990s by six independent nation states: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovenia. Kosovo came much later. In the states that were significantly ethnically mixed, the break-up was accompanied by violence. Bosnia in the 1990s will be remembered for an important contribution to the lexicon of ideas – ethnic cleansing.Revisionist historicising of the former-Yugoslavia in the 1990s was led by the scholarly community. By and large, it discredited the Ancient Ethnic Hatreds (AEH) thesis commonly held by nationalists, simplistic media commentators and many Western politicians. The AEH thesis held that Socialism’s end was a consequence of the up-swelling of primordial (natural) ethnic tensions. Conversely, the scholarly community tended to view Socialism’s failure as an outcome of systemic economic and political deficiencies in the SFRY, and that these deficiencies were also, in fact the root cause of those ethnic tensions. And, it was argued that had such deficiencies been addressed earlier Socialism may have survived and fulfilled its promise of eternity (Verdery).A third significant perspective which emerged through the 1990s was that the collapse of Socialism was an outcome of the up-swelling of, if not primordial ethnic tensions then, at least repressed historical memories of ethnic tensions, especially of the internecine violence engendered locally by Nazi and Italian Fascist forces in WWII. This perspective was particularly en vogue within the unusually rich arts scene in former-Yugoslavia. Its leading exponent was Slovenian avant-garde rock band Laibach.In this article, I consider Laibach’s career and methods. For background the article draws substantially on Alexei Monroe’s excellent biography of Laibach, Interrogation Machine: Laibach and NSK (2005). However, as I indicate below, my interpretation diverges very significantly from Monroe’s. Laibach’s most significant body of work is the cover versions of Western pop songs it recorded in the middle part of its career. Using a technique that has been labelled retroquotation (Monroe), it subtly transforms the lyrical content, and radically transforms the musical arrangement of pop songs, thereby rendering them what might be described as martial anthems. The clearest illustration of the process is Laibach’s version of Opus’s one hit wonder “Live is Life”, which is retitled as “Life is Life” (Laibach 1987).Conventional scholarly interpretations of Laibach’s method (including Monroe’s) present it as entailing the uncovering of repressed forms of individual and collective totalitarian consciousness. I outline these ideas, but supplement them with an alternative interpretation. I argue that in the cover version stage of its career, Laibach switched its attention from seeking to uncover repressed totalitarianism towards uncovering repressed memories of ethnic tension, especially from WWII. Furthermore, I argue that its creative medium of Western pop music is especially important in this regard. On the bases of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Bosnia (University of Melbourne Human Ethics project 1544213.1), and of a reading of SFRY’s geopolitical history, I demonstrate that for many people, Western popular cultural forms came to represent the quintessence of what it was to be Yugoslav. In this context, Laibach’s retroquotation of Western pop music is akin to a broader cultural practice in the post-SFRY era in which symbols of the West were iconoclastically transformed. Such transformation served to reveal a public secret (Taussig) of repressed historic ethnic enmity within the very heart of things that were regarded as quintessentially and pan-ethnically Yugoslav. And, in so doing, this delegitimised memory of SFRY ever having been a properly functioning entity. In this way, Laibach contributed significantly to a broader process in which perceptions of Socialist Yugoslavia came to be rendered less as a reality with the potential for eternity than a passing dream.What Is Laibach and What Does It Do?Originally of the industrial rock genre, Laibach has evolved through numerous other genres including orchestral rock, choral rock and techno. It is not, however, a rock group in any conventional sense. Laibach is the musical section of a tripartite unit named Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK) which also encompasses the fine arts collective Irwin and a variety of theatre groups.Laibach was the name by which the Slovenian capital Ljubljana was known under the Austrian Habsburg Empire and then Nazi occupation in WWII. The choice of name hints at a central purpose of Laibach and NSK in general, to explore the relationship between art and ideology, especially under conditions of totalitarianism. In what follows, I describe how Laibach go about doing this.Laibach’s central method is eclecticism, by which symbols of the various ideological regimes that are its and the NSK’s subject matter are intentionally juxtaposed. Eclecticism of this kind was characteristic of the postmodern aesthetics typical of the 1990s. Furthermore, and counterintuitively perhaps, postmodernism was as much a condition of the Socialist East as it was the Capitalist West. As Mikhail N. Epstein argues, “Totalitarianism itself may be viewed as a specific postmodern model that came to replace the modernist ideological stance elaborated in earlier Marxism” (102). However, Western and Eastern postmodernisms were fundamentally different. In particular, while the former was largely playful, ironicising and depoliticised, the latter, which Laibach and NSK may be regarded as being illustrative of, involved placing in opposition to one another competing and antithetical aesthetic, political and social regimes, “without the contradictions being fully resolved” (Monroe 54).The performance of unresolved contradictions in Laibach’s work fulfils three principal functions. It works to (1) reveal hidden underlying connections between competing ideological systems, and between art and power more generally. This is evident in Life is Life. The video combines symbols of Slovenian romantic nationalism (stags and majestic rural landscapes) with Nazism and militarism (uniforms, bodily postures and a martial musical arrangement). Furthermore, it presents images of the graves of victims of internecine violence in WWII. The video is a reminder to Slovenian viewers of a discomforting public secret within their nation’s history. While Germany is commonly viewed as a principal oppressor of Slovenian nationalism, the rural peasantry, who are represented as embodying Slovenian nationalism most, were also the most willing collaborators in imperialist processes of Germanicisation. The second purpose of the performance of unresolved contradictions in Laibach’s work is to (2) engender senses of the alienation, especially as experienced by the subjects of totalitarian regimes. Laibach’s approach in this regard is quite different to that of punk, whose concern with alienation - symbolised by safety pins and chains - was largely celebratory of the alienated condition. Rather, Laibach took a lead from seminal industrial rock bands such as Einstürzende Neubauten and Throbbing Gristle (see, for example, Walls of Sound (Throbbing Gristle 2004)), whose sound one fan accurately describes as akin to, “the creation of the universe by an angry titan/God and a machine apocalypse all rolled into one” (rateyourmusic.com). Certainly, Laibach’s shows can be uncomfortable experiences too, involving not only clashing symbols and images, but also the dissonant sounds of, for example, martial music, feedback, recordings of the political speeches of totalitarian leaders and barking dogs, all played at eardrum-breaking high volumes. The purpose of this is to provide, as Laibach state: “a ritualized demonstration of political force” (NSK, Neue Slowenische Kunst 44). In short, more than simply celebrating the experience of totalitarian alienation, Laibach’s intention is to reproduce that very alienation.More than performatively representing tyranny, and thereby senses of totalitarian alienation, Laibach and NSK set out to embody it themselves. In particular, and contra the forms of liberal humanism that were hegemonic at the peak of their career in the 1990s, their organisation was developed as a model of totalitarian collectivism in which the individual is always subjugated. This is illustrated in the Onanigram (NSK, Neue Slowenische Kunst), which, mimicking the complexities of the SFRY in its most totalitarian dispensation, maps out in labyrinthine detail the institutional structure of NSK. Behaviour is governed by a Constitution that states explicitly that NSK is a group in which, “each individual is subordinated to the whole” (NSK, Neue Slowenische Kunst 273). Lest this collectivism be misconceived as little more than a show, the case of Tomaž Hostnik is instructive. The original lead singer of Laibach, Hostnik committed ritual suicide by hanging himself from a hayrack, a key symbol of Slovenian nationalism. Initially, rather than mourning his loss, the other members of Laibach posthumously disenfranchised him (“threw him out of the band”), presumably for his act of individual will that was collectively unsanctioned.Laibach and the NSK’s collectivism also have spiritual overtones. The Onanigram presents an Immanent Consistent Spirit, a kind of geist that holds the collective together. NSK claim: “Only God can subdue LAIBACH. People and things never can” (NSK, Neue Slowenische Kunst 289). Furthermore, such rhetorical bombast was matched in aspiration. Most famously, in one of the first instances of a micro-nation, NSK went on to establish itself as a global and virtual non-territorial state, replete with a recruitment drive, passports and anthem, written and performed by Laibach of course. Laibach’s CareerLaibach’s career can be divided into three overlapping parts. The first is its career as a political provocateur, beginning from the inception of the band in 1980 and continuing through to the present. The band’s performances have touched the raw nerves of several political actors. As suggested above, Laibach offended Slovenian nationalists. The band offended the SFRY, especially when in its stage backdrop it juxtaposed images of a penis with Marshal Josip Broz “Tito”, founding President of the SFRY. Above all, it offended libertarians who viewed the band’s exploitation of totalitarian aesthetics as a route to evoking repressed totalitarian energies in its audiences.In a sense the libertarians were correct, for Laibach were quite explicit in representing a third function of their performance of unresolved contradictions as being to (3) evoke repressed totalitarian energies. However, as Žižek demonstrates in his essay “Why Are Laibach and NSK Not Fascists”, Laibach’s intent in this regard is counter-totalitarian. Laibach engage in what amounts to a “psychoanalytic cure” for totalitarianism, which consists of four envisaged stages. The consumers of Laibach’s works and performances go through a process of over-identification with totalitarianism, leading through the experience of alienation to, in turn, disidentification and an eventual overcoming of that totalitarian alienation. The Žižekian interpretation of the four stages has, however been subjected to critique, particularly by Deleuzian scholars, and especially for its psychoanalytic emphasis on the transformation of individual (un)consciousness (i.e. the cerebral rather than bodily). Instead, such scholars prefer a schizoanalytic interpretation which presents the cure as, respectively collective (Monroe 45-50) and somatic (Goddard). Laibach’s works and pronouncements display, often awareness of such abstract theoretical ideas. However, they also display attentiveness to the concrete realities of socio-political context. This was reflected especially in the 1990s, when its focus seemed to shift from the matter of totalitarianism to the overriding issue of the day in Laibach’s homeland – ethnic conflict. For example, echoing the discourse of Truth and Reconciliation emanating from post-Apartheid South Africa in the early 1990s, Laibach argued that its work is “based on the premise that traumas affecting the present and the future can be healed only by returning to the initial conflicts” (NSK Padiglione).In the early 1990s era of post-socialist violent ethnic nationalism, statements such as this rendered Laibach a darling of anti-nationalism, both within civil society and in what came to be known pejoratively as the Yugonostagic, i.e. pro-SFRY left. Its darling status was cemented further by actions such as performing a concert to celebrate the end of the Bosnian war in 1996, and because its ideological mask began to slip. Most famously, when asked by a music journalist the standard question of what the band’s main influences were, rather than citing other musicians Laibach stated: “Tito, Tito and Tito.” Herein lies the third phase of Laibach’s career, dating from the mid-1990s to the present, which has been marked by critical recognition and mainstream acceptance, and in contrasting domains. Notably, in 2012 Laibach was invited to perform at the Tate Modern in London. Then, entering the belly of what is arguably the most totalitarian of totalitarian beasts in 2015, it became the first rock band to perform live in North Korea.The middle part in Laibach’s career was between 1987 and 1996. This was when its work consisted mostly of covers of mainstream Western pop songs by, amongst others Opus, Queen, The Rolling Stones, and, in The Final Countdown (1986), Swedish ‘big hair’ rockers. It also covered entire albums, including a version of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar. No doubt mindful of John Lennon’s claim that his band was more popular than the Messiah himself, Laibach covered the Beatles’ final album Let It Be (1970). Highlighting the perilous hidden connections between apparently benign and fascistic forms of sedentarism, lead singer Milan Fras’ snarling delivery of the refrain “Get Back to where you once belong” renders the hit single from that album less a story of homecoming than a sinister warning to immigrants and ethnic others who are out of place.This career middle stage invoked critique. However, commonplace suggestions that Laibach could be characterised as embodying Retromania, a derivative musical trend typical of the 1990s that has been lambasted for its de-politicisation and a musical conservatism enabled by new sampling technologies that afforded a forensic documentary precision that prohibits creative distortion (Reynolds), are misplaced. Several scholars highlight Laibach’s ceaseless attention to musical creativity in the pursuit of political subversiveness. For example, for Monroe, the cover version was a means for Laibach to continue its exploration of the connections between art and ideology, of illuminating the connections between competing ideological systems and of evoking repressed totalitarian energies, only now within Western forms of entertainment in which ideological power structures are less visible than in overt totalitarian propaganda. However, what often seems to escape intellectualist interpretations presented by scholars such as Žižek, Goddard and (albeit to a lesser extent) Monroe is the importance of the concrete specificities of the context that Laibach worked in in the 1990s – i.e. homeland ethno-nationalist politics – and, especially, their medium – i.e. Western pop music.The Meaning and Meaningfulness of Western Popular Culture in Former YugoslaviaThe Laibach covers were merely one of many celebrations of Western popular culture that emerged in pre- and post-socialist Yugoslavia. The most curious of these was the building of statues of icons of screen and stage. These include statues of Tarzan, Bob Marley, Rocky Balboa and, most famously, martial arts cinema legend Bruce Lee in the Bosnian city of Mostar.The pop monuments were often erected as symbols of peace in contexts of ethnic-national violence. Each was an ethnic hybrid. With the exception of original Tarzan Johnny Weismuller — an ethnic-German American immigrant from Serbia — none was remotely connected to the competing ethnic-national groups. Thus, it was surprising when these pop monuments became targets for iconoclasm. This was especially surprising because, in contrast, both the new ethnic-national monuments that were built and the old Socialist pan-Yugoslav monuments that remained in all their concrete and steel obduracy in and through the 1990s were left largely untouched.The work of Simon Harrison may give us some insight into this curious situation. Harrison questions the commonplace assumption that the strength of enmity between ethnic groups is related to their cultural dissimilarity — in short, the bigger the difference the bigger the biffo. By that logic, the new ethnic-national monuments erected in the post-SFRY era ought to have been vandalised. Conversely, however, Harrison argues that enmity may be more an outcome of similarity, at least when that similarity is torn asunder by other kinds of division. This is so because ownership of previously shared and precious symbols of identity appears to be seen as subjected to appropriation by ones’ erstwhile comrades who are newly othered in such moments.This is, indeed, exactly what happened in post-socialist former-Yugoslavia. Yugoslavs were rendered now as ethnic-nationals: Bosniaks (Muslims), Croats and Serbs in the case of Bosnia. In the process, the erection of obviously non-ethnic-national monuments by, now inevitably ethnic-national subjects was perceived widely as appropriation – “the Croats [the monument in Mostar was sculpted by Croatian artist Ivan Fijolić] are stealing our Bruce Lee,” as one of my Bosnian-Serb informants exclaimed angrily.However, this begs the question: Why would symbols of Western popular culture evoke the kinds of emotions that result in iconoclasm more so than other ethnically non-reducible ones such as those of the Partisans that are celebrated in the old Socialist pan-Yugoslav monuments? The answer lies in the geopolitical history of the SFRY. The Yugoslav-Soviet Union split in 1956 forced the SFRY to develop ever-stronger ties with the West. The effects of this became quotidian, especially as people travelled more or less freely across international borders and consumed the products of Western Capitalism. Many of the things they consumed became deeply meaningful. Notably, barely anybody above a certain age does not reminisce fondly about the moment when participation in martial arts became a nationwide craze following the success of Bruce Lee’s films in the golden (1970s-80s) years of Western-bankrolled Yugoslav prosperity.Likewise, almost everyone above a certain age recalls the balmy summer of 1985, whose happy zeitgeist seemed to be summed up perfectly by Austrian band Opus’s song “Live is Life” (1985). This tune became popular in Yugoslavia due to its apparently feelgood message about the joys of attending live rock performances. In a sense, these moments and the consumption of things “Western” in general came to symbolise everything that was good about Yugoslavia and, indeed to define what it was to be Yugoslavs, especially in comparison to their isolated and materially deprived socialist comrades in the Warsaw Pact countries.However, iconoclastic acts are more than mere emotional responses to offensive instances of cultural appropriation. As Michael Taussig describes, iconoclasm reveals the public secrets that the monuments it targets conceal. SFRY’s great public secret, known especially to those people old enough to have experienced the inter-ethnic violence of WWII, was ethnic division and the state’s deceit of the historic normalcy of pan-Yugoslav identification. The secret was maintained by a formal state policy of forgetting. For example, the wording on monuments in sites of inter-ethnic violence in WWII is commonly of the variety: “here lie the victims in Yugoslavia’s struggle against imperialist forces and their internal quislings.” Said quislings were, of course, actually Serbs, Croats, and Muslims (i.e. fellow Yugoslavs), but those ethnic nomenclatures were almost never used.In contrast, in a context where Western popular cultural forms came to define the very essence of what it was to be Yugoslav, the iconoclasm of Western pop monuments, and the retroquotation of Western pop songs revealed the repressed deceit and the public secret of the reality of inter-ethnic tension at the heart of that which was regarded as quintessentially Yugoslav. In this way, the memory of Yugoslavia ever having been a properly functioning entity was delegitimised. Consequently, Laibach and their kind served to render the apparent reality of the Yugoslav ideal as little more than a dream. ReferencesEpstein, Mikhail N. After the Future: The Paradoxes of Postmodernism and Contemporary Russian Culture. Amherst: U of Massachusettes P, 1995.Goddard, Michael. “We Are Time: Laibach/NSK, Retro-Avant-Gardism and Machinic Repetition,” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 11 (2006): 45-53.Harrison, Simon. “Identity as a Scarce Resource.” Social Anthropology 7 (1999): 239–251.Monroe, Alexei. Interrogation Machine: Laibach and NSK. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005.NSK. Neue Slowenische Kunst. Ljubljana: NSK, 1986.NSK. Padiglione NSK. Ljubljana: Moderna Galerija, 1993.rateyourmusic.com. 2018. 3 Sep. 2018 <https://rateyourmusic.com/artist/throbbing-gristle>.Reynolds, Simon. Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past. London: Faber and Faber, 2011.Taussig, Michael. Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999.Verdery, Katherine. What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Žižek, Slavoj. “Why Are Laibach and NSK Not Fascists?” 3 Sep. 2018 <www.nskstate.com/appendix/articles/why_are_laibach.php.>