The book's six expert contributors, each a professional conductor, relate the necessary steps towards success--from choosing and preparing the music, through rehearsals, to the actual performance. The authors stress the establishment of an effective choral program containing these four ingredients: a conductor with high ideals who elicits the very best from his or her singers; carefully selected music combining poetry and music at the highest levels of sensitivity; an understanding of an enthusiasm for the music; an emphasis on the communicative powers inherent to the choral art.

This book is designed to provide direction and guidance for college students of choral conducting, and to stimulate the practicing conductor who is receptive to alternative approaches to choral development and problem solving. It is the result of professional experience in guiding choral conductors who share this art with singers and audiences. The choral experience is an avenue that is unique for communication. Because of the group dynamic, a conductor's role is that of catalyst and facilitator. Both singing group and audience are dependent upon the conductor's skills and artistry. - Preface and Prologue.

This text addresses the broad range of music in the United States from early periods to today, presenting this rich tapestry of sound in its historical and cultural context. Its reasonable length, readability, and logical organization make the text a useful and attractive means of furthering appreciation of the musical heritage of the United States. Frequent connections to other arts, particularly the visual arts, add to the book's appeal and enhance understanding of core musical concepts. The text also offers an elegant and readable introduction to the fundamentals of music. To order the text packaged with a set of three CDs of recorded examples, at a discounted price, use ISBN 0-07-304387-7.

Writing about music-about what it is and what it means-is akin to describing the act of love. Somehow, the reduction of the experience to an unblushingly detailed exposition of how, where, when, and why who does what to whom, from prelude to resolu tion, loses everything in the translation. The other extreme, the one wherein the writer, in desperation, resorts to metaphor (with or without benefit of meter and rhyme), most often results in im agery that is banal, vulgar, inane, obscure, pretentious, and almost always insufferably romantic. To achieve good and accurate writing about music is as rare an accomplishment as expert wine-tasting, lion-taming, diamond-cut ting, truffie-finding and (if one just happens to be an unconverted Mohican brave) deer-tracking. Only the intuitive, the pure, the sensual, and the intrepid need apply. Professional musicians often evidence a fixed tendency either to rudely ignore or else to actively despise those of us who bravely try to understand, define, and describe their art. To many composers and instrumentalists, those outsiders (nonmusicians) who have the temerity to discuss anything more abstract than the digital dexterity of a fiddler, the particular vanity of a conductor, or the wage scales for overtime recording sessions are judged worthy only of contempt or-at the most-patronizing tolerance. "Music means itself," insists one of the contributors to the collection that follows, and many practitioners of the art of organ ized sound would prefer to leave it at that.