Have you ever noticed that good pedagogy and the perfect methodology only goes so far? The job of a teacher, conductor or a coach is a complicated cocktail with almost infinitely changing ingredients. The main variables can be found within the groups themselves.
In this episode, I’m sitting down once again with Gary Seighman, choir director and Chair of the Music Department at Trinity University. Gary is out with a fascinating new book published by Meredith Music and GIA called The Choir Playbook.
We dive deep into the striking parallels between athletic coaching and choral rehearsing, exploring how over-analyzing mechanics can completely paralyze execution—whether a kid is at the plate or a conductor is on the podium. Gary shares how moving past surface-level band-aids allows us to build adaptive, high-performing musical environments.
What We Preview in This Episode:
- The Ecological Approach to Rehearsing: Why training your choir to “expect the unexpected” and adapt on the fly builds a more resilient ensemble than rigid, predictable repetition.
- Joint Action Theory and the Mirror Neuron System: The hard science behind how ensembles create a subconscious “collective organism”—synchronizing breathing, body language, and heart rates to predict musical movements rather than just reacting to them.
- Lego Vowels vs. Silly Putty: A look into Gary’s toolbox for vowel unification and why teaching English text requires fighting a lifetime of native, lazy speech habits.
- Defeating Teacher Burnout: Why stepping completely outside the choral bubble to explore sports, sci-fi, or Pixar movies is exactly what your default mode network needs to unlock massive creative Eureka moments in front of your choir.
If you are tired of shallow fixes and want to understand the deep neurological and physiological mechanics of what actually happens when humans make music together, you are not going to want to miss this conversation.
Grab your notebook, clip board and whistle and stick around
🎧 Tune in now on YouTube or your favorite podcast app!
Tune in, and have your thinking stimulated and challenged. Then, weigh in yourself with your related ideas and experiences on Facebook in the Choralosophers group or over on choralosophy.substack.com Also, don’t forget to grab a reading rope for your classroom wall from the shop! Music Reading Rope
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Gary Seighman is Professor, Director of Choral Activities, and Chair of the Music Department at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, one of the nation’s top private liberal arts universities. He is the recipient of several teaching awards, including the Most Innovative Programming Award from the Texas Choral Directors Association. His choirs have performed for the National Collegiate Choral Organization, the Texas Music Educators Association, and the 2026 Southwest ACDA conference. He is a regular guest artist with Worldstrides Performance for their Carnegie Hall festivals and has conducted across the world with multiple European tours, and 6 trips to East Asia conducting the Peking University Summer Opera Program, and performances throughout Taiwan and Japan.
His book, The Choir Playbook: Tools for the Imaginative Conductor, was recently published by Meredith Music and GIA. His degrees are from is from Westminster Choir College, the University of Oklahoma, and the University of Maryland. Seighman enjoys other creative outlets including signed as a model and actor with Avant Agency, where he has appeared in print, online, billboards, radio, and television. He also loves coaching soccer, softball, and baseball for his 9 and 11-year-old children.
Find Gary on Social Media:
https://www.instagram.com/gary_seighman?igsh=MTJncjhqcGdpNW15Mw==
https://www.facebook.com/gary.seighman
@choralosophypodca