Real music literacy isn’t about robotic, first-time perfection. Here is how to create individualized leveled readers that meet every singer right where they are.
September 26
If you think back to elementary school, or when your own kids were young, you probably remember them bringing home leveled reading books tailored to their specific vocabulary, phonics stage, and sight words. In a perfect world, our music students would have that exact same individualized path. But as ensemble educators, it’s easy to get caught up in the idea of the choir as a collective project and forget that our primary job is still to teach individual human beings how to read and understand music.
In this episode, I break down the exact diagnostic process I use with every single beginner to find a starting place that isn’t too hard, isn’t too easy, but is just right. We’ll also dig into why real literacy is about independence and error correction rather than robotic, first-time perfection, how customized pacing solves classroom management issues before they start, and how we can better align our teaching with the science of how brains actually learn to read. Stick around!
Choralosophy presented by Ludus. Visit Ludus.com/choralosophy for the cutting edge in fine arts ticketing and marketing solutions.
www.sightreadingfactory.com is the best literacy tool on the market today. Enter Choralosophy at checkout to get 10% off memberships for you AND your students!
Be Sure to Find Choralosophy on TikTok!
For future rehearsal clips, find me on TikTok, Insta and Facebook
Enter Choralosophy at Checkout for a 5% discount when you shop for folders, robes and other gear for your choir program! www.mymusicfolders.com and www.mychoirrobes.com
RyanMain.com is now expanding to a family of composers! Visit endeavormusicpublishing.com and of course, enter Choralosophy at checkout for a 10% discount!
ACTUAL student-centered education occurs when we design our classes, pedagogies and assessments around individual student skill attainment. The calculation of “what works” cannot simply boil down to teacher preference.
September 19th
One of the most common things you hear at music education conferences is the phrase: “I just do what works for me.”
It sounds harmless, even pragmatic. But whenever I hear it, a red flag goes up. Because “what works for me” usually means what gets me through the rehearsal, keeps the room orderly, and gets the concert ready in time. It’s an adult-centered answer to a student-centered question. The real question is: Is it working for the kids? And how do we actually know?
In music education, we have a unique blessing: we don’t have state politicians breathing down our necks with standardized testing mandates. That’s a good thing. But the flip side is that without external checks, we can easily confuse great concert performances with actual student learning. In math or science, nobody confuses watching a flashy lab demonstration with real scientific literacy.
Choralosophy presented by Ludus. Visit Ludus.com/choralosophy for the cutting edge in fine arts ticketing and marketing solutions.
Today, I want to challenge how we adopt new pedagogy, why our metric must shift from teacher comfort to student autonomy, and how a “Give Them Tools” philosophy provides the concrete, measurable evidence that our students are actually becoming independent musicians.
www.sightreadingfactory.com is the best literacy tool on the market today. Enter Choralosophy at checkout to get 10% off memberships for you AND your students!
Be Sure to Find Choralosophy on TikTok!
For future rehearsal clips, find me on TikTok, Insta and Facebook
Enter Choralosophy at Checkout for a 5% discount when you shop for folders, robes and other gear for your choir program! www.mymusicfolders.com and www.mychoirrobes.com
RyanMain.com is now expanding to a family of composers! Visit endeavormusicpublishing.com and of course, enter Choralosophy at checkout for a 10% discount!
What happens when a choral piece becomes so wildly popular that choir directors start refusing to program it? We like to tell ourselves that our repertoire choices are based on objective artistic standards…
…but all too often, artists fall into a familiar trap: the moment a piece captures the public imagination or goes viral on social media, we label it “overdone,” roll our eyes, and look for something more obscure. But, for students and amateur singers this could be a missed opportunity, or even create a disconnect.
Jennifer Lucy Cook
Today on the show, I’m joined by composer and lyricist Jennifer Lucy Cook to unpack that instinct and explore what it really means to bridge the gap between tradition and modern culture. Jen’s choral music has swept across social media, reaching millions of young singers who discovered pieces like Time not through conference reading sessions, but through viral TikTok trends. At the same time, she works actively in musical theatre, film, and commercial music, bringing a refreshing, boundary-pushing perspective to the choral world.
In this conversation, Jen and I dig into why choir should be treated as a versatile medium rather than a rigid genre, the technical craft behind writing an earworm versus classical counterpoint, and why directors shouldn’t shy away from music that connects deeply with singers. We also talk about vocal versatility—from traditional choral tone to healthy pop belt—and get a preview of her upcoming concert at Carnegie Hall, where she’s bringing Broadway collaborators and unexpected styles directly to the classical stage. Here is my conversation with Jennifer Lucy Cook.
Choralosophy presented by Ludus. Visit Ludus.com/choralosophy for the cutting edge in fine arts ticketing and marketing solutions.
Whether you are a conductor striving for a unified ensemble sound or a singer trying to navigate choral spaces without sacrificing your vocal health, this conversation offers a grounded path through one of the most polarized debates in choral music. Tune in, and let’s keep the dialogue going.
www.sightreadingfactory.com is the best literacy tool on the market today. Enter Choralosophy at checkout to get 10% off memberships for you AND your students!
Be Sure to Find Choralosophy on TikTok!
For future rehearsal clips, find me on TikTok, Insta and Facebook
Enter Choralosophy at Checkout for a 5% discount when you shop for folders, robes and other gear for your choir program! www.mymusicfolders.com and www.mychoirrobes.com
Jennifer Lucy Cook (she/her) is currently writing music and lyrics for a new comedy musical created alongside double-Tony nominee Tye Blue, the writer-director behind Titanique. In April she will headline as composer and conductor at Carnegie Hall on a program devoted to her music to be performed by a 250-person choir. Cook is developing a new pop musical with Grammy-winner Abigail Barlow and an animated musical with Riki Lindhome.
Sign up for an annual membership and save over $50 by entering Choralosophy at checkout! Save 15% on monthly or annual subscriptions.
She worked with Alan Menken on his solo show, A Whole New World of Alan Menken which premiered at the London Palladium and has toured around the world. With Hollywood Bowl director/producer Richard Kraft, Jen co-wrote on an original two-person musical Out of Toon, and she contributed songs to the sold-out show Willy’s Candy Spectacular at the Edinburgh Fringe.
Cook’s music has found an audience on TikTok, where songs from her original musical Salem, her choral piece “Time”, and her musical recaps of The Bachelor have garnered millions of views. She is currently the composer-in-residence for the Phoenix Chorale, and is based in Los Angeles.
What if we’ve been approaching Music Ed and Conducting backwards? Dr. Jordan suggests, that “the first course in music ed shouldn’t be methods. It should be a semester of learning who you are—because that’s what actually reaches students.”
Why is it that two conductors can give the exact same technical pattern to the same choir, yet pull out two completely different sounds? We spend years studying method books, perfecting rehearsal pacing, and mastering vocal pedagogy—but what happens when our technique begins to eclipse our actual presence on the podium?
Today on the podcast, I’m thrilled to welcome back Dr. James Jordan for his second visit to the show, whose last episode was incredibly helpful and popular with audiences. We dive into his latest book from GIA, The Conductor’s Triangle: Embodied Conducting and Connection. Drawing on over four decades of teaching, the profound influence of his mentor Elaine Brown, and the science behind connection and audiation, James challenges us to move past mechanical conducting habits. We explore what it means to be truly grounded, how listening differs from fixing, and why the most vital instrument in the rehearsal room is simply who you are.
After all, James warns, if your gestures are just mechanical patterns, you’re putting up a shield between your core and your ensemble.
Choralosophy presented by Ludus. Visit Ludus.com/choralosophy for the cutting edge in fine arts ticketing and marketing solutions.
🎧 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
www.sightreadingfactory.com is the best literacy tool on the market today. Enter Choralosophy at checkout to get 10% off memberships for you AND your students!
Sign up for an annual membership and save over $50 by entering Choralosophy at checkout! Save 15% on monthly or annual subscriptions.
James Jordan is a Grammy ™-nominated conductor and seventh conductor of the renowned Westminster Choir. He is Conductor Emeritus at Westminster Choir College. His experience covers over 40 years of teaching, conducting and research. He is the author of more than sixty-five books on conducting and conducting pedagogy, and has over 20 recordings under the GIAChoralWorks , NAXOS and Reference Recordings labels. He is founding director of The Choral Academy of Evoking Sound,
www.thechoralacademy.com, a groundbreaking platform for continuing study for musicians. He is Co-Founder of The Choral Institute at Oxford. He is Co-Director and Tutor for The Addamus Italian Choral Program (Addamus.com) and in 2027 will lead Conducting Institutes in Oxford, Florence and New York.
Enter Choralosophy at Checkout for a 5% discount when you shop for folders, robes and other gear for your choir program! www.mymusicfolders.com and www.mychoirrobes.com
RyanMain.com is now expanding to a family of composers! Visit endeavormusicpublishing.com and of course, enter Choralosophy at checkout for a 10% discount!
