I played for a couple of Cameron’s choirs today up at UW-BC for a choral clinic. One group dropped out, so we got extra time for both of our groups. The clinician was from the Cities (I’m not sure exactly where), and he was amazing! Very good at working with the kids and had very good methods for getting them to do things. Of course, the Cameron groups are always so good that the clinicians can work on very picky things, which makes it incredibly interesting for me. Monday is there concert and I’ll be playing for two more groups for that. Their high school is about the same size as Chetek and they have 3 choral groups, with no overlap of people – a women’s ensemble of about 25, and mixed choir of about 60 and a chamber choir (by audition) of about 30.  Plus their 7th and 8th grade choir has about 75 and sounds (again) like a very good high school choir.

I haven’t played for them for a few years, because of schedule conflicts with Chetek things, but working with them again is going to make working with Chetek very frustrating, because I know the choir could sound so much better if someone cared enough to ask them for it. Let’s see…. one middle school choir is working on uniform shaping of vowels and placing the sound in their mask and the other high school choir is allowed to breathe just anywhere and the only diction is making sure t’s and s’s on the ends of words are together. Agggghhhhh!