The online conductor

Denne artikkelen er skrevet av Ung i Kor sin musikkonsulent, Kjetil, og ble først publisert i European Choral Magazine, nummer 3/2011. Det er et fagtidsskrift som utgis av European Choral Association - Europa Cantat.

Ung i Kor vil av og til gjengi artikler som er publisert av andre, selv om de noen ganger er på et annet språk. 

Before the Internet, I had to go to schools, universities, seminars and libraries to learn new things. Now, I have the whole world of knowledge at my fingertips when I am sitting at a computer. Since I own a smartphone, I also have the whole world of knowledge in my pocket. In addition to a world of knowledge, the Internet is also a world of choral music.
Ten years ago, there were already some web sites dedicated to our work. ChoralNet, Choral Public Domain Library, MUSICA and others provide us with a lot of resources. I guess you have already spent quite some time on these websites. They have evolved dramatically since they were launched back in the stone age of the 1990s.  

So, where are the best places on the Internet to find inspiration, ideas and resources for your work as a conductor? Where is the best place to post your questions?

I don’t have a simple answer to those questions. However, I can tell you a little about how I use the Internet myself. Maybe some of the stuff that I have in my Internet tool chest can be of use to you too.

I access the Internet from computers and from a smartphone. I make sure that everything I store on the Internet myself can be accessed from my phone. This ensures that it is available in every rehearsal hall, and when I am traveling.  

First of all, I use search engines (Google, Bing etc.) all the time. Seach engines use complex techniques to find what I am looking for, and they save me a lot of time and mouse clicks. Instead of letting me navigate through menus on a web site, search engines take me directly to the page I want to see.

In addition to Google and Bing, there are some specialized search engines out there. ScorSer is one of them, and I use it often to search for scores, recordings and midi files. The nice thing about ScorSer is that I can write a search term in one language and get results in another language. In other words, I can type in the search phrase “Amur bølger” (in Norwegian) and ScorSer will find the Russian waltz “Амурские волны”.

I spend a lot of time on YouTube, listening to performances of music there. I recommend that you set up a YouTube account yourself. It is free, and in addition to allow you to upload your own videos, it also lets you subscribe to other YouTube users. This means that when your favourite choir or composer uploads a new video to YouTube, you will be notified. YouTube also has much more than videos of musical performances. Try searching for “conducting masterclass” for instance, and you may be surprised.

SoundCloud is similar to YouTube, except that is for sound instead of video. Users upload sound files to SoundCloud. If you sign up for an account on SoundCloud (yes, it is free), you can subscribe to uploads from other users. Among other things, I store recordings from rehearsals there and share them with the singers.

I conduct three choirs. That means that I communicate with a large number of singers every day. Social networks on the Internet are useful tools for such communication. Most online social networks let you create groups for sharing. In Norway, most people use Facebook, so for a Norwegian conductor, Facebook would be the first choice. However, when Google+ was launched this summer, I found it to be an even better tool for sharing information. It will deliver messages via email to those singers who don’t have a Google+ account yet.

There are also a number of social online social networks dedicated to choral music. In addition to groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, Vkontakte and others, there are also “specialized” networks. ChoirPlace is a fairly new site where choirs can upload photos and link to videos from YouTube and Vimeo. Polifonia and ChoralNet are examples of networks that in addition to information about choirs have forums, blogs, articles and lists of everything related to choral music.

There are a lot of blogs focusing on choral music. I also have Twitter lists of choirs, conductors, composers and festivals that I follow. Twitter takes some time to understand, but if you get the hang of it, you may find that it is a fantastic tool for staying in touch with colleagues.

I write a blog myself that I encourage singers to follow. Via my blog I share my thoughts, for instance my interpretation of a piece of music, with a lot of singers. And when I want to share the same thoughts with a new choir, I can point those singers to that blog post.

For music notation, I use MuseScore (it is a free application that is available for Windows, Linux and MacOS). I can upload my scores to the Internet directly from MuseScore, and share them with singers and other conductors. With a few mouse clicks, my work is stored on the Internet, and is available to my singers for download as mp3, MIDI or PDF.

Among my favourite sites is IMSLP, the International Music Score Library Project. It is a collection of scores that are in the public domain (Petrucci Music Library), but also a great music blog (IMSLP Journal) and discussion forums where I can get in touch with composers, conductors, musicologists and musicians from all over the world.

Most of us use free (public domain) sheet music downloaded from the Internet, bur there are also more and more publishers that let us purchase copyrighted music online and print it ourselves. Instead of waiting for days or weeks to have our sheet music delivered, we hold the printed music in our hand a couple of minutes after entering the credit card details on a web site. Search for “sheet music on demand”, and you will find a number of web stores that you can check out.

The Internet by itself does not make us better conductors. But it can surely make it easier to share our music and our knowledge with others. And it makes it easier to be inspired and to be inspiring. Which is exactly what our work is all about.