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High Notes May 2010

Every month, we round up interesting tidbits on current events in the choral and classical music worlds. Here's what's going on this month:

Glee makes an impact in schools

Glee, the popular Fox show about a bunch of high school misfits finding their voice in a show choir, is having impact. According to a recent Boston Globe article, 43 percent of music educators say that the show has increased interest in choir, reporting that "students [have] been turning out in record numbers for auditions and pleading for choral arrangements of songs from the show."

What's more, actress Lea Michele (who plays Rachel Berry on the show) was recently named as one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people of 2010.

What do you think of Glee? Tell us in the comments below.

British choir reality show back for another season

Meanwhile, across the pond, the BBC reality show, The Choir, has gained a devoted following and made classically trained choirmaster Gareth Malone into an unlikely star.

Malone's journey takes him to Northolt High School, which has never had a choir, to Lancaster School, a large boys-only school where singing is a dirty word and even teachers are challenging his campaign to build a choir, and to South Oxley, a town desperately in need of transformation. In each place, he overcomes the odds, forming choirs and molding them into groups capable of performing at a high level.

"Bringing people together for a common purpose and singing some of the most beautiful music that's ever been written—I think everyone should have access to that," says Malone.

The Choir premieres in the U.S. on July 7 on BBC AMERICA.

Mothers and madness

Mother's Day this month was an occasion for many a sweet, loving choral concert devoted to mothers. But Cantilena, a woman's chorale in Arlington, Massachusetts, cooked up something different—diabolically different—for its Mother's Day concert.

Their concert, Music About Mothers: From the Divine to the Deranged, featured some lovely pieces such as two settings of "Ave Maria" by Fauré and Poulenc and Duruflé's "Tota Pulchra Es."

But then the dark side came out with Irving Fine's raucous and malicious Caroline Million, whose lyrics conjure up Lizzy Borden: "One day my mother took a sledgehammer and pounded the kitchen stove into bits."

Ah, how sweet. Read more at the Cantilena website.

For stroke victims, music helps unlock language

A new study, reported in the Wall Street Journal, finds that music may hold the key to unlocking language for stroke victims who have lost of their ability to speak.

In the study, 12 patients who were taught to essentially sing their words improved their verbal abilities and maintained the improvement for up to a month after the end of the therapy, according to Gottfried Schlaug, a neurology professor at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School.

The treatment, called melodic intonation therapy, was devised in the 1970s after clinicians observed that some patients who suffered strokes were no longer able to talk but could still sing. However, the therapy never really caught on and its efficacy hasn't been fully assessed, Schlaug says.