Thank you, Elizabeth:

Thank you, again!
Elizabeth Bennett
Director of Orchestras, 
Buffalo Grove High School ​

At last week's ACDA Summer Dialog Conference. Accolades invited All-State choir attendees to "Sing Accolades"  -- that is to sing our new theme:

With such talented singers choosing a winner was difficult -- especially since the primary goal was to have fun.  In the end, we selected an ensemble made up of members from the Champlin Park High School Choir. Congratulations!

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Folks own dozens of coffee mugs. We realize that if we design one for our clients, it had better be a good one.  Attendees at the last two choral conferences apparently agreed with us, as they scooped them up.  

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Nicole Pesce at a 2011 concert displayed virtuosity, creativity, and humor as she speculates on how master composers might have performed "Happy Birthday".  We've also included a Victor Borge performance recorded 60 years earlier..

Excerpt from Neuroscience news:

If you’re a musician, this sounds too good to be true: UChicago psychologists have been able to train some adults to develop the prized musical ability of absolute pitch, and the training’s effects last for months.

Absolute pitch, commonly known as “perfect pitch,” is the ability to identify a note by hearing it. The ability is considered remarkably rare, estimated to be less than one in 10,000 individuals. It has always been a very desired ability among musicians, especially since several famous composers, including Mozart, reportedly had it. The assumption has been that this special talent has a critical period to be established in childhood based on early musical training and that it was not possible for adults to acquire this skill.

In this 2015 study published by the journal Cognition, Howard Nusbaum, professor of psychology, and colleagues tested how much an individual’s general auditory working memory capacity can predict the success of acquiring absolute pitch. Other UChicago authors on the paper are psychology doctoral student Stephen C. Van Hedger, post-doctoral scholar Shannon L.M. Heald and College undergraduate Rachelle Koch.

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The institute supports the notion that as a society, we are in need of healing, a process that has been described as "putting back into one's life what is missing."  Perhaps that healing element is creative musical expression.

​Their first finding, "Making Music Switches off Stress", WebMD, looked at 45 stress-related genes. Nineteen of these genes were reversed in the study group that participated in a recreational music-making program, The study group who spent time just relaxing only had six stress genes reversed. ​