Elise Bradley

ELISE BRADLEY, CANADA

Choral Sound Concept: Vision, visualization and vowels

How to visualise and actualise your vision through vowels and vocal technique.

What is the vision for your choir? How can you visualise and actualise your vision? How can vowels impact on the vision and the visualisation? This seminar addresses vowels and vocal techniques for vocal quality and tuning as part of a choral sound concept. Paying attention to detail!

Elise Bradley, Artistic Director of the Toronto Children’s Chorus, has long been an advocate of vowels as the key to the language, the sound, and the tuning, and as an invaluable tool in teaching choral music. The Chorus has been praised for its healthy sound and excellent tuning.

With the use of a choral sound concept, young choristers have been able to perform with unified intonation and with a blended healthy sound. Ms. Bradley continues to receive many invitations to give workshops and provide mentorship on this important topic and would lead an interactive professional development workshop on the Choral Sound Concept. Her presentation would include a lecture, an interactive exercise of ‘before’ and ‘after’ choral recordings to illustrate the benefits of vowels for tuning, and brief interactive quizzes and exercises for workshop participants.

This season marks Elise Bradley’s sixth year as Artistic Director of the Toronto Children’s Chorus. A passionate musician, career educator, award-winning conductor, and internationally respected adjudicator and clinician, Ms. Bradley served for many years as Head of Department, Music at Westlake Girls’ High School in Auckland, New Zealand, where her Key Cygnetures choir won coveted awards in both Austria and New Zealand. As Music Director of the New Zealand Secondary Students’ Choir, she has also won first-place awards in competitions in Canada, China, and Hong Kong. Since arriving in Toronto, Ms. Bradley has garnered praise for her artistry and for her deep commitment to children and the art of treble choral music. In 2009, the Choir performed at Haydn Hall in Eisenstadt, Bach’s St. Thomas Church in Leipzig, the Berlin Dom, and with the Vienna Boys Choir at the 9th World Choral Festival at the Musikverein. In 2009, the TCC had the honour of performing with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra in Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem under the baton of Peter Oundjian and, in 2010, with Krzysztof Penderecki and Soundstreams Canada. During the summer of 2011, the Chorus took part in the Melodia Festival in Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires, and was one of only twenty-five choirs invited to participate in the 9th World Symposium on Choral Music in Argentina. The current concert season, Dance Your Song, features series performances by all 300 choristers and a summer Chamber Choir tour to South Africa. In addition, Ms. Bradley is honoured to have been invited to serve as Guest Clinician and Conductor for Australia’s national choir Gondwana Voices, the Manitoba Honour Choir, and the 7th America Cantat in Bogotá, Colombia.

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