Grammy-Award Finalist Topher Keene is widely regarded as one of America’s top Acting, Singing, and Public Speaking Coaches.
From teaching kids to sing their first solo, to helping Film and Television Stars perfect their roles, to helping pro Vocalists record hit albums, to helping YouTubers and Podcasters refine their vocal skills, to helping CEOs and Executives improve communication and presentation skills, Topher Keene can help anyone develop a powerful and confident voice and improve their performance skills.
The Choir Rehearsal That Actually Works: A Working Choral Director's Philosophy and Structure
There are two different choir rehearsals happening across America every week. They look very similar from the outside — same number of singers, similar warm-ups, similar repertoire, similar lengths. But one of them produces singers who develop year over year, can sight-sing their music, hold a tuning fork in their hand and find their starting pitch on their own, and leave the program at the end of the year as more capable musicians than they walked in. The other produces singers who are bored, dependent on the piano, lost when their director isn't visibly leading every breath, and walk out with the same skills they walked in with — having simply learned the specific pieces of music in this year's concerts.
How to Conduct a Choir Rehearsal Without a Pianist
Here's the truth most graduate programs don't prepare you for: you will, at some point in your career, run choir rehearsals without a pianist. Sometimes for a single week. Sometimes for an entire season. The directors who handle this well develop a set of skills that, frankly, every choral director should have anyway. The directors who handle it badly produce rough rehearsals where everyone is frustrated and nothing gets accomplished.
Teaching Choir Singers to Read Music: Sight-Singing, Solfege, and Aural Literacy
Music literacy is a core skill. Like reading and arithmetic, it can be taught to almost every student given the right instruction and time. But it's largely not being taught in modern choral programs, which have shifted over the last several decades toward a model where the director feeds the music to the singers via the piano, the singers learn it by repetition, and the actual reading of music — the ability to look at a page of notation and produce the sound — never develops.
Monologue Websites for Actors: Where Do I Find New Monologues for Auditions, Self-Tapes, and Cold Reading?
The best monologue sites for acting auditions
