"Authenticity is a two-way street: being true to the music and true to yourself" On Friday, February 8 at 4:15 on the stage of Marshall Auditorium, the music department’s Music and Conversation Series will present a lecture/demonstration by Associate Professor of Music Thomas Lloyd and the Chamber Singers of Haverford and Bryn Mawr Colleges. This is a home-campus preview of a presentation the Chamber Singers have been invited to make the following week at the Eastern Regional Convention of the American Choral Directors Association in Hartford, Connecticut. This event is free and open to the public. The topic grows out of several aspects of the Chamber Singers’ distinctive program. The choir has performed in a wide variety of classical styles, with special attention to the “early music” repertoire of the Renaissance and Baroque, in classes with guest ensembles such as the Orlando Consort from England and Tempesta di Mare of Philadelphia. The students have also traveled to countries such as Poland, Venezuela, and Ghana, bringing back music from those cultures in original languages not published in the United States. And the Chamber Singers have explored the roots of the African-American Spiritual in shared performances with Historical Black College and University choirs such as the Fisk Jubilee Singers and the Howard University Choir. When concert choirs sing music from the vast range of musical and cultural styles available to them, they often try to come as close as possible to how the music was originally sung in its own time and culture. But this session will seek to demonstrate how this goal might more successfully be achieved by looking for cues in the music itself rather than through trying to imitate the surface of an idealized historical, ethnic, or racial sound of a particular choral tradition. Choirs benefit from reaching beyond their natural palette of sound when singing repertoire outside of their own tradition. But at the same time, choirs must try to avoid the kind of imitative performance that comes across as inauthentic caricature when it is out of sync with the natural identity of the choir itself. The Chamber Singers will demonstrate alternative approaches to interpretation of the African-American spiritual, international folk-based arrangements, and music of the Renaissance. This project is funded in part by a grant from the Louis Green fund for faculty/student research.