It is gratifying when singers come up to me spontaneously after rehearsal with bright eyes and say, “I love this music!” This happened many times in past Encore sessions, and it’s happening again now. This is true whether I picked the music on my own (as for the first two pilot sessions in early 2016 and for Encore Rocks) or collaborated with one of our conductors to put a program together. Linda Crabtree Powell and I did most of the programm for the 2016-18 seasons together; the current fall 2018 session is largely the brainchild of Mary Doughty Mauch, including the arrangement of “Allundé, Alluia.” For spring 2019, we are working as a team with Gloria Brown and Hannah Dixon McConnell to create a superb program of songs from Broadway musicals and the Great American Songbook.

We choral conductors spend a great deal of our energy thinking about repertoire. There are really two ways in which choral conductors try to knock it out of the park: one of course is the actual execution of the music, so that it can be sung at the highest possible level given the people who are performing, the venue, and so on; the other is the actual repertoire that is chosen. When I founded Chicago a cappella 25 years ago, I didn’t just want to delight audiences with the quality of the group’s singing. I also wanted to make my mark as a programmer of innovative concerts. That desire has not changed; however, this is part of the profession as a whole and not unique to me.

If you ever were to visit a convention of choir directors, you might be surprised at how much attention, devotion, love, care, time, energy, and money are spent on the experience of looking for music. At a convention like this, you’ll see people talking about repertoire all day, every day. In fact, the typical conversation between two choral directors who haven’t seen each other in a year or two will not begin with, “Hey, Tim, how are your wife and kids?” but “So, tell, me quickly, Tim: what’s the best new piece you conducted all year?” I am completely serious. The family stuff comes second.

I am reminded of the image of a feeding frenzy. When Sandy and I have visited Hawaii, we have usually stayed at a place where there is a very large pond of koi fish. At precisely 9:00 AM, the hotel staff make a big hoopla out of it being feeding time for the fish; children come from all over the resort and witness the incredible, high-energy piling-on of life-force that comes when the pellets of food are dropped in the water.

Choral conductors are better behaved than these fish are, but the sense of a musical feeding frenzy at a conductors’ convention is not that much different. Conductors peer at the wares of dozens, if not hundreds, of publishers and dealers, ranging from the behemoths like J. W. Pepper—the Amazon of choral sheet music—to tiny shops representing a single composer, sometimes staffed by the composer him- or herself. The Pepper people even call their booth “Pepperland” at the huge national convention, with an obvious reference to Disneyland, thereby planting the subtle hint that the Pepper booth is the place where a choral director’s dreams can come true.

It’s tempting to write off all of this frantic flailing as simply an exercise in retail therapy. To do so would be seriously missing the point. Let me come right out and say it, as I did in the title above: picking music is an act of love. It really is. In order to choose just the right music for you, our singers in the Encore choirs, we have to know our ensembles intimately. As you do when you care deeply for someone, but this time in the plural, we conductors have to select music with a whole group of singers in mind. “Browsing” is a verb I often use for this process;  I have whole folders and even boxes in my home office, labeled “General Browsing,” “Xmas Browsing,” and so on. (The book on top of the pile in this photo is the one I mentioned in Arlington Heights on Wednesday, a fabulous tool for choral improvisation by my friend and colleague from Sweden, Gunnar Eriksson.)

When we’re looking for repertoire, we ask dozens of questions internally about each candidate for a program. These include things like the following: Who is the composer/arranger, and do I have a trust level with him or her? How high and low does each voice part go? How long are the phrases, and is there a place to sneak a catch breath if somebody might need one? How good is the piano part? Is the piece so often done that it’s bordering on cliché (and if we’re going to do it anyway, how can we make it fresh and new)? Is the poetry familiar from this or another setting? If the poetry is not that familiar, does it convey a message that will resonate with our singers…  and if it’s a bit of a stretch, do we as the directors feel confident that we can bring the group along with a combination of teaching and cajoling? If it’s in a foreign language, at least partially, can our group handle it? Do we have enough rehearsal time to make this piece really work, in light of everything else that is on the program? How does the tempo relate to the other pieces we’re doing? Will we have to shelve this one with regret and save it for another concert? Is this the piece that I’ve been looking for, to fill that pesky hole in the program right before the grand finale?

I could go on and on.

See, I told you that we do this work with great care and tenderness. It is indeed an act of love to pick music for you. We don’t take it lightly, and we rejoice when you are happy with it. (And yes, you can tell us when you don’t like something. Don’t expect us to react with great glee, but we can take it.) Just know that this is the sort of thing your conductors regularly obsess over. It’s what I do instead of watching TV.

With love to you all,

Jon