The very first Sounds Good Choir concerts, in the spring and summer of 2016, were short, six-week pilots with five songs each. I’m still amazed at how much music our pioneering Sounds Good singers learned in a such a brief time period. I had picked those programs together with Sandy Siegel Miller, along with some help from our Encore Creativity colleagues in Washington, D.C. (who had a lending library we could use). At the time, Sandy was the unpaid operations director, and we had a part-time office intern and the proverbial “kitchen-table board.” I was flinging myself around the universe doing five rehearsals every week.

Our Arlington Heights and Oak Park/River Forest choirs launched in the fall of 2016 with a holiday-themed program. This was the first concert that Linda Crabtree Powell and I put together. For our next joint programming venture in 2017, Linda and I created a show called “Broadway to Hollywood.” That program was a good one! In fact, for the 2025 Spring program we’re bringing back one of the tunes from it, “Singin’ in the Rain,” this tine with a different arranger. You can find the complete 2017 Spring playlist on our website, along with the repertoire from every concert we’ve performed.

Last fall when Linda and I started pulling program ideas together for the 2025 Spring session, we both felt like it was time for another Broadway-focused show. Part of what tipped the program in this direction was the number of unsolicited requests that singers have made. These had come in a reasonable steady stream of singers after rehearsals, saying things like, “Hey, couldn’t we do some more Broadway sometime soon?” So it wasn’t hard to decide that showtunes were a good direction to take for 2025 Spring, at least in theory.

The challenge, as always, is to find repertoire that suits our choirs. It’s a multi-part challenge, really. The first part is to simply discover if there are choral arrangements of the tunes we’re hoping to have the choirs sing. This is not always as obvious as it might sound. Just having an arrangement for choir doesn’t mean that the arrangement has a good feel to it.

There are extremes of new arrangements, and then there’s the “sweet spot.” At one extreme, sometimes an arranger is totally faithful to the original, which is often nice, but sometimes means that the choral version can be a little square. The other extreme is when an arranger pulls the style in such a new direction that, frankly, it’s a turn-off. (There’s one arranger, who shall remain nameless here, about whom Sandy and I often joke: “Oh yes, arranger X… is it another bossa nova?”) The sweet spot is a place where the character of the original is mostly preserved, but there’s something lovely and fresh about the choral version. The sweet spot also has a few requirements for our choirs, one of which is that the soprano lines can’t above a high F, and if they do, there needs to be an alternate line that the lower sopranos can sing. Another requirement is that the tenor lines can’t go too low since many of our tenors are female.

For our concerts, we need eight songs for a full-length program. Linda and I usually start with a long list of 30 to 40 pieces. We listen to them online at a sheet music store, like J.W. Peppers. We order copies of the ones that are strong contenders, and then we meet, usually at Linda’s house, to have the full play-through session. Pieces get tossed aside; others get held in a “Maybe” bucket. The joyful moments happen when it’s clear that a particular piece is a winner. These winners start to shape the program.

Another challenge to creating a program for Sounds Good is the level of difficulty. We have 14 weeks to learn an entire program before putting it up on stage. This means that one really difficult piece, if we decide to go for it, has to be balanced with one or more much easier songs that can be learned quickly.

It’s crunch time once we have between 6 and 8 pieces picked out and we need to fill in any gaps—of tempo, mood, or feel—or, in the case of the 2025 Spring Broadway program, when we realize, “Oops, we have to have something by that great songwriter!” The final step is when all eight pieces are arranged on the top of Linda’s piano in the order they will be performed. That’s when we know the program is “baked.” After this, I create a spreadsheet of the final repertoire, the office team orders the music from our sheet-music vendor, and we put the repertoire up on the website to launch registration. Linda and I then meet once more to work out the breath markings and other musical details that Paul Langford’s team needs to create our invaluable practice tracks.

Fun Fact: SAB & SATB

When conductors and singers refer to SAB and SATB, they aren’t talking about the latest passenger jet or a new strain of the flu. These acronyms refer to the specific voice parts for singers, organized by vocal range from highest to lowest. SAB stands for “Soprano Alto Baritone” (or what’s called 3-part harmony) and SATB stands for “Soprano Alto Tenor Bass” (known as 4-part harmony). You can hear the difference between 3- and 4-part harmony in “Singin’ in the Rain”: SAB version and SATB version.

Sandy and I do a similar version of this selection process for the Good Memories Choir and for Summer Rocks, our summer session. It’s really fun and it’s hard work. For the 2025 Spring session, Good Memories is doing a very similar program to what Sounds Good is singing. Because the singers in the Good Memories choir are people with early-stage dementia and their care partners, we usually choose three-part (SAB) scores, in contrast to the four-part (SATB) version for Sounds Good. Sandy and I usually also opt for SAB settings for Summer Rocks because we only have eight weeks to learn seven charts in the summer… it helps that the tunes for Summers Rocks are usually familiar to most of the singers.

So that’s a taste of some of the ingredients in our recipe for creating fun and entertaining concert programs. I hope you enjoyed a visit to the musical kitchen! As always, feel free to share your thoughts or questions in the comments section below. And be sure to register for the spring session today… you don’t want to miss out on singing the 2025 Spring repertoire!