“Junk!" "Drivel!" "Pabulum!" Perhaps every choral director harbors a secret fear that these adjectives or others like them will at some point be directed toward the literature performed by his or her choir. If it is the conductor's intent to avoid poor literature and to program music of high quality, adopting a set of aesthetic standards is essential. Without them a conductor can do little more than impose his or her own tastes on singers, in which case such terms as good, better, and best are deceiving. Without objective evaluative criteria, attempts to describe the aesthetic quality of a piece of music end up being highly subjective opinions.
There generally is some agreement among choral directors about which music is good and which is not. Yet, the reasoning behind such judgments is seldom articulated. For some directors, "I know it when I hear it" is as specific as they ever get in defining quality repertoire. For others, identifying the composer, publisher, or editor is enough to label a piece as garbage or a masterwork.
Those conductors who genuinely try to define a good piece of choral music often will say it needs to be "artfully crafted" and "aesthetically pleasing." The first criterion is relatively easy to define. Many choral conducting texts provide a list of guidelines that can be helpful in evaluating the technical merits or limitations of a piece. Yet, even these often deal as much with pragmatic considerations as with assessing the real worth of a selection.
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