Choral Potpourri: Choral Ethics; Understanding How to Succeed

“Baseball is like church. Many attend, few understand.” Leo Durocher

In the event you’ve been living under a rock, we here in Chicago are having a better than usual year, baseball-wise, and are pretty proud of it. I happen to (usually) cheer for Our Town’s other team but this year am rooting for The Cubbies as they begin the World Series. Anyone can “have a bad century” and the Cubs deserve a bit of good fortune so we can finally put that tired truism to rest.

I am not a regular sports newspaper reader, but this October I have been religiously reading the baseball musings of Our Town’s long suffering sportswriters. Yesterday, I glanced at a column not about baseball but an interview with a football coach. What caught my eye was something this particular coach does every morning. He reminds himself what his late father (also a football coach) used to say every day; “what can I do today to help this team win?” This struck me as so profound and applicable in a choral situation, I decided to write a different blog from the one I had planned.

I suspect it is the same in sports as in the choral life; we all want what we don’t have and if we did actually did have what we want, know we could “win.” We want a bigger choir. We want a smaller choir of better musicians. We want a longer rehearsal period. We want a shorter, more productive rehearsal period. We want better facilities and a better accompanist and regular access to an orchestra. We don’t want to be told what to program. We want to be guided in our programming choices. We set ourselves and our choirs up to fail by not accepting the circumstances we have right now, whatever they are.

How many times have you programmed something you wanted to do, your choir couldn’t do it (or couldn’t do it well) and it frustrates you? I am not speaking of musical ability, necessarily, but of resources. If you don’t have enough tenors to have T1 and T2, how can you program something with a divided tenor? The reverse is also true; if you want to do a work written for a small vocal ensemble and you have an 80 voice non-auditioned group, it will sound muddy, no matter what you do. You may have enough singers to sing an eight part work with high Cs, but if you don’t have several S1s with decent high Cs, you probably shouldn’t program the piece. No matter how much you, or your singers, want to do it. Do you set your choir up for defeat by wishful programming? I am certainly guilty of this at times and am trying to change.

If you look at your choir objectively, what would you realistically program? If you have half the time you usually have to prepare a concert, how many pieces (and how difficult would they be) would you program? If your choir has no experience with Church Slavic and you have only eight rehearsals to prepare, would you still insist doing that work you’ve always wanted to do? If you have no tenors AT ALL, would you still program an SATB piece?

If we decide to make the best of what we have right now, not only is our choir going to do better but we will feel better. We spend so much time fighting and working against what is, in fact, our reality we forget what our choir needs. It is my belief; many Choral Ethics situations with the choral director/conductor as the problem stem from not accepting what they have but trying to force things to their will.

What will you do today so your choir, the one you have right now, is able to succeed? Little by little, small changes and succeeding in small ways can change a choir, a program and us, too. A history of success begets more success. Perhaps accepting who and what we have to work with and building on those things is something we should all aspire to. That’s what we can all do today to help our choirs succeed.