There is nothing worse in the choir director’s experience than having nothing to work on at the moment. If you ask, you will hear things from those who will be honest enough to tell you. Ask me what I did. Schedule a passion prayer session, that’s it! And that is terrible. When you have to turn your choir into a prayer squad, you have a crisis on your hands. Or soon you will.
Get a photo of those who come to choir practice on these days. They are not the too pious. They are the excited ones, in general. So don’t be fooled into thinking that they will enjoy prayer as much as you do. It bores them crazy. They don’t want to pray. They came to sing and sing, you will have to force them to do it.
What else do choir directors do when they’re exhausted? You write your own song and submit it the same day. There you go. So many things would not have been taken care of in this short time. The song would be too simple, too short. The harmony too weak, too cumbersome. Progression too absurd or absent. Now imagine what it would look like, appearing before a 40-voice choir in this situation. If they belong to the city where I live, two thirds of them will not attend the next choir practice. No one wants to sing a broken piece, regardless of the composer’s intention. Do everything you want in your secret place and be more than ready. That’s when you’re ready to lead. Weave the song together. Rough edges plum. Get the music flowing. It draws the musicians ahead. Then work with your vocalists. Arrive at your choir with a done deal. They will respond in tandem. Otherwise you have a raw show.
Anyway, let’s talk about the things that help keep your choir’s mill running throughout the year: Materials. With the materials you have something on the lectern every week. They provide you with the preparation elements. So a wise choirmaster gets music literature, music audios and videos. And to these he adds extensive scores, from baroque oratorios to contemporary gospel scores. It is not the other way around (scores, then literature and the rest). Nope! Literature first, followed by others.
Literatures do two things: first they inspire you; second, they round you out, widening your field of appreciation. By way of illustration, if you read GF Handel’s story before you start working on Messiah, at least two things instantly happen to you. First, you learn to make an independent but informed decision before doing the job, just like any director before you. You tend to feel no less than anyone who has done the work in the last two and a half centuries, thus assuming a resolve. Second, you are inspired to write your own works, putting the scriptures to music. These twin concepts, education and inspiration, are a fundamental resource in choral management. No choir director or choir mistress can afford to do without them.
Now, your choir has to make a song that borders on jazz, and you’ve scoured the literature from which you’ve extracted the four elements of jazz: blue notes, syncopation, improvisation, and the uniqueness of altered timbre, then you’re good to go. You are ready to listen to the audio. Your mind is ready to listen. The doors of your mind have a less rigorous job to do listening. You realize that observation is for the prepared mind. The man who has no idea what he wants to do stays alert for nothing, because when his target passes by, he wouldn’t even notice. You’re better, right? You know when you hear what you’ve been waiting to hear. And you fix it. You pause the record player and repeat that line over and over, until you get it right.