Repertoire Building: Bridging Choir Performance and Life
by Alyssa Liyana Dioquino
When it comes to being a conductor or musical director, a lot of your work is done outside of the concert hall - even rehearsal rooms. There is one task I particularly enjoy - before rehearsals are planned and concert venues are booked, I sit down, armed with an insane amount of caffeine, to look through the music that would possibly, eventually, make it to the program for the season.
My weapons of choice when picking out repertoire, and some of the most memorable works we have performed since I joined the group.
What materials do I have to work with? Children’s chorus music, at first glance, will seem so much more limited than those available for more mature choirs. Well-written treble choir pieces are gems - they require a lot of digging to be found. If the music jumps out of the page and speaks to me, I set it aside. Thankfully, finding these gems are so much easier with the Cherubim’s extensive repertoire worth 50 years of singing together - some even written specifically for them. I do my best to fish from the timeless selections already available and some new music to add to it too.
From these choices, I try to find a connecting thread. I delve into the text and history of the music I am not entirely familiar with. Sometimes, themes form. I play with order, considering length, energy, and character. From here, the vision of the end of season concert becomes a little clearer. And from here, there is even more to consider. How much time do you have? What other engagements do the kids have to deal with that could steal away their rehearsal time? I look at the music’s difficulty to make sure it is doable, but challenging enough for the children to learn something new. This phase probably takes the longest. It’s like solving a puzzle and not knowing the end result. Every single rearrangement changes the picture. It gets rearranged until well into the season, to be quite honest.
The thing about selecting music is that while envisioning that end-goal (often a concert of sorts) is a good thing, one must remember that before the concert, the children spend an enormous amount of time with the music. The biggest question I ask - the most powerful, too - is “what is there for them to take home and learn from the music?” While I am there with Tita Lenette to guide the children through the discipline and responsibilities of music making, I have to acknowledge that the music, on its own, is a beautiful teacher. It articulates things words often fall short doing. It shines a different light on literature, lends a new lens to approach art with, and offers a fresh vantage point on history, among a million other things. It teaches them of life - a world they ought to live in, and the reality of today. At the end of the day, it is their understanding of the music that makes every musical endeavor come alive. And more importantly, it is this understanding that will aid them into facing the world outside the practice rooms and beyond the years that they spend in the UP Cherubim and Seraphim.
