We’ve all been through the standard Professional Development workshop. Directors come in expecting ten tips and tricks they can take back to their classrooms — quick-fix techniques that will magically improve their next rehearsal. I've come to believe the quick-fix model is mostly an illusion. You can find counterexamples to nearly every tactical "tip" by looking at successful directors who don't use it. Some great directors are warm and effusive. Some are quiet and stoic. Some run highly structured rehearsals. Some are loose and improvisational. The surface practices vary enormously.

What are Bobby McFerrin’s Circlesongs? What is a Community Sing?

Basically, it’s a crossover of the broader concepts of community singing (pre-composed/arranged songs with or without harmony with or without accompaniment sung in large groups of amateurs) and improvisational group singing.

So if you wanted to learn CircleSongs, you could transcribe or learn his parts by ear. However the spirit of the events is for each song to be different and unique to the audience in each performance.

This is the part of being a choir director that we tend to talk about least. We talk about rehearsal technique, audition strategy, conducting craft, recruitment. But repertoire selection is where most of the season's outcome is determined. A great director with bad repertoire produces a frustrated choir. A merely good director with well-chosen repertoire produces a strong season. The repertoire choices you make in summer determine the music your singers actually grow inside of all year.

Choir singing is one of the most technically demanding vocal disciplines and one of the least understood. Soloists who can deliver an aria flawlessly often cannot blend cleanly in a choral section. The technical demands of ensemble singing are not lower than solo singing; they are different. The vocal habits that produce a great solo voice frequently undermine ensemble cohesion, and the singers who excel at both are the ones who consciously train the choral-specific technical layer.

Every audition you run is filtering not just for talent, but for confidence under audition conditions. Those are two different things, and most directors confuse them. Here's how to design auditions that find the talent you actually need.

He sang beautifully as a treble for years. He had a clear, ringing soprano or alto sound. He could sustain pitches with confidence. Then, sometime between fourth and eighth grade — or, increasingly often, well outside that traditional window — his voice started changing. His range shrank. His pitches became unstable. The notes he could comfortably sing one week were inaccessible the next. He started cracking embarrassingly in front of his peers. The reliable musician he was disappeared, replaced by a singer who seems to lose his voice every week.

Look at your own choir. If you're under that number — and most of you probably are — you have room to grow. Recruiting singers is, in most cases, the biggest single job of a working choral director that's most consistently under-invested in. We pour our energy into rehearsing the singers we have. We pick repertoire, we work on technique, we prepare concerts. The active work of bringing new singers into the program tends to be an afterthought, attempted in panicked bursts at the start of each season when we realize the bass section is down to two voices.

I have never met a person — child, teenager, adult, senior citizen — who, given the right instruction over a few weeks, could not learn to match pitch and sing in tune at a basic level.

This matters because as a choir director, you almost certainly have one or two singers in your ensemble right now who are described, by themselves or by others, as tone-deaf. They sing flat. They sing the wrong notes. They drone. They distract the singers next to them. And the prevailing wisdom in choral music — particularly in the volunteer and community choir world — is that these singers should either be politely placed in the back where they can't do damage, or, in some cases, asked not to return.

There are technically excellent concerts that leave audiences politely impressed but emotionally untouched. And there are imperfect concerts — concerts with audible flaws, missed entrances, sections that aren't quite together — that leave audiences in tears, or laughing, or filing out of the venue with that particular hush that descends after a real artistic experience.

There are two different choir rehearsals happening across America every week. They look very similar from the outside — same number of singers, similar warm-ups, similar repertoire, similar lengths. But one of them produces singers who develop year over year, can sight-sing their music, hold a tuning fork in their hand and find their starting pitch on their own, and leave the program at the end of the year as more capable musicians than they walked in. The other produces singers who are bored, dependent on the piano, lost when their director isn't visibly leading every breath, and walk out with the same skills they walked in with — having simply learned the specific pieces of music in this year's concerts.

Here's the truth most graduate programs don't prepare you for: you will, at some point in your career, run choir rehearsals without a pianist. Sometimes for a single week. Sometimes for an entire season. The directors who handle this well develop a set of skills that, frankly, every choral director should have anyway. The directors who handle it badly produce rough rehearsals where everyone is frustrated and nothing gets accomplished.

Music literacy is a core skill. Like reading and arithmetic, it can be taught to almost every student given the right instruction and time. But it's largely not being taught in modern choral programs, which have shifted over the last several decades toward a model where the director feeds the music to the singers via the piano, the singers learn it by repetition, and the actual reading of music — the ability to look at a page of notation and produce the sound — never develops.