Directors are quite certainly the most underappreciated people on the face of the earth. Their job goes far beyond the educational music level. It involves not only deep concentration and discipline, but also the ability to make good decisions. Being a choir director entails making many important decisions and if a person cannot do this well, then s/he should find another career. From the tiniest detail to the largest question, the director answers them all.

Many people are unaware of what a demanding job directors have.

When was the last time you went to see a choir performance? Did you ever stop to wonder how many decisions went into what you watched? The area where the concert was held was decided by the director, as well as the repertoire, the soloists, the musicians, and often the choir members themselves. How does a director make all these decisions?  S/he treats each decision with equal importance. Just to give an idea of how much preparation a concert takes, I will go through the director’s process before a concert.

Let’s start at the beginning, when a director must decide if s/he wants the members of his/her choir to be auditioned. An upside to auditioned members is that the director has a general idea about each member of the choir and the extent of their musical abilities. The downside to auditioning members is that it may upset people by turning singers away who want to be in the choir. Because of this, public school choral directors and other community directors do not hold auditions.

After a choir obtains all of its members, the director next has to choose the proper musician(s) to accompany the singers. Every choir needs an accompanist of some kind, and the director must be careful in hiring that musician for the choir. An accompanist and a director have a very special relationship, because they have to be able to give each other constructive criticism. Also, a lot of the communication between the director and the accompanist is done non-verbally. They develop a special bond and even seem to develop a knack for reading each other’s minds. So, picking an accompanist is a very important decision for a director and is never taken lightly.

 After a choir and its accompanist are set, it is time for the director to start picking the repertoire that the choir will sing. This is a complicated process and it is done in many different ways. Public school teachers, having no tuition fees and very little funding, usually end up buying some music and using recycled music for the rest of the musical set. Other community choirs, where tuition is paid, usually have no restraints other than the limit of the choir’s musical capabilities. This makes the director’s decision easier, because there is a broader variety of music to choose from.

Once the music is paid for and carefully distributed, the several steps involved in teaching can begin. The director will first go over the music alone, deciding how the music should be taught to the choir. Some directors prefer to make CDs for their choir members with the music recorded on them so that the singers can learn it at home. Other directors like to have the accompanist during the rehearsals play each part of the song with the choir until they can handle the written piano accompaniment. Still, others like to have their choirs learn the music individually, and then a few weeks before the concert put everything together. There are many different ways to teach the actual notes, but that is only the first step in teaching a piece of music to a choir. After the basic notes are learned the choir director then moves on to tone, style, dynamics and all the other details that make a song unique. The bulk of a director’s decisions are made during this process. They get to decide what they want the feel of the music to be, and how that feeling is to be conveyed to the audience. They get to decide if solos should be performed, and how to go about choosing them. It gives the director the ability to turn a boring medieval song into a stunning knight’s tale. It is the real difference between a mediocre choir director and a superior choir director. If a director can connect with the choir members and communicate to them how the piece should be sung, then he or she is a superior teacher. If the connection is missing, then the choir director is not doing his/her job of teaching well. This, for most directors, is the longest and hardest part of working with a choir, but it is the most rewarding. It is where the choir starts to come together and all the hard work and decision making pays off.

After the music has been taught, the director must decide on the finishing touches. This is the point at which the director will add choreography, arrange a specific standing order on stage, and polish out any mistakes. This is also the point before the concert where the director will get the choir used to the concert hall in which they will be singing. This is very important, because when learning the music, a choir is usually not in the same space in which they will perform, and the feel of the sound is different. This allows a choir to become acquainted to the acoustics of the new setting. After all of the hard work put in to perfecting the music, the day of the choral concert finally arrives.

When the sound of a trained choir hits a listener’s ears, one must wonder what they are thinking. To me, I think of the hard work that was put into that sound, to make it perfect. I reflect on the many things that it has taken to get to that point. Most of all I think of the many decisions made by the director that led the choir to where it is. Decisions are the hardest part of life, and without them there would be no originality. A choir director’s job consists of making decisions. Some of them are very hard, and some of them are easy, but all of them are important. – M.M.