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Dear choral colleagues As mentioned - I’m in season-planning-mode! I look forward to sharing ideas, concepts and processes from choral leaders across the country over the next editions of our EAR newsletter. In this first installment, I will provide some insight into my planning steps: I work on several parallel tracks simultaneously. I start from Large to Small, from Season to concert to individual composition. Pro Coro’s season is comprised of major subscription concerts and extra concerts such as New Year’s Eve. Laying out those 10 to 12 concerts in the calendar, with approximately four weeks in between, from mid-September to mid-June is usually the first step in this approach. Some events fall right into place, for example the Good Friday concert. We perform Lang’s Little Match Girl Passion on an annual basis in Advent, always with the same four singers. There are several other concepts for these multi-year series such as Moonshot (contemporary repertoire, often with extended techniques), Missae (settings of the Latin Mass text), or Roots (music from a specific region and culture, with a guest). These series are greatly anticipated by audiences and singers alike, as we re-visit the same text or certain compositional styles. Having clearly established parameters helps me to sort through repertoire efficiently, and I often have a list of compositions ready for several years, for example Passion music for Good Friday. I love telling stories. Every composition has the potential to evoke an entire narrative which leads performers and listeners through emotions, intellectual challenges and spiritual sensations. A solid concert program, one with several shorter works, should be multi-layered. Maybe the grounding constancy is a spiritual, religious thread. On this foundation I place examples of compositional techniques, - an educational, stylistic ‘discussion’. Each work then exemplifies a different sonority which can be a physical, aural experience for the audience and the singers. I personally find fairy-tale structures very effective and try to emulate the steps Orientation, Conflict/Crisis/Challenge, Resolution. For myself, a successful program addresses these steps through text selection, sonorities and emotions inherent in the composition. And a third track in planning is the bucket-list repertoire. Though I often make the experience that even though I’d love to perform a specific work with Pro Coro Canada, it has to give way to a more relevant selection. In my experience, if a concert program is based on a bucket-list-piece, I must be able to remove said piece without the entire program collapsing. I use all the above approaches now while planning the 2021-2022 season - a season which will be uncertain, an in-person and online hybrid, and exposed to restrictions. The repertoire is therefore going through several additional filters. For example will I limit the divisi to 8 parts, and select works with a running time of under 25 minutes total. Recent experiences in concerts and feedback from singers address the capacity when singing with a mask and at up to 3 metres distanced. This element will see me reach for works without extreme registers, long sustained phrases or extended techniques. Of course, we all hope that a year from now we’ll be singing un-masked and in our regular formations. I’ll make a note in my calendar to check-in with you through our EAR newsletter at that time, and we all can re-visit this series on season planning. Next week’s installment is a contribution by conductor Jeff Joudrey from Nova Scotia.
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