In Praise of Hard Music

J. S. Bach's "Gloria In Excelsis Deo" Rehearsal Excerpt

I am a choral director by training but a music educator by necessity. I direct a non-auditioned community youth chorus primarily for the purpose of pedagogy over performance. This group is located in our small northeast Louisiana town of West Monroe. It is comprised of students that I teach at Geneva Academy as well as homeschoolers in the area who choose to participate. The younger group is 2nd–6th graders, and the older group consists of 7th–12th graders. It is a wonderful, motley crew that brings me joy each Tuesday and Thursday as we rehearse.

These unauditioned 7th-12th grade singers in my Delta Youth Chorale are off to a wonderful start learning the Gloria in Excelsis Deo from Bach’s Cantata 191 and also the Mass in B Minor. They are in their third week of work. Here, they sing a little bit of it a cappella and then hold the chord just for fun to end our rehearsal. I program complex pieces because it may be the only time they can sing them. Some of them won’t sing again in an organized choir after they finish with the DYC. Some will go on to sing in groups with way less glorious repertoire for various reasons that are outside the scope of this post. In any case, we sing the masterworks so that they grow to love them.

We woodshed and workshop through the notes and rhythms, writing in the solfege syllables, and singing them in section groups of various combinations. Our Fall 2023 Concert will be on December 7 at 7 p.m. Central Time. It is going to be great. Take a listen with ears of faith and anticipation to this YouTube video clip below:

What you heard here is a cappella singing in five-part polyphony. It is not easy for adults to do, much less junior high and high school students, but the point of this post is to assure you, as I’ve had to do myself, that it can be done. But there is a hurdle of principle that must be in place for this to work.

Pedagogy Over Performance

As mentioned already, the goal must be teaching and exposure over the performance. We should not shy away from the difficult pieces because we are not sure they will sound as good as the recordings that are out there. That’s a consequence of the digital music era we live in today. We have access to so many versions of songs that we might be tempted to think we will never measure up. So, why try? But the point is not the recording. The point is the formative power of the music on the singer and the listener. It is the bonding of the singers to the difficult repertoire that they are in the trenches learning together. It is the joy of doing hard things together instead of watching others from the audience.

Additionally, the pedagogy means we must teach people to sound out the notes and the rhythms. The reason many choirs today are not singing Bach is not so much about the style being unappealing compared to newer music choral repertoire. The truth is that people can’t read music well enough to sing independently in the polyphonic style of Bach or other similarly-minded composers. If your singers can’t read music, then you have to play or sing their part and have them repeat it back by rote instead of reading it. You cannot really rote teach this much “holy chaos” and simultaneous music material that all seems to independently weave and dance around the other parts. Each part has to have some musical ability to sing independently for there to be any real success in singing musical selections like this one above.

My Encouragement

This is meant to be an encouragement and not a deterrent. If you want to move from glory to glory, there has to be music literacy at the core of what we are doing. We have to train people to sing skillfully whether they only sing in church or at home, or whether they become professional musicians or some combination of all of the above. If we do this, we can expect real rewards along the way for our ears and our people's temperament.

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Here’s the audio-only version as well, in case you want to hear it one more time: