InChoiring Minds

My Perspective on the Delta Youth Chorale

This coming Tuesday night will be another concert for the Delta Youth Chorale. On paper, we are not anything special. There are plenty of more prestigious and excellent youth choral ensembles out there. We are a non-auditioned choir that breaks into two performing ensembles based on age. Over the past few years, I have come to a different realization regarding music and children: Adults too often underestimate the ability of youth to tackle high-caliber music. When given the taste for good things, young people will not be drawn to lesser things. Again and again, I have seen this bear out as the DYC takes up a new piece or masterwork that is challenging. I thought I would explain a little bit of my perspective regarding DYC and our music-making endeavors.

Worthwhile Risk in Concert Programming

I have a different perspective when it comes to programming concert selections. While I believe that you should program doable pieces for your choir, I think that directors often shy away from pieces that will energize their singers’ hunger for good music because it may be risky to perform well. I get it. Nobody wants to look bad. But, more than a choir director, we are trying to educate our students. We very well may be the last choir that our students can participate in. In a sense, we should program our concert selections with that in mind. We should give our students a musical diet that surveys the best of past and present music.

Additionally, we should program our concerts with our audience in mind as well. If you do challenging repertoire with your choir and build a love of good music in them, their tastes and experiences will likely surpass the audience that casually attends your concerts. We should program concerts that don’t leave our audiences lost. We should put some accessible pieces that will be accessible to their ears. We do not want to program a concert of entirely audience-accessible music. But if we do include accessible music in our concerts, we get to reinforce the service component of singing in a choir. We do not sing in the choir just for our enjoyment; we do it for the public hearing that comes at each concert. We want our students to see music and singing as an act of service and a gift to others. Or, to put it a different way, one of the chief benefits of singing in a choir is being blessed by singing music that blesses those who hear it.

I want my singers to have a broad diet of music beyond what is trending today. I want them to stretch their bodies through rigorous breathing and singing that great music repertoire often requires. It may seem a bit idyllic, but I also want them to have to bond with one another while tackling a group project that has stress, deadlines, and lots of excitement and fellowship built into it. On top of all that, I want them to love rehearsing each week as much as I do.

So, if you are in West Monroe, Louisiana, please consider joining us this Tuesday evening, May 3, 2022, at 7:00 pm. It will be a lovely evening for the visual and performing arts. Geneva’s Art Show will happen before and after the concert for the second year in a row. You can see the drawn and painted craftsmanship of some of the same students singing exciting and challenging music, all themed around “Glory Springs Forth.”

Support the DYC

If you would like to support the work we are doing with the Delta Youth Chorale, you can make a one-time small donation via Square below. Maybe you can’t come to the concert. Perhaps you watch our streams of the concert and want to help us as we improve our audio and video production equipment and capabilities. Maybe you wish there was something like this for you when you grew up. In any case, we would be grateful to have your support of the Delta Youth Chorale in northeast Louisiana.