Goals for the Choir

Last week I wrote about how my adventures with Noom helped me look differently at goals for the choir and how it might relate to repertoire selection. This week I want to look at some ways to become aware of and prioritize goals.

It’s been suggested that we will achieve goals with the most efficiency if we choose goals that we both desire to accomplish and have the ability to accomplish. Noom’s suggestion is to follow these steps:

1. write a list of your potential goals
2. give each of your goals a score from 1-5 for how much you want to accomplish it
3. give each of your goals a separate score from 1-5 for your ability to accomplish it
4. add up the scores and rank the goals
5. use intuition to adjust or break ties

This for me is a good starting place, but I might suggest a couple of changes. For starters, being able to do something is different from being able to do something easily or being able to do something well. Learning all the notes on a piece of music might be something we can do easily, but doing it quickly might not let us do it well, as other elements of the piece might be affected. For example, a piece with easy notes and hard rhythms will suffer if the notes are learned quickly but over incorrect rhythms. A piece with easy rhythms but challenging text will actually suffer rhythmically when the text is added if the rhythm is learned too hastily.

There is also the issue of delayed gratification. The overall goal might be to sing a great concert, but we all know there’s such a thing as peaking too soon. Putting the last piece of the puzzle in too soon could create boredom by the time the concert arrives. Instead, creating that sense of delayed gratification leads to a concert where the performers are as excited about the “new” performance of the music as the audience.

We also need to think about pacing and balancing our goals. Brains like variety. There are a lot of prescriptive methods out there that suggest “first you do this, then you do this, then you add this…” I’ve seen the problem with these methods firsthand. The choir moves from piece to piece to piece in the rehearsal focusing on the same thing, and their brains burn out. After 40 minutes of singing on solfege, or of speaking rhythm, or count singing… they badly need a change! By having different goals for different rep, we create diversity in our rehearsals which keeps brains fresh!

Hand in hand with pacing and balancing is sequencing. Different music requires different process. In the same way, different choirs require different global learning, and different singers in the same choir require different things to build their weaknesses into strengths. Some choirs need extra help with rhythm while others might need more time harmonically. Goals need to play into the proper sequencing of learning and technique building or they will not be achieved well.

So what does the new process look like for prioritizing goals? It’s no longer an easy answer. But making lists and giving rankings can still help! I think of my goal setting as more of a flow chart than a list. Goal A will allow us to move to Goal B followed by Goal C. If there are multiple goals that can and should be accomplished around the same time, then it might be time to make a list and give rankings. And keep in mind that we’re never perfect, so there will doubtless be times when we circle back and revisit Goals A, B, and C in the future.

Do you have a method for prioritizing goals in rehearsal? Please share in he comments below!