How often do you have to sell your students on repertoire?
I put on a recording of a late-20th century a cappella choral piece. Angular, odd-metered, and with nonsense text, it’s hard to get close to. But when I told my group that we were learning it for State Festival, the group erupted in cheers.
A good metric for whether you’re connecting with your students is whether the repertoire you want to do is the repertoire they want to do.
It’s never a perfect circle, but the Venn Diagram can line up pretty well when you set the stage for it.