I wish I could choose repertoire early.
I intend to choose the music my ensembles will sing at the start of every summer. I’ll take the time to peruse stacks of rep, selecting new gems and old favorites and building a varied and musically interesting program that will enable me to teach my students all year.
What happens, though, is that I am selecting repertoire either just before or just after the first rehearsal. There are two reasons.
First, sometimes I can’t predict what repertoire will work until I know who’s in the group. I hear auditions for Shades of Blue at the beginning of the semester, so selecting rep before I’ve formed the ensemble is moot. What if I don’t have any tenors? What if it’s an SSAA group or can’t have any divisi or needs divisi for a challenge? I can’t select the repertoire until I’ve got the ensemble formed.
Second, I often want to hear the group, and meet them, before I finish selecting repertoire. With the Aces, I have the group formed in June, but I don’t sing with them much before the first day of school. I can select some repertoire (Aces Standards, for example), but until I both hear them clearly as an ensemble and know them clearly as human beings, I don’t feel able to select just the right repertoire.
The result is, I’m always selecting rep as I go, and hoping that my friendly music dealer can get it for me quickly! My score study must happen more ad hoc and on a tight deadline, but in the end, I’m happy that my repertoire is paired as tightly as it can be to the ensembles I’m working with.