Abstract
When music educators discuss repertoire, they often discuss what pieces to perform and when in the year to perform them. In this article, I ask, “Who should choose the music for ensemble study, and how should it be chosen?” I share a rationale for why music educators might include students in ensemble repertoire selection and several ways they might open the repertoire so their students can contribute to the process. Based on my interest in how teacher–student dialogue can occur in this process, I draw from conversations I had with six orchestra teachers and twenty-seven of their students. The approaches presented here come from my interviews with these six teachers, from others with whom I have since collaborated, and from my own experience as an educator. Music educators may find these approaches useful for discussion, study, and implementation of more inclusive practice.
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Could your ensemble students be included in the process of repertoire selection? Here are some ideas.
Selecting repertoire in school ensembles remains among the most challenging tasks we have as teachers. I remember first engaging with this issue as a student in a teacher education program over ten years ago, when my classmates and I studied a breadth of repertoire to guide us in the selection process. We looked at repertoire lists, method books, and texts that would help us select the perfect literature. One professor advised accordingly: “Choose one piece for you, one for your students, and one for the parents.”
Admittedly, this principle guided me in my first few years, although I became frustrated quickly. “What does it mean to choose for someone?” I wondered. I wanted all selections to include my students at the core of all decisions. Many teachers ultimately hope to include students in the selection process because it is important to help students understand how to develop a concert program. Echoing the ideals of the 1967 Tanglewood Symposium, 1 the Contemporary Music Project, 2 and our current standards movement, 3 we as teachers and scholars are compelled to select repertoire that helps our students grow as musicians and as people, to expand our musical traditions, and to reflect the students in our classrooms. 4 At the center of these goals lies each and every participant in the ensemble, and I felt responsibility to value student voice in every aspect of the repertoire selection process.
However, balancing competing interests is not so easy. Music teachers also have other stakeholders to consider—school administration and parent communities. We have curricula and performance goals to accomplish through repertoire. We consider levels of difficulty, festivals, recruitment concerts, instrumentation, the strengths of our ensembles, and many other intricate, class/ensemble-dependent, and situational factors. With so many influences, bigger questions arise. Who should choose the music for ensemble study, and how should it be chosen? How, then, might we incorporate our students’ interests and voices into selecting literature?
This article explores these questions with a rationale for why we might include students in ensemble repertoire selection and several ways to open repertoire selection to our students. Based on my interest in the role of teacher–student dialogue in this process, I endeavored to learn how teachers involved students in selecting repertoire for their ensembles. I interviewed six secondary-school orchestra teachers and twenty-seven students to solicit their ideas and experiences. Following those interviews, I continued talking with music teachers of various traditional ensembles, including orchestras, bands, choruses, and clubs of various sizes. The approaches presented here come from those conversations and my own experiences as an educator. Music educators of any ensemble and music teacher educators may find these approaches (and their variations) useful for discussion, study, and implementation in their practice.
(The Benefits of) Inclusive Repertoire Selection
The repertoire studied in school ensembles is often closely associated with curricular content. 5 We as educators wish to align elements of musical learning to curriculum content; these elements often come from their practical application in the repertoire studied in class and performed at concerts. The ensemble teacher is at the decision-making center of repertoire selection, entrusted with that power by expertise and musical preparation. Education philosopher John Dewey 6 posited that curriculum and the child should be joined in partnership in such a way that not only is the child considered in curricular decisions, but also the curriculum reflects the child’s multiple interests and life experiences. Regarding repertoire selection, we must consider each child’s interests in and experiences with music. Thus, teachers need to be aware of their students’ musical preferences—what they know, listen to, and prefer to play.
However, one apprehension with this approach is the tension between catering to students’ familiarity with music and what teachers intentionally design as crafted curriculum. Investing in curricular choices simply to satisfy familiarity, preferences, and interests would imply that the students “were forever tasting and never eating.” 7 As one goal of education is to expand what students already know into the new and unfamiliar, Dewey suggested teachers embrace this tension by a sense of balance, resisting the ephemeral nature of changing interests, but finding salient and meaningful aspects of student interest in which to build a curriculum. This partnership—in the sense of inviting, knowing, and considering student voices—has influenced my use of the terms include and inclusive.
Including students in repertoire selection may be beneficial for the students themselves, as it opens the doors to honoring the richness of their identities, including a multitude of factors like culture, gender, sexuality, race, religion, socioeconomic status, nationality, and location, among others. 8 Teachers looking to include student identities in the curriculum may look to diverse examples of repertoire—what cultural critic and professor Henry Giroux referred to as expanding “the range of cultural texts.” 9 Learning music through diverse repertoire may open self-introspection as well as awareness of others in the world. Student-inclusive repertoire selection resonates with what pedagogical theorist and professor Gloria Ladson-Billings called culturally relevant pedagogy, whereby “students must experience academic success, . . . develop and/or maintain cultural competence, and develop a critical consciousness through which they challenge the status quo of the current social order.” 10 Including individual and collective student identities and backgrounds in selection may invite them as resources in selecting repertoire, sustaining their personhood, opening pathways to understanding, and continually developing simultaneously. 11
Inclusion may constitute finding comfort in repertoire that is immediately relevant and connected to an individual, or perhaps a gesture of openness, a welcome to the unfamiliar music of another. Being that classes constitute a pluralism of identity, including students in repertoire choices may foster meaningful open sociocultural and political discussion in the classroom. Students can then be allowed to share themselves and learn about composers, traditions, and music that may or may not represent them in curriculum. They can participate in class decision making with democratic freedom.
The practice of creating a concert program is another educational element to value when including students in curricular choices. The National Coalition for Core Arts Standards in Music (NCCAS) and the National Association for Music Education’s (NAfME) Core Music Standards 12 Ensemble Strand have asked the essential question of performing ensembles: “How do performers select repertoire?” Students and educators are tasked with exploring a variety of repertoire and discussing musical implications during the selection process while emphasizing performance excellence. Through this standard, we envision that students will gain an appreciation and aptitude for understanding programming, with perhaps an ability to create their own programs. The actual experience of creating a program and selecting repertoire is valued as educative. 13
Considering the various stakeholders in the concert, a teacher’s own education and expertise, and the charge to include students, how does inclusion begin? Deciding for students while considering them is one way; deciding with them is another. Pursuing the latter approach in the spirit of Dewey, inclusive repertoire may be in the autonomous and creative model of a chamber musician who participates fully in repertoire choice and implementation, as opposed to the repertoire selection of a traditional ensemble teacher. Such decisions may bring autonomy and an important increase in motivation, deeper engagement, 14 and expanding dialogical spaces that contribute to robust educational experiences.
Strategies for the Selection Process
Strategies for student-inclusive repertoire selection can happen through a variety of settings and structures. Sometimes teachers offered inclusivity informally based on discussion—before or after class in the classroom, in hallways, and over e-mail—and by gauging student feedback. Other times teachers used knowledge of their school community and demographics to consider students’ racial and cultural backgrounds. Additionally, inclusion sometimes appeared to be more formal, with practices that were more direct and clear in opening the venue for inclusive repertoire selection.
Informal Approaches
Sight-Reading
Some teachers I spoke with placed a high value on informal student feedback when sight-reading. For many, discussions, body language, and in-the-moment reactions were important indicators of student impressions. Several teachers seemed to find great success in sight-reading as much music as possible in a given year so they could observe and talk with students about repertoire. While some prefer playing through sections or an entire piece, some also inform students that “first impressions are not the only impression,” sharing with students that sight reading a piece is not always an accurate measure of the piece itself, or a measure of how successful the ensemble might be with the piece. Many shares that sight reading might be approached by breaking down different sections and concepts rather than “run through and discuss.” Teachers indicated that informal dialogue may happen in “the tuning lines,” as students lined up to be tuned. Other teachers had informal dialogue with students during a warm-up period or as students exited. Brief conversations in the hallways or on duty in the cafeteria or bus line were also casual and effective ways for teachers to get their “feelers out to students” about what was sight-read in class.
Pull-Out Lessons, Sectionals, and Labs
Programs with small-group lessons during the day—also called “pull-outs,” sectionals, or labs—have a unique advantage to dialogue relative to classes meeting entirely as large ensembles. Although the gamut of informality runs wide, the intimate nature of a pull-out, sectional, or lab allows teachers to talk with subgroups of the larger class, perhaps by instrument, level, age, and/or other factors of grouping. Students indicated they placed great value on the opportunity for more “relaxed, open, and honest” conversation with one another and their teachers. Some teachers I worked with leveraged pull-out lessons as more intimate spaces to debrief on sight-reading and engage in discussion about repertoire students might like to play or prefer.
Informal Requests
Some teachers developed informal modes of fielding student requests for music. In some classrooms, I observed that students were free to list on a white board or in a “repertoire box” the names of pieces they were interested in playing. As part of the discussions, some teachers also shared their willingness to ask students “what they would like to play and why.” Some teachers used the information to determine what would be sight-read or programmed in order to establish important relationships with students and foster community.
Cultural Relevance
Two teachers took great care to connect student demographics with repertoire in the name of cultural relevance. In one district with what he called a “very diverse” community, a high school orchestra teacher programmed literature of Hispanic composers and folk origins. He used a survey to learn about his students as well as their parents more formally each year, asking questions about the music they listen to and make at home. The survey informed him of a gap between the music studied at home and in school, and he created opportunities to validate his students’ backgrounds. In his classes, students studied pieces such as “El Condor Pasa,” the Arturo Márquez piece “Danzón No. 2,” and the Cuban folk song “Guantanamera.” The teacher furthered his offerings through an extracurricular mariachi ensemble, where similar music was studied more in-depth and with traditional instrumentation.
Another teacher taught in a school with a majority African American and Caribbean American demographic. An African American teacher herself, the teacher felt it was important to talk with her students about African American composers of classical music. She regularly engaged in conversation with her students about where their families were from and assigned research projects allowing her students to learn about their cultural backgrounds and Black composers. Given that the ensemble regularly performed classical standards and popular pieces, the repertoire clearly needed to connect to her students’ roots. As this teacher indicated, They need to be able to pass on where they come from, and maybe discover things that were going on in, back in those times like slavery and apartheid in South Africa. You know, it’s important to talk about it, or maybe just hear music of Black composers and culture in passing. We have to go through the history. We talk about the protest songs. What’s the, what’s the relationship to us? What were different protest songs like? Where did they come from? And about the blues, you know, it’s the historical thing that’s really important, too.
The students of both of these teachers appreciated the efforts their teachers made. However, many also emphasized that they preferred a balanced approach to selection, whereby music from all around the world and in all styles (including classical and popular) would be included. These students also noted that they felt honored by their teachers’ efforts and seemed to appreciate a large breadth of repertoire.
Formal Approaches
Surveys
Teachers occasionally distributed surveys to gauge students’ interest in a piece of music. After sight-reading sessions or spending a few weeks on a piece of music, several teachers found it helpful to develop quick paper-and-pencil surveys so students can rate pieces based on different criteria. One teacher included a survey at the start of the school year to learn about his students’ goals for the year, what music they listened to at home, and what they might like to study. Since my study, I have observed teachers using an “exit ticket” survey for students to reflect on repertoire in earlier stages of concert preparation.
Formal Requests
To make requesting music more significant, some teachers offered students an opportunity to request music formally for study in a given concert cycle. A formal request may include a student presentation, in which the student justifies the piece based on his or her research about level, style, and instrumentation and articulates to the class why the piece might be considered.
One approach I have used in my classroom is an online request form, available year-round for students to use at their convenience. Students are asked to list the title and composer of the piece of interest and answer certain questions about their request, showing their commitment to the project. Some questions include:
Do you think this piece fits the level of challenge for our class? Why/why not?
Why do you want to play this piece in orchestra?
Do you think other students in our orchestra would enjoy playing this piece? Why/why not? Do you think this piece is appropriate for our audience?
Voting
Several teachers have explained that they like to open repertoire selection to students by means of voting. Often, voting may be a “yay or nay” based on quick judgment, immediately after sight-reading a piece (a less formal approach). Alternately, voting may be conducted after studying a piece over a few classes and then voting against several pieces using a ballot (a more formal approach). One teacher indicated that voting on concert music occurs just a few weeks before concert time so that students can learn six or seven pieces well and cast a vote with more informed judgment and experience than they would have earlier. Students are informed of this process at the start of the concert season and are given the rationale that the class can study several pieces without having to perform them all at the concert. Doing so offers the opportunity to include several selections for study rather than only a few concert pieces.
Some teachers were concerned that voting would skew the program balance. For example, they worried that students may vote out all classical pieces and vote in all popular pieces. To encourage a balanced program, one teacher had students rank pieces by category or genre, ranking their top choices for classical, pop, and contemporary selections. Another type of structured voting, based on predetermined concert programs instead of individual pieces, may encourage a more equal distribution of pieces. When I observed this process in action, students were given six different sample concert programs, including pieces that were part of sight-reading, over a month. Students submitted ballots to vote on their favorite program. To control the balance, one teacher prestructured each program by including a mix of genres and styles (e.g., classical, folk, contemporary, pop, fast, slow, etc.) on the different samples.
A Caution: The Tyranny of the Majority
Many teachers structured voting through a “majority rules” system. One student I talked to, Liam, a violist, brought to my attention that voting did not matter for violists: As a violist, I struggle with voting. Nobody knows the nature of the viola part, and they don’t have to play it. Plus, the violists are outnumbered in the voting process altogether. That means we’re in the minority and the pieces we think are the best aren’t chosen because nobody knows what the parts are like.
Liam’s point, known as the “tyranny of the majority,” is a common criticism of liberal democracy. Voting mattered less for Liam since the viola section resides in the minority of voting.
How might we structure more equitable voting? For one, allowing students in the “minority sections,” such as the viola and bass sections of an orchestra, to share their perspectives may give them more voice. Students may present and learn about what the viola part is actually like or if the arrangement for the bass is actually interesting, for example. Violinists and cellists can also speak about their parts. Furthermore, structuring voting through a system of ranking, or a “rank-choice” voting system, can allow pieces the students prefer to be distributed more equitably. In such a system, students may see pieces of their top choice or two, and all selected pieces may reflect a truer average of student interest. To construct such a vote, a teacher may create a ballot asking students to rank-order pieces based on their preference and tallied with points for each rank.
Overcoming Hurdles and Making Tough Choices
Offering students an opportunity to vote, request, and comment on repertoire may give pause to some ensemble educators. Opening a Pandora’s box of new educational practices may concern some at having so many voices to honor and pieces to select or reject for a concert. Some teachers with whom I worked found additional ways to include students in the selection process.
For arrangements that are too challenging, unavailable, not voted on, or excluded for other reasons, some teachers indicated that offering students certain pieces as solos or chamber music is a “middle ground” to inclusion. Though not offering this repertoire to an ensemble, finding solos through books and online sources has worked for many. Selected pieces may be studied during lessons, after school, or on the student’s own time at home.
Regarding level of difficulty and challenge, some teachers have considered their students’ abilities through unique modes of differentiation. One teacher I spoke with indicated that students received custom arrangements of pieces. If selected pieces were too easy for students, the teacher wrote arrangements and added additional challenges, such as double stops or trills. In some cases, an advanced student viola part combined the viola part with the cello or violin parts. If a piece was too challenging, students received a custom arrangement to suit their level. As students grew and progressed, they would receive a new arrangement to increase their level of challenge, even just days before concert time.
Hybrids and Other Openings
In talking with the teachers I interviewed, I found that they were not entirely student-inclusive or exclusive. The ways they negotiated the dialogical spaces of inclusion were sometimes obvious, other times subtle—a shading of all these in a fluid kind of nature. Few teachers used only one approach to including students in repertoire selection. In many cases, creating hybrids of these approaches can effectively encourage students to share their voices to request selections, confirm selections, and provide feedback. Informal discussions in and out of class, for example, may be effective in tandem with sight-reading and individual requests. Requests followed by sight-reading, dialogue, and voting may be an appropriate sequence as well. Using pull-out lessons as venues for student presentations and dialogue may also be effective. Considering demographics and composer diversity, coupled with student research and presentations, might afford students an opportunity to study a wide range of composers. Table 1, drawn from my experiences and those of teachers in my research, includes approaches to repertoire selection that ensemble teachers can offer their students.
Approaches to Inclusive Repertoire Selection
At the heart of these approaches is appreciation for the empowerment of student voice. The latitude afforded to students—how tightly or loosely the teacher holds the reins—reflects the philosophical value system of the ensemble teacher. The logistical details of infrastructure, including scheduling, class time, and technological infrastructure, may also determine the ways in which students are ultimately invited to share themselves in the process of selecting ensemble repertoire. A teacher with a class of fifteen students may find in-person conversation an effective strategy, while a teacher with a class of a hundred may opt for online surveys and ballots. Depending on class size and grade level, some teachers might choose to open the doors of inclusion for one or two pieces per concert cycle or school year.
The “Why” of Inclusivity
When we music educators of traditional and nontraditional ensembles invite our students into our curricula and curricular decisions, we open spaces of dialogue that allow interesting discussions and learning to occur. Opening the space for dialogue may not require a teacher to supply the piece du jour at the request of students; it may be yet another way to gather information and consider the needs and perspectives of the primary stakeholders in the process of selection, that is, the students themselves.
To open this space may be fruitful, inviting interesting and spontaneous learning, as well as rewarding avenues of dialogue. Perhaps discussions might ensue about what makes a piece possible for the ensemble or not (perhaps better suited for a solo or chamber ensemble). Maybe discussions about culture, gender, nationality, location, sexuality, race, religion, and socioeconomic status will enter the classroom learning environment, leading students to seek representative composers of their identities.
What if a class embarks on a journey of mostly unfamiliar music? What if the students all learn each other’s parts to become more informed voters? Maybe they would be pleased with more selections or fewer instead. The students’ perspectives enrich the repertoire, regardless of whether their choices ever make it to concert performance. It is, in fact, the selection process itself that becomes transformed into an educative experience in its own right, and with it, the students’ growth as individuals and musicians.
Footnotes
Notes
Matthew Rotjan is a music educator in the Scarsdale Public Schools in New York, where he teaches orchestra classes at Scarsdale Middle School. Rotjan is frequently sought out for professional development, leading sessions with educators, administrators, and students, and for writing curriculum. He can be contacted at