NJ All-State Chorus Conductor Selection, Barbara Retzko

Barbara Retzko Barbararetzko@hotmail.com

Is it part of your Bucket List? If it is, please read on.

If not, maybe you know a colleague who should be thinking about this. Please encourage them by forwarding a copy of this article with your comments and encouragement.

The purpose of this article is to openly invite you to begin your journey of submitting the very best demonstration of your work as a conductor for consideration and acceptance as a future NJ All-State Chorus conductor! The contributing editors, noted below, are all long-term Choral Directors, active members of NAfME, NJMEA and NJ-ACDA and all have given generously of their time to serve in leadership positions for these organizations. Most have served as past NJ All-State Mixed or Women’s Chorus conductors.

We are frankly concerned that as each year passes, fewer and fewer directors have chosen to apply as candidates for these prestigious roles. We certainly do not lack talented choral artists in the state. Why then are there just a handful of interested candidates?

First of all, (surprise!), there is an ‘inner circle’. We’re an organization of over 400 members and we produce a number of major performances and events each year including the NJ All-State Mixed and Women’s Choruses. These events take a very dedicated cadre of professional, volunteer educators to manage the myriad committees and details that each event generates. We would LOVE to include you in this ‘inner circle’! Please, please, please let any of us know of your interest.

That said, prior to my selection as the 1991 NJ All-State Mixed Chorus conductor, I felt the same way. Through my AllState experience, I became a member of the selection committee and served as its chair for a number of years. In that tenure, Conductor Selection Committee: • Agreed to request video submissions for consideration to widen the pool of candidates • Produced a rubric for scoring to ensure fairness and consistency in our evaluation • Established required repertoire to level the playing field, and • Increased the committee membership to include those who had been chosen as conductors to serve on future selection committees.

We received such a wide range of video submissions that the comparisons were no longer “apples-to-apples.” Yes, one should be able to assess the quality of a director by their conducting style but the subjectivity introduced by the wide and vast variety of repertoire simply precluded any objective comparisons. The choice of required repertoire was designed to help make the best choice of director as well as establish some control over the materials submitted. Your participation here is also encouraged; if there are other repertoire selections you would like to use, please suggest them! NJ-ACDA uses a required repertoire list for its High School Choral Festival. Perhaps you can find a selection from that list that would best demonstrate your work.

Maybe you’re not, or maybe it’s just your inner voice telling you you’re not. If you’re reading this, though, some part of you is ready. Take that leap of faith and bet on yourself!

Speaking from experience, you may be aware of the presence of your colleagues during the first few minutes of the first rehearsal, but once you get underway, you’ll move right into production mode. While we recognize there are critical opinions out there, we would hope that your talents and gifts would supercede those initial fears.

Looking forward, the task seems insurmountable; we get that. Looking backwards, however, it is a very brief moment in time. Put the effort aside for a moment and consider the rewards: Every year an All-State conductor influences students who decide on-thespot to become professional musicians and teachers. Through their commitment, our All-State conductor touches the lives of 300+ students across the state in an unending ripple. Hopefully, you had the chance to sing in a region, state or national event when you were in high school. How did that experience, that conductor, change you? This is your opportunity, maybe even obligation, to pay it forward!

You’ve been teaching in NJ for years, maybe decades. You’ve built a solid program and turn out award-winning choirs. You’d be willing to conduct, but you want to be asked. Frankly, we’d love to have the membership participation needed to know enough about the 600+ high school programs in NJ to really know who to ask. Unfortunately, we don’t. We need your help to make this selection process fully inclusive. We need you to step forward. We’ll help as much as we can if you’ll simply contact one of the members listed below, but your initiation is crucial.

Ouch. Rejection hurts, but that’s a big part of our teaching, isn’t it? Not every student we send to audition for All-State makes it the first time or every time. We empathize, counsel and coach, and then hope that this year will be their year. Regardless, we work to make the audition process itself part of the student’s positive self-image. This is the same, to a large degree: If you’ve submitted material but haven’t been chosen yet, let us work with you to help as far as we can. Our only goal is to give our students the best AllState Chorus experience we can and we’re more than happy to help you become part of that process. Reach out to any of the names below!

Here are some thoughts for you:

• Choral tone is a huge consideration in acceptance as a conductor. Do you have a sound in your head that you think is All-State quality? Are you getting that sound from your group?

If not, have you found recordings of that sound and do you share them with your group? You could have recordings playing every day as your singers walk into rehearsal and let them hear that sound regularly.

There are years of All-State Chorus recordings available on CD and

YouTube and there are recordings of choirs conducted by the big choral names that are ready available on iTunes or on their publisher’s or collegiate web pages. • Do you have an objective view of your own work? How often are you able to attend other choral concerts?

Whose work do you admire? Have you asked those directors you admire to come to your rehearsals to give you some feedback? • Programming variety, representation of many periods in music and level of difficulty is another huge factor in acceptance as a conductor. What is your programming like? Do you have a respectable variety of repertoire in your folders? Did you know that all of the All-State Mixed Choir programs are online so you could see what has been programmed in the past? Check out www.rhschoirs.net and click on

NJ All-State Programs from 1949! Do you ask others for their programs?

NJ-ACDA has a link to a page called

“What’s in your folder?” http://njacda. com/forums/forum/whats-in-yourfolder/ You could email 3-5 directors whose work you admire and ask them to give you copies of their programs, lists of their most favorite pieces or tell you what they have at present in their folders. Most colleagues would be happy to share their thoughts at no charge! • Can’t get permission to leave your school? Why not record your group and send the YouTube clip to seasoned directors and ask them to write critiques or judge your work by a festival score sheet? Skype them into your rehearsal and ask them to share their thoughts. Help them by indicating where you are struggling and let them know where you would like the feedback. Retired directors would love to help! Presenting your work in the most musical way possible and capturing that work on video is crucial in the consideration of acceptance of a conductor.

Why not “test drive” an All-State Chorus rehearsal?

We are always looking for volunteers to run rehearsals when our conductor is unable to be present. This way, the members of the Selection Committee will have an opportunity to see your work in person, especially if you have a struggling program back home.

Opening yourself up to critique is hard, we know that. But really, isn’t that the essence of teaching, of what we do every day? Critiquing and coaching our students for continuous improvement is the way we build our choirs. Certainly, not everyone has a sensitive vocabulary when it comes to providing feedback and there is a delicate line between constructive feedback and being picked apart. It takes a strong constitution to openly listen to an honest critique however sensitively given, but maybe playing the role of a student again will make us better teachers.

To this end, we, the members of the Choral Procedures Committee and those who have served as Past Conductors would like to openly invite you to contact any, many or all of us to help you on your journey of submitting the very best demonstration of your work for consideration as a future All-State Chorus conductor. The choice to reach out needs to be yours.

As an obvious disclaimer, none of the advice we give is a guarantee of anything more than a discussion about your work as a Choral Artist and your desire to make the experiences you share with the choir fulfilling for you and your singers.

Barbara Retzko, 1991 NJ All-State

Mixed Chorus , 2011 NJ All-State

Women’s Choir, Barbararetzko@ hotmail.com

Additional Contacts: Tom Voorhis,2009 NJ All-State Mixed

Chorus - voorhisong@aol.com Art McKenzie, 2013 NJ All-State Mixed

Chorus, 2009 NJ All-State Women’s

Chorus, llynch@roxbury.org Leslie MacPherson, 2004 NJ All-

State Women’s Choir, lesliemacpherson@gmail.com Hillary Colton, 2007 NJ All-State

Women’s Choir, Hcolton@hcrhs.org Helen Stanley, 1995 NJ All-State Mixed

Chorus, hstanley@gatewayhs.com Kathy Spadafino Choral Procedures

Chairperson, kspadeb@aol.com