Rehearsal Structure

Your overall rehearsal structure needs to take into account both your need to cover material and the state of mind of the musicians with whom you're working. If you can align your needs with their state of being, more will be accomplished in less time. Here's the general framework:

1. Transition: The transition generally consists of warm-ups and technical exercises that settle the singers in and help them connect with you, the singers around them, and the music to come.
2. Easy stuff: Even if you've had a really good warm-up session, your musicians shouldn't be thrust into the most challenging materials of your rehearsals right at the beginning. There is, of course, a desire to do this because those are the things that you're most worried about. However, the first third of the rehearsal is best used to review, teach new relatively easy things, and get the musicians' minds engaged and feeling successful.
3. Major challenges: Once the singers are feeling good about themselves and what they've accomplished, it's time to dig into some things that will be frustrating. When it comes to frustration tolerance, the musicians will always have a higher tolerance if they're coming off some success. Essentially, they're thinking, "Well, that was challenging two weeks ago, but now I've got it, so now I can move on to challenging things that I'll have two weeks from now." Even while you're tackling these frustrating elements of your program, don't allow yourself to dwell on them too much. Keeping the rehearsal at a fast pace is essential; dwelling on one thing for an incredibly long time just wears down the musicians.
4. Leaving on a cheerful note: As I mentioned, there should be a point toward the end of rehearsal where you look at the last block of time and decide at the moment what you're going to do. At this point, you'll be choosing how to execute a predetermined end-of-rehearsal plan. Hopefully, you'll have a couple of options at your disposal (e.g., run the piece you've been working on, switch to a piece that they already know for some review, and so forth). The main objective is to have the musicians feeling great as they pack up to leave. Ideally you want them to actually leave singing. You want them to be singing all the way home. You want them to be thinking not about the terribly challenging stuff in the middle of the rehearsal, but the really fun last few minutes they had. This, of course, will propel them into the week upbeat, optimistic, and looking forward to the next rehearsal. You never want your musicians leaving a rehearsal thinking, "Oh my God, we're never going to get this. This is hopeless. What am I gonna do?" There's always a little voice in your musicians' ears saying, "I've got so much stuff to do at home. Do I really have time to go to this rehearsal?" The best counterbalance to that voice is their memory of how good they felt at the end of last week's rehearsal. If what they think is, "Oh my gosh, I hope we're not going to have another two-hour rehearsal going over those incredibly hard parts," you're screwed.

Rehearsal Arc

Each rehearsal has an individual arc, as does the entire season's rehearsal plan. That plan is guided by the following objectives:

1. You want the repertoire to still feel a bit fresh when you go into the concert. The repertoire can become very familiar and start to go on autopilot, so it's important to strike a balance between feeling confident and and feeling over it.
2. Tackle the biggest challenges early in the rehearsal season. Underestimate how long it takes to learn things, and you will ideally uncover the real danger spots early in the process
3. The musicians know what is challenging, and they will start to get nervous if you've moved into the latter phases of the rehearsal process. If your singers start asking, “when are we going to get to X?” You’ve lost their confidence.
4. Escape valves: It's always possible that you might need to cut something. Therefore, you don't necessarily want to start all the music early in the rehearsal process. It's much more difficult to let something go if you've already spent an hour working on it. If you have easier pieces that the program could survive without, you might not address them until midway through the process when you're confident that the most challenging repertoire is under control.
5. Rehearsal aids: there are many different ways to provide your singers with rehearsal aids. I will cover several of them in another section. Overall, however, the most important thing is that singers get them not only early, but at the same time for each season. While not every singer will use them, those that do consider them essential to their success. Don’t let them down!