MMEA Mid-Winter Clinic Day 1, Part 3

Previous posts in this thread include:
Part 1
Part 2

During the 3:30 PM session of the MMEA Mid-Winter Clinic I attended the Christine Bass session entitled "Where the Boys Are: Recruiting, Engaging, and Maintaining Tenors and Basses". Bass was a very successful high school choir director in Cherry Hill, NJ outside of Philadelphia, PA.  Currently, she teaches at Temple University in Philadelphia as the Women's Choir director and as a part of the music education faculty.  An incredibly successfully educator, I looked forward to learning from her in this session.

Admittedly, I was a little nervous at the beginning of the Bass session that it would merely be an advertisement for her educational DVD by the same name.  Bass is one of Hal Leonard's star convention presenters, and has a very busy schedule traveling around the country.  While the clinic did begin with clips from her DVD (which I am sure she is contractually obligated to do), I found her presentation engaging and to the point.  Her website is quite user friendly as well, including suggested repertoire lists for SATB and TTBB ensembles, which are great starting points.

I would not say that anything information she gave in the session was revolutionary or ground breaking, but that is the point. She reiterated some very important points:

1. You will get out of your program only proportionally to what you put in.  To get a program to where you want it to go requires a lot of time and hard work.
2. Men in particular (and all students in general) are attracted to what is cool, but will only STAY if what they are a part of is successful and of high quality.  Meaning, you can (and should) use gimmicks to get young men in the door, but if what you teach is not grounded in good technique that produces excellence you will not keep them.
3. Younger male students are best recruited by the high school men that they look up to.  High school male students are best recruited by the high school female students in your choir.

One point Bass strongly encourages is the use of popular music to woo students into your program.  In her defense she insists that you program a varied repertoire of music.  However, I always have slight reservations of investing too much of my limited budget to purchase repertoire that quickly becomes obsolete.  My belief is to use purchase popular repertoire sparingly, and if you do so be extremely selective.  Ask yourself, "Will this song still be popular or powerful to young singers 5 years from now, 10 years from now, 20 years from now?"  If not, I would be hesitant to spend $2 a copy for 50-60 copies of a piece of music.  My recommendation to director's facing this dilemma is to dabble in arranging vocal a cappella arrangements of popular tunes for SATB and TTBB choirs.  The other option is to get in contact with vocal a cappella arrangers, and purchase from them.  Generally, on a singer for singer level, the price point it is a cheaper route, and if the song arranged is forgotten five years from now (or the radio exposure "kills" it), it is not collecting mildew in your files.  Granted this almost a separate topic/tangent to the greater point of Bass's presentation, but is worth stating here.

A good starting point in search of vocal a cappella arrangers can be found here.