I work at a small liberal-arts college in Southern California that prides itself on providing an elite education while not being elitist. Translated into regular speech, this means that our student demographic more closely resembles that of a California Community College(majority Hispanic, often first-gen, usually coming in with little to no prior musical experience) rather than those of similar institutions elsewhere in the country. So I’m often thinking about how to balance interest and diversity of repertoire with accessibility.

A large part of this has been informed by our existence in a post-pandemic world. During Covid, practice tracks and recording assignments became de rigeur in my choral program, and I don’t see us going back to a time without these tools. Although more traditional advocates forWestern-style musicianship may insist on prioritizing sight-singing over other methods of learning and retention, I’ve found that creating practice tracks and learning by ear has opened up access to students who have never set foot in a choir rehearsal before, provided an avenue of participation for the visually impaired, and improved confidence across the board for all of my students.

We still use scores, and I spend time throughout the semester talking about various sight-singing tools and concepts, but as part of a larger, multi-sensory toolbox that students develop throughout their time at Whittier College. This several-pronged approach to learning music enabled my non-auditioned, SATB choir of primarily non-music majors to perform an extremely challenging program of Bach and Brahms in Spring 2025 – something they would never have had the time to learn in one semester if we had been only relying on traditional learning methods.

Although I am very proud of our work on these difficultpieces from the Western canon (BWV 4 Christ lag in Todes-banden and the Liebeslieder Walzes), in an average semester I usually like to program a slightly more diverse array of pieces so that my students can be exposed tomany different genres and styles of music-making. A sample program from one of our Holiday Dinners included the following:

Alilo from Imereti– Georgian folk polyphony
Who Is This Boy? – Fahad Siadat
Throw the Yule Log On, Uncle John – P.D.Q. Bach
Deep River– arr. Alexander Lloyd Blake
The Nutcracker and Sugartongs – David Harris
Hymn– Toby Twining
Chain of Fools – Aretha Franklin, arr. Greg Gilpin

These pieces were interspersed by offerings from our Handbell Ensemble, Jazz Ensemble, and Opera Workshop, which helped complement some of the more experimental aspects of our program with slightly more traditional repertoire. As you can imagine, we also used different approaches to each piece, varying how much we learned by ear (a lot for the Georgian folk music, less so for the P.D.Q. Bach), styles of vocal production (ranging from bright and twangy folk singing to gospel), and our general performance demeanor (serenely solemn for Deep River, imperiously skeptical for Chain of Fools). It is this wide range in our aspects of being human that I am trying to make accessible by opening my choir to students of different backgrounds and ability levels, and judging by feedback from singers, audience members, and my departmental colleagues, it seems to be reaching both those with an already established love of choir as well as those who are stepping into a choral space for the very first time.

-Dr. Alexandra Grabarchuk

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