Over the summer months, when the workload is a little lighter, I try to lay out music for the entire upcoming choir season, September to June: hymns, service music, psalm settings, choral music, and prelude and postlude music. The first step of listing all the dates with each Sunday and holy day of the church year often prompts ideas for music. I don’t always start planning with the first Sunday of the season and work chronologically. I’ll think about music I’d like to do on more festive Sundays: the choir’s first Sunday (Rally Day or Homecoming), All Saints Sunday, Christ the King, Christmas. Usually I select more challenging music for those dates, and then have to make sure that the preceding weeks don’t have music quite as taxing to learn so that we can accomplish it all well. I try to plan in waves of level of difficulty. Some services might have almost sight-readable anthems or pieces the choir has done a number of times in the past so that we don’t have to spend much rehearsal time on them and can concentrate on the more challenging music coming up. Once I’ve settled what is happening on the more festive Sundays, I start filling in the remaining Sundays.