I find warm-ups to be essential to any choir rehearsal for two major reasons: 1) they are an opportunity to teach musical concepts in isolation that will be used later in the rehearsal on the choir’s repertoire; and 2) they help transition the voice and the body from a day’s worth of speaking and slouching, preparing them for the very different set of demands placed upon the singer by the act of singing.

Some of my conducting textbooks spend numerous pages on how to structure the choir rehearsal, covering a host of factors to consider. Personally, I don’t bother putting that much thought into it. It’s already all I can do to spend time getting to know the music and make musical decisions about it, let alone think about a detailed rehearsal structure. So I’ve resigned myself to simply what seems to work, which, for me, is this:

Maybe the choir’s scheduled to sing on Rally Day and you only get one rehearsal the week before…
Maybe it’s that first Sunday after Epiphany and half the choir can’t make it out of their driveways…
Maybe it’s a Sunday where nothing in the library fits and you’ve spent the choir’s budget already…

There’s a kernel of wisdom which has been true for me more often than not: “The journey is more important than the destination.” Unfortunately, when it comes to worship planning, something eventually has to make its way into a bulletin for Sunday morning, so we can’t just bask in the glory of the journey forever. But when time is short and worship has to get planned, it’s easy to let the destination (the bulletin) control the journey instead of the other way around. With that in mind, I’ll let you in on my own planning process and hope that it may inspire you to let the planning inform the bulletin more often than not.