Page 10 - CJMay25

Cultivating Tone with Your Middle School Choir

Choral Tone as a Priority for Performance es, and five respondents (31.25 percent) marked tone

In the fall of 2023, I surveyed Georgia Music Ed- as the second most important criteria for evaluating a
ucators Association (GMEA) choral adjudicators re- choral performance (Table 1).
garding their opinion of the importance of criteria for The twenty-five participants who indicated that they
judging the quality of a choral performance. The sur- did give all seven criteria the same weight were asked to
vey asked respondents to rank seven criteria from the indicate which element should receive the most weight
GMEA Choral Large Group Evaluation form in order if the instrument was redesigned to give more weight
of most to least important: diction, ensemble, interpre- to certain elements (Table 2 on the next page). Tone
tation, other factors, pitch, rhythm, and tone. 2 was selected as the element that should get the most
Forty-one participants were first asked if they give weight by sixteen respondents (64 percent) and as the
all seven criteria the same weight when adjudicating a second most important element by five respondents (20
choral ensemble. (This question was necessary due to percent). When combining the results of both ques-
the design of the adjudication instrument, which gives tions, twenty-four (58 percent) ranked tone as the most
each criteria the same weight.) Sixteen responded “no” important criteria for evaluating choral performances
and were then asked to submit their rankings. Eight (50 and ten (24 percent) ranked tone as the second most
percent) of the respondents marked tone as the most important component for evaluating choral perfor-
important criteria for evaluating choral performanc- mances. These results seem to support the importance

Table 1. Element rankings for adjudicators who do not give equal weight to all elements

You indicated that you do not give all 7 elements of the performance criteria the same weight in the overall score. Please
rank the performance criteria with 1 being the element you think should get the most weight in the overall score and 7
being the element you think should get the least weight in the overall score.

Field 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Total

Diction 3 2 1 6 3 1 0 16

Ensemble 0 0 3 3 6 4 0 16

Interpretation 0 0 1 2 3 10 0 16

Other Factors 0 0 0 0 0 0 16 16

Pitch 5 7 1 1 2 0 0 16

Rhythm 0 2 8 3 2 1 0 16

Tone 8 5 2 1 0 0 0 16

8 CHORAL JOURNAL May 2025 Volume 65 Number 8