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Treble Repertoire for Soprano and Alto Choirs

Purpose eighty-four articles related to treble choir vocal peda-
The purpose of this article is to examine and analyze gogy, repertoire, musicology, composer interviews, re-
the forty treble repertoire-focused articles published in hearsal technique, and ensemble perception and iden-
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the Choral Journal from 1966 to 2019. As scholars in- tity.

terested in secondary and collegiate treble/SA choirs, For the purpose of this article, we will broadly de-
we were curious about the nature of treble choir rep- fine treble choir, under the auspices of ACDA, as any
ertoire included in CJ articles, specifically, which com- choir that sings a variation of SA/SSA/SSAA reper-
positions for treble choir have appeared frequently in toire. Until we as a profession are able to better define
CJ articles and what story do they tell? By highlighting SA choirs at the secondary and/or collegiate level, we
compositions that were included in multiple articles, are choosing to use the treble choir designation for this
we were able to identify relationships and patterns in analysis. However, because our scholarship is focused
the repertoire articles while documenting the evolution on ensembles with primarily female and female-iden-
of repertoire-focused articles over time. tifying choristers, we did not include boy choirs and
A review of previous publications and scholarly children’s choirs in this analysis. Boy choirs and chil-
works regarding treble repertoire indicates a slow pro- dren’s choirs are also listed as a separate entity in the
gression beginning around sixty years ago. Two major CJ indexes and as a separate ACDA repertoire and re-
mid-twentieth-century books regarding treble choir source area. This repertoire analysis informs our body
repertoire are Selected List of Choruses for Women’s Voices of scholarly work in this area of research.
by Arthur Locke and Charles Fassett and Choral Music We are defining an article as a feature, column, or
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for Women’s Voices by Charles Burnsworth. Debra Spur- letter to the editor. Only featured articles are peer re-
geon edited a book in 2012 titled Conducting Women’s viewed; however, Repertoire & Resource columns and
Choirs: Strategies for Success, a seminal volume that pro- letters to the editor were found to include a significant
vided information regarding a variety of topics related amount of treble choir repertoire recommendations.
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to women’s choirs, including several repertoire lists. Therefore, the contents of all three of these offerings
Many dissertations that appear in the later-twentieth were worthy of analysis. We refined our search further
century and early twenty-first century included anno- and reviewed all repertoire and musicology articles and
tated lists regarding repertoire utilizing harp accom- found forty articles about female and female-identify-
paniment, secular repertoire of the twentieth century, ing (soprano/alto) specific treble choir repertoire, with
larger American works, repertoire for women by wom- the last article published in 2019. The 2019 article,
en composers and texts by women, and analysis of however, is a compilation of articles celebrating AC-
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Renaissance music. Shelbie Wahl’s 2009 dissertation DA’s sixtieth anniversary. This compilation included
was the only methodology that utilized the CJ as well Debra Spurgeon’s 2009 article, “Women’s Choir Rep-
as other resources to create an initial list for annotation ertoire Performed at ACDA National Conventions in
purposes. the Twenty-First Century.” As of this writing, the last
original article regarding soprano/alto specific treble
choir repertoire was published in 2013. We concen-
Definition of Terms trated our attention on compositions that were, based
A content analysis is the systematic, objective, on our analysis, frequently cited in repertoire-focused
quantitative analysis of message characteristics of a articles.
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source, event, or behavior; or in this case, a journal. It is important to note that we are not championing
We examined the Choral Journal indexes available on particular works or composers. We are sharing our con-
the ACDA website to identify articles related to treble tent analysis in order to provide an opportunity for dis-
choirs. We searched the indexes using the following cussion and reflection. We feel that the collected list of
keywords: women, treble, female, girl, soprano, and suggested repertoire has value on its own and helps to
alto. Beginning with issues from 1966, we identified better understand the nature of treble choir repertoire

48 CHORAL JOURNAL October 2023 Volume 64 Number 3