Few decisions made by a choral conductor are as important as the selection of repertoire. This study seeks to uncover the ways repertoire selection practices may have shifted in choral conducting graduate programs following two major concurrent disruptive events: the COVID-19 pandemic and the George Floyd protests. The study also seeks to fill a gap in the literature by examining repertoire trends in standard concerts on university campuses rather than in concerts occurring exclusively in festival settings (such as ACDA conferences).

Complete repertoire data for four academic years (2017–2019 and 2021–2023) were collected from sixteen research universities with choral conducting graduate programs. The design of the study was guided by four major questions, which concerned: (1) the overall characteristics of the body of repertoire performed, (2) changes in the characteristics of performed repertoire between the two-year time periods studied, (3) similarities and differences in programming practices among the sixteen participating schools, and (4) whether the trends found in the present study echo those found in previous studies of repertoire trends in festival settings. The data were also analyzed with two hypotheses in mind: (1) that composer and composition diversity and representation would increase (in part in response to the George Floyd protests), and (2) that composition difficulty would generally decrease (due in part to the COVID-19 pandemic).

Findings reveal high variation in the works and composers performed by the sixteen schools in the study, with few specific composers and works seeing broad performance across a majority of the schools. Demographically, performed composers were overwhelmingly White and male, though the percentage of non-White- and non-male-composed works performed at each school increased significantly between 2017–2019 and 2021–2023. It was found that much of this increase could be attributed to non-idiomatic works by Black composers, though this increase did not come at the expense of idiomatic works by the same. The data further suggest that conductors may often select a single piece to fill both race- and gender-based diversity goals. Performed compositions skewed significantly toward newly-composed works, though to what extent varied substantially between schools; the data suggest these variations are largely attributable to the programming practices of individual faculty members. A high level of variation among the schools was seen for sacred/secular status and accompaniment status. No conclusive result was found concerning the average difficulty of performed works, but English- language works were found to be inversely related to composition difficulty; the percentage of English-language works increased significantly between 2017–2019 and 2021–2023, suggesting a corresponding decrease in average difficulty.