This is all very strange to me. My volunteer parish choir of about twenty people all read music, standard and Gregorian. Everyone sight-reads at least tolerably well, too.
What you have is a blessing. Not many parishes have choirs with all of their members being able to read music. That said, many of my colleagues who work in certain Protestant churches are also blessed with choirs who can read. Some also have the money to pay professional singers and some professional section leaders. That is not standard in Catholic parishes.
I can’t imagine how you could regularly learn new pieces otherwise, at least without having to rehearse them over and over, or bring in a stereo for people to listen to.
You can’t. It is a slow, long process to learn new works for those who can’t read music. Lots and lots of repetition. Then if you are teaching them motets and pholyphony, you have to go through each individual voice part with them continuously, then put them together. If you have a well-established choir, the ones who have been in the choir for a long time can help the newbies out and it isn’t as time-consuming. But if it is new for an entire choir, it can take months to learn a new piece, so you only introduce a few new pieces a year and then rely on your standard repertoire that you know most of the choir will know well. Many times, choir members will bring in tape recorders/digital recorders and record then entire choir practice with their voice parts and then practice at home.
I wonder, though. For those people who are competent choral singers but say they “don’t read music,” do they just mean that they can’t sight-read and can’t hear a piece in their head by looking at the notes? They must have some idea of what those little round things on those lines over the words are, right? When they move upward, the pitch goes up; when they jump downward, the pitch jumps down; when the “alligator mouth” opens toward the right, you get louder; and so on? It’s not like what happens when I look at, say, Thai or Arabic script, which I only see as completely indecipherable squiggles, is it?
For some choir members who have been doing it for years and years, if they haven’t had any formal training, they can pick up that those little black dots mean you “go up” or “go down” and then they do learn a little bit about the dynamic markings but that’s about it. They usually don’t know what those notes actually mean. There are singers and instrumentalists who can sight-read (being able to play an instrument by sight-reading), but can’t sight-sing (being able to sing a note just by looking at it.) They are also singers who can sight-sing, but don’t have perfect pitch, so they give the note a relative pitch. Let’s say the starting note is an A. They might actually start off by singing a note around the A and then can sing the music based on the key they started in. With practice they can get very proficient in having near perfect pitch though, by ear and muscle memory. Few people have natural perfect pitch. My first voice teacher did. She was incredible and was often hired for all that A-tonal, strange and difficult modern classical music because she sight-read like no other and had absolute perfect pitch. I had to work much harder on my sight-singing skills. (I can sight read pretty well which I also had to work on .) But being able to sight-sing is a blessing AND a curse, because when I’m looking at a piece of music in one key and I hear the chanter or singer and instrumentalists performing in another key, or if I am singing a piece of music that is in a different key than my instrumentalist, it “bothers” me. I’m either trying to transpose the notes in my head if it is a fairly new piece for me, or if I know the piece pretty well, I have to ignore the notes for the most part because my brain will automatically want to sing in A written on the page, when in reality the instrument is playing in G.
So, sometimes those singers who don’t sight-sing or read music at all have it a little easier in that regard. But in terms of everything else, I think it is much, much easier to be able to read music - and much faster to learn a new piece.
It was originally a fast dance with a specific rhythmic style that you hear in all sarabandes, but many composers eventually wrote sarabandes not made for dancing in a slower tempi. They are all in triple meter.