The purpose of this study was to examine multicultural children’s choir octavos from leading music publishers in the U.S. For the purposes of this study, the multicultural choral octavos evaluated were identified by each music publishing company. Specifically, the following research questions were asked: (1) How many multicultural children’s choir octavos were available per music publisher? (2) What voicings were available in the multicultural children’s choir octavos? (3) Which countries and/or cultures were represented in the multicultural children’s choir octavos? (4) What languages were represented in the multicultural children’s choir octavos? (5) Which music styles were represented in the multicultural children’s choir octavos? (6) What specific instrumentation and/or orchestration was included in the multicultural children’s choir octavos? (7) Are the phonetic/pronunciation, translation, and performance/composer notes provided in the multicultural children’s choir octavos? and (8) Who were the leading composers of multicultural children’s choir octavos? The children’s choral octavos (N = 217) for this study were collected from 17 leading music publishing companies: Alfred Music, Heritage Music Press, Hal Leonard, Chorister’s Guild, Shawnee Press, Brilee Music, Boosey & Hawkes, Carl Fisher, Pavane, Alliance, E.C. Schrimer, Excelcia, Henry Leck, Growing Grace, Hinshaw, Jubilato, and Santa Barbara. The publishing companies were selected based on the American Choral Directors Association (ACDA) website listing of leading choral repertoire publishers at the time of the study. Results revealed that out of the countries and/or cultures represented in this study, Africa was the most represented culture, followed by the Spanish culture. However, a considerable amount of octavos could not be discerned from the available information provided from music publishers. It was found that publishers were inconsistent with listing the language, music style, countries/cultures, and the culture of origin within the country/culture in the multicultural children’s choir octavos. Conversely, there were several cultures that were represented by a single octavo (<1%) and many cultures were underrepresented in the multicultural children’s choir repertoire.
