11 minute read
FOUR SEASONS OF TEACHING CHOIR
BY DENISE EATON
Recently, I’ve been reflecting on the myriad opportunities afforded me these past few years—working with choirs, offering video clinics, and providing professional development workshops, concert evaluations, pre-UIL and UIL evaluations. I naturally progressed to thinking about endings and beginnings—especially the ending of this school year and the beginning of the next.
Consider these top musical elements and how you will address them in your planning: tone, vowels, repertoire selection, sequential yearlong sightreading, score study, and systematic plans for teaching each piece. These elements will be addressed throughout your seasons of teaching, with the goal of a most successful spring in mind!
SUMMER
Use this season to do some research and preparation. This could include going to workshops, the summer TCDA convention, and getting together with colleagues to talk about repertoire and teaching strategies. It must include selecting appropriate repertoire for the fall. It is through the repertoire that you will build musical foundations and begin developing and growing musical skills.
I firmly believe the foundations laid during the first six weeks of rehearsal drastically affect the end-of-the-year sound. So, where do you begin? By defining your sound. Your sound is what you want to hear from your singers. This summer, document the specifics and post them somewhere you will often notice. With this list in front of you, choose or create specific warmups and skill-building activities that address the sound needs of your ensembles. If this seems basic, it’s because it is—just in the same way that building tone is basic (and essential).
Tone is built and reinforced one day at a time, and just as we don’t condone poor behavior, we should not condone unacceptable tone. There must be a plan for addressing what we hear and how to fix it. Then comes the challenging part—the unrelenting insistence that it happen in warmups, in sightreading, and ultimately, in the repertoire.
While we might be motivated to avoid thoughts of teaching during the summer, consider using a little of this time to choose two or three pieces for each choir’s start of the year. Consider range, key, meter, etc. that will be appropriate based on each choir’s knowledge and skills. Study them, extracting materials for sightreading, intervals, rhythm readiness, and tone development, to name a few. From that information, I have found it helpful to create teaching sheets for the music to provide students when they return (more on that later).
The preparation you do during the summer in a more relaxed way will pay off with you experiencing less stress once school has started and meetings and staff development begin. After you establish this process, you’ll find it gets easier and takes less time. As you think about incorporating this activity into your summer, consider these truths:
• Score study and lesson planning are essential for successful sequential teaching.
• Identifying elements in each piece that will require sequencing and creative repetition is crucial. Singers need repetition to retain learning and be successful. It is our job to find the means to introduce opportunities for creative repetition.
• We are often in such a hurry to get to the words that we shortcut sequential learning, abandoning necessary developmental material that would lead us to a fulfilling musical performance. As we plan for sequential learning as a foundation for success, score study (not a curse word!) is a critical component. In its basic form, it would include identifying the following:
• Form
• Rhythm patterns—and how to break them down for successful learning
• Meter(s)—remembering 3/4 is challenging for young singers
• Tonal center(s)—including altered syllables
• Harmonic considerations/challenges
• Text: foreign language or English issues, including syllabic stress
• Melodic considerations/challenges (intervals)
After a bit of score study, several things are often revealed:
• What can be learned from this piece
• How ready you are to teach this piece and your students are to learn it (if either isn’t ready, put it in your “teach it later” pile)
• How this piece works with other piece(s) you are considering to program.
FALL
It’s time to begin building the sound you desire from your choir. Teaching vowels is the most important element of laying a foundation of sound. I highly recommend utilizing a systematic approach, and I believe the great unifier is the oo vowel. All students can reproduce a round, raisedpalate oo vowel through speaking. Begin there and move to singing it. Consider two vowel strands: (1) closed: oo–eh–ee, (2) open: oo–oh–ah.
For me, the most difficult vowel to unify is ah, with eh as a close second— ah, because it has so many colors, and eh, because we teach in Texas, the tripthong state. I have found that when oo lips are mastered with a lifted soft palate, eh is not spread, and ee has warmth. It takes time, reinforcement, and reminders about lip shape and palate to create good oo habits. From oo, other habits will follow. When I hear a piercing ee vowel, there isn’t enough oo (with a lifted palate) in it. Poor eh is usually spread lips (not singing the eh through oo lips or going to the dipthong, without lifting the palate).
Have students listen and then create a vocabulary of sound for your choirs, meeting them where they are in their development. Soon they will begin hearing the spread eh (not enough oo lips), and then you are on your way to developing a homogenous choral sound/tone.
I employ kinesthetic hand movements for vowel glides so singers can focus on both lips and hands. The beauty of teaching solfège is that it uses all these vowels except the foundational oo. You should also find yourself emphasizing the importance of adding some oo pucker to the lips with ee and eh for warmth, or create a warmup based on the vowel sequence then move into solfège, now without oo. It’s a fun journey that you can make your own as you develop the sound you want to hear from your choir in the spring.
WINTER
You have almost completed your fall repertoire, prepared for the first concert, and are moving toward the holidays. I suggest you begin score study for the holiday music at least three weeks before you are ready to teach it. Again, consider which musical elements have been mastered and which need significant work. It may be the time to add compound meter or more difficult harmonic elements, or not—only you know. Some choirs need more of the fall through their winter—and that’s okay! Keep working, maintaining high standards, and teaching the fundamentals until they are mastered.
As you near the holiday concert, that is the time to begin thinking about spring repertoire, which includes UIL. Some wait until late January, but if you are entering UIL season, there are so many things to consider about programming. Posting “Favorite SSA pieces—Go!” on Facebook is not where I would begin. Those who reply don’t teach your kids every day, so they don’t know your teaching plans, where your students are in their musical development, or the pieces you’ve performed in the fall. Instead, I suggest you begin with a list for each choir that includes:
• Elements the singers have mastered through the fall, their holiday concert music, and what still needs work.
• Keys in which they have sung and those that are most successful (sound-wise).
• If you performed an a cappella piece, list the positives and areas for improvement.
• Meters performed and which were successful or a struggle.
The answers to these questions for each group can help guide you in your UIL concert music selections. I found it helpful to have a proposed UIL program chosen for each choir before I left for the holiday break. Upon return, I could then do my score study and create teaching materials for at least one of the songs. Remember, with creative teaching materials, your students can begin learning so much of the music before even seeing it. You can also assess their level of skill mastery required by the piece through these materials. You might be wondering whether I really did all this. The answer is a definite yes! Did I have a life? Also, yes! I could because it got easier with each song and set of teaching materials created. Teaching materials are not challenging to create, but they do require study and thought to your teaching sequence.
I like to extract elements from the score and write them on a sheet that I copy (one color for each song). The elements could include melodic contours for each vocal part, rhythmic elements, and harmonic challenges. Some of the things I learned through trial and error include the following:
1. When creating melodic contours without rhythm, use whole notes and do not include more than five notes per measure. Too many notes per measure make it challenging to fix errors. For example, “Find note #11 and start there” can be confusing as some will look for the 11th note. I learned the hard way to number the measures and label each exercise with a letter for ease in rehearsal: “Let’s look at example B, measures 5–7.”
2. When creating rhythm drills (with rhythms found in the music), first eliminate ties and then add them in later. Limit the examples to no more than eight measures.
a. Consider breaking down the various rhythms the singers will see in the song. It is many times helpful to write how to count under less visually familiar patterns. I often wrote in some of the counts to help singers with challenging rhythms.
b. Write the actual measures from the song over the rhythm patterns on the sheet. That makes the learning relevant, and your singers will know where to go in the music once an exercise is mastered. For example, in a particular exercise over measures 1–4, “mm. 36–48” is written. After mastering the pattern, they know where to go in the music. I don’t believe students can overdo rhythm readiness.
Denise Eaton is a 35-year music educator, author, and editor. She is a TMEA Past-President and Choral Consultant and Choral Editor with Carl Fischer & BriLee Music. She welcomes your questions at dreaton59@gmail.com.
3. For challenging harmonic sections in the music, consider writing them out (using whole note place markers). This could also be used for sightreading. Every section sings every part followed by their own part. Once mastered, go to those measures in the music. This works because there are no visual distractions on the sheet— rhythms, words, etc. You are merely isolating the intervals.
These are a few teaching strategies that were highly effective with my students’ mastery of pieces and learning. I can remember passing out a song and a student asking, “Is there a sheet for this one?” Not all songs require such breakdown, and only you can make that determination. Perhaps you have some strategies you have found are highly successful in your students’ learning? If so, please share them with me!
SPRING
Now is the time to reap the rewards of your proactive planning and work accomplished during the fall and winter months. You will have pre-UIL, UIL evaluation, and festival performances. You may also be tackling a pop show—have fun while you teach the music sequentially, just like all the previous music learned. I fondly remember writing out chord progressions for La Bamba and we learned the entire song in one rehearsal.
Choir placement auditions will happen during the spring. You are seeking the best tone and sightreading skills. What a great opportunity this will be to hear the fruits of their hard work and your labor!
Hopefully there will be budget money left in your account to spend on needed materials for your singers’ continuing development. If you have been creating all your teaching materials, find those resources that best support your students’ needs. Ask your colleagues what materials work best and why, and share what is working best for your choirs.
As a final reminder, teaching choir is seasonal—each season has a growth purpose that builds throughout the year. Are you ready to branch out and try something a bit different? Assess this year, then go forth and make change!
