Singing To Learn

Singing to Learn

I had another magnificent teaching experience yesterday in Warrenton, Virginia. Debbie McGuire and I traveled from our homes in Bridgewater to lead 75 All-County Middle School Honors Choir singers in a day of singing. Ms. McGuire accompanied and I directed the students through a day of singing, laughing, speaking, moving, and learning.

After some mercifully short introductions, we began our first rehearsal with a discussion of correct choral posture. I had arranged a short ostinato piece for my classes many years ago using the dictionary definition of posture. "The position of the limbs or the carriage of the body as a whole." Using this to also begin working with choral diction and expression, we added the elements of good posture, "back straight, feet on the floor," and "head and shoulders in neutral." The elements became ostinatos and the definition was turned into a canon and we were experts on posture in a little less that 10 minutes!

Into the music we dived. I chose to start with Cheryl Lavender's great treble choir (SSA) arrangement of "Singabahambyo." I have to admit that a director's worst nightmare happened at this precise moment. I asked Ms. McGuire to start into the introduction, the kids were all sitting up nice and tall, as they had been taught, I counted down the four measure introduction, gave the signal to begin the song and..... silence...... Nothing happened! This is the moment that director's dread the most. Are they prepared? Do they have a different song ready? Do I have the right version? What's going on? All of these questions flashed through my mind in a nano second and all I could think of was the story of Stravinsky's birthday, when the New York Philharmonic sang "Happy Birthday" as the maestro gave the downbeat for the first piece on the program!

I don't know if that settled things or not but we tried again and the kids got in pretty well and away we went. The first run was pretty shaky, but we just went back and fixed things and made it through pretty well. I used one of my favorite tricks for learning the lush three part harmony. The middle part is usually the most problematic, so I just asked everyone to sing it! The kids all kind of blinked, swallowed hard, gave a little collective grin and jumped right in. Because of the repetitive nature of the tune, we were able to get on a roll by repeating the part several times. For this song, I was then able to ask the Part 1 singers to switch off to their part for a duet, followed by the Part 3 singers so that we soon had some rich, full sounding three part harmony. This piece was done after we reviewed the pronunciation of the Swahili language.
This whole session set the mood and style for the day, as we worked very hard with the students remaining focused, working hard, and enjoying every moment. Highlights of the rest of the day included some solo auditions for Stuart Calvert's arrangement of Allistair MacGillivray's beautiful song, "Song for the Mira," some great drumming added to "Three African Songs," by Cheryl Lavender, a Tevye-esque dance demo by the director for Allan Naplan's "Hine Ma Tov," and some fantastic dynamics, diction and harmony in John Leavitt's "Festival Sanctus."

My personal highlight of the day was rehearsal session with John Barr's new octavo, "If I can stop one heart from breaking." If you haven't seen or heard this piece, make sure you get to the concert by the Daughters of Song on April 15 at Parkview Mennonite Church or go to the publisher's website and give a listen. It has a great melody with swirling harmony and a punchy groove in the accompaniment. Teaching the students to sing in 6,7,8,9,and 10/8 was a trip. We worked for thirty minutes breaking down the grouping and learning how to place the words and accents. The kids accepted the challenge with only a little grumbling, worked very hard and happily, and the performance came off very well.

The concert came at the end of the day for a nice audience of mostly parents and friends. The kids sparkled and performed wonderfully, with confidence and grace. Parents were encouraged to keep their kids in music classes and were told that "music class is THE most important class your child can take!" Congratulations to Fauquier County Schools for a very successful All County Honors Choir.