Haslett HS Select Women's Choir - Observation #6/Teaching #2

This past Tuesday, I was able to lead a few more warm ups with the choir. The rest of the rehearsal was spent preparing for District Choral Festival, which was rescheduled for next week after being cancelled due to weather.

Ms. Valla started the warm ups and then had me lead a couple at the end. Since the choir is used to singing with some kind of pitch underneath them, Ms. Valla had suggested that I either play simple chords on the piano while they were singing, or hold "do" while they sang the exercise. I opted for holding "do" had having the choir sing above that.

I started with the alphabet warm up by modeling it once. Then I sustained "do" while they sung the exercise. At the end of the first sequence, I sang "now here" with my pitch moved up a half step. This seemed to work, but when I did it the next time, the choir did not match my pitch and began on different notes. Ms. Valla stopped them and said that I was giving the starting pitch instead of a piano so they had to be listening to what I was singing. She said the pattern was probably a predictable one (like ascending half steps) but that they had to pay attention since this was different than how they normally warmed up. Once Ms. Valla said this, the girls were able to stay on pitch very well and the problems that happened the first time I lead warm ups (changing keys, not sure of entrances, etc.) did not happen this time.

After the alphabet warm up, I modeled Marcus' warm up of "Sing legato now sing staccato, I-- just want to sing." I sang this for the choir twice because Ms. Valla said they have a similar warm up in terms of notes, but use different words. I saw a couple of the students nod like they liked the warm up though, which was cool to see. This time, the choir stayed on pitch easily with me sustaining the starting pitch for them. As I moved them through the range, I started sustaining the pitch a little shorter time, and the group managed to stay in tune, which I liked.

I talked to Ms. Valla after rehearsal and she said that she thought my warm ups went really well and that the group followed me very well. She said that method of warming up is really good to train choirs with, especially for instances where you may not have a piano around for warm ups (like Festival sometimes in the warm up room). She said if the choir was trained to hear this, that often the director can just give the starting pitch and the choir can stay in tune without anything being sustained. Obviously, this particular choir is not trained for that, but I was glad that it went better than last time.

The rehearsal was fairly typical and similar to what I had seen previously, but Ms. Valla did do something very interesting to get sections to blend better. She called each section down individually and had them sing "La" on a descending C scale. She then positioned the girls from darkest to brightest voice so that when singers added in, they blended seamlessly with one another. Then, she broke the line in half and had the girls stand with the darker voices in the back and the brighter voices in the front row. This whole process was incredibly quick, but it made a huge difference in "Bright Morning Stars," since sections are entering one after another and trying to create seamless blends with each other.

One thing that was really interesting to me is that a couple of the girls were very self-conscious just singing a scale in front of the group by themselves to get blend. "Bright Morning Stars" also starts with 3 solos, and when Ms. Valla was asking for people to sing, the majority of the girls adamantly said no. It surprised me that in this advanced group so many people were afraid or reluctant to sing solos. I remember being in advanced or additional choirs when I was in school, and more often than not, there was a competition for limited solos, which is the opposite of what I saw here. I know everyone auditions to get into this group, which made the reluctance, especially in the blend activity, even more surprising to me. I wonder if this is a confidence thing with individual students or a classroom thing that has to do with how Ms. Valla runs her classes during the day. I haven't seen anything to suggest that a solo would be intimidating to do, but this is the first song with a solo I have observed and this was not the first day people had sung solos, so I don't know for sure how it was set up.