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EFFECTIVE VOCAL WARM-UPS FOR CHANGING VOICES The warm-up period of the rehearsal is an important one not only to

In document Becoming a Choral Music Teacher (Page 65-75)

S CHOOL V OICES

EFFECTIVE VOCAL WARM-UPS FOR CHANGING VOICES The warm-up period of the rehearsal is an important one not only to

get the students mentally and musically focused, but also to assist in the development of the voice. Most students have no voice teacher other than their choir director in their entire lives, and one of the music teacher’s responsibilities is to teach proper and healthy use of the voice.

Essential things to consider as you create warm-ups for your middle school choir are the known characteristics of the developing adolescent voice of both boys and girls, which include a lack of control and diffi-culty with:

• Agility

• Articulation

• Large intervals

• Dynamics

• Register change

• Clarity of tone.

Girls tend to sound breathy at this stage, and boys may sound husky.

All of these vocal challenges can inspire creativity on the part of the choral teacher to help the young singers.

One of the critical aspects of a warm-up session is that the teacher stays aware of the ranges of the singers, and avoids forcing students too high or too low when uncomfortable. Watch for signs of vocal strain

which include lifting of the chin to reach high pitches, tension in the upper body, or a grimace on the face. As Henry Leck stated in a con-ference session, “70% of what you hear is what you see,” indicating that you can see vocal tension in the body (Leck, 2009). If you have not memorized the ranges of the middle school choir as described earlier, stop now to do that. Notate them again, find them on the piano, sing them, and internalize them visually, aurally and kinesthetically.

There are a multitude of vocal warm-up books available for se-condary choral teachers, and Ken Phillips’ (1992) vocal technique curriculum is especially useful because of its clear structure, objectives, and guidelines for achieving the objectives and assessment. He presents an instructional sequence for the middle school choral program. He provides 30 warm-ups per school year that teach five main aspects of singing: Respiration, Phonation, Resonance, Diction, and Expression.

Respiration exercises teach:

• Posture development

• Breathing motion

• Breath management.

Phonation exercises teach:

• Lower and upper adjustment

• Lower and upper coordination.

Resonance exercises teach:

• Vocal resonance and coordination

• Uniform vowel colors.

For the complete curriculum, see Phillips’ Teaching Kids to Sing, or create your own with other resources that meet the 14 key objectives just outlined.

Another clear and concise vocal skill building curriculum designed for use in secondary choral rehearsals is James Jordan’s The Choral Warm-Up (2005). He presents a sequence for teaching that is “non-negotiable . . . and must be taught in that order in every warm-up . . . each time” (p. 29) which includes:

1. Relaxation

2. Body awareness and alignment 3. Relaxation of the vocal tract 4. Creating space

He identified the following additional vocal principles as essential, but does not specify a non-negotiable schedule for teaching them:

• Dynamics

These two vocal pedagogy curricula ( Jordan, 2005; Phillips, 1992) are especially useful because they provide comprehensive and sequential, rather than haphazard, approaches to teaching singing to adolescents.

What follows is a merging of the two pedagogies in an attempt to provide the aspiring choral teacher with a solid base upon which to build warm-ups, with additional suggestions gleaned from other expert teachers.

Preparing the Body for Singing

None of the warm-ups in this category involves phonation or vocal-ization; and in fact, silence should be nurtured (Leck, 2009).

• Always begin with stretches and/or shoulder massages to relax the body.

• Insist on alignment of the hips, head, pelvis, shoulders, knees and feet ( Jordan, 2005).

Posture development exercises include:

• Spinal stretches

• Shoulder rolls

• Neck relaxation

• Knee flexes

• Side stretches

• Shrugs

• Head nods and shakes

• Heel marches

• Torso twists

• Shoulder flexes

• Neck stretches

• Model posturing

• Diving board spring position

• Sitting tall

• Standing tall (Phillips, 1992).

Respiration

Breathing motion exercises include:

• Abdominal breathing on the floor

• Filling up with air like a balloon

• Slowly sipping air as through a straw

• Quickly gasping for a quick breath

• Breathing as in a deep yawn.

For breath management exercises, changing voice expert Dan Andersen of Indiana’s Center Grove Middle School advocates:

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• inhaling for two beats and exhaling on a hiss for 12 beats;

• then inhaling for two beats and exhaling on a hiss for 16 beats.

Students enjoy the competition of who can exhale the longest.

Henry Leck (2009) uses:

• four-beat echoed rhythm patterns with consonants “s,” “sh,”

and “f ”;

• rhythms of known songs with consonants “s,” “sh,” and “f.”

Inhalation should be quiet, and both inhalation and exhalation should be accompanied by a feeling of the spine lengthening.

Phonation

Many adolescents speak in their low voice and need help finding their high singing voice. One of the best phonation exercises is the sigh from high to low on the vowel sound “oo.” It is essential that the lips be rounded, the soft palate slightly raised as in a yawn, and the jaw slightly lowered ( Jordan, 2005). This can be done once or twice every day.

The feeling of breath support combined with phonation is some-times called “singing on the breath.” Having students use circular hand motions to represent the spinning energy, or an extended pointed finger to represent the “drive” of the breath-supported sound, can make a difference between a weak and vital sound ( Jordan, 2005).

Resonance

Middle school singers can begin to discover vocal resonance through the following procedure:

• Students hum the pitch g1 (the g above middle C), except for changed baritones who will sing one octave lower

•• with lips closed but slightly protruded, and

•• with teeth slightly parted until a tingle in the lips is felt.

• Keeping that feeling, students drop the jaw approximately one finger’s width and open up to an “oo.”

• The teacher models the desired choral tone, which should be rather light and unforced.

• Students then sing the “ee” vowel while

•• lips remain slightly rounded, and

•• the tip of the tongue touches the bottom front teeth ( Jordan, 2005).

• There should be much space in the mouth for proper reso-nance, resulting in “maximum sound with minimal effort”

(Collins, 1999, p. 217).

• Visual imagery can be very effective, so asking the singers to feel as if they have a golf ball or the Astrodome in their mouth can create the optimal resonant space for singing.

Registration

Once the high voice is found and placed, adolescents can practice and become aware of going between their high and low registers. As in the previous exercise, have the students sing g1, with vowels “oo” and “ee,”

and the same mouth position, then do the following:

• Sing descending legato five-note patterns

• Sing short call-and-response patterns.

To assist in smoothing out the register break, ask the young men to open the throat and push more air as they feel the approaching break.

Instruct students to sing as they are able—to drop out when uncom-fortable but to join back in as soon as possible.

To help singers learn to feel the difference in singing in their upper (head voice), middle (combined) and lower (chest voice) registers:

• move the previous exercise to c1 (middle C), with changed voices an octave lower, and

• then to c2 and an octave lower.

• The “ah” and “oh” vowels should be added (Phillips, 1992).

Listen carefully for students who struggle with matching pitch and finding their different registers. With practice, the voices will become easier to manage, so it is important for the teacher to remain encour-aging, patient, and resourceful. Two important strategies are to keep them singing in their head voices despite the voice changes, and if all else fails, find the pitches they c an sing, match those, and begin to work

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outward from there. They will hear the difference between those matched and unmatched pitches.

Agility and Expression

Staccato, marcato, rapid tempos and dynamic control are some of the challenges of the changing and changed voices. The following exercise and guidelines are particularly helpful:

• Sing descending patterns from the head voice (keeping above middle C for changing voices) (Phillips, 1992).

• Create space in the mouth with open vowels that allow the sound to resonate.

• Imagine the sound spinning forward toward the cheekbones and forehead, using hand gestures to reinforce the spinning and energized tone ( Jordan, 2005).

Because there are few common tones among the various ranges in the middle school choir, once warm-ups leave the head voice area, it is essential to keep in mind the common notes among the ranges. What are the common tones? If you cannot answer this question, please go back and look at Example 2.2. Commit them to memory.

Range Extension

As girls mature they develop an expanded range and need to be using it in order to keep it flexible (Gackle, 1991). For girls and boys, it is important to warm up the entire range, paying special attention to taking the head voice quality down into the chest voice range, rather than vice versa. Most students will be afraid of their rarely used head voice until its use becomes a regular routine in choir. This is essential to good voice production and good choral tone, even if the sound is very light and breathy at the start. Good posture, good breath support, good vowel unification with a dropped jaw, and dynamic exercises will improve the tone dramatically with time and instruction.

• For ascending range extension vocalises, chord tones sung on open vowels (e.g., “oh” and “ah”) taken at fast tempos are best.

• For descending range extension vocalises, stepwise exercises sung on resonant vowels (e.g., “ee”) taken at slow tempos are best ( Jordan, 2005).

Diction

Diction exercises are essential not only for making text intelligible, but the production of pure and uniform vowels make beautiful choral tone possible, and clean and crisp consonants provide rhythmic impetus.

Put more artistically, the soul of choral singing is in the vowels, but the passion is in the consonants. Put more technically, vowels are sung “on the breath” with the vocal cords in vibration, while consonants obstruct the breath stream, either partially or fully, and the vocal cords may or may not be in vibration (Moriarty, 1975).

At the middle school level the diction curriculum should stress the following consonants:

• Final consonants

• Voiced (b, d, g, j) plosives

• Voiceless (p, t, k, ch) plosives

• Nasal n (for building legato)

• Fricative v (for developing high resonance) (Phillips, 1992).

The vowel hierarchy for practice uses the following five primary vowels:

• oo

• oh

• ah

• eh

• ee

The choral conductor needs to be familiar with the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) for these sounds which can be found in every language:

[u o ɑ ε i]

The pure vowel sound “oh” [o] should not be sung as the diphthong it is in the English language and will be discussed later.

Most music education curricula are too full to include a course in diction, yet it is one of the most important aspects of choral singing.

Even the youngest choristers can be taught to sing beautiful uniform vowels which make the difference between a fine choir and a mediocre one. Therefore, attention to diction principles and the IPA is necessary.

What follows are guidelines for learning to sing the basic vowel sounds.

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• Practice singing the lip vowels [u] (as in noon) and [o] (as in gold) with rounded and projected lips (“fish mouth”) and a slightly dropped jaw.

• When forming tongue vowels, practice singing:

•• [i] (as in meet),

•• [ε] (as in met), and

•• [ɑ] (as in father).

•• Note that the tongue and jaw gradually lower in the pro-gression of these three vowel sounds (Moriarty, 1975).

• Form the mouth position for the vowel during inhalation before singing.

• Sing five-note descending patterns for each vowel, beginning on c2 and not descending below middle C (see Example 3.5).

• Sing five-note patterns on enjoyable combinations of vowels such as “doo-bee-doo-bee-doo” and “so-fa-mi-re-do”.

Tongue-twisters are very effective in improving choral diction. Try

“Double Bubble Gum,” as seen in Example 3.6, using increasing tem-pos and minor tonality for extra challenge and fun.

“Red Leather Yellow Leather” (see Example 3.7) is another chal-lenging tongue-twister that can be adapted to fit a number of five-note patterns.

Example 3.5 Vowel Exercise

Warm-ups should occur at every rehearsal because they teach the students how to sing well. By keeping the pace quick, the entire warm-up sequence can be accomplished within 10 minutes with practice on the part of the teacher. These exercises may be gleaned from warm-up textbooks, from the literature to be rehearsed, or created by you, but stretch yourself to come up with warm-ups that you have never tried before. Adding movement will keep the students engaged, and is very highly recommended. Jordan’s (2005) The Choral Warm-Up includes several chapters detailing physical gestures and kinesthetic exercises to reinforce vocal principles.

There are many published warm-up books for adolescents that are easy for the middle school teacher to use, but it is most important that

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Example 3.6 Diction Exercise

Example 3.7 Diction Exercise

you know what you want to accomplish in your warm-up period, why it is important, and how to best carry it out. It is now time for you to create your first middle school warm-up sequence from scratch, using all of the information given in Chapters 2 and 3 of this textbook. Keep in mind the differences and similarities in ranges among voice parts, the vocal concepts that need to be taught in order to learn to achieve a good tone, and an overall energetic pace to engage the adolescent. In order to avoid waning attention spans, don’t plan to spend too much time on any one warm-up. Make note of how many minutes each exer-cise should take.

In document Becoming a Choral Music Teacher (Page 65-75)