A person's voice is their means of expression in their everyday lives. They have lived with their voices, they are comfortable with them, it is a great source of their identity. We realized that asking them to change this, to change their voices was challenging for many students. Many students feel their voices need to be acknowledged before they are ready and able to change them. Our work here helps us to work with them and to involve them in the exciting process of developing their own voices. Everyone can improve if they are ready to listen. But we, too, need to listen to them, to their voices, to what they say. We want to acknowledge who they are.
We regularly ask our students how they feel about chorus and how they feel about their voices in questionnaires or interviews. Four weeks into the semester last spring, a new member wrote,
“I just think that instead of encouraging all of us to sing in a high voice we should sing out. The voice may be pretty but it’s not choir and it’s not strong. It’s singing in your chest, throat, and head instead of your vertebrae and stomach and singing strong with meaning. Personally, singing here I feel trapped and oppressed in one voice.”
The strong feelings this girl expressed reminded us that the ways that students sing, and the ways that they respond to our advice about singing is strongly shaped by how they want to sing and their conception of what good singing is. We believe that in order to work successfully with these students, we need to understand what they want to do, and to let them do it.
We invite kids to suggest songs, and we spend some time in each rehearsal singing their songs around the piano, with kids frequently volunteering to take solos. This gives students the chance to share their abilities with us and with their peers, which is an important step in their process of feeling appreciated and valued, and as a result, to engaging fully in our work. Vocally, we often find that when kids sing their own music, many pieces of vocal technique are in place; their posture and breathing tend to be quite good, and they support well. Kids singing their own songs frequently identify the problems they would like to address: “I can’t sing that high part,” or “That hurts my throat.” These observations and goals can be the launching point for their work with our voice specialist.
(The ACDA National Conference is just one of the many benefits of membership in the American Choral Directors Association. Join ACDA today.)
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