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CJ Replay: A Guide to Improving Student-Led Section Rehearsals

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The September 2016 issue of Choral Journal is online and features an article titled “A Guide to Improving Student-Led Section Rehearsals” by Felicia Mulé, James Robison, and Ryan Kelly. You can read it in its entirety at acda.org/choraljournal. Following is a portion from the article.

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Many high school and college choirs hold section rehearsals that are directed by student leaders. These sectionals can be very beneficial to choirs. They offer focused opportunities for sections to study their own vocal lines and build singer independence. Student-led sectionals can also generate greater ownership of the music making and esprit de corps within sections.

Conversely, student-run sectionals can present challenges; productivity can be low, singers’ participation reluctant, and leaders’ direction heavy-handed or listless. Most sectionals can improve. Student leaders can employ a number of strategies to help them lead better and understand the needs of their sections. Likewise, teachers can take steps to guide their leaders with greater direction and oversight. This article’s goal is to offer both students and teachers strategies for improving their choirs’ sectionals so that they are more productive, musical, and unifying experiences for singers.

What Are Effective Section Rehearsals?

Sectionals can occur in different ways. Conductors sometimes schedule them at the beginning of a rehearsal calendar (i.e., early in a semester) to help sections start learning their parts independently, or they might schedule them in the middle of that calendar to teach part-specific vocal techniques. Sectionals sometimes occur in lieu of a regularly scheduled full choir rehearsal; alternatively, they might be weekly “extra” rehearsals scheduled at another time of day. Regardless of their frequency, sectionals should have three common goals:

• Sectionals should be productive.

Singers should sing more confidently when they leave. They should not leave the sectional having wasted their time.

• Sectionals should be musical.

Singers should sing more expressively when they leave. They should not leave the sectional simply having “woodshed” pitches.

• Sectionals should be unifying.

Singers should leave feeling a stronger bond with their fellow singers, not feeling disgruntled or discouraged.

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Read the rest of this article in the September 2016 issue of Choral Journal online at acda.org/choraljournal

CJ Replay: Addressing Contextual Information in Multicultural Choral Repertoire

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The November 2020 issue of Choral Journal is online and features an article titled “Addressing Contextual Information in Multicultural Choral Repertoire” by Tiffany Walker. You can read it in its entirety at acda.org/choraljournal. Following is a portion from the article.

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There is an ongoing need to help choral music educators make informed decisions about how to select culturally responsive music. Teaching music from diverse cultures is part of state and national music standards, but it needs to be approached knowledgably, beyond picking a song in a different language. Julia Shaw refers to culturally responsive pedagogy as a way of teaching music from diverse cultures using prior knowledge, frames of reference, and diverse performance styles to make the learning experience more relevant to students.1

Without this cultural meaning, repertoire selection and performance could fall victim to cultural appropriation, which happens when “people from a more powerful culture adopt the art, symbols, or elements of a less powerful culture without understanding or respecting the context or history of that material.”2 Knowing more about the multicultural music arrangements we choose to perform may spur the developing of prior knowledge and frame of reference needed to practice culturally responsive pedagogy. Why is it that choral music educators shy away from programming diverse music?

Some choir teachers may feel uncomfortable adding multicultural music to their concert program because they lack training or exposure to the genre and they fear being inauthentic or falling victim to cultural appropriation.3 On the other hand, there may be teachers who are not afraid to program music in a variety of languages, but lack cultural responsiveness by not delving further into the cultural meaning of the music. Sometimes an arrangement inaccurately includes instruments creating an entertaining affect instead of creating an authentic musical experience.

My intention is to help guide a choir director towards knowing how one could select repertoire that validly represents the music of diverse cultures. This includes ways to inform the study and programming of cultural music, examples of trusted publishers, and describing what to look for in octavos.

NOTES

1 Julia Shaw, “The Skin that We Sing: Culturally Responsive Choral Music Education,” Music Educators Journal 98, no. 4 (2012): 75-81.
2 Ryan Cho, “Cultural Appropriation and Choral Music: A Conversation That Can Make Both Our Music and Community Better,” Choral Journal 55, no. 10 (2015): 59.
3 Kathy Robinson, “Teacher Education for a New World of Musics,” in Readings of Diversity, Inclusion, and Music For All (Reston, VA: MENC, the National Association for Music Education) 14-31; Margaret M. Woods, “Alleviating the Difficulties in Teaching Multicultural Choral Music (PhD diss., George Mason University, 2018), ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global.

American Christian Orthodox Choral Music

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The November/December issue of Choral Journal is online and features an article titled “American Christian Orthodox Choral Music” by Jason Thoms. You can read it in its entirety at acda.org/choraljournal. Following is a portion from the article.

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Music majors and students in music appreciation have studied the Mass ordinary movements of the Catholic Mass, Gregorian chant, the structure and development of the motet, and the cyclical and cantus firmus masses. These are some of the most important musical forms and genres in early Western music. When asked to name a piece of Christian Orthodox music, Rachmaninoff ’s “Vespers” or Tchesnokov’s “Salvation is Created” are likely two pieces that come to mind, but many choral directors might have trouble coming up with other titles. It says a great deal about the quality of Orthodox choral music that many of the top professional choral ensembles in the United States have Grammy-nominated or Grammy-winning recordings.

Most of this repertoire, however, was not written for the concert hall but instead for small choral ensembles who sing multiple times a week in the churches and multiple times a day in the monasteries. Many music history texts contain no references to the music of the Eastern Orthodox Church, even though there is at least as much musical depth and breadth in the Eastern church as in the Western church. The harmonic and melodic beauty of Orthodox choral music provides a distinct sound to concerts or worship that audiences and congregations will fi nd enjoyable and meaningful.

The liturgy of the Orthodox Church and the Catholic Church developed as part of the same catholic faith until the Great Schism of 1054, which separated the Eastern and Western churches. Like the liturgy of the Catholic Church, the Orthodox liturgy has ordinary texts (every time a particular service is performed), and proper texts (specifically assigned to the particular service of the day, week, or season). In both the Catholic and Orthodox faiths there is a long-standing and extensive lectionary of texts and liturgies that are sung for each service of the day and week. Unlike the music of the Roman Catholic Church, the music of Orthodox traditions is not built around just one central location but instead developed, adapted, and created in every culture in which it took root, resulting in a wide variety of musical styles in a variety of languages.

Worship in the Christian Orthodox church is a vocal-choral tradition. The daily and weekly services are meant to be completely sung or chanted with usually only the homily spoken. In most Orthodox churches, the priest chants parts of the liturgy, and a chanter or choir responds. There are some selections of liturgical music and hymns sung solely by the chanter or choir and any congregants who know the music. In most Orthodox traditions, no instruments are allowed, though some Greek Orthodox churches do have organs. The Orthodox liturgy puts a lot of responsibility on the chanter and choir, which will often sing for the majority of the worship service. There are many worship experiences during the year where services can last well over three hours, such as Holy Week and Pascha.

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Read the full article in the November/December 2021 issue of Choral Journal at acda.org/choraljournal

Examining Choral Music with a Rhetorical Perspective: A Practical Guide

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The November/December issue of Choral Journal is online and features an article titled “Examining Choral Music with a Rhetorical Perspective: A Practical Guide” by Gary Seighman. You can read it in its entirety at acda.org/choraljournal. Following is the article’s introduction:

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The pandemic has challenged all of us in our pursuit of personal connection. Rehearsing via Zoom or in large spaces while masked and socially distanced has created many impediments between our singers. These can decrease the expressive potential of the music that we perform and even affect our ability to empathize with one another. This article will look at another form of social distancing that we have been encountering long before 2020: the performance of music written centuries ago in different cultural contexts than today.

A Renaissance motet written 500 years ago in what is now Northern Germany, for example, challenges us to translate the intended effect for twenty-first-century minds and ears. Instead of just a mask on our face, our entire perception of this “distanced” music is filtered through a modern lens often divorced from the practices of the time. The Greco-Roman tradition of rhetoric (from the Greek rhētorikós) or “the art of persuasion” was one of these fundamental components embedded in the overall consciousness of sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In fact, between 1400 and 1700 there were approximately 2,000 books published on the topic of rhetoric, which sought to create convincing narratives through carefully crafted speech techniques. Rhetoric and oratorical delivery permeated Renaissance and Baroque era thought, and music compositional practices would have equally been attuned to these ideals that were “in the air.”

This article will provide examples of how to decode compositional elements in this repertoire through a rhetorical perspective and offer another tool for its interpretation.

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Read the full article in the November/December 2021 issue of Choral Journal at acda.org/choraljournal

Healthy Minimization of Vibrato: An Exploration of “Straight Tone

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The November/December issue of Choral Journal is online and features an article titled “Healthy Minimization of Vibrato: An Exploration of “Straight Tone” by Danya Katok. You can read it in its entirety at acda.org/choraljournal. Following is a portion from the article.

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Straight tone singing has many applications for the modern singer, from choral singing to twenty-first-century music. Some imagine straight tone as rigid and motionless; however, straight tone singing is not without vibrato. It is round and clear in quality. It has minimal vibrato, yet shimmers with energy and pulsation. Most singers are discouraged to sing with straight tone by their voice teachers, who fear it damages the voice. While it is true that singing with traditionally vibrant tone and using the tongue and neck muscles to “straighten” it out is harmful, a combination of flow phonation and low dynamic level can achieve sonance and healthfully minimize the perception of vibrato in a way that is not only harmless to the voice, but beneficial for vibrant, versatile singing.

When I moved to New York City in 2010, I followed the path taken by many emerging professional singers and took a job singing in a church choir on Sunday mornings. I ended up at a Catholic church that valued the English Renaissance vocal quality of boy sopranos. My fellow sopranos and I were encouraged to sing with as little vibrato as possible. At fi rst, it did not come naturally; I had to be mindful of my vibrato and recalibrate both my body and mind.

At the height of my choral career, I could sing upwards of thirty hours of rehearsals, concerts, and services in one week—most, if not all, requiring straight tone. It did not happen immediately, but after some time I learned how to lessen my vibrato without putting stress and strain on my vocal mechanism. Certain choral situations required more mindfulness than others. For example, when I sang with the small ensemble at the Church of St. Luke in the Fields, with only one or two singers on a part, it was important for me to focus on healthy production of straight tone, because dropping out due to vocal fatigue was simply not an option.

My “home” on Sunday mornings is the Church of St. Ignatius Loyola, known for its wondrous, voluminous acoustics. The danger of singing with our eighteen-member choir is getting lost in the reverberant sound that the space produces and forgetting about the stylistic qualities that the music we are singing requires. At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, almost all of my choral singing was virtual. I began producing virtual choir videos, and what I learned is that straight tone singing in the virtual choir setting is even more important than in the live setting. When stitching together the audio of twenty isolated singers, with varying degrees of home acoustics, a more minimized vibrato can provide an opportunity for a cleaner product.

Honing this skill has helped me in my choral endeavors but, more surprisingly, it has also helped my solo singing. Amid all the straight tone singing I do as a professional choral singer, I practice technical concepts such as resonance production, vowel placement, and breath support that I then apply to my vibrant singing outside of the choir. This strategy has ended up serving a dual purpose: I hone the technical skills necessary to make healthy straight tone singing second nature and I use my straight tone singing to improve my vibrant singing.

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Read the full article in the November/December 2021 issue of Choral Journal at acda.org/choraljournal

Sound Teaching: Trauma-Informed Pedagogy in Choir

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The October issue of Choral Journal is online and features an article titled “Sound Teaching: Trauma-Informed Pedagogy in Choir” by William Sauerland. You can read it in its entirety at acda.org/choraljournal. Following is a portion from the introduction.

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Involvement in a music ensemble has been found to be beneficial for social, mental, emotional, spiritual, and neurobiological health; however, the scenarios above present snapshots of how trauma or post-traumatic stress can be incited during a choral rehearsal.

Though trauma might be commonly misunderstood as the suffering of only individuals who have endured severe emotional or physical abuse, mental health experts indicate trauma is more frequent and widespread.(1) An estimated 66-85% of people experience exposure to a traumatic event by college-age.(2) Described as “America’s hidden health crisis,”(3) trauma is a violation of “our beliefs that the world is a safe place.”(4) Considering the impact of trauma in the well-being of choral singers seems necessary and pertinent.

Discussions of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) have heightened awareness of trauma in our national consciousness. Trauma can be caused by the death of a loved one, a motor vehicle accident, loneliness, body shaming, or any adverse experience that causes a sense of danger or distress. Widespread adversities, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, race relations, and ongoing political divisions in the United States could all be sources of trauma. Choir directors might also be aware that stressors caused by social media, school bullying, and violence in schools can instigate a traumatic response in students. The introductory scenarios illustrate actions and behaviors that, in any social environment, have the potential to trigger trauma. The purpose of this article is to consider trauma-informed pedagogy (TIP) for choral teaching, not only as a framework for teaching singers with a history of trauma, but for the safety and well-being of all choral singers.

Even the most compassionate teachers may not be knowledgeable in how to manage and lessen the stressors singers bring to the choral classroom. Choir directors can have an awareness of the impact of trauma on choral singers and be equipped with strategies to mitigate trauma triggers and nurture more compassionate choirs. For readers who have suffered from an adverse experience, please note that this article might itself incite a traumatic response.

NOTES

1 – Christopher Menschner and Alexandra Maul, Key Ingredients for Successful Trauma-Informed Care Implementation (Center for Health Care Strategies, Inc., 2016): 2.
2 – Shannon Davidson, “Trauma-Informed Practices for Postsecondary Education: A Guide.” Education Northwest (2017): 5.
3 – M. Shelley Thomas, Shantel Crosby, and Judi Vanderhaar, “Trauma-Informed Practices in Schools Across Two Decades: An Interdisciplinary Review of Research.” Review of Research in Education 43, no. 1 (2019): 424.
4 – Vivian Barnett Brown, Maxine Harris, and Roger Fallot, “Moving Toward Trauma-Informed Practice in Addiction Treatment: A Collaborative Model of Agency Assessment.” Journal of Psychoactive Drugs 45, No. 5 (2013): 387.

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