Now You Have to Teach Choir

The thing you dreaded has happened. Through some circumstance you find yourself teaching choir. You took methods classes sure, but that was a while ago, and you never expected to have to use it. You’ve got the books to study but wouldn’t it be nice to have a quick list to triage things? Something to help you get through the first few days of school at the very least. Fear not, I am here to help. Here are my quick tips for teaching choir.

Number One: Solfege is Your Friend

Those silly syllables from the Sound of Music might seem ridiculous. They may have haunted you during theory or aural skills in college. But they are your best friend in teaching choir. You wouldn’t be able to teach instruments without fingerings right? Solfege are the vocal version of fingerings. They are incredibly helpful.

Using them instead of a scale degree number has a couple of benefits. First off it works those pure vowels that are crucial to good choral technique. Not to mention singing “ti” is much easier than “seven.” The syllables are also easily modifiable for accidentals, which helps immensely when it comes to ear training, and singing actual literature that may not stay in the same key. See below for the modifications.[1]

Number Two: Muscle Memory

When doing any sort of ear training with singers it’s as much a matter of muscle memory as it is with any instrument. This is also what is usually at the root of people who are “tone deaf.” Rarely is it a matter of not being able to hear things, and more often a matter of them not knowing how to operate the required muscles properly. Focus on this when ear training. One of my favorite exercises for this is to do a scale (Figure 1) and then an intervallic scale (Figure 2).

 I have them focus on how it feels the entire time. Slides and sirens are also great for working the physicality of the voice and teaching students how to manipulate the pitch. Having your students focus on how their body feels at all times will help not only with pitch, but with breathing, tone support, resonance issues, and will just give them a better sound in general.

Number Three: Warmup

Do a warm-up every rehearsal. It’s crucial for getting the singers going – especially if it’s early in the morning. You can do some easy piece of literature, but the countless warmups that are out there can all be used to work technique much better than a piece, where they have worry about text too. You may have read or been told at a conference to design or find warmups that directly relate to the issues in the literature you’re working. If you feel comfortable doing so, great, but don’t feel like it’s necessary. Focusing on vocal technique in isolation is a worthy goal as well. Get one of the thousands of warmup exercise books and don’t be afraid to make up your own. That’s as easy as a note pattern, vowel, and consonant. If you poke around my blog here you’ll find a few different posts about warmup sequences and coming up with your own warmups.

Number Four: Don’t Skimp on Sightreading

Any good musician will acknowledge how important sightreading is. There can be an argument made that sightreading is more important to do with choral ensembles than instrumental ones. Instruments have definitive physical actions they can take to make notes happen (picking of keys, moving of bows, turning of valves, etc.). Doing these help them any time they have to sight-read. Vocalists do not have as simple a tool. They can’t simply put a finger down and know they’re playing a fourth. They need the ear and physical training to know how a fourth sounds and feels. This is one place that sightreading can make a huge difference.

If you use solfege during sightreading you can get some ear training in, teach basic music concepts, and work on their general skills as well. It again helps because they don’t have to worry about anything in the interpretation realm. And the better sight-readers your choir members are the quicker you can learn literature.

Number Five: Follow the Text

If there is ever any question of dynamic or phrasing or breathing, just look at the text. Think about how you would speak it. Have them breathe in spots where it make since (not in the middle of a word), and allow the shape of the text to inform your dynamics if you’re unsure of what to do. This will also inform your conducting.

Number Six: Conducting

Speaking of conducting – don’t feel you have to be as rigid as you might be with your instrumental ensembles. You don’t have the two dozen different parts you have to manage in a band for example – there are usually four at the most, and because the text has to come through they are often homorhythmic, so you can break away from those timed patterns if you think it will help get the musical phrasing you want (this doesn’t mean you’re breaking out of tempo). Yes the time patterns are good and should be used as a framework, but allow yourself to, as one of my conducting mentors put it, “dance the music.” If that made you roll your eyes, that’s fine; I’m not telling you to change your entire conducting technique. I’m saying to allow yourself to let the elements unique to choral music, namely the words, influence you. When you have a second, google Rodney Eichenberger. He has done some wonderful work in the realm of choral conducting which can be very informative. In particular the video “What They See is What You Get” done with Andre Thomas is a great resource.

Number Seven: Blend

You may have seen choir directors do a thing where they will move singers around, have them sing a phrase or warmup, and then move them again. What they are doing here is attempting to find the best blend for the section. Instrumental ensembles have a defined ranking system of chairs that determines who sits next to whom. Choir can be a bit more complicated. And to illustrate why blend might be necessary I will share one simple story.

In my high school choir there was another baritone that I stood next to a lot. We sometimes sounded very good together, and sometimes sounded awful. We finally realized that when I was on his right we sounded great, but if I was on his left we couldn’t sing in tune to save our lives. There are so many instances when a tuning issue in a section can actually be solved by simply swapping two singers around, even in a section of fifty.

Some voices are very easy to blend, and can take the edge off of other voices (what my choral methods professor called a “buffer”). Other voices will be next to impossible to blend, and the section will, at best, just sound like that singer, and at worst sound like a section with a soloist in the middle.

For many years I sang in choirs under directors who were very good at this, to the point that they could simply look at the choir and move us around and get a good blend. That made me really question how it worked. It took a while to realize that the process is easy – you simply listen to the section, make a change, and continue until you get a sound that you like. Those directors could do it quickly because of two factors; their years of experience doing so, and their familiarity with the voices in the choir they were working with.

Number Eight: Stagger

You want to stagger in two senses. The first is physically. You want each singer on the risers (ideally you have risers, or built in tiers in the room, or some other means of elevating each row of singers) to “find a window.” They should be staggered so that they can see you, and, if they are holding music/folders, that they don’t hit each other in the head.

The second is staggering in the breath sense. This probably makes sense for wind players, but for those of us who came from a non-breath related instrumental background, staggering refers to breathing at different points in a long phrase so that the sound is completely connected. This is necessary for a number of circumstances – the most common being phrases that are longer than your singers can sing in one breath. The general rule is to simply not breathe at the same time as the people next to you. In larger choirs this isn’t usually an issue. In smaller ensembles you may need to have the singers plan more. I once did a concert as part of a two person tenor section. One piece required us to hum the same note for around twenty measures. We went through and decided when each of us would breathe and for good measure we marked each other’s breaths as well as our own in our scores. That is an extreme example but shows why teaching them how to stagger is important.

Number Nine: Consonants

Vowels are where the notes happen, consonants are your articulation. Vowels have their own sets of issues that can fill volumes of books, but consonants are where you can have some of the most glaring issues in vocal music. Rule number one – make sure they are actually pronouncing the consonants. They will have to do more than they do when talking. If they don’t articulate them properly the words won’t be understood, and the words are really the defining characteristic of vocal music. A general rule is that if they feel like they’re overdoing it, they’re right on.

Another consideration is how the music is actually printed. Because of the need to separate syllables on different notes, singers will often do odd things simply because of how they read the text. The word “rushing” is a good example. Spread across two syllables it will often be printed “rush-ing” under two different notes. This sometimes makes singers sing “russssh-ing.” The way this should be sung is to move the “sh” to the second note so that they sing “ru-shing.” There are countless examples of this sort of thing and you may have to have them literally cross out the “sh” on the first syllable and write it on the second in order for them to remember.

Another important thing to realize is which consonants have pitch and which don’t. Some of the biggest issues in choral music come from pitched consonants – particularly when they are sung on a pitch that is different than the vowel that follows (have them sing enough words that start with “w” and you’ll definitely get what I’m talking about).

Pitched consonants tend to be an issue at the beginning of words (or syllables), while unpitched can be an issue at the end of words (or syllables). “S” is the biggest culprit here. Which brings me to:

Number Ten: Not Everything Must Be Sung

Let’s start with the “S.” Not every singer in the choir has to sing every “s.” In fact, it might be better if they don’t. There have been times in my career when I have told the whole choir to leave the “s” off the end of a word and assigned a handful of the most competent singers to actually articulate the “s.” IN a choir of twenty people the “s” will come through even if you only have one or two people sing it. And that is not an exaggeration.

The second thing that doesn’t always have to be sung are notes – especially high ones. There are some notes that should not be sung by all people. And it depends on context. If there is a high G that has to be sung piano, I am most likely going to leave that to the tenor type people, as my voice will be too loud at that range for that dynamic. Simply mouthing the word is fine in such circumstances. These circumstances are sometimes simply due to the singers just not realizing that they don’t have to do everything, and other times it is their egos getting in the way. Teach them that the end goal is about the musicality of the piece.

Teaching choir can be daunting at first. But if you keep these ten tips in mind and focus on the health of your singers and make your goal creating good musicians you will be fine. Feel free to reach out in the comments below or through the contact forms on the website with any questions you may have.

[1] I have searched several times for a satisfactory answer on how to sharp Mi and Ti, but have not found anything that isn’t “just say fa.” If you know please comment below with the source, and I would be eternally grateful.