I think I'll share a few interesting things from the warm up. Every week we sing vocal exercises to help the kids hear patterns, and singing vowels properly. They match 4 random pitches, and also follow me leading solfege hand signals. I'm focusing on singing step-wise through the scale, and singing from so to mi--which is a skip of one note (fa). To help foster independent singing, and harmony this week, we sang a round from last term-- "I Put Music in My Life Today", and then "Mary Had a Little Lamb" in 2 groups starting on different tonalities. Basically I had each group sing the song in a different key signature--Their starting notes were 4 notes apart, so it sounded pretty strange, and they thought it was GREAT!
We reviewed all those hand gestures from last week, and learned a few phrases of harmony. In Ordinary Miracle, I showed them a "map" of the melody of a certain phrase--it looked like a 'dot to dot' drawing with the lyric below. For the new harmony, I drew a different colored 'dot to dot' map that showed that the harmony was almost parallel to the melody, it just started a bit higher (a 3rd to be exact). They caught on to that immediately, and sang it very well. I'm sure practicing with the recording helped too, but it was good to see the correlation visually.
We're tackling the music chunk by chunk. We've made it all the way through "Go the Distance" and we will be working it really hard for the next couple of weeks so that we can sing it on MARCH 5 at the "Muscle Walk" for Muscular Dystrophy at Washington Square. We will be wearing the polo shirts and jeans, and will need to be at the Mall at 7:40 AM--yikes! More info will be coming on that from the parent council who is coordinating this opportunity. I think it's a perfect song for the venue!
We are continuing to explore the Hershey Bar rhythm chart, as I try to help them understand some rhythms they are encountering in their music. They are all very good at learning by rote, but I want them to become musicians and understand music notation. So, though it's a long hard road, it's worth going down, step by step. Please remind them to practice at home, or we will never get this music performance ready in time!!! Here's this weeks assignment:
- Part 1 Tracks, 1,2 7, plus the tracks from last week 4, 6
- Part 2 Tracks 12. 14, 18 plus the tracks from last week 13, 17
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| Footnotes on Feb. 17 |
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| "When You Believe" |
Sherwood Chorale
It was the first "logit." rehearsal working through all the concert music, and nothing else. Check out the rehearsal recording if you missed it. http://jerryjan.com/sherwoodchorale/mainpage It was a blast, and we had great attendance-though we missed a couple of you! I especially enjoyed the warm up. Let me explain the thought behind it:
The first exercise was all on one pitch till the fall (slide down an octave or more)--
- mmm (place the tone high in the head) mmmah (open and let the tone flow forward freely) yah yah yah (keep the tone high, feel aware of the height) \ the fall at the end where you sing through every pitch trains you to keep the breath supporting the tone, the vowel pure, and the voice registration staying smooth as you go from high register to low register.
- The other exercises, as you discovered, were patterns that were taken from the music that I felt were problematic. By focusing on them in an exercise format, you were able to focus on singing them in tune by understanding the intervalic relationship between the notes. (You know intervals--the distance between 2 notes-steps, skips, jumps, or numeric relationships like 3rds, 4ths, 5ths, etc.)
- So yes--come in time for the warm ups, there's always a purpose in them.
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| Milling around after choir |
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| Good rehearsal! |
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