Observation #5, Teach #1

Lesson Plan:

• Warm up
• Stretch and pat
• Breathing, hiss on eighth note pulse
• Sirens
• Falsetto Lydian Warmup
• Zee ah round 1-5, 4-3-2-1
• Zee, zeh, zah, zoh, zoo, Single Pitch
• Counting, Dynamics

For this fifth visit, I conducted and lead warmups for MOH. As I mentioned earlier, before today the guys hadn't really warmed up to the idea of me teaching. This time around, they expected me more. I had given some comments earlier about their festival set so they knew who I was more. Before I went in to teach, I spoke with the director about what he wanted me to cover. I am a firm believer that warmups are the single best way to teach concepts and technique. As Dr. Snow always says, show it in the air, on the board, in the music. Warm ups act as a way to show it in the air before they realize what is going on. Since the choir was about to go to festival, he wanted me to focus on standard things, tone, part independence, but specifically dynamics and volume change. I added the final counting warm up to fit this need and will go into more detail with that later.

The first few warmups are the standard "warm up." It's a 7:30am class, these boys need to just move and get the mechanism working. I then shifted straight into a high falsetto warm up that Dr. Reed uses often. I wanted to get them out of the habit of just doing a scalular pattern so this lydian mode warm up keeps their brains active while still working on bringing the head voice down. I continued the brain work by having them sing a simple round that also works to build connectivity while leaping through the two ranges that the fifth covers. I had some issues with this one because they were all dropping their sound backward as the leapt up. I added a hand gesture (touch shoulder then have them glide forward) along with a slight squat on the leap to keep the air moving and the sound cleared up very quickly. 

The next warmup involved vowel unification on a single pitch, helping with those that have trouble finding pitch and just unity throughout the choir. I realized that trying to unify all the vowels in one warmup is a losing effort. There is just too much to work on at one time. I feel that it would be more effective to take a day focusing on one vowel, adding a new one on each day, so you can scaffold up to a full vowel set warmup. Each day you can have a specific idea that works for each vowel that you can draw on the next day if the singers slip back into old habits. 

The final warmup is a simple warm up where you count to 5 and back to 1 on a single pitch, dynamics going up with the number. We then used these same numbers and applied them to the music when they were singing. A very quick and effective warmup that can transfer to octavo application.

(Apparently this saved as a draft last week, apologies)