Zachary Gates Choir Observation #2

The rehearsal started as children began to walk into the classroom. There were 22 middle school students and only two of those were boys. The rehearsal space was a small college lecture room with a terraced seating arrangement and un upright piano at the bottom of it. These students seemed to sit wherever they had wanted and were therefore slightly mixed. There were points in the rehearsal though the Ms. Thiele would ask students to arrange themselves around the room based on what voice part they sang. The rehearsal started in a very peculiar, impressive, and frightening way. The very first direction Ms. Thiele gave the students was to sing an A. They immediately all in the same register sang a unison note that agreed with itself rather quickly. Directly after this, Ms. Thiele instructed the accompanist to play an A. The kids were only about 10 cents flat. In my deep and complex vocabulary of choral pedagogy, the only appropriate adjective I can find for this is ridiculously amazing. In that one little direction, it became apparent what happens when you not only have extremely thoughtful and precise planning in procedure and objective, but also in details like managing expectations, no matter how high they are, or creating and revisiting habits with your choir that help the learning process. By my observation, I do not believe that these students were using this audiated A to tune their harmonies and find pitches on the page, so I take it that this exercise is merely a focusing exercise that is extremely musical at the same time. Again, very interesting.

After this, they warmed up their voices some more singing nee ah nee ah nee on a single unison pitch, and then moving it down chromatically. The kids were very good at not moving down too far at a time, as well as finding unified vowel shapes. At the same time, they were singing with phrase and musicality because the director was showing the phrasing and musicality of the single pitch. They clearly have a good director but what surprised me again was that that after this, the warm-up was done. Again, Ms. Thiele abandoned the traditional warm-up procedure of Body -> Breath -> Resonance -> Tuning. If it were me in that position for both choirs, these are young children that are up early in the morning on a Saturday to sing. Id get them moving to get their energy up! Energy in my opinion was a little flat from the kids throughout the rehearsal even though Ms. Thiele was giving %110. After this, they sang a piece called A ceremony of Carols by Benjamin Britten. They started the piece on text and it went rather well. The students were able to sing the piece when the rounds werent too difficult. I felt that the rounds in the piece get more difficult and intricate as it progresses (thank you Britten) and the children lost a lot of confidence and volume as the piece progressed. When they were done, Ms. Thiele asked the observers what they could work on. There were about 5(?) collegiate observers and each of us had good things to say to the director and choir. I congratulated them on their good work and sound and continued to suggest that they make clearer entrances when their phrases start as the round gets heavier. They thanked us for our critiques and went on to the next piece. The next piece they sang was called Balulalow. They initially sang the whole piece on doo. It sounded great and they were reading their notes from their

music. This instance of music literacy was very nice to see and they seemed to be good readers as I did not see that much solfege written into the music. When they switched to words though, the sound really suffered intensely. I was very curious about this due to just how confident they were on doo, and then the sharp decline on words. The words were not difficult really, but I can only assume that textabsorption and translation into words can be very difficult for students of a young age. This is a very good thing to be aware of when working on a piece that you may think you can just slap words on at the end of a rehearsal. Id like to know how to begin infusing words into a piece that was previously learned on just doo, if there is any one specific good technique besides sequencing and chunking. The rest of the rehearsal was essentially just running through repertoire on text and standing in parts around the room. Repertoire included Carol of the Bells, Away in a Manger, Once in Royal Davids City, Sivi von, and Go where I send thee. They have a lot of practice singing in English, so that was not an issue, and the Hebrew they sang in Sivi von was correct and they sang it well! In an interesting move, Ms. Thiele asked the observers to sing with the small choir throughout this part of the rehearsal. She essentially used us to give more confidence and pump up the sound of the students and in support this theory, every time the kids stopped singing, she would give them verbal positive reinforcement. All observers were respectful to the rehearsal process and made sure to not sing loud whatsoever. Ms. Thiele finished the rehearsal up and thanked everyone (including the observers) before leaving.