CHAPTER 1: SINGING IN A CHORUS
This manual is designed to teach you the music reading skills you need to perform effectively in your choral group, and, as mentioned before, these same skills will also help you as an instrumentalist. Before you proceed, I need to discuss three aspects of this experience:
1. Attitude
2. Physique
3. Aesthetics
Attitude
You should want to sing as beautifully as you can, and you should be open to performing a wide variety of music. These sound like simple prerequisites for someone who is already in a singing group, but there are five obstacles to overcome.
a. Most people are shy about their speaking voice and feel even less
confident when asked to sing. Once you overcome your initial shyness
and learn to accept your new voice, you should become curious about
how to develop and refine your vocal sound. You should want to
improve. Listen to yourself and ask, m I doing everything I can to
produce the most beautiful sound?
At first, every new activity I ask you to try will make you feel self- conscious. For example, when I ask you to step or tap the basic pulse, you may feel awkward until you discover that these techniques are providing you with a dependable and accurate inner rhythm sense. If you are fortunate enough to be working through this manual in a class, you can find companionship among group of people who, like yourself, are trying things that are very new.
b. Purveyors of the American "macho image" instruct everyone, men in particular, to speak as low as they possibly can and to move their lips as little as possible. When you join a chorus, you are immediately asked to sing notes your voice may never have produced before, and you are asked to move your lips and mouth more expressively so the audience can easily understand the words you are singing.
c. You cannot read music, and you may think you are incapable of learning how. The singing you have done in the past has been by ear.
You might wonder why music reading skills are important or useful and become impatient and ask, Why can't I just sing?
d. You may have had considerable experience with popular music, but you may know very little about idioms that do not use drums, amplification, or pop singing styles. Learning how to read music notation will allow you entry into many new traditions of notated music, but you may be exposed to music that will, at first, seem strange.
e. You need to learn how to lose yourself in the group. In addition to becoming aware of your own developing voice, you must learn how to listen to yourself in the context of your choral section, and in the context of the chorus as a whole. Enthusiasm, energy, intelligence, self-sacrifice, cooperation, patience‒every human quality essential to a strong team effort is required here.
Physique
The second aspect of this work is purely physical. You will learn to use your body to produce musical sound. This involves learning how to breathe properly, how to direct and control the flow of air through your vocal instrument, and finally, how to promote resonance in the parts of your body above your vocal cords. When you sing, you must remember to:
a. Relax every part of your body, particularly from your shoulders up.
b. Sit or stand up straight to promote easy passage of air.
c. Breathe from beneath your chest like a frog or like a sleeping infant.
d. Open the back of your throat, as if you have been startled and have taken a quick breath.
e. Move your tongue, mouth, and lips to produce beautiful vowels and clear consonants.
Aesthetics
Hopefully, at one time or another, you have been profoundly affected by a work of art‒a movie, a song, a painting, a dance. Your response involved the part of you that is capable of receiving and appreciating an artistic message. In this part of the work, you are asked to perform and project a choral selection in order to create an emotional response in your audience.
The first two aspects of attitude and physique have already been treated extensively and expertly in other texts. These aspects are vital to your growth as a singer, but they are outside the scope of this manual. The last aspect of aesthetics is where your work begins, because in order to understand and then project the artistic message of a composition, you need fluency in two languages: the language of words, and the language of musical tones. Unless you intend to memorize everything you sing, you must be able to read and understand the words, and you must be able to read and understand the musical notation.