Vocal knowledge
Jan. 29th, 2008 10:59 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
j4Okay, this is a bit of a left-field question, but you lot are a fairly eclectic bunch, so some of you may be able to help...
If you wanted to teach someone to sing, how would you go about it?
No, I'm not entirely sure what I mean by "teach someone to sing", which is part of the problem... IME most people can sing (and when they say "I can't sing" what they usually mean is "someone told me when I was a child that I couldn't sing"); what they can't necessarily do is stay in tune (with others, or even with themselves). So let's say you want to get somebody to the point where they're able to do that well enough that they can join in confidently with 'community singing' (weddings, carol services, etc.), and eventually do simple part-singing. Where do you start? Am I asking the wrong questions?
Reading music is sort of orthogonal (and the sort of people I'm thinking of could probably teach themselves that fairly easily anyway, because they're bookish kind of people).
If you wanted to teach someone to sing, how would you go about it?
No, I'm not entirely sure what I mean by "teach someone to sing", which is part of the problem... IME most people can sing (and when they say "I can't sing" what they usually mean is "someone told me when I was a child that I couldn't sing"); what they can't necessarily do is stay in tune (with others, or even with themselves). So let's say you want to get somebody to the point where they're able to do that well enough that they can join in confidently with 'community singing' (weddings, carol services, etc.), and eventually do simple part-singing. Where do you start? Am I asking the wrong questions?
Reading music is sort of orthogonal (and the sort of people I'm thinking of could probably teach themselves that fairly easily anyway, because they're bookish kind of people).
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no subject
Date: 2008-01-29 06:38 pm (UTC)My sister and I were in Taizé in the summer and I was trying to, well, get the hang of singing right. We sat down with the Taizé song book (which is very simple chants, and happened to be what we had), and Catrin's recorder, and she played a couple of notes at me, or sang a couple of bars to me (I think originally she might have thought we'd do, you know, a line at a time, but it didn't work out like that), and I listened and listened and made her do it several times, and then tried to sing it, and sounded wrong, and tried a bit more, and she said "no no no" and giggled a bit and fed me lovehearts and played back on the recorder what I *did* do, and gradually I got that I make my jumps too big when I'm changing note (which later results in having to go in the wrong direction and being generally all over the place), and got a bit better at getting them right, and vaguely hearing them right -
- and then we came home at the end of the week, and the power cable on my piano doesn't work any more so I can't play notes at myself, but if I *did* do that every few days, and somebody every week or two or three had a session like that one with a recorder to make sure I hadn't slid away from listening to myself right, maybe I'd get better at getting it right -
- curiously, in church, when I try and obtain a hymn book with the music in, people expect me to be musical. No no no! It's because I *can't* pick it up by hearing that I want to see the notes, then I have /some/ chance!
I was in the "can't sing"/unmusical camp, and I had singing lessons at school for a couple of terms---I got signed up by mistake and we decided to go ahead with them. I don't think they did me any good because I don't think anyone managed to get through my head what on earth I was getting at. I didn't "get" music, or really listen to what I was doing, or, I don't know, understand why the exact rhythm matters. It took me to my twenties to "get" this enough to think about attempting to learn to get it right, but doing the thing I said with pianos and recorders and encouraging friends is just one of many things on a list of things that come after, well, the ones I'm managing to find time for at the moment.
I did learn some breathing exercises.