Youth & Student Activities
Dr. Jennifer Sengin
Empowering Voices!: Encouraging Lifelong Singers
A hallmark of a truly meaningful singing experience is inspiring singers to continue pursuing music beyond their time together. While conductors often focus on the immediate musical activities at hand in our rehearsals and performances, we can also foster a love of music that extends beyond our time together.
Building Confidence
In music ensembles, conductor-teachers are uniquely positioned to encourage and build their singers’ confidence, which transfers to other areas of their lives. In choral rehearsal, we can create an environment where singers feel safe to explore: to take risks and try new things without fear of embarrassment or failure. By creating a supportive rehearsal space – one in which singers can make mistakes while also being guided forward with engaging and educational rehearsal strategies – we can empower them reach their goals while also building their confidence. Acknowledging that mistakes and errors are part of the learning process both normalizes healthy risk-taking and creates an environment where singers feel comfortable expressing their artistry. Singers who learn in this type of environment may be more inclined to boldly seek out new singing experiences in the future, equipped with the knowledge that the mistakes they might make along the way are part of the journey and that they have the tools to overcome challenges.
Developing Musical Independence
In an ideal choral setting, we would each teach singers who meet at regular intervals throughout the week. All of our singers would arrive with years of contextual music literacy skill-building, ready to continue developing their individual musicianship. They would have consistently advanced their skills over long periods of time and be prepared to explore more challenging repertoire.
However, the real world often does not allow for such a musical paradise. While some programs do provide consistent and long-term learning opportunities, many conductor-teachers do not have access to this type of teaching model. Instead, choir rehearsals occur at irregular intervals, infrequently, for limited periods, or only part of the year.
In these situations, it may be challenging to incorporate music literacy while focusing on preparations for concerts and performances. Still, when confronted by challenging rehearsal constraints, we as conductors can provide singers with as musical an experience as possible by infusing elements of music literacy into our teaching. Encouraging singers to visually track the melody with prompts like, “Does the interval go up,
down, or stay the same?” helps them connect the musical notation with the sounds they hear. Another strategy is to isolate a melody from the piece and ask singers to identify that same melody as it reappears or changes throughout the piece. With this strategy, we are teaching some basic elements of score analysis and encouraging singers to decode the music in a different way. Introductory strategies like these can be easy to incorporate during short rehearsal periods and they often reap outsized rewards. By training singers to connect what they are seeing and hearing, we are facilitating critical skills to prepare singers to participate in ensembles beyond their current experiences.
Facilitating Transitions
Everyone has experienced some sort of transition in their lives. Life changes can be some of the hardest aspects of our human experience. During these transitions (graduating from middle school to high school, going to college/university, or moving to a home in a new city, state, or even country), singers sometimes miss the chance to make music.
As conductor-teachers, we can play a critical role in encouraging our singers’ musical continuity by facilitating connections to help them successfully navigate times of transitions. After my first year teaching high school, former singers often shared how much they missed singing together after graduation. I asked myself how I might help facilitate their transition so they could continue exploring their artistry. At the end of each school year and at their request, I invited singers who were interested in continuing to sing to share their name, plans after graduation, and contact information. I used this information to reach out to directors at their college or other community- based ensembles, bridging new connections to encourage the students to continue singing.
Conclusion
Many of us were drawn into this field because of personal experiences with beautiful community-based music-making. When I ask people who inspired them to first participate in music, oftentimes it was a conductor-teacher who helped them to see the value in their presence within the ensemble and empowered them to explore their artistry both within and beyond that first experience. As conductors, we are called to provide and facilitate those same experiences for our singers both during our rehearsals and long after our time together has ended.