The major skill of a voice teacher is listening. The teacher listens, discerns what is good and what needs help to get better, and then prescribes an exercise to train…
Tag: pedagogy
I really enjoyed this conversation with Nikki Loney about Sane Singing and the challenges of guiding singers through their voice training. You can hear the podcast here: The Full Voice…
the study of the methods and activities of teaching – retrieved from: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/pedagogy
In this fifth and last post of my “vocal environment” series, I’m circling back to the music itself. This includes the pitch, vowel, and volume that are the building blocks…
Cornelius Reid wrote often about the environment in which a voice responds. He liked to refer to the environment as pitch, vowel, and volume. There is, of course, a lot…
Hello comrades! Let’s talk about “growing pains”. Sometimes there is a season for something really cool in your professional life, and then a few years later, it’s not so sizzling…
I was pleased to hear that my proposal was accepted for a poster session at the biennial conference of the National Association of Teachers of Singing, which takes place June…
When pondering training possibilities, the question for me is “Go deep, or go broad?” I tend to go deep (into one approach) when I find something especially resonant. When I…
[This is an excerpt from Chapter 3 “The Confusions”.] Long ago I thought of the human voice as an instrument, just in a different family than brasses and woodwinds and…
As to methods there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries…
I have written about the dangers of an imagery-based mode of instruction for voice. Images are generally conveyed with words, sometimes also with gestures. Examples of imagery in voice teaching…
I have recently read Herbert Witherspoon’s fascinating and well-written Singing: A Treatise for Singers and Students (1925). His Chapter 13 is titled “Phonetics”, which begins as follows: The phonetics, or…
