My post-midterm teaching video captures a forty-five-minute rehearsal with the
Advanced Treble Choir students at Broadway High School. My lesson began with physical stretches and breathing exercises followed by vocal warmups and a brief sight reading exercise. After warmups, I rehearsed the piece “How Can I Keep From Singing,” focusing on notes and rhythms of the descant portion in the middle section of the piece. Next, I rehearsed the piece “Sanctus,” focusing on intonation and cutoffs. My class concluded with a run through and general spot-check of the piece, “Music When Soft Voices Die.” At this point in the semester, I began conducting breathing exercises differently, having the students inhale over one beat and exhale over four, eight, then twelve beats. I felt that inhaling over one beat was more accurate to how they breathe when singing most of their repertoire. My sequence during vocal warmups was strong, following a theme of breath engagement. First I had students sing a sequence only on a “vv,” engaging their diaphragm, then they opened to a “va,” and finally sang a warmup spanning an octave to apply the engagement to a more challenging exercise. My warmup sequence was much more concise and time efficient. To help the students who were preparing for District Choir auditions, allowed ten seconds to review the sight reading exercise before practicing it, as they would in the audition. While rehearsing “How Can I Keep From Singing,” my instructions were more direct, and I insisted on a fast paced rehearsal, which kept the students on their toes. Because sopranos and altos sang the same exact part at different points in the piece, I optimized rehearsal time by having both parts sing their common line at the same time, and splitting their parts later. I also broke down difficult lines of music by working from the end of the phrase to the beginning. The students learned the lines by singing small chunks and gradually adding material until the phrase was completely learned. To help with intonation in our rehearsal of “Sanctus,” I had the students sing each phrase on solfege before adding text, which allowed students to become more familiar with the intervals. In addition, because this rehearsal happened to fall in the middle of our Ear Training Unit, I made a point to incorporate interval recognition while singing each piece by asking students to identify particular intervals both in harmonic and melodic context. While rehearsing heavily with one particular section, I noticed that I often didn’t provide instructions to engage other sections. Next time, I would plan activities such as humming, hissing, or writing in solfege to maintain engagement with each section at all times during rehearsal. In addition, because there were some tricky notes and rhythms in the sections of each piece we rehearsed, students would have benefitted from more repetition and singing particular sections in context. During some points of rehearsal, I noticed that I moved on too quickly before a particular section of music had really solidified. This is problematic, as it will create more work for the director in the future when polishing the piece. While rehearsing cutoffs in the piece “Sanctus,” adding a kinesthetic element of snapping for each cutoff would have helped to unify the ensemble on each ending consonant. Finally, during our full runs of each piece, I should have looked up from my score more often to make eye contact and breathe with my singers, which would help them to feel more confident with their entrances.