Conductors are Teachers - Lessons from an Honor Choir

labels and false divisions

Experience truly is the best teacher. We do a good job of honoring the holistic nature of experience in the arts, as a general rule. We recognize deeply the connection between one set of experiences and another, and how those streams of information meet to form a generous well of understanding, from which we can draw future inspiration. But as we become more specific in labeling our activities or our own titles in the realm of music making, we sometimes sink back into the false compartmentalization we encounter by way of course titles during our various journeys through higher education.

Community SING in Ooltewah, TN, September, 2023. Photo Credit: Vincent Oakes.

It wasn’t until I met Alice Parker in 2018 that I began to think of the Composer, the Singer, the Conductor, and the Audience as truly unified through their shared experience, beginning with the mindfulness of the writer as the first sounds form themselves in the realm of the imagination. And, further, it wasn’t until I observed Dr. André Thomas coaching choral conductors in a master class last summer that the idea of music teacher and conductor became unified for me in conscious thought. Dr. Thomas put it this way, “All conductors are teachers. When you are conducting, you are teaching.” Experience had strongly hinted to me that this was all true, but consciousness hadn’t quite caught up. There are good reasons for this disunity, but it’s best for us (and our choristers) to overcome them.

About two years before my first honor choir conducting experience (a solid decade and change ago) I was preparing to go out of town to teach a few music education workshops. At that time I was working as a music educator and a parish choir director. In my parish job I served an adult choir as well as a seasonal children’s choir. In my day job with the public school system, I served elementary school students in a general music setting, but I had treated each grade level as its own music literacy program and choir, so that the whole school was accustomed to tuneful singing. At some point in the week leading up to my little clinician trip, I informed a group of adults that I would be out of town to work as a clinician with a group of conductors. This question sprang forth, “You’re teaching CONDUCTORS?” Now, if I had a time machine, I would turn back the clock and answer differently than I did, but I was quite young and I’m not sure I realized where the question was going until it was too late. I responded, “Yes. Conductors of children’s ensembles. Music educators!” In reply, the other adult said, “Oh, good. I thought you were talking about real conductors. It makes sense for you to work with teachers, though.” At that point, I fully received the implication of the question at hand and contrived to get myself swiftly out of that conversation. It’s not a conversation unique to me or to that moment, I fear. It is a way of thinking about music making as real or superficial that crops up in our organizing and speaking every so often, as a broad culture. If I had access to the above mentioned time machine, I’d go back and ask my own question rather an answering directly: What is the difference? Should there be one? Truly, we should not be teaching vocal/choral music if our interpretive and pedagogical skill could not also support us at the podium. But we mistakenly separate these things in our minds.

CKI choir, Hickory, NC, July, 2023.

case in point, an experience:

A few years went by and I found myself at the podium, serving as an honor choir director. I wasn’t the only clinician that day - there were several. When it was my turn to take the podium, I immediately picked up on some challenges that were getting in the way of a clear performance. The choir was having trouble hearing while singing; There was a great deal of reverb in the space, which was adding to the choir’s difficulty with timing; The collaborative pianist was struggling to see; The arrangement itself, which had been assigned to me rather than chosen, was very busy between the singers and the piano - with the reverb in the room and the lack of visual/aural clarity, it wasn’t going to hold together in that rehearsal, and possibly not in the performance later that day. What could we do?

Teachers are taught to scaffold when their students can’t quite keep up with the material. I decided I had better scaffold. Immediately. We halted the accompaniment and got the singers together. Instead of going all the way through the arrangement right then, I began to push and pull at the flexibility of the choir’s phrasing. Over 100 5th graders began to watch and listen intently as we changed the phrasing. When that morning rehearsal was over, I had digested the information before me and had made some decisions (like the instructional choices one makes after analyzing results from a pre-test). The collaborative pianist and I (both vocal music educators) put our heads together and adjusted the rhythmic nature and tempo to fit the echoing space better - we stayed true to the musical style, but we took away flourishes that were not translating sonically in that space. We decided to get really beautiful phrasing and approach it as unison piece since the canon option was not holding together. We would only have a few small group rehearsals and one 6 minute block during an evening dress rehearsal to stick our landing for a successful performance. We used those small group rehearsals to inspire care of the text in the singers. We got the phrasing right. We became unified. When we got to the dress rehearsal with our simplified arrangement, we had a sparkling performance ready. The singers experienced success and the audience experienced a clearly communicated piece of art.

Kodály Institute Choral Conducting Class, UTC, 2023.

applying wisdom from experience: the planning process

These days, when I’m asked to conduct an honor choir (especially a young one), I follow these general guidelines:

1. Balance: A variety of tempi and modal sensibilities between pieces, for the sake of a balanced, engaging program.

2. Flexible Literature: EVERY piece must have options for addition and subtraction. I only choose literature that can be either augmented or simplified. That way, if the choir displays a lack of preparedness on a piece during the first rehearsal, I have ways to adjust its difficulty so that they can experience a good performance even though there is very little rehearsal time. And if the choir comes in well-prepared, I can add something in the way of expressivity, instrumentation, body percussion, or something like a vocal ostinato or a descant.

3. Something Extra: I bring one extra piece that can be taught aurally on the day of the performance. We either add it as introit music (singing it as they file onto the stage) or as an encore if everything else comes to a place of readiness with extra rehearsal time left over.

4. Rehearsal Planning: I make minute by minute rehearsal plans ahead of time. I don’t usually get to stick to these. Something almost always gets moved by the organizers because the reality on the ground is usually different than what everyone imagined when the event was being planned. It’s not important that my rehearsal plan will need to be adjusted. The importance of the plan is the score study it requires of me. In order to make a good plan, I need to have studied the score well in advance. This activates my music-teacher-mind.

5. Mindfulness: Mindfulness is the basis of good text setting in composition. Mindfulness is the basis of good lesson planning. Mindfulness is the basis of good concert order planning. And, yes, you guessed it - Mindfulness is the basis of good conducting and good rehearsal technique. Mindfulness is our engagement with the now. I do what I need to do in order to have my mindfulness available during honor choir events and even during normal lessons or rehearsals at my day job! I get enough sleep. I eat breakfast. I make sure I’m early enough to have a moment of quiet to set my own intentions.

6. Choristers’ Intentions: I’ve written about this in other contexts before. I always ask my choristers to write about their intentions prior to performance. For honor choirs, I do this with post it notes or note cards. I ask each chorister to write down one thing they want the audience to think, feel, or experience as they sing their concert. I collect all of these and read them out at the beginning of each rehearsal block. I usually read a few of them to the audience at the performance, too, because the singers’ families benefit from knowing that their children have thought deeply about this. These intentions focus our rehearsals and draw us together in pursuing a shared goal.

8th grade SDA honor choir, South Georgia, 2022.

When you conduct, you are the teacher. And when we teach vocal or instrumental music in a group setting, we should carry the conducting skills we’ve gained in the forefront of our minds so that all we do points our students toward success in lifelong active music making. Instead of thinking of ourselves and our work as one thing, set apart from the rest of the world of music making, we must look for as many points of connection as we can find. Our students will travel across these points of connection, using them as bridges from one musical experience to the next if we really do our homework and maintain our mindfulness in the classroom and on the podium.

Sing on.

Singing Together

toward vocal belonging

What is your first memory of communal singing? Although a common thread might be the music of early childhood, it’s possible that your first memory of shared song comes from a later time. Perhaps, like me, you remember a trail of experiences, coloring your life with diverse expressions of group music making. Human beings sing together for many different reasons, and in doing so, these co-created sounds communicate the full spectrum of human emotion. What a gift.

Community SING in Ooltewah, TN, September, 2023

The singing I heard in the United Methodist congregation of my childhood and the singing I heard at Girl Scout Camp couldn’t be considered uniform in musical character, but each of these communities were engaging in group singing. Long before either of those formative experiences, I recall the singing of my own mother in our family home, and the singing of other young children in a school setting - invitational, participatory singing. All these group singing experiences, taken together, created a deep sense of vocal belonging in my young life. This sense of belonging was strong enough to transcend later musical experiences that were not so positive. The end result? When things weren’t going easily for me in my musical life, I didn’t quit. I found ways to stay engaged. This is what I most want for my music students - a sense of musical tenacity based in their understanding that there truly is room for all of us when we are making music together. Musical community is healing for human beings in a mighty way.

As you reflect on your own memories of shared song, can you recall the sense of vocal belonging? If so, do you remember what gave rise to it?

It is possible for community singing to be approached in such a way that every singer feels as fully welcomed and engaged as they are able to in that moment. The opposite is also possible. In fact, many of us carry memories of group music making experiences that closed more than opened our voices. What makes the difference for us?

vulnerability and group singing:

I’ve been working with elementary school students as a music educator in a public school system for 13 years, and as I reflect on the experiences my students and I have shared, Brené Brown’s wonderfully enlightening research on the nature of vulnerability comes to mind. In case you haven’t read or heard about her research, here is the TED talk that introduced the world to her line of inquiry:

Toward the end she says that our role as parents or care givers (or teachers, right?) is to say, “You’re imperfect and you’re wired for struggle, but you are worthy of love and belonging.”

I find that sentiment to be much needed in education, and in arts education in particular. When we teach our students that community singing is for everyone, full stop, and we follow through by modeling our own gracious acceptance of imperfection and growth, resilience and inner trust develop. Mistakes become not so worrisome. Sure, we might experience a bit of nervousness or stage fright from time to time, but we learn to trust that even when our voice makes a strange sound or we come in at the wrong time (or forget to come in), we still have a place in the choir.

“We’re a singing school.”

My school doesn’t have an extra curricular choir at this time. We like to say, in every grade level, that we ARE the choir. When we gather as a whole school or a few grade levels at a time, we like to SING together. When we give a concert, entire grade levels bolster one another. We don’t talk about talent. We talk about community. We talk about creativity. We talk about good work ethic and mindfulness. And we always invite our audiences to sing or dance along at least once. This isn’t only true during concerts - when adults come into the music room to observe me in my teaching, I try to remember to invite them to participate in some way so that the students in the room see that nobody is beyond the music.

teacher Habits that honor and promote trust and vulnerability in the music room and in the wider community:

• I apologize openly when I make mistakes - especially musical ones.

• I invite my students to analyze what I’ve done wrong when I make a musical mistake so that they can A) learn from it, and B) see a good example of someone messing up, dusting off, and trying again.

• We thank classmates for their attempts - whether it is an attempt at singing something independently or an attempt at answering a theoretical question about a rhythmic or melodic example. We glory in “wrong” answers and learn from them together.

• We practice positive self talk about our own singing voices and that in turn coaches positive speech between students as they hear each other sing solos and duets along the way.

• When we prepare for a performance, we “set intentions.” In small groups, students discuss what they hope their future audience will gain through attendance. We compile their intentions and share those with the wider school community by posting them in the hallway, and then we read some of them to the audience on concert night.

Student-created intentions for a 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade concert night in a public school setting.

Individual student-created intentions prior to a middle school honor choir concert in a Sacred music setting.

There are so many small things we can do on a daily basis to reinforce the idea that all voices are welcome and invited to participate. Sometimes adults who are not music educators come to my classroom for an observation. I’ve had many conversations with grownups who observe my students’ wholehearted participation in group singing and recall something completely different from their own childhood music experience. Frequently, adults will tell me, “My music teacher in elementary school told me not to sing.” Or, “My choir director told me it would be better if I just moved my mouth without making a sound.” Or, “They just told me I couldn’t sing and that I should find a different hobby.”

Ethnomusicologist, Composer, and all-around wonderful musician (and human), Zoltán Kodály, had a thing or two to say about how we should relate to children (and their voices) in a music education setting. He once wrote, “It is much more important who is the music teacher in Kisvarda than who is the director of the opera house in Budapest…for a poor director fails once, but a poor teacher keeps on failing for thirty years, killing the love of music in 30 generations of children.” He said and wrote a great deal more than that on the subject, but I return to this statement over and over. A music teacher could easily tell a few students in every class, every year, “Just mouth the words.” If a teacher were to do this for 30 years, it would add up. It would deprive those individuals of their belief in their own vocal belonging, and by extension, it would deprive their communities of their vocal participation.

We have the power to offer our communities the gift of vocal belonging any time we open the classroom door, provide a concert, or even better - host a multigenerational Community SING. The benefit of our repeated extension of musical hospitality will be exponential - our students and other community members will carry their sense of creative trust with them out into the world, and they will change whatever part of the world they touch.

On the first day of Pre-K music it begins. I welcome a brand new group of 4 year olds into my classroom, and I say, “I’m so glad you’re here! Your voice is exactly what we need.”

Sing on.