HI Bill,

 

Wow!  You were a former division chair for boychoirs with ACDA?  We are not even a member of ACDA yet but after joining our local music festival here, Mr. Randy Stenson (don't know if you know him) strongly encouraged us to become a member of ACDA and to go to the US mainland and join an regional ACDA festival.  We are located in Guam, a US Territory.

I will try to send you a video of our recent performance so you can offer suggestions on how we can improve.

 

This is exciting!

Maria :-)

Eek!  I haven't been on in a long time.  Sorry about that!  I hope you've had some success finding resources, but here are my thoughts if you still might be able to use them.

 

I think one of the RSCM training courses would be invaluable, even if you go as a regular participant -- it should give you an idea of the methods employed by RSCM directors.  Charlotte, King's College, and Saint Louis all look like they might be good options, in that they include a balance of young and older child choristers.  Don't be afraid to attend sessions that include both boys and girls -- vocal pedagougy techniques are pretty much the same for both up to the point at which boys' voices begin to change.  A skilled director will be able to evoke that clear, haunting sound we all love from either. 

 

Likewise, the Voice for Life materials that the RSCM puts out look like they're really well-designed and totally worth looking into.  They're available through the RSCM/America website, as well as their other sites in other countries.  I plan to use them whenever I get around to actually directing a choir (this year has been insanely busy with school, so I've had to temporarily suspend my plans to try to build up a stronger children's choir program at my church).  I think they're probably suitable even for adults who want to become solid choral singers, much like the Pony Club's manuals are sound instructional manuals for equestrians of all ages.

 

In my childhood choir, our materials included the Morning Star Choir Book series, a rather vast array of sheet music, and some nifty devices I'll describe below.  I think rehearsal tracks are a fantastic idea, especially when coupled with sight-reading lessons and exposure to printed music -- it's impossible to overestimate the importance of hearing music in the process of learning music.  My choir rarely used rehearsal tracks, but we tried, whenever possible, to find recordings of our anthems performed by boys' or childrens' choirs.  There are zillions of these on YouTube now, including an outstanding selection by the Choir of New College, and I think they might make great teaching tools.

 

When I was just starting to sing, I was fortunate to have had some music theory in school -- we were exposed to the idea of the time and pitch values of notes, basic time signatures, and solfege.  I could already read music at a very basic level.  That being said, others in my choir weren't as lucky with their school music programs, so we were a mixed bag.

 

When I first joined my childhood choir, our director, Mr. Pfeiffer, used visual aids, most of which simply employed a plain old white-board-and-black marker, and a few of which he built.  He also had some flash cards and so forth that we worked with.  I'm not sure who made them, but they were pretty standard musical flash-cards in a large format so the whole group could see them easily.  I imagine similar things could be acquired through RSCM or publishers like Augsburg Fortress that specialize in sacred choral music.

 

We worked on some of the same exercises that I had been doing in school since kindergarten -- counting time values as 'ta, ta, ti-ti, ta, ti-ti, ti-ti, ta-a,' out loud while he pointed to a line of notes on a white board (we generally worked as far as sixteenth notes -- 'terri-terries,' as it were; whole notes were counted as 'ta-a-a-a,' etc; for rests, we usually just said 'rest').  We also got out the Orff instruments to work on rhythm and so forth, though we didn't use them in church (we did sing with an honest-to-God German glockenspiel a couple of times a year, though).

 

Mr. Pfeiffer also had a really cool little device to demonstrate the movement of pitch -- it was a miniature set of stairs made out of blocks, with two little pom-pom creatures that he would move up and down to indicate which notes we were to sing in solfege: for example, Mr. Pfeiffer might make the little black pom-pom guy hop from 'do' to 'mi' to 'so,' and we would sing the expected tones; when he was demonstrating the movement of two voice parts in relationship to each-other, both the little black pom-pom guy and the little yellow pom-pom chicken might hop around.  I think this worked especially well for me because I'm a very visual thinker; I still sometimes picture the stairwell and the little pom-pom guys when I'm sight-singing a new piece!  If you don't happen to have a miniature staircase handy, you can draw one on a whiteboard, and that can work pretty well, too.

 

Basically, with the newest choristers -- the probationers and novices -- the idea was to teach pitch discrimination, basic solfege, and time values, then move into sight reading as a natural extension of those.  It seemed to work pretty well, especially since we were all constantly singing with sheet music in front of our faces anyway.  We would work through passages that our director wrote out on the white board in standard notation, beginning with simpler passages and moving on to more difficult ones over time.  These skills transferred readily to the musical page, where we saw intervals that were already familiar.  We would be asked to sing passages unaccompanied; probationers and novices would sing familiar passages a capalla with the whole choir; the most advanced choristers could sight-sing unfamiliar passages of increasing complexity solo, but this was only required of those who had reached the dark blue or red levels in the RSCM program.  Kids at the light-blue level fell somewhere in the middle; they could volunteer to sight-sing solo, but usually Mr. Pfeiffer would lead them through sight-singing together or with the whole group.

 

By the time Mr. Pfeiffer left us, I was already graduating from the dark blue to the red level of the RSCM program.  I didn't see as much of her method for teaching the new kids because she restructured the program a little -- probationers rehearsed for half an hour before our rehearsal, then joined our rehearsal for the first half an hour or so, and sang with the fully-fledged choristers once or twice a month and during some special services.  We full-fledged choristers then helped to guide the 'newbies' as they acclimated to the life of the choir.  I'm guessing that our new director used a similar approach to begin teaching the probationers to read music.  I think it's a pretty common approach to music pedagogy.

 

WRT tone -- Mr. Adams is dead on when he says the 'pure, resonant tone' is not hard to achieve.  Any of the RSCM materials, which are very much focussed on producing that very sound quality, should be helpful.

 

In my experience, it's more  a question of bringing out the beautiful tone that's already there and keeping kids from moving away from that tone.  A lot of kids want to sound like rock, country, or Broadway stars -- so they try to sound rough or breathy or they 'scoop' between notes, etc ('scooping' was a mortal offense in my choir, LOL!).  Some want to sound operatic and try to impart vibrato; this, too, was verboten in my choir.  Likewise, a lot of kids will instinctually want to use their shouting voices when they need to sing out, because they think they need to in order to be heard.  Belting is potentially harmful even for well-trained adult singers, and can really wreak havoc on a growing child's voice, so Mr. Pfeiffer was pretty clear about avoiding it.  He would have rather had one of us sing a bit more softly than the text demanded than try to belt to produce a big sound.  He was always telling the probationers and the novices, "Use your singing voice, not your shouting voice!" and "Don't sing loud, sing out!"  He also demonstrated the clear head-voice tone we were after and got us to match it by telling us to shoot our high notes out through our 'unicorn horns!'

 

Breath support is really the key to maintaining good tone.  I wish I could better remember how Mr. Pfeiffer conveyed the basics of breath support -- by Christmas of my first year with the choir, as a small boy, I was able to sing the long glorias in 'Ding Dong, Merrily on High' with excellent tone without having to breathe mid-melisma, a feat that seemed a hair intimidating when I first joined the choir.  It was entirely a question of breath support.  I do remember being asked to breathe 'from our belly-buttons' and (sometimes from our toes!), and to watch our belt-buckles (or trousers buttons, if we didn't have belts on) move in order to encourage us to breathe in deeply; we were also taught to breathe silently and without moving our shoulders (which indicates tension, which is not helpful for singing).

 

We began every rehearsal with vocalizes -- like Mr. Adams suggests, always starting from the top down -- using various vowels, including the famous (or infamous) 'Mae, Mee, Ma, Moe, Moo' or however one wants to spell it, usually on descending scales.  Then we would sing a couple of familiar rounds or canons ('Dona Nobis Pacem,' 'And Every Man 'Neath His Vine and Fig Tree,' and 'Hey, Ho, Nobody Knows' are great  -- all employ haunting minor melodies and highly 'singable' vowels and consonants).  The choir with which I now sing does not use them in the interest of saving time, and everyone kvetches about it, since we're all basically singing 'cold' for the first fifteen or twenty minutes.  I don't think one can over-stress the importance of vocalizes in stretching the voice -- we always vocalized higher than we would be singing on any given day, and because of it we were never flat on the high notes, which seems to be a problem that plauges many a soprano section, be it in a children's or an adult choir.

 

Sorry again for the long delay in responding!