Is It Really THEIR Voices? Teaching the Urban Youth Choir

Date: May 20, 2013

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(An excerpt from the interest session, "Is It Really THEIR Voices? Teaching the Urban Youth Choir," by Nicole Becker & Jeanne Goffi-Fynn. Presented during the 2013 ACDA National Conference.)

A person's voice is their means of expression in their everyday lives. They have lived with their voices, they are comfortable with them, it is a great source of their identity. We realized that asking them to change this, to change their voices was challenging for many students. Many students feel their voices need to be acknowledged before they are ready and able to change them. Our work here helps us to work with them and to involve them in the exciting process of developing their own voices. Everyone can improve if they are ready to listen. But we, too, need to listen to them, to their voices, to what they say. We want to acknowledge who they are.

We regularly ask our students how they feel about chorus and how they feel about their voices in questionnaires or interviews. Four weeks into the semester last spring, a new member wrote,

“I just think that instead of encouraging all of us to sing in a high voice we should sing out. The voice may be pretty but it’s not choir and it’s not strong. It’s singing in your chest, throat, and head instead of your vertebrae and stomach and singing strong with meaning. Personally, singing here I feel trapped and oppressed in one voice.”

The strong feelings this girl expressed reminded us that the ways that students sing, and the ways that they respond to our advice about singing is strongly shaped by how they want to sing and their conception of what good singing is. We believe that in order to work successfully with these students, we need to understand what they want to do, and to let them do it.

We invite kids to suggest songs, and we spend some time in each rehearsal singing their songs around the piano, with kids frequently volunteering to take solos. This gives students the chance to share their abilities with us and with their peers, which is an important step in their process of feeling appreciated and valued, and as a result, to engaging fully in our work. Vocally, we often find that when kids sing their own music, many pieces of vocal technique are in place; their posture and breathing tend to be quite good, and they support well. Kids singing their own songs frequently identify the problems they would like to address: “I can’t sing that high part,” or “That hurts my throat.” These observations and goals can be the launching point for their work with our voice specialist.

(The ACDA National Conference is just one of the many benefits of membership in the American Choral Directors Association. Join ACDA today.)

Alicia Jones on May 20, 2013 8:53am

I think this is a topic that truly needs to be addressed in the world of choral education. Classrooms are changing with students coming from different economic backgrounds, race, and cultures and yet we expect them to adopt the European choral style of singing as the "only correct" way of choral singing. I have heard choirs with students who are mostly of color with a rich, strong sound and a beautiful blend but comments were made from choral directors that they were too loud, or their vowels were not round enough or a bit too wide not understanding that we are demanding them to sing and produce a sound that is out of their natural voice and not found in their culture. I remember as I was in middle school and high school having to do this and I felt confused and wanted to know why my music from my culture was not accepted, why could we only sing European songs? Why could I not use the voice I was used to hearing in church or in the radio or in my family (who were full of singers)? Why was my voice not accepted in my choir? Why did I have to change my tone and blend in and sing softer and airy (or so I felt that it was-airy)? I teach choir in an urban school and I do struggle with this when we prepare for UIL (University of Interscholastic League). Year after year I teach them how to pronounce their vowels and year after year I teach them how to produce sounds using head voice, but in turn we do choose songs to conserve their natural sound as well so they are able to have diverse vocal skills. In their culture soft, high sounds are unusual and annoying (even for many of their parents who we perform for), this is not singing to them. Singing for these cultures are strong sounds (not shouting) that has an emotional tie that they can relate. Again, this is a topic I feel should be addressed and implemented in the choral classrooms in higher education.

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