Organization and Listening

The organization of the singers and the rehearsal location is also important. It does not matter if you rehearse in a room with good acoustic conditions and have an instrument available to the choir, or if you rehearse in a company meeting room around a table, or in the church hall, or even in the canteen from school. Anyway, the conductor needs to be attentive to the singers' disposition to check if the group's listening is active, that is, if the singers listen to themselves and their colleagues and if from this listening they actively participate in the harmonic and melodic process of the song.

According to JORDAN James in Ear Training Immersion Exercises for Choirs, 2004, it is necessary to make each rehearsal and exercise a musical experience.

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Thinking about it, the voice is the channel, that is, the first instrument we must produce the sound. Starting from a reference, we can hum a simple melody written only with the use of voice, without the help of instruments and thus share what interests us: the music.

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During the rehearsal process, different teaching-learning relationships take place, and the use of the voice requires preparation so that the singer can use it as an instrument.

How to deal with technical musical aspects such as voice projection and resonance, timbre, articulation, solfeggio, dynamics and inspire students to make music?

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Jordan emphasizes the practice of solfeggio not only as a repetition of the melodic line, but as a constant creation of a harmonic environment - the material of the music.

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Solfejar means to sing the name of a note with the height and duration at which it is written on the score, that is, to sing the name of the note at the correct time and duration. During a rehearsal with a community choir this practice may not be as productive since there is a need to optimize the rehearsal time and almost always a part of the choir singers or the whole choir do not read music. I suggest that instead of solfeggio the conductor uses syllables to perform the exercises.

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Dr. Jordan considered himself naive about what the singers heard during rehearsals. In view of this perception, he began a process in which he directed, through vocal exercises, the students' listening, transforming passive listening into active listening.

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In this material, developed by him and Marilyn Shenenberger, it can be seen how important it is to transform the exercises into musical experiences providing a rich harmonic environment for the choir and consequently for the performance in the practice of music together.

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The uses of these exercises worked and adapted to the repertoire provided a significant improvement in the auditory and musical quality of the students.

We can take as an example a chromatic vocal exercise, ascending where the first four notes are repeated, going in joint degrees until the major third and returning to the root.

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In this sentence we can work on various musical issues such as breathing and the internal space necessary to make a good vocal emission, allowing the tuning of equal notes and joint ascending and descending intervals. You can use the syllable No (read nôô), to work the space and depth or Di (read déê) to work the space and voice projection.

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We can also highlight several types of articulation, experiencing some variations, such as non legato for the first four notes and legato for the others, or even staccato and legato. Once organized, the sonority and articulation, we include the dynamics, establishing increasing at the beginning of the sentence and decreasing at the end of the sentence or even being able to contrast with a non expressive repetition, that is, without expression.