Choral Warm-Ups for Changing Adolescent Voices

Abstract

How did you start your last choral rehearsal? Did you begin with the same warm-up procedures you used the day before (and the day before that)? Did you carefully choose the pitches of the vocalises so that each student could be successful, regardless of his or her current stage of vocal development? Did you design vocalises that addressed specific vocal issues found in the repertoire to be rehearsed that day? During two decades of observing and leading middle school choral rehearsals, I've discovered that teachers frequently repeat exactly the warm-ups they present to their young adolescent choirs at every rehearsal. If we know one thing about middle school students, we know that they are constantly changing-physically, intellectually, and emotionally. Why is it that our warm-ups usually don't reflect these changes? Think about this: if we start our warm-ups with a unison, descending, five-note, stepwise vocalise (sol, fa, mi, re, do) and then ascend sequentially by half steps for multiple repetitions, whom have we left out? Everyone who can't sing that pattern on those specific notes. We might say, Well, that kid can't match pitch, or he or she can't do X, Y, or Z. What if we were wrong? What if we simply hadn't selected an instructional task that was achievable by everyone in the ensemble? Over time, the effects on the musical self-confidence of those marginalized would be devastating, and there would be deleterious effects on the ensemble's performance. We would have failed to take advantage of what these young singers could do, instead focusing on what they physically couldn't do. Consider how young children learn to speak: they begin by babbling combinations of vowels and consonants and gradually refine and combine them to form words. We encourage young children to experiment with vocal sounds on the path toward speech, and we need to similarly encourage young adolescents to explore their new vocal capabilities made possible by the maturation process. The vocal warm-up processes used in choirs with changing adolescent voices must, in some ways, be different from the warm-up processes used in choirs of either early elementary children or older high school students. This article is an exploration of principles that need to underlie the development of warmups that meet the needs of changing voices, encourage even the most reluctant singer, and build toward ever-greater levels of choral success. In a Music Supervisors' Journal article printed more than 80 years ago, well-regarded pedagogue Charles Farnsworth wrote about the development of vocal technique: