Have you ever watched a music teacher coaxing a class to sing a little bit louder?
Maybe it even happened to you.
Each time they try, the teacher stops them, extolling them to sing louder and each time, they are not loud enough for the teacher’s tastes.
After a few demoralizing attempts, inevitably, some kid or kids start to scream, as in, “Oh you want me to sing louder? I'll sing louder for you. I'll scream!”
I learned that what I really wanted kids to do was to sing “big”.
What is “big singing”?
Big singing is using all of our knowledge of five special precepts as well as all of our body to vocalize a melody and impart a musical emotion.
One of the skills that clever teachers master is learning what to say to kids, what not to say to kids, and what to SHOW kids.
And of course, given the first three stacking elements for success, mainly self-discipline, proactivity, and listening, the goal is for the kids to learn how to proactively sing in a big way, not to learn how to be dependent upon me to coach them to sing correctly everyday for the rest of their lives.
After a great deal of experimentation, data collection, editing, and review, I whittled down the most important aspects I wanted kids to carry with them concerning singing.
These five components were the foundation of big singing.
They are:
No hands on face.
No screaming.
Open your mouth.
Move your lips.
Move your tongue.
I determined that everything else I wanted them to know, they would pick up from my modeling.
I didn't get into a lot of descriptive anatomy or talk about diaphragms and lungs and supporting their breath because frankly, that's too abstract for many of the younger children.
I wanted to deal with very simple words.
The five steps of big singing add up to 15 words in all.
All of those words are single syllable words except for one.
Some kids will intrinsically feel that singing big means to sing loud.
It doesn't.
It simply means to do the five steps of big singing.
If those steps are followed, the sound quality will probably be pretty good and just loud enough.
I would say, “If you do these five things, you will sound as good as me - I promise! ”
The beauty of big singing is that the words involved in the five steps have nothing to do with volume.
They're all about physical attributes and technique. Big singing works at pp or FF.
When I led children song, I used my eyes and body language to communicate louder or softer. No matter what I was communicating, they had to continue to sing big.
Let me go through each of the five steps of big singing.
No hands on face.
I noticed that many kids tend not to know where to put their hands when they sing.
If they're at a desk a chair, or even sitting on the floor with crisscross legs, they'll often prop their hand up and support their head. Ninety percent of the school day that's no problem.
But when you're singing, your hands cannot be touching your face.
I would often demonstrate the problem of hands on face by strumming a guitar for a few seconds and having a student place both hands on the face of the guitar while I continued strummed. They immediately observed how touching the guitar absorbs vibrations and deadens the sound.
“We don't want our hands on our face because it will literally diminish the sound coming out of our mouths.”
The reason I didn't say exactly where to put their hands while they sing was because there are a multitude of different jobs the hands can do and different places they can be while they sing. I basically wanted to let them know where I really never wanted to see their hands while they sang, namely on their face.
No screaming.
When your music teaching gets kids so positively stirred up and happy when they sing, it can turn into a “scream-along” rather than a “sing-along”.
It's hard to diminish their enthusiasm but it's crucial that they understand that singing is not screaming.
You can program a scream at the end of a song or in the middle of the song for an effect, much like Hayden did in the Surprise Symphony, but screaming does not lead to good choral sound.
Open your mouth.
It seems like an obvious one but kids don't spend a lot of time visualizing what their mouth looks like when they're singing.
“Open mouth” is actually more easily communicated through teacher modeling. If the kids see me singing with my mouth open, they'll know that is the expectation.
I know some educators employing different ways to measure the aperture of the mouth and relay that to their students but I simply relied on the visual prompt rather than some tortured verbal explanation.
Move your lips.
Again, this is a verbal prompt that is reinforced by my modeling when I sing.
The mouth is where the sound comes out and we need everything moving together to get the sound to come out properly. If we don't move our lips we tend to mumble and mumbling never works in music.
Move your tongue.
When I was singing and modeling to my classes, I would occasionally ask, “Can you see my tongue moving when I sing?”
The common answer was sometimes.
“I know you can see my tongue moving sometimes but just know that when I'm singing, unless I'm singing a long sustained sound, my tongue is always working as hard as my lips to make the words sound as clear as possible.”
I’ll wrap up big singing in “Stacking Skills for Success: Singing – Part Four”.
Maybe it even happened to you.
Each time they try, the teacher stops them, extolling them to sing louder and each time, they are not loud enough for the teacher’s tastes.
After a few demoralizing attempts, inevitably, some kid or kids start to scream, as in, “Oh you want me to sing louder? I'll sing louder for you. I'll scream!”
I learned that what I really wanted kids to do was to sing “big”.
What is “big singing”?
Big singing is using all of our knowledge of five special precepts as well as all of our body to vocalize a melody and impart a musical emotion.
One of the skills that clever teachers master is learning what to say to kids, what not to say to kids, and what to SHOW kids.
And of course, given the first three stacking elements for success, mainly self-discipline, proactivity, and listening, the goal is for the kids to learn how to proactively sing in a big way, not to learn how to be dependent upon me to coach them to sing correctly everyday for the rest of their lives.
After a great deal of experimentation, data collection, editing, and review, I whittled down the most important aspects I wanted kids to carry with them concerning singing.
These five components were the foundation of big singing.
They are:
No hands on face.
No screaming.
Open your mouth.
Move your lips.
Move your tongue.
I determined that everything else I wanted them to know, they would pick up from my modeling.
I didn't get into a lot of descriptive anatomy or talk about diaphragms and lungs and supporting their breath because frankly, that's too abstract for many of the younger children.
I wanted to deal with very simple words.
The five steps of big singing add up to 15 words in all.
All of those words are single syllable words except for one.
Some kids will intrinsically feel that singing big means to sing loud.
It doesn't.
It simply means to do the five steps of big singing.
If those steps are followed, the sound quality will probably be pretty good and just loud enough.
I would say, “If you do these five things, you will sound as good as me - I promise! ”
The beauty of big singing is that the words involved in the five steps have nothing to do with volume.
They're all about physical attributes and technique. Big singing works at pp or FF.
When I led children song, I used my eyes and body language to communicate louder or softer. No matter what I was communicating, they had to continue to sing big.
Let me go through each of the five steps of big singing.
No hands on face.
I noticed that many kids tend not to know where to put their hands when they sing.
If they're at a desk a chair, or even sitting on the floor with crisscross legs, they'll often prop their hand up and support their head. Ninety percent of the school day that's no problem.
But when you're singing, your hands cannot be touching your face.
I would often demonstrate the problem of hands on face by strumming a guitar for a few seconds and having a student place both hands on the face of the guitar while I continued strummed. They immediately observed how touching the guitar absorbs vibrations and deadens the sound.
“We don't want our hands on our face because it will literally diminish the sound coming out of our mouths.”
The reason I didn't say exactly where to put their hands while they sing was because there are a multitude of different jobs the hands can do and different places they can be while they sing. I basically wanted to let them know where I really never wanted to see their hands while they sang, namely on their face.
No screaming.
When your music teaching gets kids so positively stirred up and happy when they sing, it can turn into a “scream-along” rather than a “sing-along”.
It's hard to diminish their enthusiasm but it's crucial that they understand that singing is not screaming.
You can program a scream at the end of a song or in the middle of the song for an effect, much like Hayden did in the Surprise Symphony, but screaming does not lead to good choral sound.
Open your mouth.
It seems like an obvious one but kids don't spend a lot of time visualizing what their mouth looks like when they're singing.
“Open mouth” is actually more easily communicated through teacher modeling. If the kids see me singing with my mouth open, they'll know that is the expectation.
I know some educators employing different ways to measure the aperture of the mouth and relay that to their students but I simply relied on the visual prompt rather than some tortured verbal explanation.
Move your lips.
Again, this is a verbal prompt that is reinforced by my modeling when I sing.
The mouth is where the sound comes out and we need everything moving together to get the sound to come out properly. If we don't move our lips we tend to mumble and mumbling never works in music.
Move your tongue.
When I was singing and modeling to my classes, I would occasionally ask, “Can you see my tongue moving when I sing?”
The common answer was sometimes.
“I know you can see my tongue moving sometimes but just know that when I'm singing, unless I'm singing a long sustained sound, my tongue is always working as hard as my lips to make the words sound as clear as possible.”
I’ll wrap up big singing in “Stacking Skills for Success: Singing – Part Four”.
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