Phillips, K. H. (1998). Teaching singers to sight-read. Teaching Music (June), 32-33.


      Teaching Singers to Sight-Read


      by Kenneth H. Phillips



      Choral music teachers know that,in general, their choral students are poor sight-readers. The exceptions tend to be those students who have some type of instrumental instruction. Learning to read music goes hand in hand with learning to play an instrument. Consider, for example, middle school students invovled in a group trumpet lesson. They not only practice the movements needed to produced the correct sounds on their instrument, but they also learn to read the notes printed in their lesson books.

      Unfortunately, the teaching of singing in our schools lacks, for the most part, the organized and sequenced type of instruction that is usually found in instrumental teaching. There is no commonly used singing method for children that combines motor-skills instruction for pitch production with note-reading instruction. Children learn to sing mainly by rote imitation. When note reading is taught, it is often from a theoretical rather than a functional approach. Many vocal music students arrive in the high school chorus without the basic skills needed to sight-read accurately. As a result, pounding out the notes with each section in turn remains a common technique used by high school choral directors to teach the repertoire to students.

      If students are to gain some degree of musical literacy before they graduate, sight-singing must be taught on a regular basis in the choral rehearsal. For choruses in grades 7-12, every student should have a choir folder with a sight-reading manual in it, and every regular rehearsal should include a few minutes of sight-reading instruction. Also, students should be advised that sight-reading skills will be included as a part of their grade for the course.

      Music educator Ruth Whitlock wisely observed that "music learning begins with the ear" and "the brain absorbs patterns, not individual pitches" (see Making the Transition from Ear to Voice to Music Reading: Vocal Connections (Southern Music, Co., 1992)). A common mistake in the teaching of sight-reading is teaching the eye before the ear, or the "seeing" before the "hearing." Such an approach is doomed to poor results because students are forced to learn a new visual system while coping with new aural events. Just as learning to speak precedes learning to read, so aural skills need to precede visual learning in sight-singing instruction. Teaching students the mnemonic phrase "All Cows Eat Grass" results in little more than correct labeling of the spaces of the bass clef; the use of those spaces remains elusive.

      The Kodaly method as described in Lois Choksy's The Kodaly Method (Prentice-Hall, 1988) and the Gordon and Woods method as described in Jump Right In: The Music Curriculum (G.I.A. Publications, 1986) are both excellent for their insistence on teaching aural skills before presenting visual representation. You don't have to be skilled in either of these methods, however, to begin each choral rehearsal with short ear-training drills to teach tonic and dominant tonal patterns, which, as Whitlock notes in Vocal Connections,"are the basic building blocks for 90 percent of the music we hear and perform."

      Once chord recognition is developed, students can more easily understand stepwise motion and will be better able to logically fill in the scale between chord degrees. When students are able to aurally recognize, label, and sing simple melodic patterns such as "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" (do do sol sol la la sol, fa fa mi mi re re do), they have made the aural response necessary to connect with the visual response. By the way, it matters little what system of pitch labeling you use --solfege, numbers, pitch names, an so forth; just use something.

      Aural instruction should not be limited to pitch alone; learning to "hear" rhythm patterns is also important. One technique for laing the foundation for rhythmic understanding involves placing four empty chairs at the front of the room. These chairs are an example of four beats that serve as the underlying structure that holds music together. Tell students that the beats are "empty"--there is no rhythmic structure present yet. Then place a student in each chair, each representing one quarter note. Lead the class in counting, clapping, or saying "ta" to represent each of the four quarter notes. Then explain that it is possible to have any of the beats "empty," and remove a student from the chair,noting that the beat is still present and must be counted "silently." After this, ask two students to sit on one chair, noting that the "sounding time" has now been halved.

      In this exercise, students can speak patterns with one person to a chair (quarter note), two people to a chair (Eighth notes), and no one in a given chair (rest). Individual students can be asked to place classmates in chairs to represent various patterns, and the rest of the class is then expected to speak what they see. Following this, clap a rhythm pattern and have students place other students in the chairs according to the pattern you clapped. The very nature of this process engages students' interest and makes the often dull routine of note reading come alive through an enjoyable activity.

      In subsequent lessons, introduce the half note by having a student sit on one chair and extend his or her legs onto thenext chair. A whole note is depicted by one person lying across all four charis. A dotted half note is shown byone person covering three chairs, and sixteenth notes are represented by two people sitting in one chair with two people leaning against the back of the same chair. As you can imagine, all sorts of possibilities exist. The point is that students gain an understanding of the metric organization of music by beats (as shown by the chairs) and the overlying rhythmic organization by notes (represented by the students). Once this type of "iconic" presentation is understood and students respond to aural patterns clapped or spoken by placing the correct numbers of their classmates on or out of the chairs, move on to standard notation by associating the "chair patterns" with visual rhythmic patterns.

      The point of this chair exercise stems from the observation that students seem to have a difficult time understanding how an underlyingbeat in music related to rhytmic notation. In fact, in one unpublished study of rhythm learning done in 19995 at the Universityof Iowa, researcher Katherine Levy found that many students organize rhythm "figurally" rather than metrically; that is, they respond to the grouping of notes in patterns as entities unto themselves, without connecting the notes to a bsic underlying metric structure. By visualizing the underlying beats with chairsin the strategy just described, students can geta graphic picture of the duality of rhythm and meter.

      Once a solid aural foundation is laid for both pitch and rhythm, students should be introduced to the traditional visual representation of notes on the staff. Again, such instruction should begin with basic patterns found in easy music. Sight-singing examplesmay be placed on the chalkboard, or you can use one of the multitude of sight-reading manuals available commercially. The advantage of the manuals is that students can practice outside the choral rehearsal.

      > When students have agained a basic understanding of reading notation, they should be challenged in each rehearsal to sight-sing at least one new section of a piece without first hearing it from you or the piano. Remember to give them a little more time to preview the music before singing it. They need time to "hear" the music internally before trying to sing it. Also, be certain to establish the tonality and key by having students sing the tonic and dominant triads of the seldction. You may first want them to speak the rhythm by itself, and then have them speak the pitch names (or, for example, syllables or numbers) before attempting to put it all together. Structure the learning in small steps, and the rewards will add up as students become independent learners. Their musical self-esteem will increase, and precious rehearsal time will be saved as rote teaching gives way to self-directed learning.