The power of music and song in children’s theatre

Last week I took our 4 -year- old grandson and his Mum to our state theatre to see a school holiday offering for young kids – “Room On The Broom”, based on the award winning children’s picture book by Julia Donaldson and Alex Scheffler, published by Macmillan Children’s books.

The show was in the main theatre, the Heath Ledger Theatre, and because ours was an impromptu decision to attend, we were seated in the last available seats, right up at the back of the circle and some distance from the stage. This did not bother young William in the least; he was intrigued by the size of the theatre and the height from which he was watching the stage. It was the largest theatre he has been in, to date, and I’d imagine it was the same for many in the young audience. Around us were children ranging in age from babies to around the 8 years mark. Lots of grandparents.

I wondered how we would all fare up there, so far from the action on stage, when the show started.

As it turns out, the physical distance did not prove a problem for William, nor for kids of similar age. Younger children were more easily distracted, but that age were distracted downstairs in the stalls as well.

The show was just the right length – about 55 minutes – and delivered with an energy of around 150%. This would be exhausting for an audience if sustained for much longer,  but seemed an important component in holding their attention in this short show.

There were puppets – big, realistic, glove style puppets. And the actors operating them provided their voices. (At one stage the actor managing the dog and the frog mixed up his accents but no one much minded). Suspension of disbelief was abundant, which was wonderful to see in this audience. (Side note – last holidays we went to a puppet show where the puppets were made of fruit and veges. This was a step too far for our 4- year- old – “You can’t really make a puppet out of vegetables, can you?”)

The main actor characters were the witch and her cat – a costumed actor -  and the audience loved them.

But by far the component of the show which held it all together and brought kids’ attention back to the stage was the music. Backing -tracks and live singing – in parts, and of a high standard.  Fun songs with catchy but easy tunes. Towards the end we were all invited to join in the refrain of the final song – and we did it lustily. Audiences love to join in.

As the performance ended, William declared, “That was a really good show”.  And it was. But without the music it would have been so much less. 

As we walked to lunch in the city, I was thinking about how enriching music and song is to so many of young children’s learning. It is of course learning in its own right, but music also enables so much more in us.

Music Monday - More about Practice

Last week’s post about music practice generated some interesting discussion. Thank you to those who contacted me with anecdotal stories about students young and older.

I’ve been thinking and reflecting further on this essential component of successful music performance.

Our daughter, Hannah had an outstanding piano teacher. Sue’s students were typical suburban kids, but consistently achieved above - average results in their AMEB piano exams. Her own daughters all went on to become professional string players. The family are clearly extremely talented in music, but I have often wondered if a significant part of their professional success was their mother’s guidance about practice routines from an early age.

I have been searching (without success) for one of Hannah’s old practice books, but my recollections of a typical page would read something like this:

D major scale. Practise hands separately 3 times then together, slowly, 3 times

Gavotte. New. Try page one slowly, separate hands. 3 times each practice.

Revise List A and D pieces once each practice.

List C. Check bars 43-49 (wrong today) and practice slowly 3 times each practice

And so on.

Very specific.

This week with my Year 8 boys’ singing group, I quizzed them about their practice since the last lesson. Interestingly - but unsurprisingly - the boy who scored highest in a technical work assessment had the most specific practice routine. Here is what he reported as being his practice routine:

“I sang each of our (5) scales 5 times to warm up.

Then I sang the vocalise, checking the breathing and the dynamics.

I practised the song, checking the rhythms at the bars you told us to.

I recorded myself singing to make sure that I wasn’t scooping or sliding.

Then I went through my parts in Matilda (their current school musical).”

Again, very specific and ordered.

We are living in an age where technology provides so many tools for practice – warm up apps, recording devices on our phones, backing tracks with or without voice / piano / orchestra. The list goes on.

But as music educators we still need to train effective practice habits.

Music Monday - Masked Music Teaching

In Western Australia, teachers and students returned to school today after a snap lockdown of the Perth and South-West for the week before – the week which should have been the first week of term. 

For this past week, Western Australians have been very diligent about mask wearing. After 10 months of not needing to wear masks, it was almost as if we as a community thought, “Right, let’s put these masks on and make sure we don’t have further community spread”. And this was based on one case of Covid-19. 

The strategy warranted an article in the New York Times last week.

At the end of the week, after no further cases emerging, the South-West region had all restrictions lifted and the Perth region had lockdown lifted, but with some restrictions – masks to be worn in all public places, 4 square metres distancing between people in any venue and the maintenance of 1.5 metres between people elsewhere.

And so, I returned to my secondary school singing teacher position today.

Music teachers of wind and voice had been given permission to have their students out of masks during lessons. I found that a challenge, given the ongoing research into the aerosol transmission of Covid-19 and the heightened level of aerosol involved in singing. I elected for my students to remain masked.

Each lesson started with an acknowledgement that our masked situation was a good reminder of what life has been like for most of the rest of the world for nearly a year. The students got it. I got it. Masks are incredibly annoying.

Because it was week one, I was able to avoid a certain amount of singing by talking through the course outlines and assessment procedures. I recorded backing tracks on piano for those students who needed it. We sang some muffled scales through our masks. One group tackled their first set song. The lessons were not significantly different from what I would usually do in week one.

One aspect of mask wearing that I hadn’t thought of is how little you see of a person’s features in a mask. I met a new class of year 8 students and really would not recognise them again next week – masked or unmasked.

It is highly likely that we will all remove our masks in WA at 12.01am on Sunday the 14th February. If so we remain incredibly fortunate and should not forget it.

But what if we had to do many weeks of music teaching in masks? Class music is fine. Many instruments are fine. I guess I’m asking my voice and wind instrument colleagues from elsewhere about strategies they are using. What do you do?

Music Monday - Happy New Year, Happy New Anthem?

Happy New Year to all music teachers. May this be a year which slowly improves on 2020 and may we all resume choir singing and directing without fear of spreading Covid-19.

Over the past few days in Australia, discussion has again started on our Australian national anthem, Advance Australia Fair. It’s a bit of a dirge musically and the words have long been seen as inappropriate to Indigenous Australians as well as those who have come here from all over the world. Our conservative prime minister, Scott Morrison, announced that as of 1st January 2021, one word of the anthem would be changed – from ‘For we are young and free’ to ‘For we are one and free’. Almost as though this simple change will solve the many other issues with the text of the song. And to be honest, in a crowd singing the changed line, who would really know? 

I took another look at the complete verses of Advance Australia Fair, written by Peter Dodds McCormick in the 1870s. Verse 2 is particularly irksome, especially to Aboriginal Australians, the original custodians of this land:

When gallant Cook from Albion sail’d,

To trace wide oceans o’er,

True British courage bore him on,

Til he landed on our shore.

Then here he raised old England’s flag,

The standard of the brave;

“With all her faults we love her still

Britannia rules the wave.”

In joyful strains then let us sing

Advance Australia fair.

Surely we can do better than this? 

Personally, I think an obvious time to change the anthem would be at the end of Queen Elizabeth’s reign – when I hope we will finally become a republic. In the meantime though – is a one word change enough?

Music Monday - Resilience in music teachers during Covid.

I have been thinking a lot lately about what it means to be an effective and resilient Australian music teacher in 2020.

The ground has shifted multiple times this year and each shift has found music teachers seeking new ways to find balance and stay effective in the job.

First there was the lockdown- which of course is still in place in parts of Australia. In the early pandemic lockdown days teachers learned to adapt and implement online learning over a variety of platforms. Those of us engaged in teaching singing quickly found the frustrations of the lag on every online platform. We started to prepare and issue backing tracks so that our students could experience accompaniments in real time when singing for us. Ideas and tips were shared.

Zoom fatigue became a thing- after a day of online teaching in front of a laptop screen our necks were locked and our brains exhausted. But then we would turn to watching videoed self-tapes submitted by students for our critical response.

When some states returned to face-to-face teaching we felt relieved. But then a new reality kicked in. Teaching rooms needed to be sanitized between students. Piano keyboards were sanitized between players. Social distancing rendered some of our teaching spaces unusable. Points of assessment missed in first semester were scheduled into a much tighter time frame. At the secondary performing arts school I work in, we scheduled two senior school musicals in the space of two weeks with a fifty percent capacity audience in keeping with the level of restrictions still in place in WA.

Our final year secondary students who are applying for places in tertiary music performance courses find the rules changed here too of course. Instead of live auditions in November - after final academic exams will be over- most tertiary institutions are requiring self- taped videos to be submitted from the end of August. This has significantly reduced the preparation time.

And of course, running underneath these shifting rules is the consideration of ‘what if?’ What if there is another wave (as there has been in Victoria) and we are locked down again? Will 2021 be the year in which most students in elite performance courses - like NIDA, WAAPA, VCA to name only three- are sourced from their home state rather than interstate and overseas? So many ‘what ifs’.

In the meantime teachers are dealing with understandably stressed students.

There has not been one week this year when I have not had at least one student at the secondary or tertiary level in a state of stress which has significantly compromised their work. I get it- none of us knows what the way out of this pandemic really looks like. None of us were around in 1918 for the last one.

But as teachers we are the guides, the strong ones, right?

But who looks after us? And if we are responsible for that, how do we do it?

Among my colleagues I have observed several approaches. One friend took a term of leave and has returned to school refreshed. Several friends are drinking more alcohol in the evenings than in non- Covid times. Yet another colleague has abstained from alcohol altogether and looks and feels fantastic. I have started knitting- nothing complicated, just long scarves with uncomplicated stitches. I find it curiously calming and meditative.

As I write this I am reminded of a radio interview on mindfulness and resilience which I heard in my car early on in the pandemic. A three point approach was encouraged:

1. Each evening think of one thing which went well in your day.

2. Each day make contact with someone in your address book- by phone, by text message, by an act of kindness or a social media post.

3. Spend 10 minutes a day being mindful- eg walk around your block focussing just on the sounds in your immediate environment.

What are you doing to stay healthy and strong in these challenging teaching times?

As always, we encourage and welcome your comments.

Music Monday - Embodied Singing

This is the final week of what has been a long and challenging semester in high schools across Australia and the whole world. In my own little world of a performing arts high school in Perth, I have a tradition in the final week of allowing the younger music theatre specialist students to sing an ‘own choice song’ of any genre, purely for the fun of singing -  the only provision being that the text is suitable for a school environment. I work at the school on Mondays and Fridays so today was the first of these ‘own choice song’ days for this year.

Predictably, today the year 10 girls chose music theatre songs from current favourite shows – think Wicked, Frozen, Beetle Juice, Bring It On.  And the year 8 boys, after asking, “Miss, is it okay to do a rap song if we don’t sing the rude words?”, sang lustily, with a nudge and wink at each other at all the (silent) offensive moments. 

What was clear in all the fun song performances today was that every student was relaxed. There was no sense of assessment or preparing a song that would at some point become an assessment task. Their bodies were relaxed and when they inhaled it was with relaxed abdominal muscles. There was a bit of bopping around to the backing tracks and a much greater unconscious grounding of their lower bodies. These are all qualities that as a singing teacher, I strive for every day. All the singing today was embodied.

Greater embodiment is something we often observe in a masterclass when a singer, after instruction from the master teacher, sings very much better on the second attempt. This can be due to valuable help from the master teacher -  but can also be in part, a more relaxed performance after settling into a performance situation.

At my other workplace – a music theatre department at tertiary level – we have a series of ‘audition performance practices’. Lately these have of course been online, but when we are all in the space together, students so often fare much better in the singing task set at the ‘call back’ than in their actual performance. It seems that getting an endorsement of their initial performance in the form of a call-back allows them to relax into their bodies for the ‘call back’.

What does this all mean for us as teachers of singing? 

I think we need to take every opportunity to learn from the expertise of psychologists working in the field of performance. And we need to constantly search for the warm-up strategies which help students unlock their own bodies. In performance, we need to encourage students to embrace the character and story and lose themselves and their complete focus on technique.

As always, I invite and thank you for your comments.

Music Monday - Performance Confidence

I spent Saturday accompanying year 11 and 12 singers for their semester one performance exams – individual recitals of around 10-15 minutes in duration. (We are fortunate in Western Australia to be easing restrictions now that we have no community transmission of Covid-19, so these exams took place live in the room, with everyone appropriately distanced.)

As usual there was a range of performance confidence – from the super confident singers who love every audience (including exam panels) through to the singers with borderline performance anxiety. Each exam had its own dynamic in that respect alone.

Most of the singers I accompanied that day are also my own voice students, and so part of Sunday was spent finalising their semester one in-class results. During the period that we were all self-isolating at home (the end of the 1st term and first few weeks of this term) these students submitted performances to me in the form of self-takes via email. I then emailed comments and feedback. During that time in lockdown, I often mused on how much more confident one of my students was on camera, as opposed to in the room with an audience. On Sunday as I again watched one of her emailed videos from earlier in the semester, I reflected on her live performance the day before and how, using the same marking rubric, her exam performance could never achieve the same result as one to the camera.

Now of course, live performance is the lifeblood of music – and aren’t we bursting to get back to it?  However, is there a step, we as teachers could take, to build performance confidence via the camera for those students with some degree of performance anxiety? And importantly – what would the steps towards confident live performance entail? Could it be the sharing of confident self-takes with their peers to ‘prove themselves’ before performing live in the class?

Do you have thoughts on this? Please share!

Music Monday - Don’t sing ‘Fah’!

Yesterday morning our friend John sent us a link to the recently -gone -viral Dustyesky Fake Russian Choir from Mullumbimby on the northern coast of NSW in Australia. Here a bunch of Aussie blokes, who speak no Russian but have a love of vodka, Russian music and song, have formed what they claim to be ‘the largest fake Russian choir in the southern hemisphere’. In that mysterious way that things go viral, they have become an internet sensation and were actually invited to visit Russia (before the pandemic put a stop to their plans). Instead they sent to Russia a video collaborated through social media. 

And that video has been popping up all over social media.

(As an aside, a Russian choir responded by sending a performance of Waltzing Matilda – in that wonderful way that choirs unite people across cultures).

Anyway, later yesterday I was driving from my school to another campus when our local ABC radio conducted an interview with the conductor of the choir. And then later still, when I was finally home in the evening, ABC television was doing a feature on the same choir. 

I was saturated with fake Russian choir singers yesterday!

Now what was of particular interest to me – and the point to today’s post -  was that, at the end of the TV report, a disclaimer was flashed across the screen alerting viewers that singing in groups at this time is not considered safe.

And so back to our previous Music Monday post where we alerted you to the disturbing findings by NATS in the USA.

In the fortnight since, the Guardian has published another finding which many singers and singing teachers - and possibly wind instrument players and teachers – have seen as a glimmer of hope.

But then a few days later, the highly regarded Australian Gondwana National Choirs hosted a webinar with a leading epidemiologist and an aerospace engineer with further findings. As one of my colleagues commented, “It seems we need to stick to pentatonic scales for now – or at least avoid singing fah.”

This evening ANATS (Australian National Association of Teachers of Singing) are hosting a ‘coffee and conversation’ webinar (for members) on health and hygiene in the singing studio.

Where do those findings leave us? I think that at the very least, we should be cautious about observing a safe distance between us and our singers. Many usual teaching studios and rooms will be of insufficient size. 

For the past 2 months I have been very aware of how dirty my laptop screen becomes after zoom lessons and classes. I demonstrate directly to the screen and aerosol droplets collect on the surface. The days of the singing student reading music over the shoulder of the pianist are sadly over - at least for now.

For so long we have recognised how beneficial singing is to all aspects of health (for example: https://ideas.time.com/2013/08/16/singing-changes-your-brain/). Singing is also immensely pleasurable and fun. 

We all owe it to ourselves to search for the safest ways forward at this time.

Music Monday - ANZAC Day

Anzac Day

Anzac Day 2020 was like no other before it in the many years since 1915.

In Australia, with gatherings banned due to covid-19, the usual services and parades were cancelled  - except for one at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra attended by only the few dignitaries who conducted it, telecast to the nation.

Instead, at the tops of suburban driveways across the country, Australians gathered just before dawn, holding lighted candles, and sometimes waving to acknowledge their neighbours without approaching or speaking to them.

 In quiet reflection Australians remembered their Anzacs  - and all who have suffered and perished in war – and as the skies softly lightened with the dawn, the morning chorus of magpies and crows was augmented by players of music – student brass players, music teachers, amateur and professional musicians and singers – each contributing to an extraordinarily moving tribute.

On my own driveway I could hear from the next street the hesitant sounds of a student trumpeter playing “Lest We Forget”. Further away there was the faint sound of the Last Post with its tricky high notes for beginner players. 

In the couple of days since Saturday the papers have carried letters from Australians suggesting that the dawn driveway tradition be kept and commenting on how moving it was to have their own silent contemplation accompanied by the sound of live music. My music teacher friends as well as non-muso neighbours have all said much the same.

Music is SO important in our many life rituals. When we work on the tedium of music theory, or teaching the singing and playing of scales, it is worth remembering how important our job is. We are contributing in our way to the rich tapestry of our country’s unique culture.

Music Monday

Covid 19. It is impossible to open a newspaper, turn on the television, scroll through social media or visit a supermarket without being confronted by the fear being experienced by so many in communities across Australia and the world.

As music teachers we face our own challenges- Our teaching is very hands-on. Many of us teach in relatively confined spaces – in which it is very difficult to implement the recommended 1.5 metres of separation between students. In the primary music classroom musical instruments are shared. Our students are increasingly anxious. And there is uncertainty about whether schools will close with online lessons a possibility.

While all the above is understandably stressful for music teachers, spare a thought for our freelance, sessional and gigging musician colleagues. Usually unsalaried, our colleagues in this sector (along with other performing artists) face months of cancelled gigs and significant loss of income.

If you are a salaried music teacher please consider:

1. Instead of claiming refunds for cancelled concerts, donate your ticket money instead.

2. Use the opportunity to hire a freelance musician to record backing tracks for your classes.

3. Ask your freelance musician friends and colleagues if they are okay; if there is anything you can do.

Stay well everyone. Wash your hands and don’t touch your face!