Haslett Internship - Visit 3

On March 5, I visited Haslett High School for the third time. Mr. Boyce was doing "voicings", or the beginnings of figuring out next year's choir rosters, in his office, so he had Abbie and I run some sectionals with the men on a brand new piece.

It was both scary and rewarding to be thrown into the mix with little warning! I got to work with the basses, which is the section home to some of the more rambunctious and distracting personalities in the group. Knowing this, I decided to have them come and stand around the piano instead of staying seated in their chairs, which are situated far enough from the piano that I think I would have felt removed from them. They ended up responding well to this, and I didn't really have to quiet them down or refocus them after that, which was a nice surprise! 

Learning the piece together was a bit more of a challenge, and since I hadn't seen the piece before, we literally were learning it together. We had a goal of getting through the first two verses of the piece, and since I knew Abbie's plan was to start with the tenors from the beginning, that's where I started with the basses. First I had them read on "lu" with me playing along on the piano. Then I isolated phrases, with me modeling them at pitch (it was in a comfy Alto 2 range). Where we had trouble with intervals and rhythms, we would isolate to even smaller bits of music. Then we would work to sing larger and larger phrases until they could sing the whole verse confidently. 

I tried to have them focus on some phrasing gestures (we "pulled some taffy" to encourage a legato line and sweeped our arms at high points of phrases), listen across the circle and match their "u" vowel, and then filter their English words through that "u" shape once we added text, but altogether I'm not sure if I like the way I rehearsed with them. It felt very note-and-rhythm-centric. While I'm glad I tried to give them other goals in addition to or along-side learning the notes, I'm not sure I found a great balance between just letting them isolate the notes and rhythms and then asking them to do more - they didn't seem to get overwhelmed as a whole, but there were definitely times where I saw individuals become so. I don't think that rehearsing for notes and rhythms is very rewarding for students or teachers, but is there a time when doing that prevents them from becoming overwhelmed and helps them to become confident enough to try more? 

I've just realized that I ran that sectional much like I did as alto section leader in high school, where we would learn the notes and bring them back to the choir to receive further instruction on phrasing, tone, etc. What was different though is that I tried to add the phrasing and tone and etc. to the sectional. Should sectionals function differently than full choir rehearsals?