Quality Teaching with Vocal Music
Using wordless singing lessons for an excellent music education
Singing is essential to music education but it need not use language. Wordless vocal music and wordless instruction may produce the music teaching methods of the future.
We usually think of vocal music as words set to a melody. A few ancient traditions, however, use the singing voice without words, and now we are beginning to discover that such wordless vocalising can be the basis of teaching methods that lead to quality learning of music principles and techniques. This insight has led to an important component of the 2007 National Conference of the Australian Society for Music Education.
Singing central to music education
The voice can be seen as the primary human instrument for music production. Scientific research is rapidly concentrating on this fact with particular attention to the voice as a medium for communicating emotion and building social bonds. The research indicates that human song was developed independently of – and possibly prior to – language. The need to make and respond to vocal music is embedded deep in our nature. Singing should be the central component of music education for younger children, and it should be promoted far more among adults as an ordinary activity.
Quality learning through song without words
We should treat pure vocal music – singing without words – as a frontier for developing more effective musical education. Nicholas Bannan has conducted workshops on this in Australia, and participants testify to the peculiar power of the experience. Using hand gestures, body-language and his own voice he led the hundred or so people into melody and harmonies sung as common vowel-sounds.
It is essential to the method that not only the choir or class, but also the teacher-leader, does not use language. From the beginning of the Bannan workshop to just before the end not one word was uttered by him or anyone else. For at least thirty minutes the participants learnt tunes, created triads, moved in harmony to the subdominant and then the dominant and other chords by following Nicholas’ signals.
Music teachers applaud
Following the session this gathering of music teachers made their enthusiastic approval obvious: at the feeling level it had welded them with a sense of real community. But more than that, as educators they agreed that through the Bannan method a school student would develop much better aural perception and learn rules of vocal harmony without necessarily knowing the musical theory in an intellectual way. (In fact progress in singing is sometimes much better without a focus on theory.) In a typical response, one called the workshop “an inspiring session reinforcing perception before conception”.
A new trend in music teaching methods?
It is heartening to see Nicholas Bannan’s workshops on the ASME National Conference programme, where he will focus on creating choral communities through wordless choral singing. Admittedly his approach calls for leadership by a teacher who can sing well and has a thorough knowledge of musical principles. His early background as a chorister in the Canterbury Cathedral community gave him superb skills for this type of role.
But experience of this approach persuades many that it is an important path for quality teaching and learning of music in the near future. Such pure voice experiences – as in Bannan’s workshops and also in traditions like Tibetan deep chant and Mongolian harmonic song – must no longer be treated as just fascinating oddities in the world of music. Rather they should be the gateway to exploration of our rich humanness and an essential tool for building community.
