To Sing or Not to Sing in Instrumental Class

Singing can be used as a method to help improve your students’ musical and critical thinking skills.  It is an important part of any college undergraduate degree but many teachers do not use it.  Why?

1.      It take up time from rehearsal

2.      Teachers do not have the confidence in their own singing skills

3.      Fear of a negative student response

However, singing can be used to help students become more independent in their ensemble rehearsals as they will have the training to sing which helps to improve their own musical ears so that they can fix errors on their own.

Methods to introduce singing into rehearsals: learning songs by rote, taught in phrases or tonal patterns not on syllables at first.   Various critical thinking skills can be reached from this as well that lead to a better understanding of music.

This helps add to my research in that it contains a skill that is widely used in elementary methods but for students who go down the band and orchestra tracks for their musical studies, becomes neglected often.
 

Robinson, M. (1996). To sing or not to sing in instrumental class. Music Educators Journal, 83(1), 17. Retrieved from EBSCOhost. https://libproxy.library.unt.edu:9443/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=9607152597&site=ehost-live&scope=site