Choral Sightsinging with Denise Eaton

Veteran music educator Denise Eaton shares a plethora of tips on how to teach sight singing in choral rehearsals, gleaned from her nearly thirty years of leading high school choirs. She's written down this approach in her SMART, STEPS, and InSIGHT sight singing books, which she created to help high school choral conductors like herself overcome the challenges of building independent musicians.

Links:

Denise Eaton's website: www.deniseeaton.com

SMART, STEPS, InSight series, and choral textbooks: https://www.deniseeaton.com/media.html

 

Show Notes:

00:20 Introductions: For nearly thirty years, Denise Eaton taught high school choirs, including building one of the top choral programs in the country at Spring High School, north of Houston, Texas. Her approach to teaching complete musicians is remarkable, and it’s one she’s shared with the world in her SMART, InSIGHT and STEPS series of sight singing books. She’s also taught choral methods on the faculty of Sam Houston State University, served as president of the Texas Music Educators Association, and is choral editor for Carl Fischer Music.

02:00 How do you build an ensemble of singers who read well? It takes an intentional, systematic approach. It can't be done at the last minute. The beginning of learning skills is glacially slow, and it takes time.

03:00 What does that look like in rehearsal? Clear objectives for the rehearsal, and a precise lesson plan. An "Order of Events" on the board helps students to buy into just how much we have to accomplish.

04:00 A rehearsal should be a crescendo, not a checklist. I avoid the term warmup, and prefer to say vocal technique. From vocal technique training, to sight singing or singing the repertoire, everything is reinforcing what happened during the vocal technique time.

05:30 Moving from solfege to the page, from sound to sight. The importance of building in visual orientation to singing in different keys.

07:50 The SMART and STEPS books are broken up into chapters by key, and arranged by difficulty within each chapter. What's the philosophy behind that? A lot of people feel compelled to start at the beginning of a book and go in order. But, what if you don't need to sight sing in F-sharp major? The idea is to see a scale and a tonic triad in the key, and to sing through some fundamental exercises to get visually acclimated to what you'll see in the music, and then to sight sing. The fundamental skills are singing steps and thirds, and singing intervals from the tonic triad, and that's what you get in the SMART books and STEPS books. If students can do that they can do anything. Every key is a new language for young singers, it just looks different.

12:50 This approach was purely practical. If I'm going to teach a piece in A-flat, then three weeks before we start that piece we're going to start sight singing fundamental drills in that key, we're going to sight sing in that key so that students can be successful when they eventually get to the piece we're singing. InSIGHT Singing has fundamental drills around I, IV and V chords, they can see how those chords look.

15:30 If I'm working on a piece with a choir, and I want to help prepare students in advance by pulling out basics. What else, besides key, should I look at as I study the score, and how do I turn those into basic practice? This is what score study is about: identifying melodic patterns, harmonic patterns, and rhythmic patterns in addition to form. My sight reading will be the melodic contour of the patterns throughout the piece.

With some of these sub-non varsity treble pieces, there are only really three melodic patterns in it. Instead of looking at the music right away with students, write these out in whole notes and practice the pitch content first, after they've seen a scale and a tonic triad. And write out the most common rhythm patterns on the other side of the page.

17:35 Can you talk about the philosophy behind each of the books? The SMART books started off as a tool that I needed for my teaching. Each melody is written in both treble and bass clef. It was written for key orientation, so that teachers could give students material to sight sing in the keys of the music they're singing. SMART minor was self-serving, because when you go to contest with your varsity groups in Texas, the form will be Major-minor-Major, so this will help prepare. Minor's challenging because you have the altered notes to deal with. You have to teach it from a diatonic standpoint, I'll have them sing "Mi-Fi-Si-La is the Sol-La-Ti-Do of the minor key."

 

22:45 What are the fundamental exercises? A scale based on the range of melodies in that level, a tonic triad, and written out patterns (like Do-Re-Mi-Do) that move through the scale. The tonic triad should refle