Observation 4: Bella Voce, DeWitt HS

This past week at DeWitt High School, Bella Voce rehearsed in their final days before festival. They had just had a concert of their festival pieces and used this as a tool for final adjustments to their pieces.

Procedures began as usual with attendance, announcements, and warm-ups. Then, they all listened to the recording from their concert. Ms. Eldred mentioned that they had received some really nice compliments. She warned them not to be too critical of themselves, because people are always particularly critical of every aspect of their own work. She asked them to listen for things that they could really fix in just a few days. They listened attentively to the recording looking for elements that could use improvement. After each piece, Ms. Eldred asked them to collectively create a “kill and drill” list and made it clear that it was crunch time. I think the singers took ownership of this concept that they could all contribute to what needed to happen for them to improve, and that they had just a few days to perfect their pieces.

The students had very thoughtful responses to their recordings. They were particularly critical of the vowels in both pieces, recognizing the effect when vowels are not unified. They talked about specific words that gave them trouble. “Old Mountain Thyme” is in English, while “Yo Le Canto” is in Spanish, but many of the same vowels were the problematic ones. In the Spanish piece, there were certain words that some were mispronouncing, causing some disputes in the sound.

One student pointed out that a lot of the phrases were too short, that people were breathing when they weren’t supposed to. Ms. Eldred said she agreed, but that there probably wasn’t enough time to fix that, because everyone had gotten into the bad habit. I can understand this point, and it was a good reminder of reality: that sometimes you cannot achieve perfection with every element of every piece in every choir, especially in a real-world school setting. She wanted to focus on more fixable things, which is very practical.

“Old Mountain Thyme” begins in unison and moves to two-part, then three-part. The group, along with Ms. Eldred and her husband, who had given feedback to her, conceded that the three-part sections sounded better than the unison. I thought this was interesting, since we recently talked about unisons being difficult in class. I bet Ms. Eldred chose a piece with a lot of unison for this group of mostly beginners as a good challenge. They certainly were able to focus on line and unity.

Bella Voce rehearsed their pieces, stopping to clean up a lot of little details. There was a strong sense of focus in the ensemble and a definite common goal, which made it pretty productive.