Princeton High School Junior Varsity Choir, March 23, 2016

    The same day, March 23^rd, directly after concert band, Mr. Crawford moves down the hall to teach the Junior Varsity Choir from 9:25 until 10:40. Here, he was also preparing the group for their spring concert which was coming up soon. Their warm-ups came out of warm-up book called Building Beautiful Voices, in which they did warm-ups number 3, 5, 9a, and 53. These warm-ups in order, focused on freedom and relaxation, tone quality, and synthesis. They worked on three pieces, with the first being The Cloths of Heaven. They worked on measures 1 through 25 and measures 27 through 46, where he first had the sopranos sing their part, then he worked with the altos, and then the men, who are all considered basses because there are only 5 of them.

    Then he had them all sing together, SAB. He had worked with each group of singers separately to make sure that all of their individual vowels were matching before he added them all together. He did this same thing in their next two pieces, El Vito and Elijah. The students in junior varsity choir are less experienced singers, but enjoy singing, so I could tell that they were definitely trying to take Mr. Crawford’s advice and apply it to what they were doing. Mr. Crawford, being vocal music education and really enjoying choral music, gets very into his teaching and finds the expressiveness of vocal music to be one of the most important aspects. It’s really motivating to watch someone who loves music as much as Mr. Crawford teach it.
   Separating the different voices and working with them individually was a really important aspect in developing the sound of the choir. By making them sound unison separately, when he put them back together, their sound sounded that much more mature. When they had to focus on vowels though, they were really good at producing the right vowels sounds when they used hand motions to remind themselves of the proper shape of their mouths, but as soon as their hands went back down, they forgot what they were doing. Having them rely on their hands to mentally remind them what shape their mouth was supposed to make probably should have been used earlier in the teaching of the song and weened out sooner as they approached their concert. To adapt into instrumental teaching, I like how vocalists have to use the same vowels to sound mature and in unison, and I would like to use that same idea when it comes to the intonation in between instruments. The hand gestures they used were similar to the ones that I used last semester in Milliwomen, so it was a concept that I was familiar with.