The Ontario Music Educator’s Conference FORTE 2004

THE CHANGING MALE VOICE

James Pinhorn, Presenter

The only thing better than singing is more singing...

said by the late Ella Fitzgerald

Common problems when dealing with changing male voices:

VOCAL PROBLEMS -
• male sopranos in vocal transition. Should they sing with the males or the females?

This is a sensitive problem, puberty hasn’t hit yet. The rule here is keep them
singing. Make this their choice completely, if they choose to sing the Soprano part
than that’s ok, if they choose to be with the guys then they can still sing the melody
or do the bass or tenor part in their own voice if it is comfortable. Feeling
comfortable in the choir is key here.

• dealing with the basement boys. What to do with boys whose voices have
changed but they can’t yet match pitch?

The problem here is partially vocal and partially societal/cultural. Let’s deal
with vocal issues first. The basement boy problem is caused by either inexperience
and poor training when they were younger. It can also be that their voice changed
quite recently and they haven’t been able to find their “new” voice yet. What is
important to recognize here is that this is trainable, pitch matching is most often not
an ABILITY, it is a skill that is developed over time.

VOCAL solutions:
Go heavy on the warmups. If you are skimping time in the warm up to work on the
music, the basement boys will not match pitch. A logical progression for warm ups is
the following, the skills are stackable, meaning one level supports the next...

BODY (Warmup activities that energize the whole body first, mutual massage,
stretching up and down, shoulder rolls, head rolls. Then warm up activities that
energize the facial muscles, kissing sounds, lip smacks, rub the face vigorously)

BREATH Warm up activities that energize the diaphragm and focus on the two kinds
of breath support -
Support for LEGATO singing, sustain the letter “s”, hold for 4 counts, for 8 counts...
(example 1)
Support for staccato singing, use “s”, “f”, “ch” in rhythmic patterns. Also rhythmic
phrases “the tip of the tongue, the teeth, the lips” or take phrases from the pieces
you are working on. (example 2)

PLACEMENT (This is the area that is often missed the most.) Have males embrace
the falsetto voice. Have them sigh from the top down in their “female” voice and
find a middle C in a head tone using the vowel Oo or Oh which are excellent head
tone vowels. (example 3) Until they can do this successfully, go no further as there
isn’t much hope for pitch matching. Work from the TOP DOWN for the first 5
minutes of vocalizing... using descending scales, descending arpeggios. (example
4) Talk about lifting the voice, and have them place their hands on their face to
FEEL the vibrations.

VOWEL (Finally begin working on the 5 main singing vowels:)

“EE, AY, AH, OH and OO”

On a single tone sing “Mee May Mah Moh Moo”, descending. (example 5)
The last stage is to use the head tone you have now established to do ascending
work:
Arpeggios on Zee ee ee AH and then a descending scale. (example 6)
For other ascending scale/arpeggio exercises see (example 7).

MUSICAL PROBLEMS -

• repertoire, should I use SAB or SATB music? At what point should I introduce
SATB music? Where do I find GOOD SAB music, is there any?

There are two concerns here. Your own choices in terms of repertoire are very
important. If your library is like mine there are tons of really bad SAB arrangements
in your filing cabinets. If you can seek the funds out from your school, aim to buy
at least one new SAB piece every year and then chuck and old one out. There are
some amazing pieces now available for SAB, and they are composed as originals
not remakes. In a nutshell, buy some new music. Do not be afraid of SAB or even
2 part or unison music, just make sure it is GOOD music. Bach’s BIST DU BEI MIR
sung in unison can be a wonderful experience for a young choir, and the benefits
of boys singing in unison in terms of their confidence may outweigh your needs to
get them split into parts before next year’s course.

There is natural progression through the younger grades that may or may not have
been taught to your students. If these skills are missing, you may need to backtrack
and reteach older concepts as you would in any other course of study:
Grade 1/2 Unison Singing/Pitch Matching
Grade 3/4 Rounds and Partner songs (Polyphonic textures) introduced
Grade 5/6 Partner Songs and Polyphonic 2 part singing
Grade 7/8 Homophonic singing is introduced
(NOTE - singing harmony in homophony is much harder for students than
polyphony where they have their own melody which is quite different from the
other)

You might want to survey your students as to how much of the above itinerary
actually happened to them in grade school and that will dictate much of your
repertoire for the first few months of school.

SOCIETAL/CULTURAL PROBLEMS:

• There aren’t enough boys in my choir, they don’t think it is cool. There doesn’t
seem to be effective singing taught to the boys in my feeder schools.

Part of the problem of boys in choir is cyclical. There aren’t enough boys who have
the courage to sign up for vocal music at this young age because it “isn’t cool”.
Boys at this age need a good male vocal role model, if you are a female teacher
teaching males this is doubly difficult. What boys need are other boys in the choir,
lots of them, and the opportunity to hear boys who are older than they are, singing
effectively for vocal and peer group reasons. This is an endless circle of unsuccess
in some schools.

Another problem is that society provides very few good vocal role models for boys
in singing, this is not true of girls. They grow up listening to pop singers who use
their head tone and they sing all the time with their peers, it is acceptable, even
expected in society for girls to do so. If you listen to commercials, boys voices
when they do sing are not exactly what we want boys in our choir to use.

SOLUTIONS:

Create a Positive Peer Culture

There are two possible solutions here. Given the fact that boys do not have good
role models and are relatively untrained in their younger years, the only solution is
to do FEEDER school work. A long term program of visiting the feeder schools,
performing for them and working alongside the teachers there will pay off in droves
over 3 or 4 years. As more boys get used to you coming to visit, more will join and
as more will join, then more will join.
Another solution is to get older boys in your vocal program to work with the younger
students and to visit the feeder schools with you. It is especially effective if these
same older students can work with SPORTS teams at the feeder school as well.
When younger boys see that these jocks also sing, they will have much more
courage to sign up.

If boys in your school are not joining choir because your practices conflict directly
with sports teams, visit your Phys Ed department and discuss a time share situation.
They attend 1/2 your practise and 1/2 theirs, most teachers help each other.

My overall advice:

THIS group of kids, THIS school, THIS year.

Try not to allow external concerns and expectations to effect your work with your
choir. Worries about what your choir sounded like last year, or with previous
teachers/conductors, worries about placing in festivals as highly as you have in the
past, worries about how you “rank” in comparison to the school across the street;
these all negative influences on your rehearsal environment.

Each year your choir is brand new, and isn’t that one of the BEST things about our
job, it is why we have chosen not to work in an assembly line for a living. There is
never much carry over from year to year in choral music so forget about it. Deal
with the PROGRESS of this group of students, and enjoy the PROCESS of working
with them, forget about the past and look forward to the culminating performance of
the work you have done with THIS group of students. Praise them for improvement
and rejoice in the fact that they have chosen to be courageous and sing in front of
others, truly a risk taking activity.

Don’t worry, be happy...

Bobby McFerrin