Singing is a powerful tool for developing musicianship, as anything you learn through singing is automatically internalised. As a result of this, singing removes barriers to learning, allowing you to focus fully on the development of musical skills without the technical distractions posed by getting to grips with an instrument. As Ofsted put it in the 2012 ‘Wider Still and Wider’ report: ‘The importance of singing is clear – not just for participation and enjoyment, but also to improve pupils’ internalisation and understanding of music.’ Of course, your pupils come to you because they want to learn an instrument, and it would be pretty hard to do that through singing alone! But singing can be used to support and accelerate the process of musical skill-building to complement the process of technical development on their chosen instrument.
It is clear that singing is an important part of the musical learning process, but how do you approach this as a ‘non-singing’ instrumental teacher?
The first thing to remember is that it's not like you've never sung before. Even if you think your voice is awful, you will have sung along to a song on the radio, or at least made a half-hearted attempt at ‘Happy Birthday’! If you are a trained instrumentalist, it's unlikely that you will have major problems with your tuning. If you do, in most cases this will be a technical problem that can be corrected with a few weeks of singing lessons. So, assuming that you have an in-tune voice, even if it won't light the world on fire, you're equipped to incorporate singing into your lessons. The key message here is don't be frightened. Your pupils will just assume that it's perfectly ordinary for you and they to be singing as part of their lessons, and they won't be judging you for your vocal performance.
Once you've committed to trying some singing in your lessons, you're going to need to decide what kind of activities and exercises you're going to prepare. The most obvious use for singing is for aural test preparation for certain exam boards that require you to ‘sing back,’ but even if you don't have an exam looming there are plenty of ways to use vocal work effectively in your lessons.
Sometimes, trying to remember how the music goes (whether you're following notation or not) and how to get that music to come out of your instrument correctly is just too difficult to deal with all at once. You can simplify the learning process by singing the piece first and then, when the pupils have internalised it and know it so well that they don't have to think about how the music goes, you can then introduce the instrument back into the equation so that they can focus their thinking on the technique of playing, not remembering, the music.
If you're a group teacher, singing can be a great form of differentiation for all sorts of reasons. For example, if some of your pupils are struggling, you can use the simplifying process above to support them by allowing them to sing while the rest of the group plays. Conversely, if some of your pupils are finding things too easy, but you're still working to bring the rest of the group up to speed and haven't got time to teach them something new on their instrument, why not ask them to vocally improvise over the top of the music. This will develop their ear as they learn how to harmonise, and will allow them to use their creativity to invent more complicated melodies than they are able to play, developing their musicality.
Singing is also useful for ‘busy work.’ Often in choirs, when we're working on one vocal part, we get the other voices to ‘hum’ in their parts. This keeps them on task and also supports the part being worked on, without being obtrusive and confusing it. Nine times out of ten it's not performing the part in isolation that's the problem, it's the confusion caused by trying to fit it in with the rest of the music, so having the other parts gently hummed in while you work is ideal. This technique can easily be applied to instrumental ensemble work, to give you the opportunity to focus on a few players at once without losing the attention of everyone else in the room.
Even if the exam board you use doesn't require singing as part of the aural tests, you may still want to use vocal work to develop aural awareness skills. There are many professional musicians (perhaps you are one) who can sight-read anything, but really struggle to pick up music by ear. This is often because our aural awareness was sacrificed early in our learning on the altar of notation. I once gave a workshop to some higher education music students, in which I asked them to sing up and down the first five notes of a major scale, and some of them couldn't do it without miming the motions they would have to make on their instrument. This suggests that they understood what the task was, and their muscle memory could kick in to play it, but they hadn't really internalised what the first five notes of a scale sounded like, which meant that there was an extra unnecessary step making the process more complex than it needed to be.
In the early stages of learning, swapping our instrument for singing can help with pulse and rhythm understanding as it frees up the hands and feet to mark the beat or reinforce rhythms. As we progress, intervals can be learnt through familiarity with the opening bars of Christmas carols and hymns (which of us doesn't know that ‘Away in a Manger’ starts with a fourth?). We can learn common scale patterns such as major and the various minors through singing – the great thing about the voice is that any major or minor scale pattern is the same to us, it doesn't matter what note it starts on, which is why singers don't do scales in exams. Learning to sing these scales means that we are familiar with the musical patterns before we have to start thinking about where to put our fingers for the rest of the scale in relation to the starting note – another process of simplifying learning.
However and why ever you choose to include singing in your sessions, above all, remember: Singing is fun. Have confidence in your voice and enjoy making music the way that nature intended.
Liz Stafford is also the senior lecturer in business and professional studies at Leeds College of Music, and editor of Primary Music Magazine. Find her on Twitter @DrLizStafford.
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