Season Three
Episode 93
Musical Literacy and Repertoire Selection in the Choral Setting with Dr. Carol Krueger
Dr. Carol Krueger Bio:
Dr. Carol Krueger formerly served as the Director of Choral Activities at Valdosta State University, Emporia State University, and Florida Southern. She also served as the Associate Director of Choral Activities at the University of South Carolina and the University of Montevallo. A native of Wisconsin, Krueger received her bachelor's degree in Music Education from the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh and both an M.M. and D.M.A. in Choral Conducting from the University of Miami.
An active clinician, adjudicator, and guest conductor, Krueger has most recently conducted festivals and honor choirs at the collegiate, high school, and middle levels in many states through the USA. In addition, Dr. Krueger served as the guest conductor of Vivaldi's Gloria in Carnegie Hall (2010), the Adult Chancel Choir and Chamber Singers at Montreat Presbyterian Association of Musicians Conference (2010), and multiple performances of Epcot's Candlelight Processional and Massed Choir Program (2005).
Krueger has presented interest sessions at the American Choral Directors National Convention in New York, the OAKE (Kodály) National Convention in Charlotte, the Southern Division MENC Convention in Charleston, numerous ACDA Division Conferences, the Eastern Division NAFME in Hartford, as well as interest sessions or workshops in twenty seven states. Krueger is widely recognized for her work with music literacy. Oxford University Press publishes her book, Progressive Sight Singing.
TRANSCRIPT OF THE SHOW
Jessica: Carol, thank you for sharing with us today.
Carol: Oh it's an honor to be asked to be a part of your series and for the opportunity to get to talk to those who are your listening crowd.
Jessica: Yes. Well, I know they're in for a treat so I would love for you to share a little bit about how you became interested in choral music.
Carol: Actually I was an instrumentalist through high school and it wasn't really until I went to college that I sang and part of the reason I did was I knew I wanted to do high school things and women were not very accepted in the instrumental world. And so I took my mother's advice and she kept telling me that music was music. And that I could figure it out and might learn to love the voice as much as I did my horn and piano. And sure enough, she was right and it was the right place for me to be. And there's such similarities between them that I also feel lucky to have had the instrumental background because it has served me well in the choral world with major works and other such things and also when you teach sight singing and ear training at the collegiate level you get lal those instrumentalists and many times they're afraid of singing so I think my coming from their background has really helped them get over their fear of using their voices - one of their instruments.
Jessica: What an asset that would be in helping them understand how to train their instrument that maybe they aren't familiar or as familiar with as you probably felt when you switched from the horn.
Carol: Well it puts you out there in a different venue and I've seen that with my students and often they will come back and tell you how their instrumental playing because singing is your first instrument. So you can get everything connected and moving then it's only going to improve your tone on your instrument as well. So yeah - I think it was a benefit. At the time I might not have thought so, but in looking back I can tell you I feel blessed to have had both worlds in my life.
Jessica: I'd love to focus - these are huge topics so we could probably talk hours about this - but to kind of look at musical literacy and then also repertoire selection because I feel like those are such massive areas of choral study that are really important for choir teachers to consider. So if we tackle a little bit of musical literacy, where do you recommend starting in teaching musical literacy to students?
Carol: You really have to start at the beginning as much as teachers might not like to hear that. Students all have holes and so the best thing you can do is to go back to the very beginning because too many teachers approach musical literacy through the eyes and they have to actually be approaching it with the ears because we are an aural art. It's like speaking any language. You absolutely have to understand that language with your ears. You have to hear it. And so that can be a real challenge, especially if you're working with older students. Middle school, high school, collegiate. Your community choir. Your Church choir. Most of them do not read and so that means you have to go back and train the ears.
And that process is a bit slow at times, but I think people would also be surprised at how quickly it can happen. The window closes around age 10 or 11. Prior to that is when we learn any language quick and it's part of our brain mechanism to pick up those sounds quickly. Around 10 or 11 that closes and then you have to hope something was planted beforehand. You blow the dust off and you get going, but it isn't teaching them to look at the staff so much and say, "This is do. This is re. This is mi." That's just low level cognitive. What's difficult is being able to use those sounds and incorporate them. For example, I'm sure you were taught the kitty said meow meow and the dog said woof. And then they showed you the words somewhere down the road and it wasn't even for a while. You learned to use sentences and everything. You were actually having conversations with your parents and friends and you were improvising in the language. So reality is we need to teach our students the sounds and give them to improvise in it before they ever read in it.
I'm going to give you another example. If I asked you to give me the sound of an aardvark, I'm going to guess that you will not be able to do that. Well, that's kind of what we're doing to our kids when we put the music in front of them and they might be able to tell you that's do-mi, but many times they can't sing that it's do-mi. They'll actually sing do-re. And not do-mi, which tells me they don't know what the sound is. We need to spend far more time in music literacy and putting into their ears the various sounds and labeling them so that then I give them the label they can give me back the sound. And then I show them what it looks like in symbols and they'll read very quickly. However, they will not read quickly nor accurately if they don't have those sounds in their ears.
And too many times we're teaching decoding, not literacy. Literacy means that they can not only read, but then they can improvise using all of those sounds and they can take dictation in it and they can audiate in it. That means that they can sit down and read that octavo by themselves, hear every bit of it, and then turn around and sing it to you with just about zero errors. You know that, unfortunately, is not what we're getting at the college level. They can't do those things. They have little to no skills in the area of most of those that I mentioned: dictation, nothing. And most teachers that I meet have never been taught how to take it and do improv. And yet it is the comprehension of what our students knows. Meanwhile we are teaching decoding rather than music literacy. So let me give you an example of decoding.
Many of our choral musicians have had Italian diction, French diction, etc... What we're teaching them there is to decode. So I look at that word and I know what the rules are. And I know in German the first vowel is silent. So then I know what the vowel accent: lieder not lieder in German, but it doesn't mean I understand the word nor can I use the word in a conversation with my friends nor can I write using that word and have an intelligent conversation. I've only been taught to parrot it. And so most decoding is being taught and it is just parroting and it is not that our students are literate; in fact it's far removed from literacy. So unless you're teaching both the dictation, the improv, the audition along with the decoding, the student is really just mimicking; they are not literate. In fact a good percent of the population graduating with degrees in music are not literate. They are illiterate. Cause they're not fluent at dictation and in most cases they never took dictation until they went to college and yet it was in our national standards since 1965. And so one of the things - we have to do with our teachers at all levels is to get them to understand literacy is what we need to be working for and not using the word sight reading because sight reading is a misnomer. You would never say in English, "Take out your book. We're going to sightread Macbeth." We wouldn't do that. You either read or you don't read. There is no in-between unfortunately. So a lot of problem is we don't teach the whole process. They do in language arts and there are a lot of books out now that do the correlation between language arts literacy and music literacy. They are almost identical. And so when we get teachers to say, "Oh I don't want to go to that workshop because it's only for the English teacher." No - it's for us too. And probably more of it is for us than we'd like to admit.
Jessica: Interesting.
Carol: So that's basically in a nutshell the difference between sight-reading or sight singing and literacy. So the book you have in front of you is for the most part doing music literacy. It starts with the ears. It doesn't start with the eyes. And almost all good literacy teaching will start with the ears. Never the eyes. So let me perhaps just back up here momentarily and talk just a bit more about improv. As we've put these sounds into their ears one of the first things we do is we ask them to improv them with a neighbor using only those sounds. It's only then that we'll know that they're ready to go to reading. Let's start from the beginning of the literacy process.
So we take simple patterns. Three notes or more. They're never repeated. They are three different notes. Pitches for tonal and rhythms that are about three beats long. 3-5 beats long. We start with simple ones and gradually increase that. I do it on a neutral. I ask my students to give it back to me on a neutral. Then I label it with the sounds. Solfege or takadimi or something in that nature. I ask them to echo me on it. And then I will come back to them and I do it on a neutral and see if they can label what they hear, but along gate way I'm teaching a lot of rote songs. Never with the text 'cause if I use the text they're not listening to the intrinsic music values. So I'm teaching it on a neutral. I'm using different things with my body and physically to get them to see high and low. I'm working with them on the parts of the beat. I'm working with them on meter and what strong and weak. All the while they're singing those songs. So I'm putting the vocabulary of music into their ears and hopefully if I'm dovetailing the patterns are occurring in those songs, I will do double duty with them and hopefully get them to acquire the vocabulary quicker. Then I go to showing to them in iconics. Bruner was really big on iconics. He said in all academic areas we need to go to iconics before we go to symbols because symbols don't show us an awful lot of what they need to know. Let me give you an example.
If there are four quarter notes, that doesn't begin to tell us one thing about the meter. And that the first and the third beat are more important than the second and the fourth. So I hear a lot of bands and choirs and orchestras pound their notes because they don't understand meter and that is something that should have been taught before they ever went to reading so that they would have felt it and understood it like the lilt of our language that you've learned before you've ever started reading in Kindergarten or First Grade.
In tonal I'd be reading the do-re-mi's written in a line above. Tonal contour there would have the d,r, and m's or whatever that I was teaching them at that point. Would get them to get their eyes to go from left to right as well as up and down. And I have to do this with - I hate to say this to you - college students. Grad students. Who do not have those skills. And some of them will cry when they finally get the skill because no-one worked with their eyes to really coordinate it. So then they felt that they were not smart when in reality they were; they were just perhaps left eye dominant rather than right eye dominant and we won't have time to get into that here, but that is a huge problem with reading and a huge problem with our singers with reading. And iinstrumentalists because we're asking them to read in two direction simultaneously. And in linguistic reading they're only reading one direction. So it is far more complicated than what they will do in linguistic reading. So everything is done with the ears first. (16m 03s)
**MORE TO COME SOON!!**
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Episode 93
Musical Literacy and Repertoire Selection in the Choral Setting with Dr. Carol Krueger
Dr. Carol Krueger Bio:
Dr. Carol Krueger formerly served as the Director of Choral Activities at Valdosta State University, Emporia State University, and Florida Southern. She also served as the Associate Director of Choral Activities at the University of South Carolina and the University of Montevallo. A native of Wisconsin, Krueger received her bachelor's degree in Music Education from the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh and both an M.M. and D.M.A. in Choral Conducting from the University of Miami.
An active clinician, adjudicator, and guest conductor, Krueger has most recently conducted festivals and honor choirs at the collegiate, high school, and middle levels in many states through the USA. In addition, Dr. Krueger served as the guest conductor of Vivaldi's Gloria in Carnegie Hall (2010), the Adult Chancel Choir and Chamber Singers at Montreat Presbyterian Association of Musicians Conference (2010), and multiple performances of Epcot's Candlelight Processional and Massed Choir Program (2005).
Krueger has presented interest sessions at the American Choral Directors National Convention in New York, the OAKE (Kodály) National Convention in Charlotte, the Southern Division MENC Convention in Charleston, numerous ACDA Division Conferences, the Eastern Division NAFME in Hartford, as well as interest sessions or workshops in twenty seven states. Krueger is widely recognized for her work with music literacy. Oxford University Press publishes her book, Progressive Sight Singing.
TRANSCRIPT OF THE SHOW
Jessica: Carol, thank you for sharing with us today.
Carol: Oh it's an honor to be asked to be a part of your series and for the opportunity to get to talk to those who are your listening crowd.
Jessica: Yes. Well, I know they're in for a treat so I would love for you to share a little bit about how you became interested in choral music.
Carol: Actually I was an instrumentalist through high school and it wasn't really until I went to college that I sang and part of the reason I did was I knew I wanted to do high school things and women were not very accepted in the instrumental world. And so I took my mother's advice and she kept telling me that music was music. And that I could figure it out and might learn to love the voice as much as I did my horn and piano. And sure enough, she was right and it was the right place for me to be. And there's such similarities between them that I also feel lucky to have had the instrumental background because it has served me well in the choral world with major works and other such things and also when you teach sight singing and ear training at the collegiate level you get lal those instrumentalists and many times they're afraid of singing so I think my coming from their background has really helped them get over their fear of using their voices - one of their instruments.
Jessica: What an asset that would be in helping them understand how to train their instrument that maybe they aren't familiar or as familiar with as you probably felt when you switched from the horn.
Carol: Well it puts you out there in a different venue and I've seen that with my students and often they will come back and tell you how their instrumental playing because singing is your first instrument. So you can get everything connected and moving then it's only going to improve your tone on your instrument as well. So yeah - I think it was a benefit. At the time I might not have thought so, but in looking back I can tell you I feel blessed to have had both worlds in my life.
Jessica: I'd love to focus - these are huge topics so we could probably talk hours about this - but to kind of look at musical literacy and then also repertoire selection because I feel like those are such massive areas of choral study that are really important for choir teachers to consider. So if we tackle a little bit of musical literacy, where do you recommend starting in teaching musical literacy to students?
Carol: You really have to start at the beginning as much as teachers might not like to hear that. Students all have holes and so the best thing you can do is to go back to the very beginning because too many teachers approach musical literacy through the eyes and they have to actually be approaching it with the ears because we are an aural art. It's like speaking any language. You absolutely have to understand that language with your ears. You have to hear it. And so that can be a real challenge, especially if you're working with older students. Middle school, high school, collegiate. Your community choir. Your Church choir. Most of them do not read and so that means you have to go back and train the ears.
And that process is a bit slow at times, but I think people would also be surprised at how quickly it can happen. The window closes around age 10 or 11. Prior to that is when we learn any language quick and it's part of our brain mechanism to pick up those sounds quickly. Around 10 or 11 that closes and then you have to hope something was planted beforehand. You blow the dust off and you get going, but it isn't teaching them to look at the staff so much and say, "This is do. This is re. This is mi." That's just low level cognitive. What's difficult is being able to use those sounds and incorporate them. For example, I'm sure you were taught the kitty said meow meow and the dog said woof. And then they showed you the words somewhere down the road and it wasn't even for a while. You learned to use sentences and everything. You were actually having conversations with your parents and friends and you were improvising in the language. So reality is we need to teach our students the sounds and give them to improvise in it before they ever read in it.
And too many times we're teaching decoding, not literacy. Literacy means that they can not only read, but then they can improvise using all of those sounds and they can take dictation in it and they can audiate in it. That means that they can sit down and read that octavo by themselves, hear every bit of it, and then turn around and sing it to you with just about zero errors. You know that, unfortunately, is not what we're getting at the college level. They can't do those things. They have little to no skills in the area of most of those that I mentioned: dictation, nothing. And most teachers that I meet have never been taught how to take it and do improv. And yet it is the comprehension of what our students knows. Meanwhile we are teaching decoding rather than music literacy. So let me give you an example of decoding.
Many of our choral musicians have had Italian diction, French diction, etc... What we're teaching them there is to decode. So I look at that word and I know what the rules are. And I know in German the first vowel is silent. So then I know what the vowel accent: lieder not lieder in German, but it doesn't mean I understand the word nor can I use the word in a conversation with my friends nor can I write using that word and have an intelligent conversation. I've only been taught to parrot it. And so most decoding is being taught and it is just parroting and it is not that our students are literate; in fact it's far removed from literacy. So unless you're teaching both the dictation, the improv, the audition along with the decoding, the student is really just mimicking; they are not literate. In fact a good percent of the population graduating with degrees in music are not literate. They are illiterate. Cause they're not fluent at dictation and in most cases they never took dictation until they went to college and yet it was in our national standards since 1965. And so one of the things - we have to do with our teachers at all levels is to get them to understand literacy is what we need to be working for and not using the word sight reading because sight reading is a misnomer. You would never say in English, "Take out your book. We're going to sightread Macbeth." We wouldn't do that. You either read or you don't read. There is no in-between unfortunately. So a lot of problem is we don't teach the whole process. They do in language arts and there are a lot of books out now that do the correlation between language arts literacy and music literacy. They are almost identical. And so when we get teachers to say, "Oh I don't want to go to that workshop because it's only for the English teacher." No - it's for us too. And probably more of it is for us than we'd like to admit.
Jessica: Interesting.
Carol: So that's basically in a nutshell the difference between sight-reading or sight singing and literacy. So the book you have in front of you is for the most part doing music literacy. It starts with the ears. It doesn't start with the eyes. And almost all good literacy teaching will start with the ears. Never the eyes. So let me perhaps just back up here momentarily and talk just a bit more about improv. As we've put these sounds into their ears one of the first things we do is we ask them to improv them with a neighbor using only those sounds. It's only then that we'll know that they're ready to go to reading. Let's start from the beginning of the literacy process.
So we take simple patterns. Three notes or more. They're never repeated. They are three different notes. Pitches for tonal and rhythms that are about three beats long. 3-5 beats long. We start with simple ones and gradually increase that. I do it on a neutral. I ask my students to give it back to me on a neutral. Then I label it with the sounds. Solfege or takadimi or something in that nature. I ask them to echo me on it. And then I will come back to them and I do it on a neutral and see if they can label what they hear, but along gate way I'm teaching a lot of rote songs. Never with the text 'cause if I use the text they're not listening to the intrinsic music values. So I'm teaching it on a neutral. I'm using different things with my body and physically to get them to see high and low. I'm working with them on the parts of the beat. I'm working with them on meter and what strong and weak. All the while they're singing those songs. So I'm putting the vocabulary of music into their ears and hopefully if I'm dovetailing the patterns are occurring in those songs, I will do double duty with them and hopefully get them to acquire the vocabulary quicker. Then I go to showing to them in iconics. Bruner was really big on iconics. He said in all academic areas we need to go to iconics before we go to symbols because symbols don't show us an awful lot of what they need to know. Let me give you an example.
If there are four quarter notes, that doesn't begin to tell us one thing about the meter. And that the first and the third beat are more important than the second and the fourth. So I hear a lot of bands and choirs and orchestras pound their notes because they don't understand meter and that is something that should have been taught before they ever went to reading so that they would have felt it and understood it like the lilt of our language that you've learned before you've ever started reading in Kindergarten or First Grade.
In tonal I'd be reading the do-re-mi's written in a line above. Tonal contour there would have the d,r, and m's or whatever that I was teaching them at that point. Would get them to get their eyes to go from left to right as well as up and down. And I have to do this with - I hate to say this to you - college students. Grad students. Who do not have those skills. And some of them will cry when they finally get the skill because no-one worked with their eyes to really coordinate it. So then they felt that they were not smart when in reality they were; they were just perhaps left eye dominant rather than right eye dominant and we won't have time to get into that here, but that is a huge problem with reading and a huge problem with our singers with reading. And iinstrumentalists because we're asking them to read in two direction simultaneously. And in linguistic reading they're only reading one direction. So it is far more complicated than what they will do in linguistic reading. So everything is done with the ears first. (16m 03s)
**MORE TO COME SOON!!**
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