Here is an exercise I use with the pupils at a performing arts school.
This is about developing the students aural skills and their internal awareness of pitch and intervals through vocal improvisation. Use the following as a guide that you can adapt suitably for your own group of students.
1) Warm up and introduce a key (or indeed mode, depending on students’ ability) by singing up and down a scale using sol-fah. I find that B flat major is a good key for the majority of vocal ranges. Sing up and down in sequential 3rds or go ‘doh-ray, doh-me, doh-fah’ etc…whatever you fancy, to establish a tonality from which to work. B flat is the campfire around which we are going to sing.
…Now for the candles…
2) Ask the students to spread around the studio or classroom, standing in their own space, ideally not facing anyone. Once they are standing ready to sing ask them to put out one hand in front of them as if they were holding a candle that is yet to have a flame.
3) You are holding the only lit candle, and this is the point where the metaphor of many candle begins to make sense. As one flame lights many candles so you will go around the room giving each student a flame: a note for them to sing, which in this example is any note from the scale of B flat. They will hold this note, breathing when they need to until everyone has a note. Their indication to you and each other is to clasp the imaginary candle with both hands.
4) You should now have a large cluster chord. This static chord will now gradually break loose as you give an indication to one pupil at a time for them to freely improvise singing up and down the scale, using any vowel or intervals they may choose, sustained or staccatto.
5) Bring the overall dynamic down to a more hushed volume and pick out 3 or 4 singers go gather in the middle. They will now sing, as directed by you, the chorus of ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’, backed by the tapestry of B flat major. Indeed many spirituals or folk songs would work well for this.
6) Once everyone has had a chance to sing in the middle ask the students to move into a big circle while continuing to improvise. The task now is to see if they can, as a group, ‘agree’ on the same note. By this I mean that they eventually unravel the many notes and converge onto one note. Or, if you are not yet tired of the metaphor, they are now one united flame.
7) When this has been achieved ask one singer to sing the chorus to ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’ over this one sustained note, bringing everbody off once s/he has finished.
Dr. Jonathan Lee
