At 3:05 PM -0700 9/16/11, TXSTNR POP account wrote: >At least you guys know singers who can read at >all. When I took first semester sight singing >an North Texas, the worst readers in the class >were the singers.
Oh, we understand the problem; we just can't do anything about it by ourselves. There are two causes: (1) Music Education in America is catch-as-catch-can, with music ed students "exposed" to a number of approaches and encouraged to use whichever ones appeal to them rather than adopting a single approach and following through with it in a sequential and progressive TEACHING system. Think about what math teaching would be if every year ignored what had been learned the year before!!! That's why 6th graders in Hungary can read music infinitely better than college Sophomores in the U.S.!!! And (2), singers are permitted to get by with pretty voices and parts are pounded out for them on the piano until they finally hit those sightsinging classes at age 18 or 19, when nobody has bothered to teach them basic solfege skills. Or if they have REALLY pretty voices they go on to sing opera, where "voice coaches" continue to pound out the parts for them. By rights we should require good sightreading as a prerequisite before we accepted any student as a college music major, but if we actually did that we wouldn't have any voice majors at all (except the smart ones, many of whom started taking piano at around the age of 7!!). John -- John R. Howell, Assoc. Prof. of Music Virginia Tech Department of Music School of Performing Arts & Cinema College of Liberal Arts & Human Sciences 290 College Ave., Blacksburg, Virginia 24061-0240 Vox (540) 231-8411 Fax (540) 231-5034 (mailto:john.how...@vt.edu) http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/howell/howell.html "Machen Sie es, wie Sie wollen, machen Sie es nur schön." (Do it as you like, just make it beautiful!) --Johannes Brahms _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
