... not to belabor the obvious, but serial intervals are one thing, but simultaneous intervals are another, and they seem to get short shrift in so called "sightsinging" classes (which have never, that I know of, taught anyone to sing at sight!).
I learned sight singing by sight singing... I sang and sang and sang... from an early age, and realized at some point that I could "hear" the intervals when I looked at them.
A few years ago, when we spent three=plus years with the same group of kids in our California recording sessions, laying down tracks of songs for the McGraw-Hill series, we started with a group of about twenty novice singers with good ears, and good voices, and very little music instruction. That basic group of kids averaged recording about 500 songs of the 1400 we did all around the country. Most of them began by learning the songs in rehearsals... even "Hot Cross Buns" and other really SIMPLE songs...but also fairly challenging part songs. Pretty uch by rote repetition, of course.
As we neared the end of the project, and our eight to eleven-year-olds were pushing eleven to fourteen, we discovered that they had gone way beyond learning by rote repetition, way beyond "up, down, stays the same sight-guessing" to actual sight reading. As we ran out of time, we threw them into the studio without rehearsal and discovered that our veterans were terrific little sight readers, without any "sight singing classes" at all.
Of course, that was a rare case, and one that trained only two dozen or so young people. But learning by doing... throwing the baby into the pool to learn how to swim... has its points. I don't know how this would apply to any class structure, but it certainly worked in practice.
Linda Worsley
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