Keep Up On Your Yard Work
KEEP UP ON YOUR YARD WORK
Picture Spring. Everything turns green, and then the green things turn shaggy. New growth needs cut and trimmed to make one’s lawn pleasing to the eye.
Singing is like lawn work. We want some things to grow and prosper: tone, tuning, phrasing, musicality, etc. We want some things pulled and/or killed, like weeds in the lawn: bad vocal habits of all kinds. And so we find two things are true:
1) The best way to prevent weeds from springing up around your yard is to have such healthy, lush, thick grass that weeds are effectively choked out. Great technique, musicianship, and culture will all keep “the weeds” at bay in your choir.
2) Once we have grown a thick, healthy lawn, it will need cut to look nice. This is how we make music better: we do more, take more action, make more mistakes in order to get growth. Then we trim off the rough edges to reveal something uniform and beautiful.
So the lawn looks great! Then what? Grass always gets longer. Edging along the sidewalk always creeps back towards overgrowth. Just because the lawn was mowed, it doesn’t stay mowed.
Choir Bites Interactive Slides can enhance online/hybrid lesson plans or be used as supplemental assignments. Your singers’ awareness will rise as they engage with these simple, “sticky” concepts! Click here to learn more!
No matter how well you prepare your music, it is never done. It requires constant maintenance. Notes that were once solid will eventually slip away with neglect. Chords that used to ring the rafters will dull if not regularly polished. My singers are in grades 7-12, and they suffer from delusional thoughts like “I got it,” and “didn’t we already do this?” They see songs as being “checked off the list” as if once they reach a performance-ready state, they will always be in such. They might work hard on a song they don’t know, but once that is “done” they turn their attention solely to the next song that is not “done.” In the meantime, the “learned” material is now growing shaggier by the day.
Well-prepared music must be maintained. In order to best capitalize on our HARD WORK, we must remember to keep up on our YARD WORK.
