Advice needed from those w/ experience w/ large children choirs!
  • Stella611
    Posts: 112
    Is there anyone out there who has worked quite a bit with large children choirs??
    Context:
    Since I began 3 yrs ago, we have now established a children's choir program that has 60+ children involved. This is only the 2nd year of the program for the children!
    And this is really a challenging venture for me since my degree was concentrated on "church music", not music education.

    The first year, I focused mainly on teaching them chant notation, Ward method exercises to improve tuning (I just have the 1st Ward method book), and they learned a lot of chant hymns for advent, Christmas, and Easter.

    So some big questions I have:
    1) How do work with a a group where most know quite a bit, but then a few who do not? How do you balance what to teach them about music theory/notation when you have a large disparity between kids within a same choir?
    Having a separate rehearsal for these less knowledgeable kids is not an option, and I doubt I could get some of these older kids to want to sit in with the younger group even for learning purposes, because then they would be rehearsing for 2 hours straight, which is a bit much for children of this age, I think.

    Each choir meets for an hour by the way, and back to back rehearsals.

    2) What would be the best resources for systematically teaching about modern notation, scales, etc? (I use the Gregorian Chant Workbook for chant, so I feel confident with that).
    At what pace do you move? How to keep a momentum building, and how much theory should you really teach to kids ages 9/10+? How do you balance the time with learning music for the liturgy and trying to teach theory?

    We are a traditional parish, so just keep that in mind with giving advice. The only music we sing in english would normally be entrance/closing hymns.
  • Chris Garton-Zavesky
    Posts: 6,902
    Kimberley,

    I hope that Mary Ann Carr Wilson will chime in here, soon, since she is at an FSSP apostolate and has success under her belt.

    In any event, since I'm not a complete stranger to the topic, let me offer some thoughts.

    1) To succeed with children, one does not need a degree in Music Education! I don't have one, but I successfully taught a choir of mostly-non-Catholic kids to sing Credo I -- recently. Sure, it took an oppressively long time, but that is the result of having other fish in the pan.

    2) Years ago (21, I think) I was asked to start a children's choir in my parish (vernacular Mass). When I followed the advice of the "Director of Early Childhood Education", the children were miserable, I was exhausted, and we accomplished little or nothing of value. When I decided to disregard the free advice, things improved. Then, yesterday, a group of young people came to sing in my parish for the Requiem of a mother they knew. None of them had ever sung a requiem, but they remembered much from a chant class I taught to the homeschool choir 3 or 4 years ago, and mastered the details with great speed. The "regular" choir was there to help, but the newcomers were an asset, not a liability. If you start with small-enough chunks, the young sponges can absorb it well, and the older ones (I think the oldest was 15) can use their developed brains to master the work.

    3) If you ask the children to sing the Ordinary, and add Propers later, they will become comfortable with the notation before they have to see some of the trickier stuff.

    4) Have them sing for Mass as regularly as they can, because this will give the children a sense of accomplishment as well as experience.
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