THE ENSEMBLE SOUND: TOWARDS A CURRICULUM FOR DEVELOPING ENSEMBLE- BASED SINGING STRATEGIES by Kellie Motter Submitted to the faculty of the Jacobs School of Music in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree, Doctor of Music Indiana University December 2020 Accepted by the faculty of the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Music Doctoral Committee ______________________________________ Dominick DiOrio, Research Director ______________________________________ Carol Vaness, Chair ______________________________________ Brian Gill ______________________________________ Mary Ann Hart December 10, 2020 ii Copyright © 2020 Kellie Motter iii To Ms. Betty iv Acknowledgements This document exists because I am lucky to be surrounded by brilliant minds, generous mentors, and ever-supportive loved ones. I want to thank my research committee for embracing this topic and offering encouragement and guidance when I needed it. To Profs. Hart and Gill, I am so grateful to share this research with two professors who I have greatly admired throughout my time at IU. To Carol, thank you for your love and support over five years of instruction and guidance. A special, enormous thank you to Dr. Dominick DiOrio for guiding me on the logistics, structure, and content for this paper with an expert hand, seasoned wisdom, and eternal patience. Dr. DiOrio, if not for your help, this paper would be a tangle of incoherent ramblings with way, way too many em dashes. Thank you to my friends, colleagues and mentors who shared their time and knowledge with me over Skype, phone, Facetime, Zoom. To Dr. Edward Maclary, thank you for letting me be one of your forever students and offering your insights and repertoire suggestions. Lastly and most importantly, thank you to my parents—my earliest and most valuable teachers—for encouraging me and empowering me throughout this entire writing process. I love you both! v Table of Contents Acknowledgements........................................................................................................................... v Table of Contents ............................................................................................................................. vi List of Appendices ..........................................................................................................................vii Chapter 1 : Introduction .................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 2 : Review of Related Materials .......................................................................................... 6 Chapter 3 : Synthesis of Research .................................................................................................. 20 Chapter 4 : Toward An Ensemble Singing Curriculum................................................................ 109 Bibliography ................................................................................................................................. 127 vi List of Appendices Appendix A. List of Interviewees.................................................................................................117 Appendix B. Course Syllabus & Schedule...................................................................................118 Appendix C. Suggested Repertoire...............................................................................................125 Appendix D. Selected Course Readings.......................................................................................126 vii 1 Chapter 1: INTRODUCTION In many University settings today there exists something of an unfortunate, unspoken schism between two closely related departments: the Voice department and the Choral department.1 Undergraduate singers receive the entirety of their technical vocal training learning operatically-based solo singing from their applied voice professors, yet spend several hours a week in choral ensembles, where they are required to blend, reshape, and refocus their instruments to match other singers’ voices with very little personal guidance or pedagogical explanation. In today’s collegiate choral atmosphere, methods of choral singing may be conveyed expertly from the most brilliant of choral conductors, but as most university choral ensembles are comprised of at least 30 singers, rarely are such skills developed on a smaller-scale or individual level. In singers who struggle to incorporate these methods on their own, this gap in concrete pedagogical knowledge and personalized coaching can result in a perceived inability to perform certain styles of music. Up until recently, many choral singers formulate their own technical process for singing in a choir—they draw knowledge from the directions they hear in solo voice lessons, in vocal pedagogy classes, and from the language they hear from their choral directors. In fact, many leading ensemble singers today feel as though they were largely self-reliant in developing the working concept of their ensemble voice. Oftentimes, however, young singers struggle to assimilate language from their choral director and voice teacher, as the demands can sometimes exist in direct conflict with one another. This confusion creates singers who automatically decide that they “don’t have a voice for choir” and they miss out on potential musical opportunities. Worse still, a student who unsuccessfully attempts to replicate a choral sound with little 1 Sharon A. Hansen, Allen Henderson, Scott McCoy, Donald Simonson, and Brenda Smith, "On the Voice: Choral Directors Are from Mars and Voice Teachers Are from Venus: The Top Ten Complaints from Both Sides of the Aisle (or ‘The Farmer and the Cowman Should Be Friends’)," The Choral Journal 52, no. 9 (2012): 52. 2 knowledge of how the vocal mechanism works can inadvertently create a great deal of tension in their singing.2 This tension (and subsequent vocal abuse) can easily slip by unnoticed in a choral rehearsal, where the choral director is busy managing and listening to other singers.3 For voice teachers and professors, their primary goal is, in general, to instill in their students a working technique that is reliable, healthy, sustainable, and flexible. Today’s voice students deserve the opportunity to build a modified technical framework for singing in an ensemble that will allow for healthy, sustainable singing and open up a greater variety of professional opportunities—this is especially lucrative for young singers who may not be ready to tackle professional operatic roles, as the bulk of their early professional responsibilities is comprised of primarily ensemble singing—collegiate choirs, church jobs, opera choruses, the occasional choral solo, etc. Indeed, the quantification of a healthy “ensemble voice” is critical for young singers, their voice teachers, and their choral conductors, whose choice of rehearsal language and personal understanding of the ensemble vocal mechanism can make or break this technique.4 In addition to pursuing technical excellence, building collaborative musical and leadership skills is essential to the development of today’s version of the gigging artist, who regularly balances multiple regional and international engagements while collaborating with singers, conductors, directors, and artistic staff from diverse backgrounds and ideologies, frequently spending multiple months of the year on the road. Through exploring musicality and collaborative etiquette in small, intimate chamber ensemble settings, young singers can discover and nurture musical leadership skills that will carry them beyond the choral rehearsal and into 2 Hilary Apfelstadt, Loretta Robinson, and Marc Taylor, "Building Bridges among Choral Conductors, Voice Teachers, and Students," The Choral Journal 44, no. 2 (September 2003): 26. 3 Ibid., 26. 4 Ibid., 30. 3 their careers as professional soloists, giving them confidence in their individual artistry and in communicating effectively with their collaborators. With prominent American choral ensembles such as Roomful of Teeth, Seraphic Fire, Skylark Ensemble, and The Crossing gaining worldwide recognition, universities and music schools are just beginning to acknowledge the value of a healthy ensemble technique and the need for a curriculum surrounding the genre of choral music—the University of Southern California has recently developed undergraduate and graduate degree programs in Choral Music, the University of Redlands offers a Master’s degree in Vocal Chamber Music, Seraphic Fire leads a Professional Choral Institute through the Aspen Music Festival and School, and a number of colleges in Europe (including the University of York and the Royal Conservatoire of Hague, to name a few) offer postgraduate certificate programs in Ensemble Singing.5 As many smaller universities might lack the funds to sustain an entire degree program and/or multi-course curriculum around ensemble singing, the inclusion of a semester-long workshop course in ensemble singing methods would bridge that gap and provide a beneficial resource to undergraduate and graduate singers. To formulate this curriculum for a semester-long workshop course in ensemble singing, my research takes on two distinct components—a review of existing research surrounding ensemble singing strategies and an IRB-approved research study involving interviews with choral conductors, voice teachers, and, most importantly, with singers who balance careers