Bodymind And Voice

The Owner's Manual to the Voice demystifies the voice, enabling singers and all voice professionals - whether actors, broadcasters, teachers, preachers, lawyers, public speakers- to communicate intelligently with physicians and understand dangers, treatments, vocal hygiene and medical procedures.

As the landscape of choral education changes - disrupted by Glee, YouTube, and increasingly cheap audio production software - teachers of choral conducting need current research in the field that charts scholarly paths through contemporary debates and sets an agenda for new critical thought and practice. Where, in the digitizing world, is the field of choral pedagogy moving? Editor Frank Abrahams and Paul D. Head, both experienced choral conductors and teachers, offer here a comprehensive handbook of newly-commissioned chapters that provide key scholarly-critical perspectives on teaching and learning in the field of choral music, written by academic scholars and researchers in tandem with active choral conductors. As chapters in this book demonstrate, choral pedagogy encompasses everything from conductors' gestures to the administrative management of the choir. The contributors to The Oxford Handbook of Choral Pedagogy address the full range of issues in contemporary choral pedagogy, from repertoire to voice science to the social and political aspects of choral singing. They also cover the construction of a choral singer's personal identity, the gendering of choral ensembles, social justice in choral education, and the role of the choral art in society more generally. Included scholarship focuses on both the United States and international perspectives in five sections that address traditional paradigms of the field and challenges to them; critical case studies on teaching and conducting specific populations (such as international, school, or barbershop choirs); the pedagogical functions of repertoire; teaching as a way to construct identity; and new scholarly methodologies in pedagogy and the voice.

This concise book critically examines the intersection of power, privilege, and classical music in higher education through an extensive study of the experiences, training, and background of teachers of musical theatre singing. Mapping the divides within the voice pedagogy field, it shows how despite the growth of non-classical programmes, the teaching of vocal music in the United States continues to be structurally dominated by Western classical music. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and observations of practicing instructors, the author argues that current voice pedagogy training’s classical-centred approach fails to prepare instructors to teach the range of vocal styles needed in the contemporary musical theatre profession. Combining a critical review of existing practices with proposals for change, this book sheds light on a key problem in voice pedagogy today. Based on field research and drawing on both Shulman’s signature pedagogies theory and Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus, capitals, practice, and field, this book will be useful for scholars, researchers, and practitioners of voice pedagogy, higher music education, performance education, cultural studies, music, musical theatre, and theatre studies.

Singing has been a characteristic behaviour of humanity across several millennia. Chorus America (2009) estimated that 42.6 million adults and children regularly sing in one of 270,000 choruses in the US, representing more than 1:5 households. Similarly, recent European-based data suggest that more than 37 million adults take part in group singing. The Oxford Handbook of Singing is a landmark text on this topic. It is a comprehensive resource for anyone who wishes to know more about the pluralistic nature of singing. In part, the narrative adopts a lifespan approach, pre-cradle to senescence, to illustrate that singing is a commonplace behaviour which is an essential characteristic of our humanity. In the overall design of the Handbook, the chapter contents have been clustered into eight main sections, embracing fifty-three chapters by seventy-two authors, drawn from across the world, with each chapter illustrating and illuminating a particular aspect of singing. Offering a multi-disciplinary perspective embracing the arts and humanities, physical, social and clinical sciences, the book will be valuable for a broad audience within those fields.