Our first meeting was a great beginning.

Let me summarize:
The purpose of the class is to teach you how to sing harmony. Like the story about teaching a man to fish, my intention is not to give fish, nor even to fish with you, but to teach you how to fish. What that means specifically is that if I teach you specific parts to sing for specific songs, you will get more familiar and skilled at singing harmony. But you would still primarily be dependent on someone else writing the parts for you. I want to teach you how to hear harmonies, how to recreate harmonies, and how to create harmonies.

If I teach you all the parts, correct all the mistakes, and get everyone to do the right things then you will just be choir members, maybe well-trained, but not know how to do anything except what you're given, or have learned by rote. Certainly that would increase musical proficiency. This is what is traditionally done in lessons, in music instruction, even in music schools. But rarely does this approach, by itself, create musicians.

So my intention is to combine rote learning, experiential learning, and music theory. I really do know the value of experiential learning as you know from our voice lessons which are certainly experiential. I will be making lots of adjustments based on our experience together. So trust me, I can hear what is happening, what is needed to learn, and will be creating exercises to give you experiences that will help you learn. And I will be more specific about assigning exploratory exercises that you can learn from on your own. And that will include listening and watching assignments!

And I will challenge you to learn what I refer to as music theory so that you are more literate, know what you are doing, and understand what is going on in music so you can experience music much more deeply, appreciate music much more fully, and create music much more powerfully.

I hope you enjoy and look forward to more exploration.