What has happened to our choir programs?

The course I am developing for the High School Course Exchange combines vocal pedagogy and choral music with digital audio and video. It is inspired by the song "I'd like to teach the world to sing, in perfect harmony . . . "

With the current push in education to focus on "serious" subjects, many schools have pushed fine arts to the side or out. Vocal music is neglected even more than band. In Texas (where I currently live), this is partly explained by the need for marching bands to play during football games. ;)

Also, it seems that many choir programs imploded on themselves. They cherished only competitions and winning while at the same time evolved into dumping grounds for apathetic students who just needed fine arts credit. And since scheduling often does not allow students to commit to multiple music groups, the band, choir, and orchestra teachers found themselves fighting each other for the the most talented students.

Rather than reinventing vocal music courses, schools dropped them completely.

Another factor that always hurts vocal music education everywhere is the myth that either you are born with the ability to sing, or you are not. That simply is not true. Singing is a learned skill and it is scientific. If your body (the instrument) does X + Y + Z(A+B), you will have a pleasant sounding singing voice, the exception being rare. Now there are those who for some reason seem to be born doing X + Y + Z(A+B). Their singing is beautiful, but they do not know why. Still, anyone can transform their bodies into singing instruments.

In my online course, I am going to teach the "Five Things to Help You Sing Better." Plus we will learn about what to do with vowels and consonants.

Students will work on solo pieces and choral works. They will learn how to record themselves in audio and video. We will use multi-track recording software to create our own online choir. Another possibility could present itself if a large enough group of students were in geographical proximity to each other. They could get together for a concert.

Someday, teleconferencing technology will exist to allow for an online live choir. Currently I think there is probably too much lag time for it to work. Let me know if I am wrong here! There are many musicians performing with each other remotely on YouTube already.

We will use the Musix Live DVD (free and fabulous), http://www.musix.org.ar/en/index.html for all of our software needs. A student could mange the course quite well with the Musix DVD, a flash drive, earphones, their computer's internal mic, and a webcam.

Another resource we will use are the thousands of archived copyright free musical works available on the Internet. Also, I will encourage students to use their own compositions licensed under the Creative Commons license.