Singing Songs

 

Watching children playing games, we often realise how effortlessly music, dance and speech play together: skipping, jumping, swirling around is given spontaneous accompaniment by some voice sounds or even a song; telling a spontaneously invented story is often not just spoken, but sung in an individual tonality not connected to our major/minor system. 

Starting from those natural conditions in a teaching situation means to develop singing out of children‘s play. Playsongs invite children to dive immediately into their rich imagination, playing characters, using props to transform themselves, playing instruments to emphasise and underline their gesture in singing the song. The child wants to be addressed in all its possiblities and in doing that, it develops its emotional, social, sensual, bodily-kinesthetic, mental and musical abilities.

 

Adults often regret their loss of spontaneity. They are suffering from judgement of their individual expression, but at the same time feel a strong longing for visiting these places of free play with voice and movement again. Starting with movement and breath and getting the feeling to be„in the body“ can free the individual voice and strengthen self confidence by participating in a group situation: Everybody gives his/her voice in the song which connects a group communally. Explorative and improvisational steps fascilitate the access to songs from different ethnological backgrounds, canons, circlesongs, seasonal songs ...

 

Advanced singers in choirs experience in this kind of work a playful and new access

to singing by exploring possibilities how body awareness can inspire their voice.

It can also be a welcoming change to learn a song not by concentrating on a written

score, but by staying in the previously built up body awareness: feeling, listening,

watching - and going with the flow of the melody.