|
The new school year has got off to an excellent start with eighteen new Grade Sevens, and nine other new students in the senior grades. This brings our total to seventy - and of this number, twenty-three are tenors and basses. This then gives us an excellent balance among the voice parts. Most of the males in grade seven, eight and nine are going through the voice change. Back in the 1950's, especially among the churches of Europe, boy sopranos (who were losing their top notes) were advised to stop singing for a year or two until their voice had stabilized. Fortunately, that view no longer holds. Nowadays, boys are encouraged to sing in a comfortable range - and usually by the ninth grade, the traditional parts of tenor or bass can be commonly assigned. Males undergo a much more dramatic change in their voice than females. Their vocal cords double in length - and as Pythagoras found out in Ancient Greece, if you double the length of a vibrating string, you get the pitch of an octave below. So when men and women sing a melody together, they will normally be singing an octave apart. This is a musical universal - and it holds true whether it's a tribal chant in the Amazon rainforest or a 'Happy Birthday' sung around a family candle-lit cake. Given the myriad of musical cultures on our planet, it is difficult to find a universal that applies to them all. The octave is one such universal - and it all comes down to the inescapable fact of biology and the human body. Malcolm V. Edwards  Comments are closed.
|
Malcolm EdwardsMalcolm Edwards was born in Halifax, England and emigrated to Canada in 1967. He is a graduate of Sheffield College of Education (UK), Trinity College of Music, London, the University of Lethbridge, the University of Montana and has done further graduate work at the University of Northern Colorado. He taught music in junior and senior high school for twelve years in southern Alberta before joining the University of Calgary as a Professor of Music Education in 1980. He retired from the university after thirty-one years of service in 2011. In the community he was affiliated with the Youth Singers of Calgary for 21 years directing the Act Three and Senior divisions. In his retirement, he is now employed as an Adjunct Professor of Music at St Mary’s University, as the Artistic Director of the Calgary Men’s Chorus and as the Senior Choir Director at St John’s Choir Schola. He has held leadership positions within the Alberta Choral Federation, the Association of Canadian Choral Communities, served on the Board of the Alberta Foundation for the Arts and is active as a choral adjudicator and workshop leader in schools and churches. He is the recipient of two awards from the Provincial Federation – one in recognition of advocacy in arts education and the second in recognition of exemplary service to choral music within the Province of Alberta. In 2004 he received recognition from the national body (ACCC) for twenty-five years of service to the Canadian choral community. Archives
November 2024
Categories |
RSS Feed
587-892-7321
© 2024 All Rights Reserved St John Choir Schola