Sing-Up training

In January this year, Glyndebourne Education collaborated with Pegasus Opera and the Royal Opera House to deliver a residency for professional singers and other music practitioners to develop skills to provide singing opportunities for primary school children.

Sing-Up training workshops at Glyndebourne. Photo: David Illman

The project, 'Spread the Tunes', led by Pegasus Opera, is part of the national Sing Up initiative to ‘help kids find their voice’. Eighteen singers from diverse backgrounds spent three days at Glyndebourne in workshops led by Una May Olomalaiye and Jo McNally diversifying their skills and enhancing their ability to share these skills. The overall goal of the project is to create a larger pool of singers (especially black and ethnic minority singers) trained to lead and support singing in primary schools in London and the South East.

One of the singers on the residency, Bobby Jeffrey, has written a blog of his experience for the Glyndebourne website.

Links

www.singup.org
www.pegopera.org
www.royaloperahouse.org

Comments

I have performed with Pegasus Opera for many years and it was lovely to be given this opportunity to learn how to work in schools.

On the first day of the workshop at Glyndebourne, I couldn’t believe that I was sitting with all these people to learn to teach, having never considered teaching music seriously before.

Between the two great tutors, Jo McNally and Una May Olomolaiye, we gained a lot of insight into the various approaches we could use to teach and inspire children and every exercise we practised on the first day was adaptable for different age groups.

For the earlier Key Stage 2 children our first exercise was on the first five notes of the scale together with hand shapes and movements. The first group exercise was to create five ways of creating a circle flowing from one to the other and connecting them to each degree of the scale.

We’d also been asked to prepare an aria and vocal exercise we liked, I don’t think any of us felt terribly confident about our choice as we didn't know how it was to be used. We were eventually singing eighteen different songs and arias all at the same time.

I’m happy that I managed to remain fairly relaxed throughout the day. I’m often thrown by rhythm exercises so I’m interested in different approaches. I was again reminded of how important movement and feeling rhythm is for singing.

By the time we’d reached the end of the first day of our sing up training program, I couldn’t remember what we’d done first thing, or the order, but I certainly knew the reason for the exercises!

01-Feb-2008 16:34

Bobby Jeffrey

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