space.template.Choral+Music,+If+music+be+the+Food+of+Love

 The purpose of this lesson was to introduce David Dickau's "If Music Be the Food of Love" to the advanced mixed choral ensemble at my cooperating school for student teaching. The class meets for a total of 35 minutes a day, so lessons need to be quick paced to get through two or three pieces and a warm up. I try and design warm ups in three parts: 1 that focuses on breathing, one on tone production, and one that puts them together in mind with the piece that I am working on first. For example, with this piece, I picked warm ups that required more sustaining of breath, and a rich tone that would be considered more "romantic". For this piece, I knew that the soprano/alto and tenor/bass parts were similar, so I isolated them and let them sing together and by themselves. Once both parts had been sung on neutral syllables, I then had them sing with the words (pronounced carefully). This ended up being a very straightforward lesson.