Técnicas De Canto

National Schools of Singing and Their Impact on Teaching Vocal Pedagogy and Literature Rachel J. Holland Christopher Newport University 1 University Place Newport News, VA 23602 The teacher of vocal academic courses in America faces a unique challenge in Western music. Western classical music was born and developed centuries ago and has a long standing tradition in Europe, while the UnitedStates’ tradition can only boast a relatively short lifespan. America’s legacy in Western classical music has only truly come forward within the last century, inheriting the genre from the Western Europeans, including the styles and tendencies that grew from each country’s sensibilities and unique national personalities.
In the arena of vocal music, we have inherited the rich vocal tradition of Italianopera, the high romantic style from Germany, the rich impressionistic style from France. American music, therefore, “has become as eclectic as the cultures which make up her population.” 1 While American composers have benefitted from selecting the very best from each nationalistic style, American composers have struggled to find unifying characteristics. It is just within the past generation’slifetime that composers have been trained in America. It was more common in the years previous, that aspiring composers would travel to study with the great instructors in Europe. With the emergence of highly rigorous music conservatories in the United States, it has become commonplace for young American composers to receive most if not all their compositional training within the United States.Composers like Samuel Barber, Leonard Bernstein, and Dominick Argento received their formal education almost entirely in conservatories within the United States. While these three composers are thought of as distinctly American in their compositional personalities, each has elements of European styles scattered throughout their music.
1 Carol Kimball. Song: A Guide to Art Song Style and Literature.Revised Edition. Milwaukee: Hal Leonard Corporation, 2005. Presented at the 17th Annual Convention of the Global Awareness Society International, May 2008, San Francisco, CA, USA
As a reflection of the eclecticism of American composition, so has the North American school of singing become a mixture of technique and methods. Richard Miller states:
The “melting pot,” … might be assumed to haveproduced a uniquely American vocal ideal. Such is not the case, … coexistent threads of vocal pedagogy are clearly visible. There is no American national school of singing because teachers trained in each of the national vocal traditions have continued to go their diverse ways; within American pedagogy there is less unity of approach than in any of the major countries of Western Europe.2With so manydiffering viewpoints on healthy technical production within the American academic system, the teacher of vocal academics faces many challenges, particularly in the instruction of vocal pedagogy and vocal literature. The ideology of nationalistic pedagogy is inseparable from the national style that it reflects. Undoubtedly, each technique was born from the necessity to sensitively interpret thecomposer’s intent and fit the tonal aesthetic ideals of the intended audiences.
2 Richard Miller. National Schools of Singing: English, French, German, and Italian Techniques of Singing Revisited. Lanham, MD and Oxford: Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1997, 200. 3 Ibid.
Surely it need not be argued that diversity with regard to the technical aspects of tone production exists among singers. It must beequally apparent that the technical means expressed within various pedagogies have developed in response to specific aesthetic goals. 3The problems are two-fold for the teacher of pedagogy and literature: the successful navigation of the student’s pre-conceived notion of sound technique when teaching pedagogy as well as the student’s already established taste when teaching literature. It is...