Observation #1

My first observation of a lesson was with Dr. Hepworth teaching Amanda Marvin.  Amanda has a beautiful soprano voice.  She is currently a senior in her undergrad and studying to be a music educator.  The lesson started with lip buzzing, skipping up and down the scale.  Then there where "E's" and "Ah's" starting in the middle of her range and going up, then coming down.  During this Dr.Hepworth instituted the mirror and had Amanda watch herself warming up.  This helps the student with their preconception; they realize what their mouth and face is doing and then they can work on fixing the shape.  After about five to ten minutes of warming up the lesson moved on to working on the repertoire.
  She spent about seven to ten minutes on three different songs.  At the beginning of each song Dr. Hepworth either reminded Amanda of potential mistakes or the pronunciation of certain words.  After that Amanda started singing while Dr. Hepworth either sung along with her to help pitch and musicality, or listened and stopped to correct small mistakes.  There was always more positive feed back then negative.  I believe this encourages the student to be better and makes correcting the negative seem easier. I know in my instrument lessons, the positive always builds my confidence and makes me strive for perfection.  The mood of the entire lesson was very exciting.  I believe it is up to the teacher to set this mood and Dr. Hepworth does a great job at it.
Each song in this lesson brought up a different aspect of singing and preforming.  There was work on rhythm, body language, pronunciation, focusing on the head voice, and even some IPA.  I found many similarities between a voice lesson and my clarinet lessons.  There is a basic set up of warming-up then spending equal increments of  time on each repertoire piece.  Singers although do have more pieces but the instrumental weekly etudes help balance that out.