Becoming an Artist: Interpretation, performance, and a lifetime of singing (textbook)

Becoming an Artist delves into the depths of the music, working out ideas and experience-inducing exercises that help you lead your students into richer expressiveness – a deep and satisfying experience.

Click here to view the Table of Contents for Becoming an Artist.

While integrated with the vocal techniques described in the books comprising the Excellence in Singing series and integrated with our animated videos: Breath, Vocal Folds, Vocal Tract, Resonance, and The Human Voice, this text offers a plethora of tools and ideas you can give students about what to do with a new score and begin to work as an artist. Like the other books in the critically acclaimed Excellence in Singing series, it is part of the integrated vocal pedagogy multimedia platform, so it follows the basic pattern of essays followed by pragmatic exercises, which allows you to mix and match the materials to build a curriculum suited to your precise needs. It helps you help your students make fine distinctions about what to notice and respond to in the score and within themselves – all in a systematic series of principles that are easy to grasp, yet profound to implement. Throughout, there is a tone of exploration and self-expression, a tone of reverence toward what it means to become an artist.

It begins with ideas and exercises for working with the vocal line, giving you a smooth connection between technical execution and musical expression.

The next section connects the structure of story to interpreting a song, giving you tools to teach your students a framework for finding the dramatic and cohesive elements in the music and text.

It then includes an innovative section for integrating the many parts – the technical, musical, dramatic, emotional, psychological aspects of the work – into a gestalt of the final expression. These exploratory exercises are fun, interesting, and often profound in what they reveal and what they galvanize in the performer.

It then includes a full section on performance – the act of walking out in front of an audience and creating something special and memorable. Fun and interesting stuff.

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To get a sense of how Becoming an Artist fits into whole platform, consider following these links, especially the sample chapter Breath, which follows the essay with exercises pattern of nearly all the written materials:

Multimedia Learning Platform