Choral Workshop – Taiwan Style!

On Tues 25th August, we had the privilege of participating in a choral workshop led by Dr Yu-Wen Pan. Pan (this is how she introduced herself, I am not taking liberties), is an Assistant Professor at the National Taiwan Normal University. She teaches future music teachers. It was a full on night for us, but lucky John got to relax all evening!

We started off with a warm up. This reminded me of my university studies in theatre, as it encompassed our whole body. We did some breathing, but then moved on to “shaking out” and massaging our body, to release the tension of the day and enable us to focus on our voices. It progressed to rhythmic pattern mimicry, which started our diaphragms working in the correct way and our ears to work harder. The warm up also included what my singing teacher used to call “sirens.” The exercise of singing “oo” (kind of like an ambulance siren” from your low to high register and back down again, really opens up the throat.

We sang “Benedicum Domine” for Pan and then workshopped through it as she suggested how we could improve it. Pan asked us to try singing our parts without words, to the sound “ah.” Then, when we put the words back in, to keep our mouths in the same “ah” shape, so that the vowels didn’t get squashed. I found this technique really helpful, and it definitely improved my tone for this song.

Pan tried to explain to us the concept of “kendo”, which they use in Taiwan. I am not sure that I entirely got it. I wish I did, because it sounded cool, but I was so tired that my brain didn’t take everything in!!

I googled it, to see if that would help. All I could find is that it means “Way of the Sword” and it is a Japanese modern martial art form of sword-fighting, with a traditional basis.

Pan placed a lot of emphasis on involving the whole body while singing. Keeping the knees loose, as opposed to locked and allowing the body to move naturally. She also demonstrated using our hands to “shape” our voices and create the sound that we want. This was a new experience for me, and I guess for most of the others. I was concentrating very hard, trying to learn all I could, and therefore probably un-doing the relaxing warm up!

The part of the evening that I enjoyed the most was when we were singing an excerpt (to the text of “dah”) from “Carmen” by Bizet. As a side note: If you’re a “you-tuber”, look up Sesame Street Carmen. We found it by accident. Back to the main story: Firstly, we had to make sure we were all singing the same rhythm. I think there were some stray acciaccaturas! Then came the tricky bits... We went through it a few more times once singing only the first note of each bar, and another time singing only the third note of each bar. This was quite tricky, as it meant we really had to keep focussed and “singing” in our heads to get the right note.

Pan finished the evening teaching us a little Taiwanese tune, a phrase at a time. Then at the end asking us to take the phrases in our own time, holding any note as long as we wanted, then when everybody had finished each phrase, we would move on to the next one. It was very cool!
Thanks to Pan for her time and to the Choral Music Association of Australia for bringing her out to Perth and arranging our workshop.

Here's a photo of us all at the end of the night