Dr. Lynn Brinckmeyer, Associate Dean of Faculty Development and Research for the College of Fine Arts and Communication, was recently published in the December 2020 issue of the Southwestern Musician.
Dr. Brinckmeyer’s article, Motivating Middle School Singers, outlines strategies she has found effective in teaching young singers by keeping music education exciting and motivating. Dr. Brinckmeyer, who leads the Hill Country Youth Chorus, writes in her article about the human experience of working with young singers. “Our students most likely will not remember how we taught them to read sixteenth-note patterns,” she writes, “[h]owever, they will remember how they felt during our rehearsals.” She explains that the quality of the journey is just as important as the outcome. “If we consistently ask ourselves whether our singers are experiencing the joy of singing, we will stay on a positive path of serving them well.”
This experience is achieved by keeping students engaged through variety. “Anyone who works with adolescents knows they crave variety,” Dr. Brinckmeyer writes. She expands upon this variety and couples it with strategies to work with “expanding voices” that are common of middle school students. One strategy she recommends, from James Cumings, a middle school director in Michigan, suggests all singers create a video diary. In this diary students sing short melodies and speak short phrases at the beginning of each month to help them review the progress of their changing voices as well as track the development of their musical range and quality of tone production.
For more strategies curated by Dr. Brinckmeyer and other work from music educators across the state, please visit TMEA.org for the December 2020 edition of Southwestern Musician.