I also think ear training is so important. I’m glad you found the examples helpful.

Yes, accompanied singing is great! I really like singing unaccompanied. After you’ve sung that way for a while, it feels really strange to go back and sing with a piano doubling the parts, the tuning is a little off, which makes sense as the piano is strictly tempered.

Thanks again for the comments!

I even make my praise team sing unaccompanied when we rehearse so they can better hear each other and sing in tune. It has definitely helped.

And no, no section leaders in the choir… they are followers of each other down the path to “flat-dom.”

Thanks for your input. I really like the responses I’m getting here.

There are a lot of terms you’ve included in your response that I think is worth unpacking, mostly because I don’t know what you mean by them, so it is hard to for me to respond parts of your response. “Choral technique,” “vocal production issues,” “vocal technique” “vowel alignment,” “vowel color.”

“They still want to sing and so a technique has been developed to allow conductors to mold the most number of people into the most pleasing sound they are capable of with a couple hours a week of rehearsal.”

It sounds like you are saying that there is some kind of universal method of teaching choir. Is that really true? Or are you saying that most choir directors don’t talk about pitch?

“I was trained as a choral conductor to generally not talk about vocal technique because honestly, many don’t have the vocabulary or familiarity with their own voices to apply what is said.”

Just so I’m clear, I’m saying that more attention be paid to pitch matching, which I don’t equate to vocal technique. It sounds like “vocal technique” might mean more than that to most people. And it seems like “flat” and “sharp” are pretty easy concepts to understand.

“Asking someone in that boat to sing a flat note higher leads to a strained and unpleasant sound that might fix that one pitch but results in other issues. ”

Asking someone to sing a little higher (less than a half step) in my experience doesn’t normally lead to a drastic change in tone quality unless the pitch in question is in an uncomfortable range for the singer.

“Between singer vibrato and pitch variation within large choral sections, tuning becomes a general game.”

I’m not sure what you mean here.

I think other approaches might be necessary when communicating with less experienced singers (vowel modification, bizarre imagery, whatever it takes) but those methods (if you accept that pitch is paramount) should be treated as an exercise or a way to properly correct pitch. The choir director should be explicit about how their creative methods are changing the pitch. I imagine these creative methods to be like training wheels. Unfortunately, I don’t feel like directors use these methods in this way, and generally neglect expressing the importance of pitch.

Glad to hear that speaking directly about pitch to your more advanced choirs seems to be yielding good results!

I believe most people have a decent enough ear that they, given two examples, can discern the more in-tune of the two. That doesn’t mean they have the technique and production to do what their ear might tell them to do. There is always a “why” when singers sing out of tune. I was trained as a choral conductor to generally not talk about vocal technique because honestly, many don’t have the vocabulary or familiarity with their own voices to apply what is said. Asking someone in that boat to sing a flat note higher leads to a strained and unpleasant sound that might fix that one pitch but results in other issues. Vowel alignment seems to get folks at least on the same timbre page. I should mention that vowel color is a whole other issue used for effect in certain repertoire. Between singer vibrato and pitch variation within large choral sections, tuning becomes a general game.

With all that said, in more advanced college and community groups and smaller chamber ensembles, there is little excuse for not calling a spade a spade and asking more advanced singers to make straight up pitch correction. This is what I am trying to do in Ave with 14-18 female singers of a wide age range and from a wide variety of ability levels who want the thrill of singing renaissance polyphony in a chamber ensemble. What I do is a mix of class voice, standard choral technique, and forthright critique-no sugarcoating. They have to carry their own weight on the line and the only way to improve the over all sound is for singers to take control over what comes out of their own mouths and what their bodies are doing to make it happen. It may be wishful thinking…but I think they are singing better in tune for each concert!

There’s my book on this Mark!!

I’m not sure what you mean by “vowel matching effects the way we hear pitch,” but I’m interested in hearing more about that. In Example 4, Margaret sings two totally different vowels on the same pitch and that pitch sounds pretty clear to me.

Matching vowels is a good thing to do (though I think directors pay too much attention to it), but I respectfully disagree with the idea that a chord cannot “ring” unless everyone is singing the same vowel. There are many cases in Renaissance music where not all parts are on the same vowel, but the chord still rings. What I think is more likely, is that not all notes are in their “correct” position. And that is a much more complicated but wonderful subject:)

Thanks for your comment. What an interesting idea – that singing in tune might be easier to understand. I maybe just assumed that many choirs talk about vowels because tuning was a harder concept to teach.

Ha, very nice. If only I had anything helpful to say on that front. Do you have section leaders? It might be helpful to have at least one person with a decent sense of pitch lead others in the section.

“Open your tone,” that is a good one. I need to start a page with awesome quotes like that:)

How about an article about how to get an amateur church choir to consistently sing on pitch? I’m only the accompanist, but I hear the basses consistently singing under pitch. The director’s favorite line is “open your tone.”

This is frequently demonstrated in Barbershop. A group can be singing technically in tune (much closer than 20 cents), but if their vowels aren’t matching, many of the overtones do not “ring”.