Singing Harmony in Elementary Music
What’s the best way to introduce singing harmony in elementary music? Also, what’s the most appropriate age? Thanks!
For our purposes, let’s divide harmony into a few different categories. Normally when people talk about harmony they mean parallel harmony.
I’ll answer this with an eye toward vocal harmony, because there’s another conversation we can have about performing in an Orff ensemble - things like types of borduns, rhythmic interest on the fifth, color parts, etc. I don’t want those to get confused so to articulate this clarification, we’re moving toward vocal harmony here.
Harmony: Two or more melodic parts performed at the same time
Very often, we can approach melody more intentionally by backing up and looking at rhythm first.
Texture
Rhythm vs beat
Important because all our other harmonic work will come down to the ensemble skill of staying together. This is the first partwork skill we use and we can start it around 1st grade.
Pat the steady beat and sing, play the rhythm on rhythm sticks and beat on tubano, step the beat and clap the words, play the melody on recorder while others play the beat with a chord bordun. (for our purposes I’ll include borduns here but there’s more of a conversation we could have about them)
When we start working on partwork in the early grades, parallel harmony is so much easier.
Ostinati
A repeating musical pattern
Rhythmic or melodic
Rhythmic first
Potentially around 1st grade, with increasing levels of complexity moving forward in other grades, especially in terms of melodic ostinati
I Love the Mountains (boomdiada)
Rocky Mountain
Who Has Seen the Wind?
Chord Roots
Great Big House
Potentially around 2nd or 3rd Grade, corresponding with tonic and dominant
By this point we have a collection of partwork skills we can use. Importantly, students aren’t being asked to interact with harmony (texture / partwork) for the very first time in 6th grade choir.
Partner songs & partner “fragment” songs
Yonder Come Day (arr. Judith Cook Tucker)
Weevily Wheat, Bow Wow Wow, Tideo partners
Rounds
Partner movement with
2-part Harmony & Parallel Harmony
This is a natural next step of the learning progression of texture.
