Sweet Harms: Teaching Harmony Singing at an Early Age

As a self-proclaimed "choir geek" from an early age, I have been very lucky to spend a good portion of my life sharing songs with others. I could go on all day about what choral singing has done for me as a person, but I will spare my readers from the never ending list. Namely, choral singing as a child gave me life long friends, positive childhood musical memories, a supportive atmosphere to be myself and a strong sense of community.
Musically, choral singing as a child gave me strong sight-reading skills, the ability to hear moving chordal structures, self-discipline in practicing, a healthy understanding of vocal technique and the ability to sing contrasting harmony against a melody.
However, there was one aspect of choral singing that did not carry far through my vocal upbringing: learning by rote.  In elementary choirs, a "call and response" method is often used to speed along the learning process and can allow all singers to learn on the same level as many young children have not yet learned to read music. As the choirs I began joining became more advanced however, all emphasis was placed on sight-reading and learning scores from a theoretical standpoint. Let me now state, that both of these methods of teaching and learning are effective and build different skills in singers. Now, as I work more with adult singers, I see a strong disconnect between what we can read on the page and understanding what we are hearing harmonically.
As a singer coming from a predominantly classical upbringing that launched herself into the jazz idiom, in some ways I had to teach myself how to listen again. I had become so "stuck" to the score that I felt as though my ears were lacking the discipline that my theory knowledge had far outstripped.
Recently I have begun to work with some of my private voice students  on the relationship between melody they have learned vs. what they hear in the accompaniment and encouraging improvised melodic development by having them pick out notes from what they hear in the piano, or for some more advanced students, giving them a starting harmony note for a phrase and asking to complete the harmony by listening to the progression of chords underneath. This is the foundation for teaching simple composition, improvised singing and melodic and harmonic arranging. And it's FUN! For some of my students who are strong music readers, this has pushed them to step outside their comfort zone and into new musical territory, while for others who have strong ears but are slow in theory, this method teaches them to think critically and theoretically about what they are singing.

I love harmony singing and I believe having a multitude of methods of teaching harmony is perhaps one of the most important aspects of early musical development in singers.