Dianne Stewart Singing Lessons

Sunday, September 12, 2021 by Dianne Stewart | Blog

I love the new world of online information and support.  There is so much good stuff out there.  

I listen to 4 podcasts about voice teaching and choir leading and listening to them makes doing the housework for me bearable!  But I am also a member of the Kodály Music Education Institute of Australia KMEIA and the Australian National Association of the Teachers of Singing ANATS who both have online blogs, email newsletters, workshops and conferences.  And if there was a singing teacher close enough to me who could support my own continuing voice learning I would be having individual lessons myself.  

Why?  Because I want to be the best singer I can be and I want to be the best singing teacher I can be, and this for me means continuing to learn and grow and be open to new ideas and ways of doing things and I want to encourage all of my singers to be open to new learning, to listen and read and attend workshops and be involved other musical learning like school or community band, learning an instrument with another instrumental teacher, being a part of school and community performances and just being open to learning and growing.

But when you have a lot of information coming in it is sometimes contradictory - so I love to talk with my singers about what they are doing and leaning in these other spaces, discuss why some teachers work in different ways and for what possible reasons, how the work we are doing can support their participation in those other activities and even about how some of that information can be included, or not, in the work that we are doing together in our lessons together.

When I was a beginning singer I depended on my teacher to give me music, to play accompaniment for me and it was very difficult to do anything outside of my lesson because I did not play any instrument - at all!!  These days we can easily use recordings, online portals, online music shops where we can find sheet music to just about any song we hear as well as backing tracks as well.  And this is just great because my singers can bring songs to me and I get to hear and sing songs I would never know if they didn't bring them to me.

This month ANATS is running an online workshop all about Jazz styles and how to sing and teach them - and I am really looking forward to this - i love Jazz and I encourage my singers to give that style a try - and even though I love it and know quite a bit about how it works I am really looking forward to learning more, knowing more and being able to share that with singers.

So, Looking forward to keeping learning and sharing and having fun singing.

Hope to see you all back in the studio soon

Dianne