At the end of January 2013, Singing Children’s Choir was honored to be the recipient of an extraordinary learning experience from Xiong Shi-Ling, who graciously accepted our invitation to conduct a series of training sessions with us.  An expert on children’s choir and an instructor of the Taiwan Philharmonic Children’s Choir, Ms. Xiong’s teaching not only inspired our students, but also immensely benefited all our teachers.

We learned from life that we need to start from the basics in everything we do.  Whether it’s cooking a meal or launching a big construction project, we should not ignore the details nor should we skip any necessary steps. The same goes with singing.  We are all equal in learning music, and every step we take should be solid and serious.

We were most impressed by how Ms. Xiong taught the song “A Grateful Heart”, the melody of which was familiar to the students. Ms. Xiong first focused on the hardest phrases of the bass, demonstrating by playing the tune, singing it herself and switching places with the students singing different parts. In order to teach long tones, she maximized the effect by using metaphors. When there were difficulties, Ms. Xiong practiced with the students bar by bar, until they had it under control. Finally, to make it more interesting and to increase the students’ confidence, she asked all the teachers to sing the main melody with the students singing the bass, and the effect was marvelous. Looking back, I realized that Ms. Xiong magically made the students master the song without using any special techniques unknown to us, nor skipping any necessary steps. Ms. Xiong may not be a very soft-spoken person, but her professionalism, frankness, and teaching style truly earned my respect and admiration.

Sometimes I wonder if the only goal of a teacher, especially a choir teacher, is to teach the students to sing. I don’t think so. Fu Lei wrote in his “Fu Lei’s Family Letters” that he taught his son, Fu Cong, to “first learn to be an upstanding person, then an artist, lastly a music virtuoso”. We at Singing Children’s Choir are certainly not going to be turning our students into “virtuosos”, but we feel that we are giving each of our students a good start in being an upstanding person.