Cabrillo Music 17A with Michelle Rivard
Spring semester, 2008: I am having such a wonderful time with this most challenging learning experience: taking a beginning voice class!
The class is Music 17A at Cabrillo Community College. The instructor, Professor
Michelle Rivard, is just great. She has a great sense of humor,
and clearly has a vast knowledge of voice and singing and music. (She is also Chairperson for Cabrillo’s
Music Department.) She makes the class very demanding and rigorous;
almost every week we are getting up and singing a song (with piano accompaniment), solo, in front of the class—while they critique us!
It’s quite anxiety-provoking, but as she says, it is helping us get over the “stage fright” that is part of what a singer/performer
needs to deal with, so that is part of the instruction along with everything else.
Class Notes
Well, yeah, that would be great, to have some class notes posted... Anyone want to help me with that?
Vocal Warm-Up Exercises
Here are some of the vocal exercises with which we warm-up.
The Songs
Here are the songs we are learning in class. For each song, there is a link to a PowerPoint slide shows of the sheet music, and links to the audio files from Michelle Rivard
of the songs. The “melody” files are piano accompaniment without singing; the other files are of Michelle singing the songs. These are large files
(file size shown), so be patient.
- Simple Gifts (Traditional American Shaker tune)
- Sheet music (3.7 MB PowerPoint file
)
- Melody (piano) (752 KB MP4 audio file
)
- Michelle Rivard (MR) singing, higher register (764 KB MP4 audio file
)
- All Through the Night (Traditional Welsh tune)
- Sheet music (2.6 MB PowerPoint file
)
- Melody (piano) (732 KB MP4 audio file
)
- MR singing, higher register (776 KB MP4 audio file
)
- Bist du bei mir (German, music attributed to J. S. Bach, text by anon.)
- Sheet music (2.8 MB PowerPoint file
)
- MR singing, lower register (1.2 MB MP4 audio file
)
- Da Unten im Tale (German, music by ?, text by Nicola Haym)
- Sheet music (16.9 MB PowerPoint file
)
- Pronunciation (444 KB MP4 audio file
)
- MR singing, higher register (612 KB MP4 audio file
)
- Con que la lavare (Traditional Spanish folk song)
- Sheet music (2.5 MB PowerPoint file
)
- Melody (piano) (1.4 MB MP4 audio file
)
- MR singing, higher register (956 KB MP4 audio file
)
- Edelweiss (American theater, Rogers & Hammerstein)
- Sheet music (1.3 MB PowerPoint file
)
- Melody (piano) (900 KB MP4 audio file
)
- MR singing, higher register (772 KB MP4 audio file
)
- MR singing, lower register (772 KB MP4 audio file
)
- Laschia Ch’io Pianga (Music by George Frederic Handel, Italian text by Giocomo Rossi)
- Sheet music (2.5 MB PowerPoint file
)
- Melody (piano) (988 KB MP4 audio file
)
- MR singing, higher register (888 KB MP4 audio file
)
- MR singing, lower register (872 KB MP4 audio file
)
- Non lo diro col llabro (Music by George Frederic Handel, Italian text by Nicola Haym)
- Sheet music (3.8 MB PowerPoint file
)
- Melody (piano) (1 MB MP4 audio file
)
- MR singing, higher register (1.2 MB MP4 audio file
)
- Now is the Month of Maying (Elizabethan era, music by Thomas Morley, text by anon.)
- Sheet music (1.6 MB PowerPoint file
)
- Till There Was You (American theater, music and text by Meredith Wilson)
- Sheet music (4.4 MB PowerPoint file
)
- Melody (piano) (1.1 MB MP4 audio file
)
- MR singing, higher register (1.2 MB MP4 audio file
)
- MR singing, lower register (1.1 MB MP4 audio file
)
- Almost Like Being in Love (American theater, music and text by Meredith Wilson)
- Sheet music (34.6 MB PowerPoint file
)
- Melody (piano) (1.1 MB MP4 audio file
)
- MR singing, higher register (788 KB MP4 audio file
)
- MR singing, lower register (864 KB MP4 audio file
)
- The Water is Wide (British folksong, traditional text)
- Melody (piano) (672 KB MP4 audio file
)
- MR singing, higher register (1 MB MP4 audio file
)
