This is a lesson for a grade 10 vocal class. This lesson would be a rehearsal plan for TaReKiTa by Reena Esmail. The focus would be on the proper pronunciation of the words in the piece. It would be the second or third rehearsal of this piece. Students would already know the rhythm and pitch of the piece, but the text would not have been touched. This lesson would cover the following curriculum expectations: A1.1, A2.1, A3.1, B1, B2, C1.2, C2.2.
To start this lesson, the class would listen to the piece. Then we would dig into the pronunciation. The choral music has a pronunciation guide that the teacher would study before hand and be well versed in. The score says that this is “a vibrant joyful piece in a raga (an Indian classical melodic framework) called Jog, which incorporates both major and minor modalities into a single scale. The text syllables are onomatopoeic vocalizations of the sounds produced by Indian instruments and are easy to master when learned by ear and repeated aloud.” In this lesson, we are not going in depth about the Jog or the Indian instruments, that will come later. We will touch on this briefly as we want to emulate these instruments discussing how we can do that. We can experiment by creating onomatopoeic sounds with western instruments.
After this, we would watch a video from the composer about how to pronounce the words: www.oup.co.uk/tarekita. We would then go over how the letters sounds sound differently in this piece vs English. The score has the sound for each letter that the teacher can facilitate via a repeat-after-me activity. As a class we would go through the phrase TaReKiTa and explore how it sounds different. Students would be asked to have a pencil so that they can add in the phonetics that will help them remember. In doing this, we would focus strongly on the T consonant. Unlike the English T sound, this one is closer to a ‘Dh’ like in the word the. There will be a lot of repetition in this lesson so that students can hear the words correctly and get the new language in their head.
Once we do a micro lesson on the text, we would put it together with the pitch and rhythm. The piece is at a faster tempo, so for this rehearsal we would slow down the tempo so that we can focus on diction. When the students are singing, the teacher should listen specifically for diction. As the composer shares, the T sound needs to be unanimous across the choir to create the desired sound. If I was teaching this lesson, I would do a lot of repetition of these pieces and working on getting the tempo faster with good articulation. This will not be accomplished in one lesson, but this is a good start to drill the basics for the students. In each following rehearsal, the teacher should desire proper pronunciation from the choir. Check out the video for how you can facilitate a repeat after me activity with this piece.