Contemporary Vocal Pedagogy and the Singer-Songwriter: Towards a Toolkit of Physical Approaches to Performance Training

‘The body and music are intrinsically bound together, especially within the live performance context.’ (Davidson, 2017, p. 223) The ‘singer-songwriter’ is unique as the only category of singer to create and perform their own music, the broader sense of this term including solo performers and those who sing as part of a band. Since the rise of the popular music degree in the 1990s, questions of what and how we should teach the popular musician have been present. This practitioner research asks how we might address the training needs of the singer-songwriter and what those needs might be. Although the roles of the singer-songwriter are ‘performance-centred’ (Moir & Medbøe, 2015, p.147), higher popular music education does traditionally focus on performance skills (Pipe, 2018). As a vocal teacher, I am involved in a constant process of developing my practice in order to best serve the needs of the singer in front of me. This research highlights and responds to a lack of performance pedagogy within popular singing discourse. It explores the performance roles of the singer-songwriter as popular artist and how relevant skills might be developed in training. Through the practical exploration of the movement techniques of Rudolf Laban and Michael Chekhov, this research looks to other performance disciplines in search of physical approaches to the development of performance skills in the singer-songwriter and suggests tools that teachers and singers might apply. Themes emerging from this practical research include the interrelationship between the physical, the vocal, and the emotional and the ways in which it is possible to embody performance. Drawing on primary, practical research and secondary knowledge sources from a range of fields, the centrality of the body to the communication of meaning and how this might impact singer-songwriter performance pedagogy is explored.