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.