The process of pedagogically analysing selected Afrikaans art songs to facilitate vocal development in classical voice students

Ten Afrikaans art songs were analysed from a pedagogical perspective to demonstrate their practical application as teaching tools for addressing principles of vocal technique in classical voice students. The processes of this study are framed within evidence-based voice pedagogy (EBVP) and practice knowledge. EBVP consists of three pillars, namely teacher experience, voice research, and student needs. My accumulative experience as a South African-born Afrikaans mother-tongue soprano, vocal pedagogue, and classical voice lecturer enabled me to draw from my practice knowledge and experiences. At the same time, I also relied on existing literature to create a sturdy theoretical foundation for the study. Even though no participants were involved, student needs were considered by providing numeric patterns for vocal exercises that could equip them to create vocal exercises from their repertoire.

The pedagogical analyses were conducted by analysing each song systematically according to a qualitative content analysis. The structure of the content analysis was created by combining various sources in existing voice research and literature associated with a repertoire-based approach to teaching singing with my teaching practices. During the analyses, I identified challenging vocal line patterns according to the literature-based analysis guidelines that I created for this study. The challenges were discussed at the hand of voice pedagogy literature, and corrective strategies from the literature and my teaching experiences were suggested. I translated challenging vocal line patterns from the musical material of the Afrikaans art songs into new vocal exercises for general vocal training by adding numeric patterns for easy transposition during warm-ups or cool-downs. The processes implemented in this study enable students to gain autonomy during the processes of learning repertoire. This is not only applicable to Afrikaans art songs, but also to vocal repertoire in general.

This dataset illustrates aspects of the research methodology that I implemented to collect and analyse data from the sheet music of three of the ten songs in my doctoral research study.