Training singers to be literate musicians: the integration of musical, linguistic, and technical skills in the private voice studio

The singer faces some significant challenges in learning to read music, namely that their instrument has no physical domain for pitch and they must sing two languages simultaneously. When those challenges are combined with the fact that they often arrive in college with less well-developed literacy skills compared with instrumentalists, and that musical literacy instruction is often linked immediately with theoretical analysis before literacy has been established, it is not surprising that singers graduate with graduate degrees with poor musical literacy skills. Using principles of second language acquisition and reading theory, this paper seeks to present a case for the separation of theory and literacy in college curricula, and proposes that such a development will not only see the musical literacy skills of singers improve, but can be seen as the foundation for the connection of performance and theoretical streams of musical study in higher education.