Texas Music Educators Association

Last February, I decided to take a brief trip to San Antonio to attend the Texas Music Educators Association (TMEA for short) Convention.  This convention is  a BIG deal - basically every choral, band, and orchestra director tries to go every year to attend workshops, buy music, and get a few days of relaxation before the competition season!  Normally, I skip the event as the seminars are not geared to voice teachers, but as I had a young son and wanted my wife to have some time to focus on the workshops.

While it is always fun in San Antonio, I did attend some seminars that helped give me new ideas, and refreshed old concepts, for voice lessons.  One seminar that was a great refresher was a workshop based on the idea that many vocal problems are centered around five consonants - l, r, w, m and n.  For the first three consonants, the tongue retracts and gets tense, causing issues with pitch, resonance, and articulation.  The last two (m and n) can easily cause a person to sound nasal.  Several solutions were given on how to combat each vocal problem.

Another conference I attended addressed musical acoustics and how to make a room more soundproof and/or acoustically pleasing, but I'll address that in another blog.

DWS