The Singing Competencies of Five-Year-Old Developing Singers

Abstract

Under the Education (National Curriculum, Attainment Targets and Programmes of Study in Music, England) Order 1992, the Secretary of State established a statutory curriculum for music in English maintained in schools from 1 August 1992. The curriculum applies to all children aged 5 to 14 years and specifies the nature of the content and the target learning outcomes for the end of each key stage (at ages 7, 11, and 14). In relation to singing, young children in their first 2 to 3 years in school are expected to memorise and internalise...simple songs/' sing a variety of simple unison songs, part in simple vocal.. .improvisations, compositions and arrangements and explore and use a range of sound sources, including their voices (DES, 1992 p. 4). Among the intended outcomes is that, by the age of 7 pupils should be able to sing in a group...demonstrating some control of the sounds made (p. 4). The overall conception of the music curriculum is as a (uni)linear hierarchy of development, with each successive key stage specifying more complex musical behaviors. Given these statutory requirements, it would seem important for teachers to be able to track musical development and, as a baseline, to have some notion of the range of musical competences that young children are likely to have on entering school at the age of five years. With regard to singing, there is a general consensus within the research literature of certain developmental traits and a (potential) continuum of development has been proposed (Welch, 1986; Welch et al., 1991) as a model for the collective interpretation of the extant research findings. The key features of the model with respect to vocal pitch-matching competences have been revised for the purposes of this paper, drawing on examples from the most recent research literature. The revised model is shown in Table 1 (Welch, 1993). Prior to these stages, the literature indicates that infants play with vocal sound from the age of (approximately) 4 months (e.g., Hargreaves, 1986; Keating, 1984; Moog, 1976; Ries, 1987), usually on a single vowel or a few syllables, and that this vocal exploration has a bi-potentiality for both language acquisition and musical development (e.g., Thurman & Klitzke, 1994). The structures of the voice mechanism are immature, and it is only around the ages of 2 to 3 years that the vocal ligament and thyroarytenoid muscle begin to take shape and help to stabilize the vibratory patterns of the vocal folds (Titze, 1992). The stages outlined above must be seen in relation to other factors that may affect singing competency. For example: there is extensive evidence that girls are more competent than boys in traditional