During OBU’s 2015 Spring semester, Drs. Jon and Glenda Secrest, both Professors of Music, took their sabbatical leave to examine two aspects of their specialty more closely: musical duets and team teaching.
“We, as voice teachers, are exposed to more solo repertoire,” Glenda Secrest said. “We’ve always had a senior recital for music theatre where they had to do a duet, but a few years ago we decided as a faculty that we were going to include a duet in the sophomore recital as well. Duets are harder to find so I thought we should think about compiling some kind of list.”
The Secrests began their research by pulling available music from the OBU music library such as vocal scores, vocal selections and musical theatre duet anthologies. An important requirement of the duets was that they were appropriate to be presented at OBU.
“We went through the music looking at the subject, language, and content,” Glenda Secrest said.
After eliminating inappropriate duets, the Secrests entered the remaining music into a spreadsheet. Going page-by-page through each song, they picked out every aspect of the songs from voicing to dance breaks to range. These categories were entered into a spreadsheet that the Secrests and their students will be able to use to look up duets based on the preferences of the student and the requirements of the students’ recital.
“We researched 505 duets and 399 of them, coming from 161 different shows, made the cut,” Glenda Secrest said.
The other topic of their research was team teaching.
“Over the years, Glenda and I have been so fortunate to work together,” Jon Secrest said. “This is the third university where we have been able to teach together so team teaching has been something that has been of particular interest to us.”
The goal of their research was to find out how to create a more high-impact approach to team teaching without any additional costs to the university. They visited Penn State University to observe the team teaching methods of faculty members Mary Barton Sanders and Norman Spivey.
“We were privileged to sit in on an audition of a candidate for an MFA in Music Theatre Pedagogy,” Jon Secrest said. “We watched the candidate perform and observed Mary and Norm’s formal interview of the candidate. It was very revealing just the way they worked together in that audition process.”
The Secrests managed to conduct informal interviews with the current MFA candidates and asked them what they felt was unique about the program.
“Invariably, they mentioned the fact that Norm and Mary work so well together and that they were fortunate to have the privilege of studying with both of them.” Jon Secrest said. “In many schools, especially high profile schools, the voice teachers don’t always get along very well, so it’s a really nice thing to have an environment where ideas are free-flowing back and forth between colleagues, and we love to think that that is the case here as well.”
In addition to their two research topics, the Secrests are working on several new projects to improve the experience of those involved in Ouachita’s music department.
“We have a lot of positive things going on here and we want to keep developing them.” Glenda Secrest said.
The Secrests will be performing a recital of duets on October 6 at 7.30 p.m. at McBeth Recital Hall.
By Kimberly Wong
