Introducing Harmony Signing

Harmony Signing arose out of the realisation that children responded swiftly and fluently to the gestural representation of sound, and that this presented the opportunity for them to devise and share their own musical ideas: to compose and improvise. While Harmony Signing is in no way intended to replace the introduction and learning of notation in music education, it complements this well through providing a means of exploiting group interaction and building on children’s – and adults’ – capacity for play. Where musical learning in choirs and orchestras can often represent a form of obedience to the wishes of a teacher or conductor – a unidirectional process – Harmony Signing furnishes the means for musical understanding to proceed, as in mother-tongue language learning, through self-expression in communicative exchange. It builds meaning and awareness through group interaction. In a world increasingly obsessed with competition and the identification of winners (‘You are the weakest link, goodbye’). Harmony Signing flourishes as a means of optimising group cooperation as the principal purpose of the human capacity for music.  

Gestural systems have a long history in musical practice, dating back to the influence of Guido d’Arezzo on medieval education and the subsequent development of musical hand-signs in the tradition initiated by Sarah Glover and John Curwen that formed the basis of the musical pedagogy of Zoltan Kodály. The innovation of Harmony Signing is its capacity to bring polyphony to life through exploiting a system of new, additional gestures to represent chords and their relationship to tonality. In a manner that parallels performance on the piano and accordion, harmonic accompaniment is assigned to the left hand. This leaves the right hand free to control in the manner of the conductor – starting, stopping, indicating flow and character – while also permitting the new left-hand gestures to be combined with Kodály signs in the right hand so as to conjoin melody to accompaniment.

The left-hand gestures commence with signs for the Primary Triads, I, IV and V, that form the principal framework for a wide-ranging network of harmonic relationships that can be acquired over extensive periods of sequential experience. The early phases of Harmony Signing can be commenced from around the age of seven, as was the case in their original emergence from creative work with a children’s choir in the mid-1990s. The full array of Harmony Singing’s potential can subsequently be set out over the period of secondary education to embrace complex chromatic and modulatory procedures that can support aural and musicianship training up to tertiary level, especially where students are ready for the transition to achieving its potential in the medium of instrumental performance. Similarly, Harmony Signing has proved suitable as a warm-up technique for choirs, including adult ensembles, in which it provides the means of supporting blend, tuning and balance.