Welcome to Nicole's Website!
Nicole Bussey
I am a third year undergrad music student at Western University. This is my website where I post anything related to my Music Education courses, taught by Dr. Cathy Benedict.
All About Me
My name is Nicole, and I am in my third year of my studies here at Western. I am a classical vocalist, as well as a piano and guitar enthusiast. I adore anything music related and am so excited to be taking some music ed classes during my studiers here! I am a true believer in the power of music education, and I hope to convey some of that through my work that I'll be posting here.
Teaching and Learning Music (1802A)
This is my website for Music 1802A-Teaching and Learning Music. My name is Nicole Bussey, and my professor for this course is Dr. Cathy Benedict at the University of Western Ontario.
Reflection 12
The talk given by Brene Brown about shame really showed me the power teachers and parents have over their students/children, and the importance of empathy. Brown talks about the idea of shame vs guilt. Brown defines shame as a negative feeling that is assosicated with low self worth, or believing that you are the root cause of a problem or negative outcome. Guilt is the idea that a negative situation/outcome is the result of a mistake or negative decision, rather than a low self image. This is such an important concept for educators to understand, because with shame comes an inability to learn and puts students at risk for problems down the road. "Shame cannot survive being spoken because shame requires you to believe you're alone in order for it to maintain it's power." This quote by Brene Brown explains the importance of being a support to your students, and allowing your classroom to be a safe space for expressing emotions and ideas. If a student does not feel alone, and has an outlet to talk about shame, then they will not have these internal struggles with shame, because they will have reassurance and support from their teacher or peers. I personally found that Brown’s talk really ressonated with me. I have personally been in situations where I felt I was not good enough, or my flaws were the root of a negative situation. After listening to Brown’s talk, I understand the difference between guilt and shame and how we can learn from guilt, but become incapable of learning when we experience shame. I think this is a video that should be shown to every teacher, to further their understanding of the impact educators can have on their student’s lives.
Reflection 11
During my first week at Western, I was very nervous about how I would fit in at my new school, along with my capability to succeed in my program. I often wondered, would I be able to handle this new workload and learning environment? My goal at the beginning of the term would be to learn more about myself, both vocally and personally.
I would definitely say I have grown closer to this goal through my time here at Western. I am now much more comfortable with who I am, and am reassured that I am capable of this challenging new learning system. I have learnt a lot about myself vocally, and have become more aware of vocal challenges I tend to face, such as overdarkning my vowels. I have also become aware of my physical limits and vocal fatigue. After a long demanding day of classes and chorale practice, I have come to realize my voice is tired and the importance of rest over practicing on days like this. I think in these ways, I have grown towards my goal of knowing myself and my voice. I think my goal has remained essentially the same throughout the term, but my focus definitely shifted more to the importance of my physical and mental wellbeing before I can succeed vocally/academically.
A challenge I faced this semester would be my physical health. Towards the beginning of the semester, I struggled with a very bad case of laryngitis. This caused me to put into consideration the importance of my physical health, especially as a vocal major. It definitely caused me to fall behind in my studio classes, as well as in general. It taught me that nobody is perfect, and sometimes, if you have to miss a class or practice for your physical health, that is okay. It is more important to be physically well rather than push yourself until you become more sick. It took me a fair amount of time to realize this, but now I know in the future that physical health is so important in this demanding environment.
An idea that I would like to keep in mind for next semester is the importance of organization, and working a little bit every day so I do not wind up having to cram for an assignment or test, which causes me stress and anxiety. I found myself in this situation for the history midterm this year, as well as the scattered assignment in which I perhaps missed the deadline. I plan on writing down a to-do list every week, as well as setting aside at least one hour a day as “review time” to review what I learnt that day, as well as prepare for any upcoming evaluations. This way I will be more on track of assignments and deadlines. A mantra I plan on using the remember this is “This too shall pass.” I am using this mantra as a reminder to myself that even when I am feeling stressed, the feeling will not stay forever. If I put my mind to it and get my work done, the stress will pass.
“This too shall pass.” - Nicole’s new mantra for 2020
Reflection 10
In the article “Posture: The Great Big Rump” by Dr. Nick Dregenburg, a particular quote stuck out to me, “Posture is what is left over when you exclude most of your being to focus only on that screen, or some other activity. Most of your body and surroundings are being ignored, and we then get this bizarre split idea of that great lump of ignored flesh having to be postured back into place in some way. But that lump of flesh is doing exactly what you are doing (it is you!), it's not really engaged in its surroundings because you aren't either.” After reading this, I realized this applies to me as well. For example, today in my history lecture, I was writing notes and noticed how slumped my posture was. This goes back to the idea that I was not focused on my posture at that time, but rather completely focused on the notes in front of me. Yesterday, during my voice lesson, I was very aware of my posture, because it is such an essential part of good vocal production. Therefore, my posture was much improved, because I was focused on the majority of my body. The second article, “By Intention Alone” by David Gorman and Marion Day, provides a very interesting idea on awareness and space. “You can move the space, that is, you can move yourself around into space. And it’s not so much that you are doing things, you’re just recognizing that, for whatever reason, you had projected or narrowed the space here or there — it is all a very elastic awareness space like a bubble — so if you can just move that bubble of attention space back around you and let it open out you’ll be centred back in the present, almost as if it is a movement of where things actually are in space.” This conveys the idea that by having intention and imagining things as though they are physically in front of you can actually help to achieve your goal. I tried this by visualizing my sound as getting brighter, and focused my attention on my mouth as well as the sound it was producing. Just by imagining this brighter sound, I found I was able to improve the quality of my vocal tone as well as realize the position my tongue and mouth must be in order for this sound to be achieved.
Reflection #9 Sound Lab
Monday: Today, I have a lesson with my studio teacher, Torin Chiles. I am going to experiment with tongue placement and how it affects the clarity and brightness of my vowels. I have a tendency to pull my tongue back, so I am going to try pushing it forward behind my teeth to hopefully achieve a brighter, more even tone.
After experimenting with this, I discovered that I will achieve a brighter tone while placing my tongue forward. I also discovered that this is something I will have to bring into the practice room, as I have a tendency to try and pull my tongue back while doing this.
Tuesday: Today, I have a coaching, where I am going to work on breath management. I am going to try to take full diaphragmatic breaths in between phrases.
After trying this, I discovered I have a tendency to rush and take shallow breaths in between phrases. To combat this, I am trying to end phrases sooner and take full breaths to achieve a much more natural, easy breath support.
Friday: Today in the practice room, I am going to experiment with jaw movement vs stillness. I have a tendency to move my jaw to achieve vowel placement, however this is not necessary and the vowels should be coming from the mouth and tongue.
To discover this, I tried placing my hand on the side of my jaw while singing my warmups on changing vowel sounds. I realized I move my jaw much more than I thought! This will be something I will have to continue to practice to correct.
Reflection #8 Sound Lab
The articles “Learning Happens!” and “Golf In Mind” both center around the idea of the “target practice approach” for improving skills. The target practice approach involves learning through making mistakes, and realizing what occurred for this mistake to happen, and how it can be corrected. The target practice approach involves looking at mistakes as learning opportunities. A skill that could be acquired through this target practice approach is learning to roll your “r’s”, a skill that I am currently trying to master. The first step is having an intention or goal set, in this case, it would be to achieve the italian rolled “r” sound. This is the target or bull’s eye. The next step is taking action - attempting to roll the “r” with the intention in mind. Then, assess what just happened. If the “r” roll was successful, continue practicing. However, if it wasn’t correct, assess what happened and what made it wrong. Reflect on how close you came to rolling the “r”, and specify what was wrong about it and how to improve it to be closer to the goal. The more this process is repeated, the closer you will come to achieving the goal of a perfect rolled “r”. I personally tried this approach, and found that the more I reflected on what I didn’t like about my rolled “r”, the more I was able to experiment with how to fix it. To set a goal of what I wanted my “r” to sound like, I listened to Italian opera singers online to figure out how it should sound. Although I was not able to perfectly perform the rolled “r”, I did feel like this approach made me more aware of what I have to do to reach my goal. Overall, I felt like this “target practice” approach definitely is effective in learning vocal techniques, such as the rolled “r”.
Sound Lab Reflection 7
A time when I felt frustrated with my overall vocal performance was during an audition for Manhattan School of Music in New York City. I had been anticipating the audition for quite some time. When I woke up that morning, my voice felt a bit hoarse and worn out from the extensive travel I had taken to get there. This made me nervous and paranoid, so during my warmup I didn’t feel totally in touch with my body/sound. During the audition, I felt it went rather poorly compared to my other auditions. I sounded much more strained and dryer than usual. I was not pleased with the overall performance, and I recall feeling unhappy with myself, and rather upset that I did not perform better since I only had “one shot”. I was irritated for the rest of my weekend, and felt sad and angry that I “blew it”. I couldn’t stop thinking about the “what if’s” of my performance. However, I still was accepted into the school, so that was definitely a confidence booster for me, and showed me that one weak performance doesn’t make you a bad vocalist.
‘So, it appears that your point of view has the focus on what is not there. Are you aware of what, in fact, is there? This is an actual question. In those moments, are you aware of what is happening that shows you what precisely is there which is not beautiful? Or what precisely is there which is not harmonious?’ This quote from the article “Failure is Hard, Learning is Easy” by David Gorman really ties in to the way I felt after my audition. I was focusing only on the “bad” qualities of my performance, and not focusing enough on some of the good things I was doing, such as brightening my vowels in my lower register. This goes to show that when we focus on the bad things, or what wasn’t there, we can forget all the good elements of the performance.
“It is success at noticing when learning is needed; success at seeing what you need to learn; and then success at actually learning.” This point made in the article really made me rethink the way I viewed my audition performance. Perhaps instead of being so hard on myself for what went wrong, I should’ve viewed it as a success to know what I would need to adjust for future auditions.
The second article, “Patterns of Joy” by Babette Lightner, brought up some interesting points concerning how we interpret situations compared to the reality of the situation. Lightner says “You feel the meaning you’ve made; you feel your understanding. Responses tell you about your interpretation of the world, not about the world.” This idea really relates to how poorly I felt about my audition. Since I felt it was a bad performance, I felt anxious and upset about it, since that was my understanding of the performance. However, that was only my interpretation. Perhaps the performance didn’t go as poorly as I thought, since I was so focused on the negative attributes of my audition.
Lightner makes yet another intriguing point that I feel applies to my audition situation. “To change a feeling you don’t like or is interfering with your life, you need to update the interpretation.” Instead of feeling like a failure for not performing my best, it would be more beneficial for me to interpret the audition as a learning experience. I could use it instead as an example for what to fix next time, or to realize what triggered my anxiety/vocal fatigue to prevent it happening again.
Overall, I felt that these articles definitely changed my view on my interpretation of my audition experience. It’s important to consider how you feel about a situation compared to the reality, as well as changing your emotions/reaction to benefit you instead of causing further harm.
