My open dislike of lip-trills has been a source of discord for me. You see, my current teacher often (always) begins my lesson with lip-trills - before anything else. I know she is not alone on this. I have been virtually unable to find any other singer who shares my dislike of lip trills. In fact, because I couldn't give a good logical reason why they in theory would be bad, I thought that I just must be doing them wrong. Here is what I felt: whenever I did lip trills, my voice afterward would feel immediately small, thin, whittled down. I can already hear it from voice teachers around the world: "it's supposed to feel small!" "You shouldn't be trying to sing big/warm/fat" "healthy singing is narrow singing with the thin-edges of the vocal folds" etc. I don't know how to articulate it, but trust me that based on my personal experience, sensation, and history of performing - this feeling was not good. It wasn't bad enough to have my teacher thinking I sounded bad, just enough to have those around me complacently accept a sound that is half the size of my actual sound.
Here's the thing about my singing - the quality of my voice never offends people. I am blessed(/cursed?) with a natural timbre that is generally pleasing to the ears, and as a result, even when I sing with crappy technique, people assume that's just how I sound, and that I'm a decent mediocre tenor. It gets very tiresome to have people constantly telling you that your personal dissatisfaction with the way you are sounding on a given day is all in your head, or all because you are listening too much and the acoustic of the room is unflattering. Anyhow, it has been very gratifying to me of late to have a had a few moments where I was singing in front of other people in a way that, in my own estimation, was very good. First, I sang at an event where I sang "o nature" from Werther. This is not a challenging aria at all, but still, I happened to feel in ideal voice, like my singing was happening in just the way I want. Not only was the performance successful, but my husband, who was playing piano, commented very vehemently and earnestly on how good this was, and if I sang like that all the time, how ideal it would be. Next, I learned a new aria - "Bannis la crainte" from Alceste - which was feeling really good. One morning, after a very productive vocal discovery from the night before, I was singing it to great effect, producing sound and using my voice in the way I always want to. My friend stopped her work to call down from upstairs "wow! you sound extra amazing today!!" Then in church on the first day of Spring, I sang Rachmaninov's "Spring Waters" while my mother-in-law was in the audience. This is a piece which suits me well, and I felt like it had me singing at my best and most exciting. My mommy-in-law, though she is not a professional musician herself, told me afterward how much I had grown up in the past year, and that now I seemed like a real "Opera star." All of these instances were very gratifying because these strong visceral positive responses coincided with performances which I felt very specifically were instances of me singing successfully, the way I wish to be doing all the time.
What people fail to understand is that that "extra amazing thing" they heard me do is not some fluke - that's me singing! That's how I sing! That's how I want to be singing all the time! That is why I feel frustrated when I am not achieving that, and people seem to think I am being ridiculous for disliking my singing. Look, I know no one is at their best all the time - but sometimes I think people - even people who are among my biggest fans - aren't entirely aware of what I am capable of.
All this is to say, though my teacher may "approve" of my small singing post-lip-trills, I do believe if she actually heard what I am capable of, she would prefer the real thing!
Anyhow, this was a source of great frustration because it created an unhealthy cycle. People in the professional world would want to hear me as a full-lyric. My teacher would tell me Rodolfo, Alfredo, Romeo, were too big. Then I would go into a lesson, she would lip-trill me down, and then, like a self-fulfilling prophecy, my voice would sound, even to my ears, too small for Boheme. Which is incredibly frustrating, because when I sang Rodolfo as a cover put on in a dress rehearsal, I felt great, and like my voice was perfectly well-suited to the role.
I became frustrated by this lip-trill business because I thought, why should a stupid little exercise be able to wreak such havoc on the way I want to sing? Surely I'm a better singer than that, to succumb to one little exercise? But I remembered, even as far back as undergrad, having this perception while doing a group warm-up before a performance of Songs for a New World that the lip-trills were making my voice feel thin and not-good - I even started just pretending to do them, to save my voice for the challenging sing that was Man 1. (I'm not joking actually - if you are unfamiliar with SFANW, look up Steam Train, Flying Home, King of the World - that s#!t is high!)
Anyhow, I decided to do a little research to try to come up with a good justification of why I hate lip-trills. And I found it!
My first search was to find why, scientifically, people advocated for lip-trills. Here is what one commenter eloquently said:
"So what is it that the lip rolls, tongue trills, puffer fish and other exercises like them achieve? All these exercises can ge grouped under one heading... they occlude the vocal tract... that means they narrow the space that the air can get out... by doing this they slow down the the air flow. Why is this a good thing? Well when the air can't get out fast enough, it creates back pressure.
Voice scientists believe that this back pressure is beneficial. Why? Because you have positive pressure coming up from your lungs pushing up against the folds and negative pressure coming backwards from an occluded space pushing down on the folds. These two pressures cancel each other out and hold the vocal folds in place nicely. You can liken this to training wheels on a bicycle."
Now - I know this is just a random person's opinion, but it actually seems quite sound to me. My teacher had had me do the Ingo Titze "straw exercise" as well, which also falls under the category of semi-occluded vocal tract exercises. So - back-pressure. I agree - this counterbalance to the outward flow of air is crucial. In fact, it has been my biggest trial/discovery. I like to think of it as "resistance." I like to feel a healthy amount of resistance in the voice - this helps manage breath, and contributes to a healthy, beautiful, powerful sound. How to get this resistance, though, is elusive. I have figured out a number of personal tactics that I might describe further another time. Anyhow - it occurred to me upon reading this - the back-pressure caused by an occluded vocal tract is artificial! You don't get to occlude the tract when you're singing a vowel. You can do it on voiced fricatives, or rolled "r"s. But learning to support a sustained vowel with the proper resistance in the body is a great challenge, and occluded vocal tract exercises counteract this process by offering an artificial crutch. He makes the analogy of training wheels - well, training wheels on a bike are meant to be placed so they don't quite touch the ground if the bike it balanced upright. This means that as a child uses the bike, (s)he can, for moments, get used to the coordination of balance in motion because (s)he knows that the wheels will catch her. If you attach training wheels so that all four wheels of the bike are firmly planted on the ground at once - well then they will never be assisting the child in making the great leap of faith to experiencing the unusual muscular coordination of balance. I venture that a child training on such a crutch bike, will find, upon removal of the training wheels, that they are still unable to ride. This is akin to my feeling about lip-trills. They offer an alternative artificial source of resistance in the voice which does not provide a facsimile of how it feels to find resistance in the voice without that crutch, purely using the body. My personal experience is that lip trills make me used to the feeling of letting loose, un-supported air lean against the lips, which provide the necessary back-pressure. Then, when I go back to normal singing, I have trained my body not to expect to be finding it's own resistance from within - and as a result, my voice feels thin and under-supported.
Now, I will say - if you tell me "well that's your fault for singing un-supported behind the lip-trill," you are right. But that begs the question of what the point of the whole thing is. If you are meant to be creating the back-pressure on your own, separate from the lips, why have the lips closed? Why not just sing? It seems to me like you are making a situation in which it is appealing, if not necessary, to use poor technique behind an artificial crutch.
How do I find resistance? Well, that will have to be my next topic!!
Wednesday, March 30, 2016
Tuesday, February 25, 2014
Troubleshooting and the forward tongue position
Before I get into today's journey, I feel the need to mention that yesterday morning, I casually practiced some of the highest passages from I Puritani, and I felt fantastic! I even attempted the high F at the end of Credeasi Misera with some success. I tried something new - usually I tried singing "l'ire frenate" in the phrase going up to the B-flat and A-flat, and then I would just start on the high F with the word "poscia." But instead, this time, I tried "l'ire frena-a-TE" with the final syllable of "frenate" on the high F. I expected this to be all the more impossible because the F was coming at the middle/end of an ascending phrase - but it actually turned out more successful! I don't totally love the sound I'm making up there, and I kind of feel like it might be a sort of reinforced falsetto - but it's certainly respectable, and I would be quite happy to do it in performance like that. After all, half of the tenors who attempt the high F do it in some sort of heady mix/reinforced falsetto. There are only a few - Brownlee, Kunde, Matteuzzi - who do a really convincing high F that sounds connected to the rest of the voice. Anyhow, I achieved success with the F and with the preceding D-flat. I felt like the D-flat particularly went into a narrow, yet full place, in which it felt both powerful and in control. The odd thing about high notes for me is that when I really do them well, it feels as though they are going to be impossible. My best high notes usually occur when my voice feels a little bit "low" and robust - and I will hit the preceding note, perhaps an A-flat or B-flat, and that note will feel like it must be the absolute top of my range. I will feel as though I am at a ceiling, and I will think that ascending to the D-flat would be impossible from this place - and then it just comes out! It's the oddest thing, and I have trouble describing the sensation. Because when I say I feel like I am at a ceiling, I don't mean that I'm struggling or that the larynx is high - it just doesn't feel like I am singing in a high position.
Anyhow - that was yesterday. Today, I wasn't feeling quite as wonderful vocally - yesterday was a nice "fluke" that I can hopefully eventually turn into habit. Oftentimes, I feel that vocal development works thus: A teacher will be trying to get you to do something, and you can't quite do it or figure it out. You try really hard with seemingly little success. Then there might be a fluke one time when it works, and it feels so good, but then you can't replicate it, so you wonder if it was just luck, or if you just imagined it. Then you move on and work on other things and forget about that one thing and then a year down the line, you are singing better in general and then suddenly it strikes you - "this is what my teacher meant a year ago!" But at this point you are doing it consistently, and you never even realized you had figured it out.
So today I was experiencing some of my usual issues of having trouble connecting immediately to my support - my voice felt a little thin and pressed at the top - but when I tried to take the "pressed" feeling off by giving a little more warmth to the tone, it just felt loose and overblown. Sometimes when I experience this sort of issue - a general sense of weakness, I try to troubleshoot by thinking about the breath or the body or keeping my rib cage open - and these direct approaches usually don't help. Today what did help was some experimentation with tongue position. It's amazing how something as physically small as the position of the tongue in the mouth, or the position of the jaw, or the larynx, can so hugely affect the sensation of resistance and support. I think it has more to do with the fact that removing compensatory tensions forces the body to support deeply - but I don't sense it as a deep body/torso/lungs issue, I sense it as a vocal tract issue. Now - I don't want anyone who reads this to walk away thinking that I advocate controlling the tongue, or putting it in some particular forward position. There is no one size fits all. I just happened, at the time, to be experiencing a tongue that was dipping down and back on the left side, so thinking forward with the tongue helped me. Now - it is important to note that I never once attempted to stick my tongue in a position and force a vowel through that position. The true integrity of the vowel always comes first. Really, I was just releasing the tongue's false dampening effect in order utter a true vowel. But for me this has to be a conscious effort. The thing about the tongue is that it is very difficult to feel. The changes are subtle, and oftentimes I can think that I am very deliberately keeping my tongue released forward - but unconsciously, through the formation of vowels and through my habits, the back of the tongue is dipping low. Today, the sensation that helped me achieve a properly behaving tongue was the sensation that the tongue was fairly narrow in my mouth. This does not mean that I was bunching it up - it's just that my perception of the tongue when it dipping down on the left side is a sensation of the tongue being wide and flat on that side. So I thought of a narrow tongue down the center of my mouth, and I sang an [o] vowel with this thought in mind. The [o] really focused beautifully, and the sound was somewhat baritonal, and lent the support nad resistance I was looking for!
Now, there are other instances when I will specifically think of a wide tongue. It just depends on what issues I am having. It is very important, I think, not to make rules for yourself while singing. Singing is an act of constant experimentation, and you are cutting yourself off from so many possibilities if you decide "the tongue should always be forward" or "I should always breath through my nose" etc. There are things I didn't discover and achieve in my own voice for years because someone had hammered unspoken rules into my head like "don't push" or "lighten up on the top." Indeed, in my undergrad training, there was a widespread fear of "pushing" and "over-singing" and students and faculty alike seemed to equate light and bright with "good singing" and dark or heavy with "bad/dangerous singing." This was so damaging to me. It took me so long to discover my true tenor voice because I thought tenors were supposed to sound light and bright and forward and reedy - so it never occured to me that exploring the natural slightly deeper color of my voice could actually help me unlock my high notes!
Anyhow - that was yesterday. Today, I wasn't feeling quite as wonderful vocally - yesterday was a nice "fluke" that I can hopefully eventually turn into habit. Oftentimes, I feel that vocal development works thus: A teacher will be trying to get you to do something, and you can't quite do it or figure it out. You try really hard with seemingly little success. Then there might be a fluke one time when it works, and it feels so good, but then you can't replicate it, so you wonder if it was just luck, or if you just imagined it. Then you move on and work on other things and forget about that one thing and then a year down the line, you are singing better in general and then suddenly it strikes you - "this is what my teacher meant a year ago!" But at this point you are doing it consistently, and you never even realized you had figured it out.
So today I was experiencing some of my usual issues of having trouble connecting immediately to my support - my voice felt a little thin and pressed at the top - but when I tried to take the "pressed" feeling off by giving a little more warmth to the tone, it just felt loose and overblown. Sometimes when I experience this sort of issue - a general sense of weakness, I try to troubleshoot by thinking about the breath or the body or keeping my rib cage open - and these direct approaches usually don't help. Today what did help was some experimentation with tongue position. It's amazing how something as physically small as the position of the tongue in the mouth, or the position of the jaw, or the larynx, can so hugely affect the sensation of resistance and support. I think it has more to do with the fact that removing compensatory tensions forces the body to support deeply - but I don't sense it as a deep body/torso/lungs issue, I sense it as a vocal tract issue. Now - I don't want anyone who reads this to walk away thinking that I advocate controlling the tongue, or putting it in some particular forward position. There is no one size fits all. I just happened, at the time, to be experiencing a tongue that was dipping down and back on the left side, so thinking forward with the tongue helped me. Now - it is important to note that I never once attempted to stick my tongue in a position and force a vowel through that position. The true integrity of the vowel always comes first. Really, I was just releasing the tongue's false dampening effect in order utter a true vowel. But for me this has to be a conscious effort. The thing about the tongue is that it is very difficult to feel. The changes are subtle, and oftentimes I can think that I am very deliberately keeping my tongue released forward - but unconsciously, through the formation of vowels and through my habits, the back of the tongue is dipping low. Today, the sensation that helped me achieve a properly behaving tongue was the sensation that the tongue was fairly narrow in my mouth. This does not mean that I was bunching it up - it's just that my perception of the tongue when it dipping down on the left side is a sensation of the tongue being wide and flat on that side. So I thought of a narrow tongue down the center of my mouth, and I sang an [o] vowel with this thought in mind. The [o] really focused beautifully, and the sound was somewhat baritonal, and lent the support nad resistance I was looking for!
Now, there are other instances when I will specifically think of a wide tongue. It just depends on what issues I am having. It is very important, I think, not to make rules for yourself while singing. Singing is an act of constant experimentation, and you are cutting yourself off from so many possibilities if you decide "the tongue should always be forward" or "I should always breath through my nose" etc. There are things I didn't discover and achieve in my own voice for years because someone had hammered unspoken rules into my head like "don't push" or "lighten up on the top." Indeed, in my undergrad training, there was a widespread fear of "pushing" and "over-singing" and students and faculty alike seemed to equate light and bright with "good singing" and dark or heavy with "bad/dangerous singing." This was so damaging to me. It took me so long to discover my true tenor voice because I thought tenors were supposed to sound light and bright and forward and reedy - so it never occured to me that exploring the natural slightly deeper color of my voice could actually help me unlock my high notes!
Sunday, February 23, 2014
Parmi veder le lagrime, A te o cara, and the dangers of Italian language
I just finished my first week of rehearsals for Rigoletto and today, my day off, is the one real chance I get to do some in depth practice for the Duke, which I am covering, and Arturo in I Puritani, which I will be covering in May. I take these roles I am covering very seriously for several reasons. The obvious: I want to make a good impression on my employers, and I want to be ready if there were some emergency and I had to go on. But in addition, these roles are some of the most challenging I have ever approached, and I want to learn them right, free of bad habits, so that the next time I am hired to do one of these roles, I will be well prepared for the vocal demands.
As it happens, each of these roles contains an aria that I rank under my "most terrifying" arias. These are "Parmi veder le lagrime" in Rigoletto, and "A te o cara" in I Puritani. Parmi is notoriously challenging because it is full of long lines that sit in the passaggio. Though the range only extends to a B-flat, the high notes all come at the end of long ascending lines through the passaggio. On top of all of this, the piece needs to be sung in an elegant, gentle manner. All of these factors combine to make this aria a true test of ones technical prowess. "A te o cara" similarly sits in a challenging tessitura - the singer must navigate fluidly from D through high A in a manner that is fairly casual, as the A's and G's are merely a part of the legato phrase rather than climactic high points. I find F-sharp/G-flat to be the most challenging note of the passaggio for me - it is the one pitch that doesn't know exactly where it wants to be. In my voice it feels too low to really try to cover it the way I would on higher notes, but it certainly feels too high to be singing wide open. But I don't like to think of "covering" as a major event, it's just a natural acoustical shift that happens when you are not allowing the larynx to rise as the pitch rises. Anyhow, Parmi begins on a G-flat, and A te o cara frequently sits on F-sharps. A te o cara also has a big climactic high C-sharp. The combination of singing long lines around F-sharp and A, and then ascending to a high C-sharp, makes for an incredibly risky aria.
I was practicing these pieces today and I found that in both of them, I tended to get mushy in the language because of the long sustained lines, and as the language became mushy, the control and support would also become lax, and then I would start struggling, and I'd get the fast-vibrato syndrome.... None of these things are pleasant. So I took a stop back. One general thing that was helpful was to just sing more connected to the body - regardless of the gentle esthetic of the music. For me this means being aware of the full column of the torso beneath the vocal tract, and feeling a sense of strength in the lower back and thighs. I also find it oddly helpful, when playing my pitches on the piano, to play them at the actual pitch that I sing them (that is, an octave lower than they appear on the page). Music for tenors is written in treble clef, but the pitches we sing are actually an octave below what is written. Now, a coach of mine once told Brendon (the love of my life, and my pianist) that he should always play tenors' pitches up the octave because it will help them to sing brighter or in a higher placement or something. I find the opposite. Playing them down the octave encourages the singer to connect to the voice in a deeper, richer way, and in encourages the singer not to reach for the high notes, since they don't sound high. But apart from staying connected and grounded in my body, I also felt that the language itself was playing a significant role in my discomfort. I know everyone says Italian is the singing language, and that it's the easiest to sing in - but I find it so much easier to sing in English and German. English and German have a deliberate feel. There are plenty of consonants, and the vowels are open and bright. I realize that my comfort with these languages has to do with the fact that I am American, so the vocal production of American English comes naturally to me. I was trying to isolate what I was doing differently in Italian - why did I feel like my tongue wanted to pull down in Italian? Why did I have trouble forming the pure vowels? I took some inspiration from this video of Madonna at a vocal coaching: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cY9GR_-eXHE
There is one point where her coach is helping her with the word "change" which she has to scream in performance. In the coaching, she is using a supported "shout." I tried this with the same words she used. Then I switched to an Italian line to do the same thing - just sort of shout-calling - and I noticed something odd. When I shouted in colloquial English, there was a sense of stability and symmetry in my laryngeal position. When I switched to Italian, however, I would feel the larynx slightly move to one side. I analyzed further and found that this was in response to my tongue moving to one side, because when I formed Italian consonants like [l] or [r] with the tip of my tongue, I was putting the tip of my tongue over to the left side. Why? Because I associated a particular fluid sound with the Italian language, and I would subconsciously change my voice and my formation of consonants in order to create that sort of a liquid sound. I tried to deliberately create an Italian flipped [l] while keeping the tongue stable, symmetrical centered and forward, and the result was instantaneous - I was forced to put real support behind the consonant, and with this came the feeling of my real, direct voice, rather than the mushy faux-Italian thing I was doing.
I should mention one more epiphany, particularly in regards to the "A te o cara" high C-sharp. I had this epiphany a year ago when trying to work on legato singing. the phrase in the aria is "se ramme---enta" going from an F-sharp to an E, and then ascending on the middle vowel of "rammenta" to the C-sharp. This is a large leap, and it is tempting to try to do some kind of big switch. Some tenors do so successfully: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Bh7snchrq0
Here, Gedda aspirates the high note, as though it has an "h" behind it. He does so to great effect, and produces a beautiful C-sharp. I have found myself less successful with this type of approach. My epiphany was continuing the breath entirely legato through the ascent, as though I were just continuing to sustain the F-sharp. This involved a sense of constantly moving forward through the breath. The feeling as I did this was that it was not possible - surely if I didn't reset in some way, I would just top out and wouldn't make it. But to my surprise, I ascended cleanly and robustly to the high note with no problems! After forgetting about this a little bit, and having some trouble with that particular note, I went back today to the idea of really continuing in a true legate through to the high note - and once again, this approach was met with consistent success!
As it happens, each of these roles contains an aria that I rank under my "most terrifying" arias. These are "Parmi veder le lagrime" in Rigoletto, and "A te o cara" in I Puritani. Parmi is notoriously challenging because it is full of long lines that sit in the passaggio. Though the range only extends to a B-flat, the high notes all come at the end of long ascending lines through the passaggio. On top of all of this, the piece needs to be sung in an elegant, gentle manner. All of these factors combine to make this aria a true test of ones technical prowess. "A te o cara" similarly sits in a challenging tessitura - the singer must navigate fluidly from D through high A in a manner that is fairly casual, as the A's and G's are merely a part of the legato phrase rather than climactic high points. I find F-sharp/G-flat to be the most challenging note of the passaggio for me - it is the one pitch that doesn't know exactly where it wants to be. In my voice it feels too low to really try to cover it the way I would on higher notes, but it certainly feels too high to be singing wide open. But I don't like to think of "covering" as a major event, it's just a natural acoustical shift that happens when you are not allowing the larynx to rise as the pitch rises. Anyhow, Parmi begins on a G-flat, and A te o cara frequently sits on F-sharps. A te o cara also has a big climactic high C-sharp. The combination of singing long lines around F-sharp and A, and then ascending to a high C-sharp, makes for an incredibly risky aria.
I was practicing these pieces today and I found that in both of them, I tended to get mushy in the language because of the long sustained lines, and as the language became mushy, the control and support would also become lax, and then I would start struggling, and I'd get the fast-vibrato syndrome.... None of these things are pleasant. So I took a stop back. One general thing that was helpful was to just sing more connected to the body - regardless of the gentle esthetic of the music. For me this means being aware of the full column of the torso beneath the vocal tract, and feeling a sense of strength in the lower back and thighs. I also find it oddly helpful, when playing my pitches on the piano, to play them at the actual pitch that I sing them (that is, an octave lower than they appear on the page). Music for tenors is written in treble clef, but the pitches we sing are actually an octave below what is written. Now, a coach of mine once told Brendon (the love of my life, and my pianist) that he should always play tenors' pitches up the octave because it will help them to sing brighter or in a higher placement or something. I find the opposite. Playing them down the octave encourages the singer to connect to the voice in a deeper, richer way, and in encourages the singer not to reach for the high notes, since they don't sound high. But apart from staying connected and grounded in my body, I also felt that the language itself was playing a significant role in my discomfort. I know everyone says Italian is the singing language, and that it's the easiest to sing in - but I find it so much easier to sing in English and German. English and German have a deliberate feel. There are plenty of consonants, and the vowels are open and bright. I realize that my comfort with these languages has to do with the fact that I am American, so the vocal production of American English comes naturally to me. I was trying to isolate what I was doing differently in Italian - why did I feel like my tongue wanted to pull down in Italian? Why did I have trouble forming the pure vowels? I took some inspiration from this video of Madonna at a vocal coaching: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cY9GR_-eXHE
There is one point where her coach is helping her with the word "change" which she has to scream in performance. In the coaching, she is using a supported "shout." I tried this with the same words she used. Then I switched to an Italian line to do the same thing - just sort of shout-calling - and I noticed something odd. When I shouted in colloquial English, there was a sense of stability and symmetry in my laryngeal position. When I switched to Italian, however, I would feel the larynx slightly move to one side. I analyzed further and found that this was in response to my tongue moving to one side, because when I formed Italian consonants like [l] or [r] with the tip of my tongue, I was putting the tip of my tongue over to the left side. Why? Because I associated a particular fluid sound with the Italian language, and I would subconsciously change my voice and my formation of consonants in order to create that sort of a liquid sound. I tried to deliberately create an Italian flipped [l] while keeping the tongue stable, symmetrical centered and forward, and the result was instantaneous - I was forced to put real support behind the consonant, and with this came the feeling of my real, direct voice, rather than the mushy faux-Italian thing I was doing.
I should mention one more epiphany, particularly in regards to the "A te o cara" high C-sharp. I had this epiphany a year ago when trying to work on legato singing. the phrase in the aria is "se ramme---enta" going from an F-sharp to an E, and then ascending on the middle vowel of "rammenta" to the C-sharp. This is a large leap, and it is tempting to try to do some kind of big switch. Some tenors do so successfully: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Bh7snchrq0
Here, Gedda aspirates the high note, as though it has an "h" behind it. He does so to great effect, and produces a beautiful C-sharp. I have found myself less successful with this type of approach. My epiphany was continuing the breath entirely legato through the ascent, as though I were just continuing to sustain the F-sharp. This involved a sense of constantly moving forward through the breath. The feeling as I did this was that it was not possible - surely if I didn't reset in some way, I would just top out and wouldn't make it. But to my surprise, I ascended cleanly and robustly to the high note with no problems! After forgetting about this a little bit, and having some trouble with that particular note, I went back today to the idea of really continuing in a true legate through to the high note - and once again, this approach was met with consistent success!
Wednesday, February 19, 2014
Lessons from musical theater
So I'll sort of just jump into things here. I just started rehearsals for Rigoletto with the Boston Lyric Opera - I am singing Borsa and covering the Duke. The Duke is a more challenging role than any I have approached, and certainly a bigger sing than anything I've done in the past. A couple years ago I wouldn't have dreamed I'd be singing Verdi. So needless to say, I've been practicing a lot in the past months to prepare myself for this role.
Today, my voice was feeling flimsy. I can never tell what causes it, but I feel like my voice is on a sine wave, and I will have a week where I feel amazing, like I can dominate the world and sing anyhting, and then I have a week where my voice feels a little underpowered and flimsy and I have trouble getting my breath and my body under me. Anyhow, I am finally at the point where on a "flimsy" day I can troubleshoot and use vocal exercises to get my voice feeling robust and vibrant as usual. Today my revelation came through singing musical theater. Sometimes when I am singing classically, the sound gets a little too far back - it gets muted and covered and I have trouble with my breath. I noticed at some point that when this happens, it is because my tongue is dipping down and back to one side. I have significant facial asymmetry, especially in the jaw, and I think my issues keeping the tongue in line have to do with this. Anyhow, I turned on a recording of me singing "Flying Home" from Songs for a New World from a cabaret at the Woodstock Playhouse last Summer. Listening to the recording, I thought I sounded full, direct and clean in the voice. So what was I doing now that was making my voice loose and flabby? I decided to sing a little bit of Flying Home, engaging fully in the musical theater style (which in this piece is decidedly non-classical). Immediately, I felt the presence back in my tone. I felt that I was phonating efficiently, and my tongue was not pulling back. This felt natural in the openness of the musical theater style. But how to translate this to my classical singing... First, I tried singing a section of an operatic piece in the style of contemporary musical theater. I even pronounced the Italian like an American who couldn't master the accent. I scooped up to notes in crooning ways that would make Verdi cringe. This was effective, so I tried working the real Italian back in, along with the correct stylistic mannerisms.
I had to think consciously about the tongue being wide and forward in the mouth. Essentially, what I am trying to do it to disengage the association of tongue movement with the creation of tone and vowel. Of course, the tongue does shift for idfferent vowels, but not in the drastic way I was pulling it back subconsciously. I thought of my voice as being something that already existed fully supported and fully formed into a vowel before it reached my pharynx, so I could just let it slide out over my tongue without morphing the shape of my mouth/vocal tract in order to control it.
I also had an image of keeping the mouth wide. This sounds controversial - but I do not mean that I was singing with a wide tone. Mostly, this sensation of wideness just has to do with my own sensations and proclivities. I was tending to round the lips too much and pull the cheeks down - this went hand in hand with the tongue narrowing and pulling back. I didn't give myself a smile (I hate what that does to the sound) but I did imagine the corners of my mouth continuing to point outwards to either side. This gave me just the right "width" so that the tongue could lie naturally in the mouth.
Another of my epiphanies today had to do with the sensation of "support." You see, it is easy to push air and think you are supporting - but in fact you are doing the opposite - you are over-blowing loose air. I found my sense of support while singing "Flying Home." Something about the natural intention of words brought about a supported tone. It didn't have to do with breathing deep, or moving air. It had to to with meaning the words, and leaning into the tone rather than into the breath. It's hard to describe, because we don't sustain pitches when we speak casually. But if you imagine saying and meaning something that is very important - there is an impetus - a source of expression - that comes from the gut. This impetus gives consistency to the tone. Many of us don't speak like this often in everyday life because our speech is lazy - but it happens in moments of heightened emotion, when the soul takes over and you truly speak your mind. Anyhow, it is very odd to take this sort of sensation and sustain it - but that is where support and consistency are found. I like to think that while I am sustaining a tone, I am not holding it, but rather I am constantly continuing to intend it - continuing to intend the meaning, continuing to deliberately intend the vowel.
Using musical theater as a way to connect to my classical voice is nothing new to me. Last year I went through a Jesus Christ Superstar phase when I would warm up for opera auditions singing Judas' "Heaven on their Minds." Something about that song and the rock style forces emotional directness and complete abandon. That kind of freedom that comes from letting go of technical concerns is often exactly what I need to temper the control of opera singing.
Today, my voice was feeling flimsy. I can never tell what causes it, but I feel like my voice is on a sine wave, and I will have a week where I feel amazing, like I can dominate the world and sing anyhting, and then I have a week where my voice feels a little underpowered and flimsy and I have trouble getting my breath and my body under me. Anyhow, I am finally at the point where on a "flimsy" day I can troubleshoot and use vocal exercises to get my voice feeling robust and vibrant as usual. Today my revelation came through singing musical theater. Sometimes when I am singing classically, the sound gets a little too far back - it gets muted and covered and I have trouble with my breath. I noticed at some point that when this happens, it is because my tongue is dipping down and back to one side. I have significant facial asymmetry, especially in the jaw, and I think my issues keeping the tongue in line have to do with this. Anyhow, I turned on a recording of me singing "Flying Home" from Songs for a New World from a cabaret at the Woodstock Playhouse last Summer. Listening to the recording, I thought I sounded full, direct and clean in the voice. So what was I doing now that was making my voice loose and flabby? I decided to sing a little bit of Flying Home, engaging fully in the musical theater style (which in this piece is decidedly non-classical). Immediately, I felt the presence back in my tone. I felt that I was phonating efficiently, and my tongue was not pulling back. This felt natural in the openness of the musical theater style. But how to translate this to my classical singing... First, I tried singing a section of an operatic piece in the style of contemporary musical theater. I even pronounced the Italian like an American who couldn't master the accent. I scooped up to notes in crooning ways that would make Verdi cringe. This was effective, so I tried working the real Italian back in, along with the correct stylistic mannerisms.
I had to think consciously about the tongue being wide and forward in the mouth. Essentially, what I am trying to do it to disengage the association of tongue movement with the creation of tone and vowel. Of course, the tongue does shift for idfferent vowels, but not in the drastic way I was pulling it back subconsciously. I thought of my voice as being something that already existed fully supported and fully formed into a vowel before it reached my pharynx, so I could just let it slide out over my tongue without morphing the shape of my mouth/vocal tract in order to control it.
I also had an image of keeping the mouth wide. This sounds controversial - but I do not mean that I was singing with a wide tone. Mostly, this sensation of wideness just has to do with my own sensations and proclivities. I was tending to round the lips too much and pull the cheeks down - this went hand in hand with the tongue narrowing and pulling back. I didn't give myself a smile (I hate what that does to the sound) but I did imagine the corners of my mouth continuing to point outwards to either side. This gave me just the right "width" so that the tongue could lie naturally in the mouth.
Another of my epiphanies today had to do with the sensation of "support." You see, it is easy to push air and think you are supporting - but in fact you are doing the opposite - you are over-blowing loose air. I found my sense of support while singing "Flying Home." Something about the natural intention of words brought about a supported tone. It didn't have to do with breathing deep, or moving air. It had to to with meaning the words, and leaning into the tone rather than into the breath. It's hard to describe, because we don't sustain pitches when we speak casually. But if you imagine saying and meaning something that is very important - there is an impetus - a source of expression - that comes from the gut. This impetus gives consistency to the tone. Many of us don't speak like this often in everyday life because our speech is lazy - but it happens in moments of heightened emotion, when the soul takes over and you truly speak your mind. Anyhow, it is very odd to take this sort of sensation and sustain it - but that is where support and consistency are found. I like to think that while I am sustaining a tone, I am not holding it, but rather I am constantly continuing to intend it - continuing to intend the meaning, continuing to deliberately intend the vowel.
Using musical theater as a way to connect to my classical voice is nothing new to me. Last year I went through a Jesus Christ Superstar phase when I would warm up for opera auditions singing Judas' "Heaven on their Minds." Something about that song and the rock style forces emotional directness and complete abandon. That kind of freedom that comes from letting go of technical concerns is often exactly what I need to temper the control of opera singing.
Introduction
Several years ago, I decided to quit singing. I had been pursuing an opera career with all my might, through a Bachelor's Degree, a Master's Degree, and a couple years of auditions out of school. I lived and breathed opera. I listened to great singers of the past for fun. I stalked young professionals' websites for fun. I went to the library and read through opera scores for fun.
The one thing I didn't find fun was singing.
You see, it wasn't the rejection, or the financial realities of a performing career, or even the requisite nomadic lifestyle that made me decide to quit. It was when I realized that I did not enjoy singing. In fact, it made me utterly miserable. This had not always been the case - indeed, I went into music because for all of my young life, I loved to sing. I had no desire for fame or delusions of grandeur, I just loved to sing. And then after a hasty transition from baritone to tenor and a number of years singing wide open at the top with a manufactured bright sound that I thought a tenor should have, I ended up with my voice all tied in knots. It's not that I was awful - my friends and teachers at the time loved to tell me that it was all in my head, and that I sounded "fine" - but I could feel on the inside that what I was doing was not right. I felt that my artistic choices were being squashed by the limitations of my technique. I felt that my tone was either indirect and muted, or spread and pressed. Above all, my voice didn't feel like my voice.
At the time, I was prepared to defer to my teachers - I told myself that I shouldn't worry about what I think, because I shouldn't be listening to myself, and it sounds different in my head than it does to anyone else. I told myself that it would just take time and practice and then somehow my voice would magically get better. I told myself that if I gained weight, or stopped eating acidic foods, or fixed my posture, my voice would be mine again.
But I gave it time, and time didn't fix me. So I went on a year-long search for a new teacher, and after deciding that no teacher could help me, I thought I would quit. I had been so profoundly unhappy - more unhappy, I think, than any other time in my life (and that includes my bout with anorexia in High School). It was an odd sort of unhappiness, and perhaps many of my friends didn't know I was unhappy, because my unhappiness was all to do with my professional life. On the personal front, I couldn't have been happier. I was finally living with the love of my life, and we were supporting each other financially - all the long-distance and waiting were over. That joy in my personal life was part of why it occurred to me to quit singing. With so much to be joyful about, how could I waste any time making myself miserable about something so arbitrary as singing. I looked at people who didn't have to perform, people who lived quiet lives that they could really dedicate to the people they loved instead of slaving for their art.
So I took a Summer off - and by off, I mean I still had a gig as a comprimario in The Merry Widow with a small opera company, and I still made some recordings for projects that a friend of mine hired me for, and I still had a concert in which I performed a scene from Manon... But it was more time off from singing than I had ever had, having done two YAPs back-to-back the previous Summer, and I tried to use the down-time to get singing out of my head and just enjoy life. I had my first Almaviva coming up in the Fall with a tiny local company, and I thought I would just do what I needed to get through that, and then I'd stop. And I'd look for a new job, a new career, a new field. What that would be, I never did know.
Anyways long-story-short - or I suppose long-story-long because I've been going on for a while - I couldn't do it. My sense of self was to dependent on singing. It was too much in my blood to let it go. Even when I tried, even when I didn't have to sing, it was still on my mind like an unhealthy obsession, and the only way out was for me to indulge it. I did find a teacher that Fall, and she was the first one who started to turn me around. I had hit rock bottom with my voice, and then I had a lesson with my now current teacher, and for the first time in years, I walked out feeling good. No, I wasn't magically transformed, but finally I felt like my voice was on the track to where it wanted to be.
Though she was an integral part of mt journey, that is just where it started. I realized from that point, that my gut was often right, and that though it is important to go to a teacher and turn off my own preconceptions and my own ego, I also have to be my own teacher in a way. My voice knows where it wants to be, and my journey since then has been uncovering that voice within, layer by layer.
I probably think about vocal technique more than anyone. Seriously. I can't imagine anyone else on Earth spending so much mental energy on this niche topic. My thoughts and the images that help me move past roadblocks are often odd, and might not really make sense to someone outside my head, but I thought I would start recording them here, as much for my own sake as for any poor soul who stumbles upon and reads this blog.
The one thing I didn't find fun was singing.
You see, it wasn't the rejection, or the financial realities of a performing career, or even the requisite nomadic lifestyle that made me decide to quit. It was when I realized that I did not enjoy singing. In fact, it made me utterly miserable. This had not always been the case - indeed, I went into music because for all of my young life, I loved to sing. I had no desire for fame or delusions of grandeur, I just loved to sing. And then after a hasty transition from baritone to tenor and a number of years singing wide open at the top with a manufactured bright sound that I thought a tenor should have, I ended up with my voice all tied in knots. It's not that I was awful - my friends and teachers at the time loved to tell me that it was all in my head, and that I sounded "fine" - but I could feel on the inside that what I was doing was not right. I felt that my artistic choices were being squashed by the limitations of my technique. I felt that my tone was either indirect and muted, or spread and pressed. Above all, my voice didn't feel like my voice.
At the time, I was prepared to defer to my teachers - I told myself that I shouldn't worry about what I think, because I shouldn't be listening to myself, and it sounds different in my head than it does to anyone else. I told myself that it would just take time and practice and then somehow my voice would magically get better. I told myself that if I gained weight, or stopped eating acidic foods, or fixed my posture, my voice would be mine again.
But I gave it time, and time didn't fix me. So I went on a year-long search for a new teacher, and after deciding that no teacher could help me, I thought I would quit. I had been so profoundly unhappy - more unhappy, I think, than any other time in my life (and that includes my bout with anorexia in High School). It was an odd sort of unhappiness, and perhaps many of my friends didn't know I was unhappy, because my unhappiness was all to do with my professional life. On the personal front, I couldn't have been happier. I was finally living with the love of my life, and we were supporting each other financially - all the long-distance and waiting were over. That joy in my personal life was part of why it occurred to me to quit singing. With so much to be joyful about, how could I waste any time making myself miserable about something so arbitrary as singing. I looked at people who didn't have to perform, people who lived quiet lives that they could really dedicate to the people they loved instead of slaving for their art.
So I took a Summer off - and by off, I mean I still had a gig as a comprimario in The Merry Widow with a small opera company, and I still made some recordings for projects that a friend of mine hired me for, and I still had a concert in which I performed a scene from Manon... But it was more time off from singing than I had ever had, having done two YAPs back-to-back the previous Summer, and I tried to use the down-time to get singing out of my head and just enjoy life. I had my first Almaviva coming up in the Fall with a tiny local company, and I thought I would just do what I needed to get through that, and then I'd stop. And I'd look for a new job, a new career, a new field. What that would be, I never did know.
Anyways long-story-short - or I suppose long-story-long because I've been going on for a while - I couldn't do it. My sense of self was to dependent on singing. It was too much in my blood to let it go. Even when I tried, even when I didn't have to sing, it was still on my mind like an unhealthy obsession, and the only way out was for me to indulge it. I did find a teacher that Fall, and she was the first one who started to turn me around. I had hit rock bottom with my voice, and then I had a lesson with my now current teacher, and for the first time in years, I walked out feeling good. No, I wasn't magically transformed, but finally I felt like my voice was on the track to where it wanted to be.
Though she was an integral part of mt journey, that is just where it started. I realized from that point, that my gut was often right, and that though it is important to go to a teacher and turn off my own preconceptions and my own ego, I also have to be my own teacher in a way. My voice knows where it wants to be, and my journey since then has been uncovering that voice within, layer by layer.
I probably think about vocal technique more than anyone. Seriously. I can't imagine anyone else on Earth spending so much mental energy on this niche topic. My thoughts and the images that help me move past roadblocks are often odd, and might not really make sense to someone outside my head, but I thought I would start recording them here, as much for my own sake as for any poor soul who stumbles upon and reads this blog.
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