Body lies

I recently had a long series of email conversations with the authors of a book about “Body Mapping” called What Every Singer Needs to Know About the Body. As the book describes, a body map is “your mental representation of your body’s size, structure, location, and function.” Therefore, Body Mapping is “the process of refining, correcting, and embodying individual body maps.”

Singing elicits sensations. These sensations can give us false notions about what is actually happening in the body when we sing (an idea explored by author Kenneth Bozeman in Kinesthetic Voice Pedagogy). For example, when I sing, I often feel sensations in my head that make me feel like sound is ringing throughout my open skull. The problem is that my brain is (supposedly) in that space and sound can’t resonate in a space that is filled with brains (or any other matter, for that matter).

I asked What Every Singer Needs to Know… co-author Kurt-Alexander Zeller about some of the misconceptions, or “mis-mappings,” he encounters the most in his interactions with singers. He said,

"I think the broad areas of respiration and resonance are where the largest number of mis-mappings cluster. Every year I still am astonished by the number of amazing fantasies about breathing I hear from new students. Many of them truly don’t even know where their lungs are—somebody once told them to “breathe low” and now they think their lungs are in their intestines. Or they think that ribs are stationary or immovable. Or that the diaphragm is a vertical structure. And they will do their darnedest to move as if that faulty body map were reality.   

Don't head out on the trail without a good map!

Another common mis-mapping that drives me crazy is the idea that the muscles of facial expression on the outside of the skull are directly connected to laryngeal or pharyngeal muscles—of which the old 'lifting your eyebrows will keep the pitch from sagging' myth is one notorious manifestation. These are almost stereotypical singer myths—but one does encounter them fairly often."

Plain and simple, our bodies sometimes lie to us. It happens fairly often since most of the working parts for singing are inside of us and not that easy to see or feel.

That’s what makes Body Mapping so important. When we have a false idea of how the body works, we try to make it work that way. When we have an accurate understanding of function, our bodies tend to work more efficiently.

And since, as singers, our bodies are our instruments, this tends to lead to more effective, more expressive singing.

Have you had to confront “mis-mappings” of your body and voice? Did anything change when you had a better understanding of actual function?

How has your singing been this week?

Now go practice.

Sight reading

A few weeks ago I posted this video on the MTP facebook page with testimonials from current Broadway singers about the importance of sight reading and musicianship skills.

Music is odd in that we have the ability to learn it by ear. That's probably how most of us learned most of the music we know, just by hearing it so many times that it started to stick. While that can be a good way to learn things at times, it can also be slower and more inefficient than being able to read the score itself.

Imagine trying to learn a monologue just by having someone read it to you repeatedly. How much longer it would take you to learn and memorize that monologue if you didn't have the ability to simply read the words on the page?

It's essentially the same with music. Not only can sight reading skills help you learn music faster and more thoroughly, you will be certain to learn the notes and rhythms the composer intended and not someone else's variation from those notes.

These thoughts came up in an article I recently read in Classical Singer magazine by Peter Thoresen called "Thriving (Not Just Surviving) in Music Theory." In the article, he interviews one of my former professors from the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, Mary Ann Hart. Besides being an outstanding instructor and a wonderful human being, Hart's performance career includes several definitive recordings of classical song and lieder AND singing one of the voices in the original Beauty and the Beast animated movie.

When that job came up, Hart was living in NYC and working as a singer. She recalls,

"The Disney thing—that came through my church job...half Broadway [singers], half legit singers...The Broadway people that came in were pretty good readers, and anything they didn't get the first time through, they had perfectly the next day. So the ability to learn on your own—really fast—was crucial for that gig." 

Later in the article she makes another point about the importance of good sight-reading skills:

"It just makes everything so much easier," she says, "and coaching is great, but coaching is another expense—and when you're starting out, everything adds up. So the more you can do for yourself, the better off you are."

I had another professor in grad school who said, "When you get a new piece of music to learn, if your first move is to run to a piano or—even worse—to go find a recording of the piece, SHAME ON YOU! You should ALWAYS sit down and try to figure it out yourself first. Only go to those other tools when you have gone as far as you can with your own skills."

Once you get through your music theory classes, if you aren't forced to continue with the skill, it will eventually fade away (like most skills). Of the many, many skills we are asking you to build and develop during your time here, don't forget about sight reading. Consider taking 2-5 minutes at the beginning or the end of your practice session to read some melodies. There are lots of free sight singing guides on the internet. Print some out and give them a shot.

How has your singing been the last couple of weeks? Now that we're on the other side of fall break, give an honest evaluation of your practicing. Have you been doing enough? Do you need to come up with a new practice schedule for the second half of the semester?

Now go practice (your sight reading).