It's just the voice

When I was in college, I remember one of my wrestling teammates asking me, “What do you DO when you’re a singing major? I mean, it’s just the voice, right?” Even though, as an athlete himself, he understood the concept of building physical strength through weight training, building stamina through cardio, and building skills through technical practice, he didn’t see how those same concepts applied to the voice.

As singers, we need to consider ourselves vocal athletes and, as such, we should approach our practice with the same intention, discipline, and regularity as the Olympians we’ve been watching this summer.

Therefore, the primary purpose of this blog is to have an ongoing conversation about your vocal practice: what you are practicing, when you are practicing, how you are practicing, and even why you are practicing. In this regard, we are all each other’s best resources (coaches, teammates, and cheerleaders). By discussing our goals, successes, frustrations, and processes, we can motivate each other, support each other, and learn from each other. You all have something to offer this group in this forum.

If some of you returning students have come to see this blog as an inconvenience or just a way for you to lose points on your grade when you forget to do it, I hope the new school year can be an opportunity to take a new approach.

To start things off, I’d like everyone to post a couple of vocal goals they have for this year. Maybe it’s a specific technical issue (I want to find better ways to release jaw tension), an end-result issue (I want to add another two half steps to the top of my range), a process issue (I want to be better about sticking to my practice schedule), or something related to repertoire (I want to learn a new song every two weeks and memorize my songs earlier in the semester). For you beginners, it may be something even more basic but just as crucial (I want to think outside of the vocal limitations I have imposed on my voice and see where things go).

Here are my personal goals:

Since I have some new commitments this semester that will place additional demands on my time, my first goal is to stick to my scheduled practice time and not use it for other things.

Secondly, I want to continue to explore the specific techniques I learned this summer at the CCM Vocal Pedagogy Institute to see how they may impact my performance sound (and to see if I want to incorporate them into my teaching).

Tell us about your goals for this semester and this year.

Again, welcome back. Let’s get to work!

Now go practice.

Reversibility

With summer break just a couple of weeks away (!) it is a good time to discuss reversibility.

Essentially, reversibility (also called detraining) is the “use it or lose it” principle from exercise physiology. As described in The Vocal Athlete by Wendy D. LeBorgne and Marci Rosenberg, the longer you take a break from training, the more time it takes to get back the strength, flexibility, and capabilities you have built. The research suggests that if you take two weeks off from strength training, it can take up to four weeks to get back to the performance levels achieved before the hiatus. This likely applies to vocal training in similar ways.

Of course, we all need occasional breaks from vocal work. On a daily basis we need to plan resting periods (or "vocal naps") throughout the day, especially on days of heavy vocal use. Many pedagogues suggest taking one full day each week to rest from singing for both a physical and mental break from the discipline. Rest is an essential element of vocal training.

However, as I heard Placido Domingo say once in an interview, “If I rest, I rust.” This may be an oversimplification of the reversibility principle, but it gets the point across.

I hope you all find time in the coming months to relax, to have some time away from academic demands, and to devote time to the personal relationships and outside interests that are so vital to the human experience. But none of us can afford a three-and-a-half-month vacation from singing. Reevaluate your practicing when you know what your summer schedule will be, and continue to set aside times in your day for vocal activities. You have all made great progress and are on a positive trajectory with your technique and artistry. Make sure to maintain the commitment and discipline over the summer.

Have a wonderful summer. Relax, recuperate, and rejuvenate, but avoid reversibility.

And stay in touch!

Now go practice.

Motivation

This Auditions Plus blog entitled, “The Art of Practicing," is a quick read with some thoughts worth entertaining:

http://www.auditionsplus.com/blog/?p=3216

The author starts with the simple question, “Do you like to practice?”

Acknowledging that we all make excuses sometimes to justify not practicing, she goes on to say, "The art of practicing is not just about discipline—about practicing every day without fail, whether you want to or not. This might lead to improvement, yes, but it may also lead to burnout, resentment, or just constant excuses."

Instead, she asks the question, “Why do you practice?” Is it because you love to sing or you love telling a story or is it just because you feel like you’re supposed to practice?

To me, one of the more important points here is to distinguish between the discipline of practice and the art of practice.

I believe that we are what we do most of the time. If you want to be a healthy person then you have to make healthy choices a lot more often than you make unhealthy ones. If you want to be an honest person you have to practice honesty and avoid the situations that drag you into dishonest behavior. Therefore, if you want to be a good singer, you have to employ discipline and regular practice.

But, being an artistic singer also requires inspiration. Sometimes, to avoid burnout or drudgery, you may need to step back from your practice routine. If it is becoming mundane or tedious, taking a break for a while or reevaluating your process could be in your best interests. Until you find the motivation to get back into a routine, you may decide to use your practice time to rediscover or reignite the passion you have for singing and the love you have for music as both an art form and a necessary part of life—to refocus on how singing can make you a more expressive, compassionate, sympathetic, and communicative human being.

So I’m curious: Why do you practice? How do you get yourself to the practice room when you’ve lost motivation?

Now go practice (or don’t and tell me why).

Musicianship

[EDIT: An updated version of this post is now available here on the Classical Singer blog.] 

Sometimes people mix up the terms “musicianship” and “artistry.” While artistry refers to the expressive interpretation of a song, musicianship refers to being accurate to the pitches, rhythms, dynamics, and tempo markings written by the composer.

If you’ve ever listened to a Broadway cast recording and followed along with the printed music, you may have noticed a tendency for singers to occasionally stray from the score. Even though I tend to be in the “sing what is written” camp, in my estimation, there actually are times when it is appropriate to deviate from the score. Here are some examples:

#1: It is a stylistically accepted part of the genre. This is not a blanket statement for all of music theatre, but in certain pop/rock-influenced or gospel-influenced musicals (Children of Eden, Memphis, Jesus Christ Superstar) it may be OK to deviate from the printed notes and rhythms. As a rule, however, riffing and “optioning up” are fairly rare in most music theatre.

#2: The piece has been around long enough that there are multiple examples of professionals singing notes that are not in the score. Some shows and songs have been done for so long by so many artists that there is a track record of ways to change the printed notes that still honor the composer’s intent but acknowledge how the piece has grown over time.

Conversely, if there is only one professional recording available and the singer does something that is not in the score, in my mind, that is not sufficient justification to sing it that way yourself. Maybe the notes were changed by the composer from the time the recording was made to the time the music was printed and published. Or maybe the composer asked the singer specifically to play around with the melody during rehearsals to see what would happen. Which leads me to…

#3: If you receive permission from the composer to deviate from the score, knock yourself out! We’re lucky in music theatre that so many of our composers are still living. When I get the chance, my favorite question to ask composers is what degree of latitude they would like performers to take with their music. Overwhelmingly, the composers I’ve talked to prefer greater accuracy to the score.

[I have a story here about a famous composer coaching one of our singers when he visited campus a few years ago. Ask me about it if you want to hear it!]

So, before you change the written notes or rhythms, try considering the following:

1. Do I know what the correct notes and rhythms actually are and have I made every effort to make the song work in my voice the way that it is written?
2. Does my choice to deviate from the score enhance the text and help tell the story more effectively or does it just show off something about my voice? In other words, is it about the music and the story or am I making it about me?
3. Is it my own interpretive choice, born out of the text, or am I just copying someone else?

I understand that sometimes our lack of accuracy comes from learning music via recordings instead of from a printed score. Naturally, we are often attracted to music because of a recording we have heard. But, as you know, that does not guarantee that the singer on the recording is being musically accurate.

We MUST take the time to read the score (keep working on those essential music theory skills!) to find out what the composer intends. Otherwise, we are not singing, for example, Lerner & Loewe’s My Fair Lady. We are singing our version of Lerner & Loewe’s My Fair Lady.

The place where you “make it your own” (though I sort of abhor that phrase) is in the way you express and tell the story from within the parameters the composer gave you. This is where musicianship becomes artistry. And that’s what composers and audiences both want to hear.

When we begin with musicianship, we uncover honest, original artistry.

Now go practice.

Appoggio

In most of your lessons over the last few weeks we have talked more specifically about the appoggio breathing technique. Once again, appoggio comes from an Italian word meaning “to lean,” which indicates the approximate level of engagement we should keep in the muscles of inhalation while we are singing. Some people summarize this breath management strategy as “singing on the gesture of inhalation.”

To help demonstrate this, we identified the two primary muscles of inhalation: the diaphragm and the external intercostals. Watch this short video and take special note of the location and motion of the diaphragm in relation to the rest of the torso.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WMt_1jw47Q

We also identified in our lessons where it is that you all tend to notice engagement or expansion in your own bodies when you take a real singer’s breath. Based on who you are and how you are built, you may not feel things exactly the same way as other singers. For instance, larger people (endomorph body types) tend to take deeper abdominal breaths whereas people with smaller builds (ectomorphs) tend to be more ribcage-oriented in their inhalations.

In The Vocal Athlete by Wendy LeBorgne and Marci Rosenberg, the authors point out that studies have confirmed that elite singers do not all use the same strategies for breathing. They say that we all tend to develop an individual pattern that works based on what we are being asked to do: speaking vs. singing, singing classically vs. belting, singing while standing still vs. singing while dancing, etc.

This is all the more reason to bring breathing more into our consciousness and notice how we breathe in different situations. Then we can observe what our default habits are and decide if they could be replaced by more efficient practices. But if we don’t take the time to even notice, we’ll never know.

Of course, the other main reason breath is so important for singers is that it tends to calm our nerves, center our energies, and bring an internal focus to our singing. It’s no accident that activities like meditation, prayer, and yoga often begin by bringing our attention to the breath. From there we are more attuned to what we are feeling and to how our emotional and physical selves align.

Inspire.

Now go practice.

Speak easy

No, this post is not about Prohibition or bootlegging. (sorry to disappoint)

There is an old Italian, bel canto phrase that says, “Si canta come si parla” or “You sing as you speak.” The idea is that if you have bad habits in the way you speak, those habits will impact your singing voice. Conversely, if you use your speaking voice efficiently, that bodes well for your singing.

One of the negative practices we can fall into is speaking too loudly. Just as singing loudly uses more force and pressure than singing at a medium dynamic level, speaking loudly can similarly cause vocal fatigue.

We often get subconsciously tricked into speaking louder than is necessary. Try this experiment: get in a car and, before starting the engine, turn on the radio to an acceptable sound level. Then turn on the engine and start driving and notice how much louder you need to turn the radio volume in order to hear it (especially if you’re driving at interstate speeds). This tells us just how much noise our voices have to compete with when we’re in the car. This applies to any noisy environment (loud restaurants, music or sporting events, classes with theatre majors, etc.). We always have to be guarded about how loudly we are speaking but especially when we are competing with background noise.

Another pitfall is speaking below our optimal pitch level. We all love the sound of deep, radio-announcer voices and our culture definitely tells us that low voices are viewed as powerful, sexy, and authoritative. But the truth is that most of us speak at a lower pitch than is ideal for our voices.

As we all know, the vocal folds lengthen for high notes and shorten for low notes. Interestingly, one study I read pointed out that, when going from silence to speaking, most of us actually shorten our vocal folds. This means that when we speak, our vocal folds engage to take on a shorter position (using a lower pitch) than when they are at rest.

A common rule of thumb is the “uh-huh” test. When we say “uh-huh,” as if we are answering “yes” to a question, the pitch we use tends to be pretty close to where our natural speaking voice sits.

One other inefficiency is the use of glottal fry (also called vocal fry). This phenomenon usually happens when we drop in pitch or trail off at the end of sentences. In recent years, however, it has become an unfortunate trend in the way people speak—especially young women.

Watch this video to see what it is (and to see how annooooooying it is):

http://www.cbsnews.com/videos/faith-salie-on-speaking-with-vocal-fry/

While speaking in vocal fry is not necessarily harmful, per se, it is definitely inefficient and in no way benefits our singing. Author and Speech-Language Pathologist Karen Wicklund points out that vocal fry can play a role in some voice therapies, but in singing it may encourage imprecise onset.

There are lots of ways we use our vocal folds that can have negative impacts on our singing voices, like throat clearing, coughing, and sneezing. Given how much we speak throughout the course of a day, it’s a good idea to pay attention to “how” we speak as well.

Si canta come si parla.

Now go practice.

Tongue tied

As you all know, we must sing with freedom. While singing is not a relaxed activity it does require the releasing of any tension that may be extraneous or detrimental to our singing.

One of the main culprits when it comes to unhelpful tension is the tongue. If the tongue is not free and flexible it cannot properly shape vowels or articulate consonants.

I do tongue-freeing exercises with all of you, usually toward the beginning of our singing (Session 1), in order to encourage a release that will carry over to the rest of your singing as well.

In exercises like la-la-la and da-da-da the tip of the tongue moves to the front part of the roof of your mouth (the alveolar ridge) or even to the teeth. The freer the tongue is the faster you will be able to do this.

In exercises like ga-ga-ga and ya-ya-ya the middle and back part of the tongue moves up and down. Do these exercises quickly with the jaw as released and uninvolved as possible.

Then you can do combinations of these exercises, again as quickly as you can manage and with release at the jaw: ya-la-ya-la, di-ga-di-ga.

Those of you who can trill your r’s can use that as well. I always like to go from a trilled r to a vowel so you can get as close to “real” singing as possible.

Another thing to consider is that, since the base of the tongue is so near the top of the larynx, if the tongue is pressed too low it will push down on the larynx. While we do often want the tongue to be flat and out of the way for our open vowels, we don’t want it to be held in a way that depresses or excessively lowers the larynx. One helpful image I’ve read to help with this is to imagine that the tongue is falling forward. You may think of the tongue as being weightless or even floating in your mouth as you are sustaining vowels.

Knowing how involved the tongue is in our singing, it’s a good idea to regularly “check in” and see if it is free or if it is carrying any undue tension. Freeing exercises like the ones discussed above are great to incorporate into your regular routine.

Happy singing!

Now go practice.