Teachers

I've been hearing, lately, a lot of talk, in some cases confusion, about teachers and singing. I don't recommend or condemn one teacher over another. Teacher and singer have to suit one another but here's something for your consideration.

There is an important phenonema which take place with the voice. This phenonema is the the same for an actor on live stage as it is for a singer, except one uses the speaking voice with the inflexions and modulations thereof (albeit over a small pitch variation) exclusively, whereas the singer uses the whole range of frequencies that the vocal chords can produce to extend the pitch well past the range of the speaking voice. The phenomena occurs because the voice can be coaxed to project in a natural manner.

The first requirement of the theatre is projection. Now this is the same for the small voice as it is for the big voice. Big voices will overpower small voices in a room but might not necessarilly be heard to greater advantage in the theatre. If the voices, however, project well, a small voice like Tito Schipa's or Galli Curchi's can share the stage with a large voice like Gigli's or Pavarotti in his prime, Kirsten Fagstadt or Leontyne Price in her prime. The bigger the theatre the better, because, given space to project, the perception of a big or small sound rapidly disappears. Now singers tend to hear the word "volume" bandied about and try to make volume. Not necessary. A big voice, say like Omar's, already has volume but it's of no use if the voice does not project. That fortunately is not the case with Omar, his voice projects magnificently. So what causes that projection? Pure vibrations that carry the note being sung with all the overtones necessary to complete the progressive chord of the note, much the same as the piano carries all the overtones of the progressive chord when it is struck. It is the vibrations of the strings being struck that carry not just the dominant pitch but the pitch of the perfect chord and beyond. Poor pianos don't complete all the harmonic overtones of the dominant note and so do not project as well as the pianos that do. Where does the human voice have an advantage over all other musical instruments? It can be varied by the user whereas a fixed instrument cannot. The first and foremost requirement of the singer, therefore, is to simply sing the note and not worry about volume. When the mind dictates a change of volume, the sound will amplify naturally without being forced. Forcing only damages the voice or rather the primary vibrators of the voice which are the vocal chords. A sudden blast of air over the vocal chords can actually knock the chords together which is not supposed to happen. Any knocking bruises them or makes them swell. Consistent knocking severely bruises and hence thickens them so that they cannot vibrate as nature intended. When the chords are thickened through bruising, the voice becomes hoarse or faint. That means the singer has been trying to make volume by pushing out more air instead of letting the air flow freely to set the chords vibrating. If one was to isolate the chords from the whole vocal mechanism and set them in vibration, the sound would be barely audible. But put a board behind them and the sound will increase in volume because the board acts as a resonator. Much the same thing happens when one removes the reed from an oboe and tries to make it vibrate. The sound of the primary vibrator is weak without its resonator which is the oboe itself.

Our bodies are our resonators. When one hears a voice that projects well, it seems everything in the room starts to vibrate with the voice. When you are projecting well, the body is vibrating in harmony with the voice. A good test of resonance is not what you, yourself hear, but what your piano reflects. If you are projecting well, it does not have to be projection with great volume, it can be a pianissimo passage, you will find the piano continues to sing after you stop singing. That means you have created a note with perfect overtones and the piano is reflecting sympathetic vibrations, i.e. the vibrations of your note has caused the piano strings to vibrate, i.e. the strings of the dominant note plus the strings (albeit fainter) of the overtones of that dominant note. Caruso used that simple law of sympathetic vibrations to determine if his voice was ready to project well in the theater. If the piano did not sing, it meant he was forcing (something which he was ever on guard about because as a young man he tended to force frequently with long periods of vocal silence following such stupidity.) Caruso is one singer who learnt from his mistakes. Most of the great singers did. When the piano did not vibrate, the mature singer would not get upset but would return to the middle of his voice and practise progressive softly sung changes of vowels preceded by a consonant on one note at a time until he heard the piano sing. Then he knew resonance had returned to hisvoice and that it would project well in the theatre.

We can all make our voices project but it doesn't necessarily mean that we are making our voices project in a healthy manner. The Italians often say "the voice will find its right canal". Well, in our every day speech, we do not really put great demands on the voice. So if we suddenly have to raise our voice perhaps to attract attention or to vent displeasure or to hail a cab, the voice instantly responds because it has been in a relaxed state. That's OK. No harm done yet, but we can't keep it up for five minutes because we did not give the voice a chance to warm up. When we sing, the voice must start from a relaxed state and then it fills as it warms up. In short, the voice finds its own canal. Higher voices tend to take less time to fill than the lower voices. In my case, I always found the voice took a good half hour or so to fill and become resonant. I did not try to make resonance or to force resonance by mistakenly forcing volume. I know some singers required less time and some more. Each singer is individual. For some years, I lived in Loerrach on the German/Swiss/French Border and then in Basel in Switzerland about one mile down the road. I would sometimes go to Freiburg, about 30 minutes away to attend an opera. I decided that I would never sing in a German Opera House simply because they barked rather than sung. They had a method. Bring the voice into the mask with a firm diaphrametric support. Yes it produced an inflexible bark. A dog's bark carries but it doesn't have great expression. They all sounded the same. I just could not have worked in that environment and felt that I could never work with fellow singers to build a rapport. In all roles, I used to take individual singers aside and rehearse with them until there was true and convincing interaction between the characters we were portraying. In a sense I was really doing the director's job for him. That meant the voices had to be flexible and inevitably it could not escape my notice that we all shared a common approach to singing, "let the voice find its own canal" or another way of expressing it would be "let the voice fill in its own time, do not try to force or shorten the time."

Now that is simply common sense. But some teachers demand that in the half hour or hour they have assigned for your lesson that your voice be instantly on tap. That is wrong. I've worked with a lot of singers and I know that is an impossibility. The teacher and pupil must be aware of the time factor required to let your individual voice fill. There are two ways to allow this time factor to work. One is vocal exercises if you respond well to vocal exercises. The other is with vocalises. By vocalises, I mean certain pieces, or phrases of a song or aria, or perhaps a whole piece that lies predominantly in the middle of the voice and which requires emotional output from the singer. I favor the latter because I think it is difficult for both teacher and singer to bring emotion (which I regard as an essential requirement) into vocal exercises alone within the time frame of a lesson. Senseless drilling in vocal exercise has minimum benefit because it is not exercising the imagination of the singer which is the very basis of wanting to sing. There are many whole pieces encompassing no more than just one octave that are ideal for the singer to use both as a warm up and as an experiment in building on emotion (for instance "Caro mio ben" which is to be sung, as the words indicate, to the very object of your love. As Crocodile Dundee would say, "Sing it with feeling, mate!") At home, the singer should keep the voice limber with daily vocal exercises but it is up to singer to experiment within those exercises with emotional coloring. The singer should try to sing perhaps a particular exercise with humor, then with sadness, then with ecstasy etc. Never sing a vocal exercise just purely on a physical basis or the the voice will tend to be monotonous throughout its range and that monotony often transfers to a song. In short, try to avoid just exercises in your lesson but select certain pieces to allow the voice to fill and then tackle your bigger numbers when the voice has filled. When the voice has filled, it will be as resonant as it can be. You will not be able to make it more so unless you overcompensate somewhere along the entire vocal mechanism like the German singers who bark. Your voice is a musical instrument. It becomes richer as you play it. Play it always with emotion.