High but not lifted?

High but not lifted?

Singing is hard to teach and confusing to learn. I think a lot of this has to do with our need as singers to balance opposing elements. After all, we are trying to use highly contracted vocal cords within an expanded throat; a contraction within an expansion. I have often found myself in a lesson, wondering at how such contradictory advice can come out of my own mouth. “Up and over” I say, only to follow up a moment later with, “No, you’re lifting!”  Related to this is “lift the palate…. But don’t go up!”

This clearly needs a bit more unpacking to make sense. I think it comes down to imaginative work as opposed to physical work. Physically lifting the palate is less effective than feeling your palate is high: best of all may be to “see” the palate high as a kind of visualization of inner space. You want the singer to imagine that the voice is lifted and the palate is high, but not to physically lift anything to do it.

Cognitively speaking, muscularly lifting the palate would involve the sensorimotor strip of the prefrontal cortex, which initiates conscious action. Imagining a lifted palate may involve proprioception, or the felt sense of body, an activity involving the parietal lobes. The “beginning of the yawn”, a concept taught by the old Italian masters, involves imaginatively triggering the body feeling leading to the yawn without fully engaging the unconscious reflex. The only way you can hope to do this effectively is with the inner imagination, or mind’s eye.

I might just as well say, “Don’t do it, see it”! You can’t imagine a ham sandwich and have it appear, but if you imagine your palate is lifted, it is. Try it!

                  

Music Psychology at the movies

Music Psychology at the movies

One of the best movies I have seen recently was the animated feature, Inside Out. Actually, it brought me to tears more than once. The authors have created a cartoon that is based on modern cognitive psychology, in particular, modern theories of personality, memory formation and retrieval, cognitive development and emotional function. I was particularly touched to see how, in the control room of the mind of an 11 year old girl, musical memory has a privileged route to consciousness. No matter who you are, where you are, or what you are doing, a musical thought can find its way into your mind, imbued with all the emotional significance that has accrued to it through your experience.

I was touched to think what a delight and what a privilege it is to study music as a psychological phenomenon, and to attempt to add to our understanding of its’ unique function in human mental and emotional life. Oh, and by the way, birds do it too! 

http://esciencecommons.blogspot.ca/2012/12/birdsong-study-pecks-theory-that-music.html

Help! My student is getting worse between lessons....

When the student gets worse between lessons

There are times when, with all the good will in the world, a motivated and hard-working student  just seems to get worse instead of better. What is going on?

In my experience, most singers fall into certain types, when it comes to practice. There are those who really know how to practice effectively, can take what the teacher gives them, and run with it. On the whole, these are students who know how to work imaginatively with the important concepts. Unfortunately, they are in the minority. Among the others, some practice too little, and some too much. Among the former are those students who treat voice lessons like a kind of massage therapy. They arrive for the lesson, have a good workout, and then don’t think about technique until they see the teacher again. This type of student will not progress much from one lesson to the next. They won’t actually get much worse; but any progress made at the last lesson has to be relearned, over and over.

Among the most challenging students to teach are those who work hard and get worse between lessons. When this happens, perhaps the first thing you should ask yourself as a teacher, is whether the student is being overly zealous in carrying out your teaching instructions. An overly physical approach to vocal technique is as bad (or worse) than no approach at all. Emphasize that all physical instructions must be carried out imaginatively. “Up and over” is not about lifting your eyebrows: “lifting the palate” is not about muscularly jamming the pharynx and tongue: “breathing from the back” does not mean grabbing the intercostals and employing a “squeezebox” technique on the inhalation.

One of my students last week came in sounding noticeably worse than at her previous lesson. Being somewhat aware of her issues, I know that she tends to overdo it, physically. Turns out she was focusing so hard on the “gesture of inhalation” and on the feeling of a lifted palate, and doing it in such a physical way, that she wasn’t feeling the voice in the front at all. “Singing is like calling” I said to her. “If you’re not calling to someone, you’re not really singing”. Without balancing the elements that cause the voice to emerge, beautiful and expressive singing just cannot happen.

When students have PTSD

--> Recently, a singer came to me so bruised from her previous vocal experiences, that she virtually had post-traumatic stress disorder. Her former teacher was an expert in the "blame the student"  style of teaching, which left her with no self-confidence, and unable to sing in tune.

Alice (not her real name) was in such a state over her voice, that she was unable to produce a sound without paranoia. The effect of constant worry about sound is that you can’t sing. The first thing I tried to do with this student was to emphasize that there was nothing wrong with her voice; in my opinion, she had to learn how to let it out, rather than judging the sound before she produced it. If you believe your sound is intrinsically bad, and has to be “fixed” before it can be acceptable, you are stuck. No amount of fixing is going to produce a voice that is free, balanced and flexible. The problem is first and foremost, in your thinking.

Far better to see your voice as a potentiality that needs to be released. Once you get your mind off “sound”, you can begin to do the things that allow the sound to be produced in a healthy, balanced way. Sound is the ultimate effect of certain causes: balanced breathing, support, placement, a loose throat, a comfortable domed shape to the resonators, a sense of drinking in as you ascend the scale, a rounding to the vowels. Oh, and always, the feeling of speaking as you sing, which brings lightness, clarity and a forward feeling to the voice. Devote yourself to the causes, and the effect, a beautiful singing voice, takes care of itself. No amount of paranoia about sound will produce a beautiful voice, if you forget to care of the causes. After all, if you are too worried about your sound to do these things, who’s going to take care of them for you?

Training tenor voices

--> I have two tenors who came to me recently for lessons. They share a similar problem: no approach to the passaggio area. Instead of rounding the voice, they blast their way up to the top. This means that neither of them have high notes.

The first tenor sings as a baritone; the second finesses everything above a “g” in a light head tone. Tenor 1 works as hard as he can to keep his larynx down, to no avail; inevitably, it goes higher as he ascends the scale. Tenor two “puts it forward” as a method: of course, his larynx is up around his eyeballs.

Is there any middle ground between trying to force the larynx down (don’t even try it, it  never works) and just letting it the larynx do what it wants, which is to lift as you ascend the scale? Mercifully, there is a natural function which releases the throat; it is called yawning. Unfortunately, no one ever taught us how to yawn and sing clearly at the same time.

If we examine the feeling of a yawn very carefully, we find that it consist of several aspects. The most obvious one is releasing the jaw; next to that, a feeling of width across the neck in front, around the collar bone. Finally comes the least obvious part; an internal tilt behind the tongue, at the level of the arytenoid cartilages. The throat seems to tilt back, and the root of the tongue releases around the hyoid bone. It is this backward tilt of the larynx which seems to release the whole apparatus into a yawn.

With a comfortable yawn as you phonate, make sure the voice is well forward, at the point of clear pronunciation. Do not let the voice fall back or be swallowed. Do not let the onset become glottal or airy. It is extremely useful to practice this forte, then piano, without taking a breath in between. Piano then becomes a matter of leaving the spaciousness in the throat as it is , but using gentle air instead of compressed breath to sing.

Singing higher becomes a matter of rounding the palate and using increased abdominal compression (support), while not tightening the throat below. It is imperative to keep the voice forward at the point of pronunciation as you sing.

Moving the breath… or not?

Lately I have had a number of singers come to me with similar problems; the voice is weak on the bottom, loud in the upper middle, and screamy on top. The sound is airy and without focus, frequently out of tune in the passagio area. The throat and jaw are tight, and the sound is uncomfortable to listen to.

This particular complex of problems is often associated with the student trying to “move the breath”. They send the breath forward, which lifts the larynx and puts air in the sound. To me, they are using a sound pedagogical principle the wrong way.

The easiest way to explain what I mean is to illustrate with “blowing air” and with “warming air”. Blowing air is only too easy to demonstrate; just make a loud whisper, like “hah”, and feel the air against your hand positioned in front of your face. You will see right away that the larynx is lifted and the throat contracted. Now try feeling warm air against your hand, positioned in front of your face without making a sound, as though you were trying to warm your hands with your breath on a cold day You should notice that the larynx is low, the pharynx is expanded, and the palate is high. This was all achieved without trying to lower the larynx, expand the pharynx or lift the palate.

The feeling of “come si parla” or singing like you speak, means there is a clear point of pronunciation in front of the face. Most people feel it either on the hard palate or just in front of it, between the nose and the skin of the nose, or at the bridge of the nose. Christa Ludwig described it as the "point" in the vowel. Because it is a resonance effect, and not an actual place of physical vibration, exactly where you feel it is unique to the singer. You find it by speaking clearly and directly, as in a “demonstration” of clear speech. You can also find it with a quick hum, and identifying where you feel the vibration.

By all means, move the breath when you sing; but use warming air, not blowing air to do it. Aim for a sound with frontal focus and a clarity related to speech. Whatever you do, don’t blow the air past the point of pronunciation!

Life-long learning III: The Young@Heart Chorus

Yesterday I watched the film "Young @Heart". I found it almost unbearably moving. These choristers, with an average age of 80, live to sing, quite literally: singing may actually be keeping them alive. Recent research tells us that the onset of Alzheimer's can be delayed through mental activity, especially by learning new skills.

There is something deeply touching about seeing this chorus convey the lyrics to rock-and-roll songs with such joy, such sincerity, such lack of artifice. Watching them perform to a jail-house audience who were enthralled and at times, deeply moved, was really something.

I wept a lot watching this film. I was so often reminded of my father, who had a deep and abiding love for music. He was listening to violin music on the walkman I bought him until the day before he died. For him, his research and his lab (he was a scientist) kept him fighting against lung cancer. He was absolutely determined to beat it so that he could go on with his work. Sadly, he didn't. He died at the age of 86.

I once gave a concert at a long term care facility here in Toronto. I heard later from my mother, who was in the audience, that when I started to sing, there was a visible stir in the crowd. She said that some of those people, who were terribly sick, seemed to come back from the dead when they heard the sound of my voice.

I don't think that my singing was so special; I do think the human voice has an extraordinary power to stimulate, move, entertain. I believe it can even bring, for a moment, life to those who are ready to leave it.

Life-long learning II: A Master's at 59

This summer, when I turned 59, I began a Master’s Degree.

I had first thought of it more than 15 years ago: in 1994, when I got back to Toronto from the Phantom of the Opera tour, I looked at a Master’s in Performance under Lois Marshall, an artist whom I adored. Something held me back. Perhaps it was a fear of studying under my own professional colleagues, perhaps it was a fear of the state of my transcripts; at any rate, I never filled out the forms.

By 2001, I was again thinking of post graduate study. I had in the intervening years turned from performing to teaching, having had some success coaching advanced singers in Europe. This time, I thought of a Master’s in Education. I got as far as downloading the application and writing away for my transcripts. When my transcripts arrived, I tried to convert the letter grades into the standard 4 point system. I was overcome with shame. Confronting that trail of successes, failures and incompletes was too much for me. I never even finished computing my grade point average.

As a more or less ‘gifted’ child, I had graduated from college at the age of 19, and left behind me an academic record rife with inconsistency. For every “A” in literature or music, there was a “C” in quantum mechanics, or a B- in biology. I took far more courses than I needed, in every conceivable field, but I often didn’t finish them.

In 2010, after the opera workshop I taught at a prominent Toronto music school was canceled, I thought once again of going back to school. Somehow, I knew that I could not face approaching 60 without beginning something. Because I didn’t want to leave home to study, I looked for a plausible distance master’s. I found a program that looked really interesting; the Master’s in Psychology for Performers at the University of Sheffield in England. Working with singers does bring you to the heart of psychological issues, and I thought this two year program might be just right for me.

Once again I began the hell of applying. To my amazement, when I finally confronted the shame of my messy transcript, I had just over a 3.0 average for my BA and a 3.4 for the first year of a graduate diploma I did in 1981. I filled out a ream of forms, and sent them in. I was accepted to the program.

I began the degree with a residency in Sheffield in August, and I loved it. At first I was overcome with anxiety. I thought I had been out of school for too long to succeed academically, that the subject would be horribly dry and I would die of boredom, that poor eyesight would not allow me read the assigned reading. I was all wrong. The teachers have been wonderful, the assignments interesting, the readings fascinating. Whether this degree leads to me getting a good university teaching post or not hardly seems to matter. I feel welcomed into an entirely new community of scholars, and I feel like I belong there.

To any of you out there who also feel like it’s too late to start, I say “Go ahead. Start your Master’s at age 59. Maybe you’ll even have a PhD by the time you retire!”

Life-long learning

As a voice teacher, primarily of adults, I meet a lot of people who have been told at some point (usually early on) that they cannot sing, have no talent, etc. This type of person has made a decision to confront early life experience of a negative kind to find out what is actually possible. We know from many studies that how you understand failure in music is a powerful predictor of whether you stay with it or give it up. Research has shown that those students who attribute failure to lack of ability tend to give up; those that attribute it to lack of effort stay with it. It would be interesting to know how many of those students who gave up music come back to it as adult learners.

It is a conviction of mine that development in later life has a lot to do with revisiting situations from early life that left us incomplete or unsatisfied. For example, working out at the gym leaves me with a particular sense of accomplishment; the gym was the scene of much trauma and humiliation as a child. As an adult, I can reclaim that experience and cast it in a new mold.

Financial and time constraints will always play a part in ongoing adult learning. For an adult to invest time and money in studying music means prioritization. Music must be given a higher priority for time and resources than the other things in one’s life. For myself, ongoing development has been an important part of my identity. I was one of those musicians who couldn’t get it all from teachers. By the age of 26, I had decided that whatever further progress I would make as a singer was going to come from my own efforts. That began a life-long struggle to acquire vocal competence.

If you want to keep singing past the age of 45, you have to learn to accommodate the changes that life brings you. Essentially, I believe that all singers who continue into later life have to be engaged in a practice of on-going learning. I read recently an excellent article on Tony Bennet, still singing in his 80’s. He has a set of warm-up exercises from his teacher, and a carefully worked-out regime that allows him to keep performing. He too, is engaged in on-going life-long learning.

High note problems: fixing the “quick fix”

Once in a while, I will see a tenor in mid-career, who comes to me with a high note crisis. This kind of singer has enjoyed considerable success with a dangerous technique; he has learned to sing the high notes with a stentorian sound and tremendous compression. His method is to depress the larynx as he approaches the top, and to support like crazy.

Most of us, I think, are in agreement that to sing well, the larynx has to be comfortably low. “Releasing” or “loosening” the throat is a cornerstone of technique for many teachers. Pressing on the larynx can be an addictive approach for several reasons.

1. It really feels like “doing” something. Unlike more imaginative approaches, it gives you something that you can physically do as you approach the upper register.
2. It may work really well for a while. The memory of this success will keep you at it long after the approach ceases to function effectively.
3. It has an appealing simplicity. "Push down, sing high".

Eventually, the cords no longer want to approximate with the voice box under all that pressure. The medial compression which serves to keep the cords together no longer seems to function. At this point the singer is cracking virtually everything over an A flat in performance.

The solution is to substitute an imaginative approach for a physical one. That means the singer has to have great trust in the teacher. Doing it right always feels like much less than forcing did; and it is hard to believe that an imaginative picture of the loose throat and the progressively higher palate will help at all.

There is a famous story from one of the meditative traditions (I forget which one) of the monk who had a profound experience of illumination, and then spent the rest of his life trying to recapture the experience, to no avail.

Experiences cannot be recaptured. When an approach fails you, even if it worked in the past, let go of of it. Have the courage to approach things in a different way.

In singing, we keep going back to basic principles; good breathing, good support, a feeling of forward clarity and lightness in the voice, a loose throat, a healthy onset and an imaginative picture of the vocal space, that allows room for development as you go higher. Rounding or vowel modification can be a helpful way to make the transition to the upper register, provided you don’t get stuck.

In my experience, interfering with the larynx always leads to trouble. The quick fix will get you there sooner; but it will lead to collapse over the long haul.

When students leave

I don’t know about you, but every time a student leaves me to go to another teacher, I feel both anger and loss. If I really look at myself, I think there is also a fear in me that I haven’t given enough, and a sense of personal inadequacy.

I heard a lovely expression once, derived, I think, from zen buddhism. “Teaching” it says “is impersonally guiding those with affinity”. I don’t think this precludes compassion; a compassionate response is the reason the Buddha taught in the first place.

If we guide others impersonally, but compassionately, we give them our best, but are able to let go when they decide to move on. The saying also demonstrates that teaching is not possible without affinity. I think I am a good voice teacher; but I know that my process of seeking out answers through explicit understanding is not for everyone.

There are singers who are better off, in my opinion, just singing, rather than thinking about singing. It is my personal feeling that those singers may also need, at some point in the future, to understand how they go about singing, if they want to preserve the voice, and progress in their art.

This type of singer is probably better off working with someone who will just let them sing. Sooner or later, if they start with me, they will leave. My job is to guide them impersonally, but compassionately, to the best of my ability, and in my own fashion; then, when necessary, let them go without rancor. “Senza rancor” said the lady in the opera, and I agree with her.

The way I teach is conditioned by my own particular history, how I got into trouble as a singer, and how I got myself out of it, wht my natural talents were, and what I had to learn. Whatever your teaching style, there will be students out there who have a real affinity for it.

To a certain extent, I will adjust the content of my teaching to suit the particular needs of the student; but I know that on the most basic level, my personal approach to teaching comes from a belief in the cultivation of awareness. When I hear from a student “I sing better when I don’t think about it”, then I know that the clock is ticking.

Let the conscious mind understand, guide, and then get out of the way. That, to me, is the path to freedom.

What to do when your breathing feels stuck

When I was a young singer, my teacher, whom I adored, was a stickler for correct breathing. He called it “breathing from the back” and I could never get the hang of it.

Eventually, he said to me “You’re smart, you know what to do… go do it!” That was the end of my formal training. I spent the next few years struggling with my breathing, while working professionally. Somehow, I managed to get through performances.

I remember a particularily horrible radio broadcast of Vivaldi’s Gloria with a noted Canadian chamber choir. My breathing felt like lead. I gasped with every breath. I struggled to force it into the back: All to no avail.

Much later, I realized that to get the breath subtle, balanced, and in the right place, neither too high nor too low, you had to work imaginatively. It was also very helpful to realize that a balanced breath has an abdonimal component, and that this involves using the transverse and oblique abdominal muscles.

The breath will feel different to the singer, depending on body posture. If you breathe sitting in a chair, hunched over with your elbows on your knees, you will feel the abdominal component clearly. If you breathe in a standing posture, with a healthy feeling of classical presentation (not slouched), you may imagine the breath starting in the back, around the level of the floating ribs, and moving to the front along the edge of the rib cage.

The key to getting the correct physical response in breathing is to work imaginatively. You can give the appearance of correct breathing by forcing muscles to behave, but this kind of breathing is never comfortable.

Once the inhalation is balanced, you still have to master the release of the breath at the end of the phrase, or you will feel stuck as the music continues. This is especially true in bel canto repertoire, where the composers seem not to give you time to recover between phrases.

The same muscles that we use to take the air are the ones we use to support the voice; this is the “lotta vocale” or “vocal contest” between the inspiratory and expiratory muscles that is basic to the support/appoggio mechanism. You have to release the inspiratory muscles sat the end of the phrase so they can do their job in the inhalation.

Instead of taking air at the end of the phrase, release the residual air. This should allow the diaphragm to rebound and initiate an inhalation quite naturally. Practice this by deliberately taking more time to release the breath after every phrase, even it means adding beats to the music. Once you get the hang of it, you can eliminate the rhythmic distortions.

Singing on the gesture of inhalation

I love the Italians, So often, those little nuggets of advice which we have heard from our teachers (“sing on the breath”, sing “on the gesture of inhalation”, “appoggio”, “with the words forward, on the lips”) are derived from the Italian vocal tradition. To me, these aphorisms bridge the gap between the science of singing and how it feels to actually do it correctly.

I first encountered “singing on the gesture of inhalation” in the wonderful little book, “Hints on Singing”, a description of lessons with Francesco Lamperti. Let’s unpack the term:

1. Beginning the tone with a feeling of inhaling, or “drinking in” allows us a smooth transition between inhalation and exhalation/phonation.
2. It is an efficient way to set up the action of the inspiratory muscles against the expiratory muscles which is the hallmark of appoggio.
3. It releases the larynx, lifts the palate and expands the pharynx, in a dynamic fashion.
4. It reverses the contraction of the windpipe which generally accompanies phonation.
5. It “places” the voice. Singing “on” (not “in” or “under”) the feel of inhalation means that we feel the voice “over” the resonance cavities of the throat.
6. It teaches us the feeling of the correct onset. All we have to do, then, to have a perfectly balanced onset, is to take care that there is no breathiness in the sound.

Ultimately, it is the imagination that makes the sound; muscles are directed by brain at the speed of thought.

Singing Italian music: come si parla

I recently received a recording of a piece I am interested in doing at my school, Garica’s I Cinesi. It is one of a series of one act operas written by Manuel Garica to be performed in salons, and is for voices and piano. The works are all gratefully written for the voice, and are a bit like early Rossini in style. The modulations are individual and surprisingly original. The vocal writing demands an assured coloratura technique.

The recording I have is of a college opera department, and they sing, for the most part, pretty well. The Italian is curious, to say the least. All of the vowels are correctly pronounced, and the double consonants are all there; but to my ears it still sounds like terrible Italian. The actual cadence or phrasing of the Italian language is simply not there.

Most young singers have no idea that they are expected to impose the shape of the language on the notes. This may be why so much collegiate Italian is so bad. In Italian music, for example, whenever a composer sets a word with an unstressed ending, a decrescendo, or “phrasing off” (often an appogiatura) is expected., even if what is on the page are two equal notes on the same pitch.

On the more global level, every phrase of the music corresponds to the natural pronunciation of the text; this requires carrying the stress patterns of the language over to the written out notes themselves. In classical repertoire, very little of the performance dynamics are actually written into the music. To a young singer, it may requires a certain courage to add so much to the written score. It is an expected part of the performer’s job.

In Mozart, for instance, once you begin to sing the music with the cadence of the language, you begin to perform in the Mozart style. Mozart usually writes his high notes on unstressed syllables, except at the climax of the piece. This means that most Mozart high notes are should be sung piano; it is the same phrasing you can hear when any good violinist plays a Mozart Concerto.