Voice and Opera Training

From time to time, a female singer will come to me with suffering from  a  kind of mid-voice anorexia:  the  lower notes are   strong, but there is no sound in the mid-range. Usually this type of singer has been trained to separate the registers, and to vocalize in a heavy chest voice   as a means of “strengthening” the “vocal muscles”. They proceed from there to an empty middle range and an overly light, breathy high voice.   For the mid-voice to be healthy, the low cannot be forced. If you produce the low notes with a heavy chest adjustment and do not allow the vocal cords to make a smooth series of lighter adjustments as you  ascend the scale, you are in for a bumpy flight!   This heaviness in the low range may feel strong to the singer; but it takes its toll on the middle register. Encouraging the singer to find a lighter chest adjustment in the low can aid the transition on the way up. The insight that a feeling of light chest adjustment is possible is often the beginning of achie

On August 21 st   2011 at the age of 59 I went back to school.     I began a two-year distance degree in psychology for musicians at the University of Sheffield in England. Of course, I had all kinds of anxiety about the program. On the plane on the way to Sheffield, I remember thinking “Is this the dumbest thing I have ever done?” This whole venture was prompted by an increasing sense of failure in mid-life. You know it’s bad, when you get a twinge of remorse every time you see a certain poster on the subway (“It’s not too late to do what you were born to do!”). When I was at school in my 20’s, a Master’s degree was not that common for performing musicians. I was more focused on trying to get work as a singer than on getting more degrees. I did register for a Master’s degree from a small American Conservatory back in 1981, funded by the Canada Council.  The experience was not a happy one. I had already spent 10 years as a post-secondary student (BA, Performance Diploma, Opera Diploma)

  I am sure that most of us are familiar with the adage of the Italian school, “sing like you speak”.  We also know from experience that while in some respects this is completely true, in other respects it is not. It would be equally correct to say, “to sing well, you must have a flexible vocal position that will allow for modification of the vowels when acoustically necessary.” There is no single correct vocal position that will accommodate every note in the singer’s range. While the first two formants of the singer’s voice determine what vowel is produced (and in this way are intimately related to correct speech), formants 3, 4 (the singer’s formant, which does not appear in speech, and allows the voice to be heard over the orchestra) and 5 determine vocal quality and individual timbre.   Without correct balancing between the fundamental pitch and the shape of the resonance cavities, beautiful singing is impossible.  Both vowel modification and an imaginative sensitivity to the chang

A tale of two tenors   I have two tenors who have come to me recently for lessons. They share a similar problem: they have no approach to the passaggio area, blasting their way up to the top. This means that neither 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 consists of

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 treat voice lessons like a kind of massage therapy; they arrive for the lesson, work hard, and then don’t think about technique again until the next lesson. This type of student will seem not to progress much from one lesson to the next. They won’t actually get much worse; but any progress you made at the last lesson has to be relearned, again and again.   “OK”, you might say, “if only I had a serious student who really practiced between lessons.” Be careful what you wish for. 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

Recently, a singer came to me so bruised from her previous vocal experiences, that she virtually has post-traumatic stress disorder.   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