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Training tenor voices

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 several aspects. The most obvious one is a release of the jaw; next to that, a feeling of release behind and through the corners of the jaw, which is not quite the same thing as simply dropping the jaw. Rather, it is a kind of loosening which leads to a comfortably hollow feeling in the throat. This loosening is best achieved by imagining the response rather than by physically trying to manipulate the throat. There is no feeling of “spreading” or deliberately widening the throat.  

 

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 full yawn. Again, this is best achieved imaginatively, by “seeing” the release.

 

With a comfortable feeling of the beginning of the 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 helpful to practice this forte, then piano, without taking a breath in between. Piano then becomes a matter keeping hollowness and clarity but modulating the exhalation from compressed breath (with an active support response) to gentle air (with a feeling of suspension). 

 

In all of this it is well to be guided by the Taoist maxim, “Doing nothing, everything is done.” This means that the most productive approach to singing is not physical, it is imaginative. 

 

 

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