Voice and Opera Training

  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 modific...

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...

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 wa...

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 i...