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...

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...