Teaching the older Adult singer

I have had several opportunities to teach singers in their 70's and 80's.  They usually are still singing in a choir and want the mental exercise of continuing to learn.  They are often struggling with reduced muscle tone and elasticity, both in their breathing and with their vocal folds, related to aging.  In breathing, this shows up when the singer wants to take a full inhale and their diaphragm and rib muscles are slow to respond.  With the vocal folds, the reduced elasticity means that the folds no longer stretch for the higher pitches as easily, creating a reduced vocal range.

I have found that a starting conversation around these issues is helpful, as often the older singer thinks they are "doing" something wrong.  Most active older adults are already engaged in flexibility and strengthening exercises to maintain their bodies, so they understand immediately the carryover to breathing and singing.  We then develop an "exercise plan" for their voice, based on their level of physical well-being, and we transpose songs to approachable keys so they can enjoy their singing immediately.

I have a great time working with this age group.  They usually have a great attitude and sense of humor toward their learning process :)

Teaching the singer with scoliosis...

I have personal experience with this one, as I have scoliosis from a childhood injury and have had to learn to work with it in my own singing.  The path of support deviates from normal, as does the path of resonance.  For instance, my core support is to the right of center, because that's the direction of curve in the lumbar spine region.  I can access support better if I put a little more of my weight on my right foot, than my left.  Similarly, my path to head resonance is to the right of center, also, because the cervical spine is also curved to the right, as is the atlanto-occipital joint between the top of the spine and the base of the skull.  I can access more head vibration on the right side of my face/skull than the left.

I found initially that the core spinal muscles on the interior side of the curves, both lumbar and cervical, responded  less quickly and strongly than the muscles on the exterior side of the curves, so I had to mentally encourage both sides to activate equally. This proved easier to do than I thought.  Internal muscle systems are, of course, not managed directly, but by clear understanding and thought-commands.  The results tell you if you are achieving anything.  In my case, the results displayed in my singing tone as greater core support became available.

I have students in the studio with some similar challenges.  One student is a pro-actor who had a severe injury to her neck in a car accident less than 5 years ago.  There is major scar tissue along her cervical spine, limiting  some of her movement.  When she found a clear pathway to her head resonance, her head/spine relationship went to a different place than a "normal" singer's would have.  I have another student, a community singer, and when she breathes in fully and deeply, her rib-cage opens to the left more easily than the right and her entire hip structure moves to the left by several inches.  This is a movement she is not aware of.   We experimented with her thinking her inhalation more down and to the right, looking particularly to a more even response between left- and right-side ribcage movement: she could do it, but the right side was quite slow to respond.  It will take time...

In general, I have found that you have to work with what's there, curves, tweaks and all.  And nobody has a "perfect" structure :).

Teacher with dysphonia, named Mary.

My student who is a teacher with dysphonia has made some legitimate progress.  Let's call her Mary.  Mary's breathing coordination is much clearer, but she still has to think actively about it.  She went ahead and had a mini-botox shot (half dose), so she could function at work; so now she has a breathy, but non-spasming vocal sound.  This gives us a little room to work on other issues.  We took a look at how she forms her words with her tongue and jaw.  She's used to pressing her jaw forward and blowing extra air through her vocal folds to try and get sound out past the spasming and it's become a habit - a coordination that happens all the time.

We began to experiment with making sound, hums and oo's mostly, while keeping her jaw and tongue loose and relaxed.  A loose tongue is generally soft and curved in the jaw.  It's curved the highest for the "oo" and "ee" vowels, with the tip of the tongue resting against the back of the lower front teeth.  Think like a softly rounded hill from back to front.  She experimented successfully with the new tongue shape on her hum and "oo" vowel, but when we went to the "ee" vowel, the tongue flattened hard and the jaw thrust forward.  It took a while for Mary to figure out an "ee" vowel with the same tongue shape as the "oo" vowel and, when she found it, she was surprised that it actually sounded like "ee" because it felt so different.  We noted other things that changed as we remapped her tongue:  it became easier to inhale because her throat became more relaxed, her jaw was looser and moved more easily, her sound had more resonance and carrying power without more effort.

There's often a moment in a lesson when the teacher (me) has a learning moment.  I noticed Mary was more efficient with her air on the hum and less efficient when her mouth was open for a vowel. As mentioned before, she generally pushes a lot of air through in an attempt to overcome the dysphonia.  Her air efficiency improved even more when I asked her to pay attention to the air movement at the edge of her nostrils during her humming.  Then I asked her to open her mouth and say a sustained "ah" while paying attention to the air flow at her lips.  Again, she became more efficient, with less air flowing out to sustain the sound and more resonance as a result.  Here comes the surprise part: I asked her if she noticed a difference in the air/sound relationship.  She said, yes, there was more air flowing when she paid attention to her lips.  Objectively, there was much less air flowing when she paid attention to her lips, but I realized that she had no way to monitor her air flow and had no idea how much air she was pushing out normally.  Paying attention to the air flow at her nostrils or lips gave her feedback that she otherwise did not have.  We are going to pursue this idea for a while longer...

Teaching children to sing...

Studio voice teachers see more children for singing lessons than ever before, myself included.  I could simply say that I don't take students younger than 14 into the studio, but many of these young singers are already performing in children's theater, choirs etc. and sometimes already running into vocal trouble because of either putting too much effort into their singing or trying to produce a sound not compatible with their age, or both.

I always spend time talking to a parent who calls me about lessons for their child.  Often, I will direct a young singer and their parents to the local, University-run children's choir or, for very young children, suggest a Kindermusik program (yes, I've had parents call in for children as young as 3).  Usually, the parent has no idea of their options and they are not musical themselves, so they don't know which direction to go.

When I do interview a child singer and their parents for possible lessons, I look for several criterion.  Is the singer wanting the lessons or is the parent wanting the lessons for them?  Many children sing naturally and effortlessly, but are not ready for a structured learning program.   Is the singer a good student in school?  Good study habits mean they learn well and will practice between lessons.  Can the singer match pitch well already and do they already have training on another instrument, such as piano or violin.  If they aren't matching pitch well, then I am an expensive way to bring them up to speed and they would have much more fun learning the basics in a children's choir.  Are they already performing?  Are they self-assured?  I have taken an occasional student who is a good candidate but is shy and needs one-on-one lessons to gain confidence.

The difference in teaching a child is not in the what, but in the how.  The most important detail is the trust factor.  A child has to feel utterly safe with you in order to sing freely and learn easily.  A voice teacher working with children can never lose patience and must know how to gently put forward and enforce behavioral boundaries, just like any good parent.  Information and concepts are given out in smaller bites, and the learning process is more activity or movement directed, using games and imagery.   Indeed, with a child singer, your primary job is to nurture their love of singing, the technical aspects coming in second to that.

The last detail to take into account is how close they are to puberty.  Even with females, the voice undergoes a process during puberty, where their voice first gets fuzzy in the top range, then the lower tones start to emerge, then the upper range clears.  This is due, of course, to their bodies and larynx growing, as well as the changes in hormones.  I usually bring the topic out in the open with both parent and singer, explaining how the process works and what they can expect.  There is a period of about six months where the effects of puberty are the most evident, then there's the process of the singer getting to know their "new" voice.

Jack-in-the-Box: the vocabulary of subjective experience

So, let me start off by saying that one can't help but be subjective about one's own singing experience.  Your perception is from the inside, so to speak.  That's why a second set of ears, hopefully knowledgeable, is so vital in the learning process.  Then there's the words we use to describe our subjective experience, usually also unique to us and arising out of a combination of intuition and imagination.

When a singer has a "new" experience in their singing process, I often ask them if they can describe it.  I, as teacher, know what change I have just heard in their sound and I am curious as to what they are going to say.  Some singers come up with a movement word, some come up with a visual or tactile word, some with an auditory word or an entire imaginary scene.  Finding out their perception helps two-fold:  I get a glimpse into how they process new information, and they create a "marker", by their word or their image, that can help them reproduce the new experience later.

I was remind of how fun this process is yesterday when one of my youngest singers came in for a lesson.   During a particular warm-up, her voice suddenly released.  I asked her what the experience was like.  She thought for a moment, then said it was like a Jack-in-the-Box the old-fashioned kind that you wind up and it pops.  Well, OK, Jack-in-the Box it is.  We went on to her song and Jack-in-the-Boxed to high notes, into beginnings of phrases, where-ever we could experiment with it, with excellent results.

Upside-down singing for Musical Theater

This is an old concept, really, put forth in the early 80's in a book called "Soprano on her Head," by Eloise Ristad.  Eloise very eloquently addressed some of  the mental processes that get in the way of free singing in her book and gave ideas for overcoming them.   I came back around to it this week, for two of my musical theater students.
When a singer is oriented to her low voice (chest register), both in speech and singing, then the head voice seems perceptually "high".  This perception alone give rise to certain types of tension in the back of the tongue and throat, as the singer then tries to  "reach" or "push up" the voice to the higher range.  So what if up became down?  Having a singer lean over at the hip joints until her head is even with her hips, face towards the floor, and sing, accomplishes several things at once.  It relaxes tongue and jaw, changes the head/spine relationship, activates the core stabilizer muscles of the cervical (neck) spine, opens the naso-pharynx (passage between throat and sinuses), encourages vibration in the facial bones (mask) and muddles the up/down perception.
Both singers who tried this idea in their lessons this week immediately had access to a clear, strong head voice with no "work" in their throats at all.  They did already have their breathing established and functioning well, which I think is a necessary precursor to this "trick".  And singers are marvelous creatures, really, because once they know what they are going for in terms of a sound or a coordination, they can head right back to it.  All you need to do sometimes is give them the experience.  Both singers then experimented with singing a high phrase both head over and then standing up, until the coordination was clear to them.  They also experimented with starting a phrase head over and then standing up while continuing to sing.  All the components, balanced head, deepened breath, loose jaw & tongue, loss of perception of "high" came together.
This trick certainly doesn't work for all students so immediately and easily, but at the appropriate time, can be a helpful tool in giving the singer an experience of what she is aiming for, when she is close to the goal already. The current musical theater sound in the upper middle register of the voice is very bright, clear and strong and requires the singer to find all the facial bone (mask) resonance available to her.  Both these singers already had access to their head voice, but not all the resonant power they needed and not all the freedom they needed.
 

Balance: the singing soccer player...

Yesterday, my high school soccer player came in for a singing lesson.  She's starting to learn what it means to have her core support available for her singing.  The core muscle strength is developed already from her sport, so the trick is in the carryover to singing.  Since the core muscles that balance us are also the core muscles needed for support in singing, we needed to activate them for her while standing.  Time for the balance pad.

I learned about the use of the balance pad as a training tool from Cathy Madden at one of her Alexander Technique workshops.  Airex has one on the market that is usually used at fitness gyms for core training during strength building exercises.  It's made of a high density foam and you stand on it.  Because the surface under your feet is now flexible instead of fixed, your core muscles activate to balance you.  It also gives back to the student marvelous information about the micro-movements related to balance.

So, back to my soccer/singer... first I had her balance on one foot and sing. Then I had her stand on the balance pad and sing.  She's very strong, so this was not difficult for her.  I got some response from her core muscles that reflected in her tone (stronger & clearer), but I also got a response from her back and leg muscles, which I wasn't looking for.  How to really activate those core muscles?  Finally, we tried having her balance on one leg on the balance pad.  Now that's tough to do!  But it also did the trick for her; her core muscles activated fully, her breath deepened and out came this new firm, clear sound, that she said felt easy on her throat.  The whole process made her laugh. :)  Once she got the connection, of course, then the balancing act was no longer necessary.

Tiny dancer...

It's not unusual to have dancers coming into the studio to learn to sing, usually because there's a musical they want to try out for.  My youngest singer in the studio currently is one.  She is only 13, but has been in dance training for years and has been participating in childrens' theater musicals for almost two years.  She is my tiny dancer :).
In her first lesson, we talked about the difference between a dancer's body balance and a singer's body balance. Dancers are taught to think in shapes, have a developed kinesthetic sense of their large muscle movement and strong core muscles.  However, the stance usually adopted by dancers, with an exaggerated arch to the back, doesn't allow for good diaphragmatic movement on inhalation.  Most dancers are emotionally attached to their dancing and their dancer's stance, so I didn't want to address a change in balance with my tiny dancer that negated her dancer's stance, but that offered an alternative for singing.  We talked about breathing muscles and structures and how they work and then experimented with breathing.  Luckily for singing teachers, a good, deep breath is instantly rewarding to a student.  As she explored her new breathing, her body naturally started to come more into balance to accommodate the diaphragmatic movement.  I then had her move back and forth between a singer's balance and a dancer's balance, until she was clear on the difference.  Of course, her body started incorporating the more core-oriented "singer's" balance into her dancer's stance without her noticing, because our bodies like to be able to breathe, and she will be a stronger dancer as a result.

Bodymapping and Asthma...

Probably one in ten singers coming into the studio say that they have some kind of asthma.  I looked up the word asthma, which is defined as a spasm in the bronchii, with many possible causes; the most common cause being an allergic reaction to something airborne.  There's also an activity-induced asthma, a stress-induced asthma and a chronic asthma, at least from what I've seen as a voice teacher.

It's probably pretty straightforward to say that teaching an asthmatic to breathe better is going to be helpful to them; whether the ineffective breathing process came first or the bronchial spasming came first doesn't really matter.   Asthmatics are already seeking ways to overcome their breathing difficulties, so they are already manipulating or interfering with the natural process in an effort to help themselves.  They create a set of compensatory muscle movements for breathing that may or may not be anatomically based, and therefore may or may not be truly effective.

Here are some things to watch for in an asthmatic student:
     Weak diaphragmatic movement:  The diaphragm muscle has lost tone and strength because it has not been able to move through it's full range of motion in a long time.
     Rigid chest and upper back muscles:  A severe asthmatic looks somewhat barrel-chested if they've been manipulating their ribs with their outer muscle structure in order to get enough air.  Sometimes there's a psychological component to this, also - a hoarding of air related to a fear of not being able to breathe.  After a while, the ribs cease to move at all during inhalation or exhalation, remaining rigidly open as far as possible.
     Use of throat muscles to "draw in" air:  The throat muscles are ideally passive during inhalation and exhalation (this includes the tongue) but if nothing else is working, then that's what you've got left to draw the air into your lungs.  This is characterized by "air noise" during inhalation.

Bodymapping:  The factual Bodymapping approach, coupled with gentle explorations of breathing movement, can be very helpful in retraining the breathing of an asthmatic.  Bodymapping seeks to clarify, through anatomical information, a person's mental picture of their own structure (ie: their mental Bodymap).  The information of what the diaphragm looks like, it's shape, size and how it moves, how the ribs move at their joints and how lung tissue actually works can literally be enough to effect change.  I have anatomy books, a couple of skeleton models, a spine model and a larynx in my studio (perfect for Halloween :).  My first lesson with any student, not just asthma sufferers, is to go through the structures of breathing with books and models.

Training through movement:  An asthmatic in particular will tend to over-do attempted breathing exploration.  The use of a parallel movement that the core musculature of the body can naturally follow can be a really helpful training tool.  I've had student make a model of their ribs with their hands and move their hand model in the same way that the ribs naturally move.  I've also had them make a diaphragm model with their two hands together in front of them, cupped in a dome shape, that they then move downward on the inhale and upward on the exhale.  Within a few minutes of exploration, the actual structures (ie: diaphragm, ribs) start to move in sync with the hand model.

Unravelling the compensatory breathing process and encouraging the natural process to return can take a while and can be quite revelational.   I encourage students to keep a journal.  One student recently found true diaphragmatic movement in her lesson and immediately had a flashback to a near-drowning experience.  Another student, a pastor in his late 50's with spasmodic dysphonia and anxiety-related asthma, worked with me for over two years on his breathing and speech and realized at the end that he was unhappy at his current position and needed to retire and return to his hometown.

More information on Bodymapping can be found at the Andover Educators website: www.bodymap.org

Application of Alexander Technique to vocal dysphonia...

A client came in this week with severe speech problems.  She gets about two words into a sentence and her voice tightens so much, she can hardly continue.  Her day job is that of an ESL teacher in grades K - 12 in a small town.  She has been struggling with her speech for seven years.

She visited a laryngologist who, in absence of being able to see clearly what was wrong with her, gave her a diagnosis of vocal dysphonia so that she had a legitimate claim for insurance.  She had been going several times a year for the past two years to this laryngologist for botox injections to relieve her symptoms and was desperate to try another way.  Some colleagues of hers suggested she contact me and also the local Speech and Hearing clinic.  The laryngologist agreed that other paths should be looked into.

When I met her, she had already gone to the Speech and Hearing Center and had a scope done.  The scope revealed an interference in her vocal fold activity to the point where her false folds were attempting to take over the process of phonation.  Hmmm...how much can I help here?

Our first lesson together was a chance to take a history (I was especially curious about any type of trauma to her head/neck) and have the beginnings of a discussion about breathing, a choice of first topic that she brought up.  She is a small woman, barely 5 feet tall, sweet and intelligent, and with a lovely openness and self-awareness.  The first things I noticed physically about her was a significant down and forward head position and severe jaw and tongue tension when she tried to speak.  She had an intuition that at least some of her vocal trouble was breathing related.  We clarified the diaphramatic direction of breathing: down on the inhale, up on the exhale.  As her inhale became deeper and her exhale became smoother, we heard immediate improvement in her speech and were encouraged.

We had a second lesson together yesterday.  I checked in with how her breathing practice had gone that week - definitely clearer movement throughout her torso; ribs responding more easily and naturally.  I opened the topic of head/spine relationship and vocal tract shape and structures.  The information on the vocal tract, larynx, etc. was already familiar to her from her doctor visits.  The truly amazing moment came when we began to trace where and how her head rested on the top of her spine.  With a little guidance, she found a better head/spine balance and, suddenly! her voice was flowing freely.  She started to cry in amazement and joy.  She couldn't sustain the new balance for long, some of the supporting muscles were weakened, but by the end of the hour she could  re-find the new balance on her own.  It was the fastest response to the Alexander Technique I had ever seen.

Working with ADHD

I have two adult students with ADHD, who take medication for their condition. I have had others in the past. ADHD appears to make it difficult for a singer to track multiple events at the same time, such as the piano part and their own vocal part during a song. The singer wanders off pitch, not because they can't hear their pitches but because they can't hear the relationship between their notes and the piano part. To hear the relationship, they have to be able to track both simultaneously, something the rest of us take for granted.

It's difficult to tell whether the inability to track simultaneous events is the condition itself or a result of compensatory habits developed in childhood in order to be effective in school; specifically, the habit of concentration. Concentration is the habit of blocking everything out except for the object of your focus; your homework, perhaps. Is there another option?  Barbara Conable, in her course "What Every Musician Needs to Know about the Body (Andover Educators, www.bodymap.org)", discusses the concept of Inclusive Awareness. In Inclusive Awareness, a central focus is maintained in a broader field of awareness. We are all taught this as part of learning to drive a car; we are told to keep our peripheral vision on our mirrors while we focus on the road ahead and to keep an expanded field of awareness at all times (this became much more developed in me when I started to ride a motorcycle).   By contrast, concentration could be described as Exclusive Awareness.  When someone only knows how to concentrate and they must track multiple events simultaneously, they end up scanning, moving thier attention rapidly back and forth, which requires a great deal of mental effort.

I had some success with one of my ADHD students by introducing a mental game based on a meditation technigue. I asked her to do this for a few minutes before bed, when she was already lying down. The game was to say hello to each part of her body sequentially, beginning with her feet, and to "see" in her mind's eye that part of her body while she acknowledged it. When she finished at her head, she was to take a mental step back and see her entire body as a whole ( like going from seeing just a tree to seeing the whole forest). After a few weeks of this, her ability to track simultaneous events, such as piano and vocal line in a song, improved 90%. She had only to reference the mental "stepping back".

Visualization...

An actor was in her lesson with me yesterday. We were exploring how much or how little breath she needed to speak and sing and how to deliver that breath steadily. Allowing arm movements to reflect breath movement, we discovered that she started every phrase with a "push" of air. She shared that she has an image in her mind of having to "throw" her air with a lot of force for it to go far enough to make it to the end of the phrase, like throwing a ball. The effect, of course, is the opposite: if you release the bulk of your breath at the beginning of a phrase, you have less for the end of the phrase. As soon as she verbalized the image, she realized the ineffectiveness of it. So, we went on a search for a new image for her: starting the sound like setting a top spinning, controlling the release of breath like a bellows (closing the handles quickly or slowly). She's going to do some more searching this week for an image that really makes sense to her.

It's a good illustration of how the singer's perception influences their production (almost 100%). When I hear an ineffective approach to singing being used consistantly, then I ask "How are you thinking of that?" Sometimes, the thought is under the surface, but asking gives permission for the singer to take a look and, after a bit, the current image comes bubbling to the surface. Sometimes, I also ask if the production is beautifully done. One singer I had several years ago had the most beautiful onset of sound I had heard in a long time. I asked her how she thought of her sound. She said she started her sound like an airplane gently touching down.

Funny voices...

I have a young, female student, just going through puberty.  She came into the studio a year ago with a heavy belting low voice, a gap in the middle and no clue how to access her high voice.  She loves to sing and has made good progress because she practices a lot at home on her own.  Her low voice is now much less strident, the gap in the middle has closed, though the notes are still not very strong, and she has high notes now.

Sometimes, students make breakthroughs on their own, without realizing it.  This young singer was singing Popular, from Wicked, today in her lesson.  After we had gone through it a couple of times, I asked her to sing it like a cat.  The sound was immediately strong & clear in the mid-range!  She then divulged that she loved using character voices and had also tried singing Popular with a British accent at home.  I asked her to show me and again, the mid-range voice was clear and strong.  We spent the rest of the lesson trying out other "character" voices, coming up with Kermit, a plugged up nose and country.  She's going to explore some more voices on her own this week, her only watch-for is that it shouldn't hurt at all.

Breathing...

If somebody asked me, "What is at the core of your teaching approach?", I would have to say "teaching people how to breathe." Some people have simply lost flexibility and strength in their breathing structures and musculature. Some, out of ignorance or incorrect information, impose an artificial and usually labored secondary breathing pattern over the organic one. Some seek to control their breathing. Some manipulate their breathing for an effect. Some hold their breath, when they are thinking or emotional or editing their speech. And some have adopted compensatory breathing patterns because of allergies or asthma.

Believe it or not, one of the most important influencers on breathing is body balance.
If a person's body balance is off of their skeletal structure, then the breathing structures in the core of the body cannot function properly. Body balance is posture in a sense, but the word posture has come to connotate something rigid, whereas body balance has to be something flexible and fluid. Just in normal breathing, our bodies make dozens of micro-movement adjustments to our balance. Try standing on a non-solid surface, such as a trampoline, a piece of foam or a mattress and notice the changes in your balance as you breathe.

Singing is based on breathing - we are a wind instrument, essentially. The most frequent thank-you comment I get is: "Thanks for teaching me how to breathe."

A palate of colors

One of my singers is an actor with a pretty active career in commercials, voiceovers, etc. We were working on a musical theater song yesterday that requires a semi-speech approach to the first section. The melodic line lay in her mid-range, a difficult transition for her because she usually speaks in her lowest range. As we explored the mid-range speech a little more (with a few giggles), a nasal quality appeared in her voice that I had noticed before, but that she was unaware of. What a learning moment! I identified it for her, demonstrated an alternative which she imitated, and asked her what the difference was in her experience. She immediately identified a difference in her throat; right before starting the more nasal sound, there was some tension/closure. I asked if she could inhibit the closure. After a couple of tries, she was successful and went on to easily "speak" the first section of the song in her mid-range with clarity.
This process was especially important for her because she's always been cast as a character actor and wants to develop more options. All sorts of vocal colors are possible and can be considered a palate of colors. Some colors are more difficult to produce and should be used sparingly, for effect. The goal is to give the performer complete freedom of choice.

Max

I'm trying out blogging from my iphone :). Summer has been pretty full teaching-wise, with lots of students studying jazz just for fun. We planned a jazz soiree at the home of one of the singers. My jazz trio came and we had our own open mic night, complete with wine & appetizers. Everyone wants to do it again next summer.

Unusual high school male singer came in this summer: very ADHD, with a subsequent speech disorder. We'll call him Max. He loves to sing and wants to be a comedian - well, why not?
Discovered quickly that he is VERY intelligent. Picks up and applies concepts so fast, it's amazing to watch. We've worked on 3 songs and 2 monologues so far. The most effective directive I've given him so far seems to be to slow down. One day, I suggested he deliver his monologue in slow motion and suddenly all the words came out clearly, with no dropped syllables. He's a very good mimic :). He seems to have the support of his high school drama teacher. He's trying out for the school play this week: I wonder how he'll do?

6/6/2011 Recital

OK - I'm back.  Been busy with NATS and our Studio Recital this past month, where almost all my students performed.  So pleased :) - seems like every singer peaked at performance time.  Several had personal triumphs over stage fright and memorization fears.  Everyone was musical.  Sarah has decided to take a break for the summer, a good choice.  It will give her ear and mind a chance to assimilate the work we did this spring.

3/10/2011 Sarah

Sarah's pitch memory is gaining ground and she can accurately imitate back the intervals of  a 3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th, ascending.  The 2nd is more difficult for her because of the smaller distance between the notes and we just today began an exploration of what a 1/2 step sounds like.  We also started working on rhythm, which she has no internal sense of.  We sang "Dona nobis pacem" together, myself next to her left side and tapping the rhythm on her back while she kept her eyes closed to limit her sensory input.  Felt like a Helen Keller moment...

3/2/2011 Sarah

Amazingly, Sarah is preparing for an audition as chorus for a local musical theater production.  She's done one production with them already but she's nervous about the audition because it's for a new director.  We are going to have an extra session this week to get her independant on her vocal line.  Aside from that pressure, a very good discussion today.  Practicing an octave glide with her on different vowels, but the same pitches.  I explained that she needed to find a way to differentiate between the color/vibration change that happens because of pitch change and the color change that happens because of vowel change - otherwise she would change the pitch when the word changed.  She understood, but then asked why it wasn't an issue in her speech.  It was a moment of brutal truth.  Her vowels in her speech are almost identical, giving her the characteristic deaf "slur" to her speech.  Her face changed when I told her, and then became strong with determination as I explained that this process would help her speech as well.

2/26/2011 Vocalizing

My studio accompanist asked the other day about vocal warm-ups for singers.  What were good ones, etc.  We got into a discussion about what vocal warm-ups were for, as there are many warm-up systems available out in the market.  I often use vocal warm-ups in a lesson as an opportunity to teach a concept on a simpler structure than a song phrase, but that's not what a singer is looking for when they want to prepare for a coaching or performance or rehearsal.
Three things need to happen during a warm up session: 1) The body needs to come into balance from whatever previous activities it might have been involved in (sitting at the computer, travelling in a plane, etc.) 2) The breath needs to move from every day breathing into a longer inhale/exhale pattern, which can take several minutes  3) The areas of the singing range that are not part of the speaking range need to find their resonance, especially high range for low voices and low range for high voices.
Sooo, the best warm-ups are the ones that the singer devises for her/himself, that they can do without any accompaniment.  My favorites as a singer?  Lip buzzes, octave glides on various vowels, staccati, ascending and descending 3rds.

2/17/2011 Rose

Rose is an experienced musical theater singer, often cast as a lead in the local productions. She's been with me for about a year, starting as a belter, and has been finding her head voice so she can audition for ingenue roles.  Yesterday, she discovered that her dance training regarding posture for head and shoulders (ie. back and long) has been a major inhibitor of her breathing.  Her upper back, upper chest and neck muscles were so tight that the ribs and lung underneath could not move to draw in air.  She discovered that "shoulders" are actually part of her arm structure rather than her torso structure and that her arms are attached to her body in front at her sternum (breatbone).  She has a history of getting lightheaded when breathing deep - I'm wondering if this new release will take care of that issue.

2/10/2011 Sarah

Sarah's pitch matching has improved, sooner then I expected any results :).  She's patient and dedicated, which is good because this is slow and repetitive work.  The pitch memory is going to take longer... I'm also teaching her Dona nobis pacem (a round), but not letting her dissect or analyze at all - a practice in right-brain learning.

2/7/2011 voice psychology

  Several people have asked me over the years about the psychology of teaching voice.  This is probably a topic for a book all its own, but I can weave some pieces into this blog.
  The most  unique aspect of teaching voice is the close link between voice and mind.  Just a thought of speaking can trigger a response from our larynx.  Songs stuck in our mind produce vocal fold changes, even if we never make a sound.  Emotions affect how the voice sounds, both positively and adversely.  Think about what happens when you become angry - how does your voice change; when you are happy...
  A student has to understand that the coordination between mind and voice is mostly at a sub-conscious level and that just understanding something differently will have it's effect, without trying to apply the new information directly.  This is why, for years, the singing teacher tradition has included imagery as a teaching tool.  Then, for the past 40 years, vocal pedagogy has swung to the side of physiology, with anatomical data being of primary importance.  We have been discovering that this approach can lead to singers' trying to consiously manipulate their voices, often with disastrous results.  So where is the balance?  The teacher is more effective with their use of imagery to get a concept across if they themselves are well-versed in the actual anatomy/physiology of what needs to happen and sometimes an anatomical discussion is important because the student has a real misperception that needs to be corrected.  Singers learn to sing by feel (kinesthetic sense) and listening and they guide the process by thinking.  More on this later...

2/2/2011

Sometimes its quite a process discovering the natural inclination of the voice of an individual.  Allison is a music major at the local university as an instrumentalist (cello) with an early music focus.  She has been coming to me for voice lessons since last spring.  Allison's sense of self expresses vocally in a dark, husky speaking voice.  Imagine both our surprise when we began to discover that her voice is happiest up in the high (coloratura) range!  Now, her process is as much a personal journey as a vocal one; she has to re-think her sense of self to one that includes a higher voice.
So often, our speaking voice color that we choose is a part of the "persona" that we adopt in order to deal with the world: lower, darker speaking voice connotes authority or "don't mess with me"; higher, lighter speaking voice connotes gentleness or vulnerability.  A low voiced speaker will raise the pitch of their voice to speak to animals and children; a high voiced speaker will drop their voice when issuing a command.  If the speaking voice color choice is at odds with the natural instrument and is sustained over a period of time, the result is fatigue and a "husky" or "crackly" quality.

1/25/2011

Explored the mind/body connect with a singer yesterday. :)  Lisa, a copy writer and editor by day, is very detail-oriented in her approach to her singing; so much so, in fact, that it tends to bog her down and her singing becomes more and more laborious as she goes along.  During her lesson, I asked her to think of the entire phrase that she was about to sing while she was inhaling for that phrase, sort of a mental preview of what she was about to sing.  The resulting freedom in the sound was phenomenal and, though she had a fear response to losing control of the sound, she has agreed to continue to practice the idea this week.  I'm eager to hear her next week...

1/20/2011

I am reminded today of how learning to sing is as much of a mental & emotional journey as it is a physical one.  Sam came in today, only 12 and his voice still adjusting to its new baritone/bass range.  We identified his head voice sound and his chest voice sound today; important for him because, if he's in the incorrect "voice sound," he can't find the notes.
When he started, several weeks ago only, he was very self-judging during his lesson, and made grimaces and sighs for every mistake he thought he made.  This slowed down our progress a lot, so finally I asked if he would be OK not reacting negatively to his mistakes, because he was going to be making a lot of them while he learned, that the studio was definitely the place to make all of them and we would make faster progress if he didn't react.  Right away, he stopped and hasn't done it since.
I had to chuckle inwardly today: we tagged his head voice and chest voice with colors as references.  This is something I do with many of my students and I always let them choose the colors, partly because I'm curious as to what they will come up with.  Usually, they choose purple, maroon or dark blue for chest voice, red, light blue, green or orange for mid-range and pink, yellow or some other pastel for head voice.  Sam chose white (head) and black (chest), and I thought back to his initial right/wrong mental judging during his beginning lesson.  I've only had one other student choose black & white...

1/19/2011

I had a young singer come back into the studio this past week.  She worked with me through her last two years of high school and then stopped lessons when she went to college, but has returned because she misses lessons. She has a beautiful  voice and her style is becoming clearer; amazingly, it is what would be called contemporary Musical Theater, or Disney style.   She could easily sing a Disney princess part.  To fully develop her talent, she'll probably need to go to Los Angeles or New York.

1/13/2011

Sarah (deaf student) came in for her lesson yesterday.  She had started a visual journal of sounds, using colors and shapes.  Then we discovered something new.  Since she has to feel vibration in order to match pitch with either an instrument or another voice, she can't sing something on her own.  I sang a line to her and asked her what the visual picture looked like.  She told me very clearly.  Then I asked if she could hold on to the picture mentally after I was done singing the line.  She couldn't: it faded immediately.  I can see now how the visualizations of the sound will act as a tool for her; eventually an entire song will be a visual and when she calls it to mind, she can sing it.  It's going to take some time, but she's very intelligent and very motivated.

1/11/2011

A singer (Anne) came in today who comes in every other week for an hour lesson.  She is in her mid-50's and sings locally for one of the higher-level performance groups.  She has good musicianship skills and is intelligent.  She is slender, muscled and still athletic.  She speaks quickly and in short sentence bursts.

The challenge she faces in her singing is over-muscling, both her singing and her breathing.  Because she has always been so physically active, she automatically uses her outer, movement muscles for her breathing and balance, instead of her core muscles.  Slowly, she is beginning to understand breathing from the inside, and how to find her balance so that the core muscles can work well.  With that understanding, the outer muscles can let go a little.

Today, I began to realize how much the hard-muscled body exterior mirrored her internal reality.  As her body softens, she is becoming less assured, more hesitant as she becomes mentally more open.  For a little while, she will be emotionally dependent on me during the lesson, until she feels more secure.

1/5/2011

Sarah's first lesson has prompted this process, because I can tell right away that her journey will be quite unique. Sarah is almost completely deaf and has been since she was a young child.  And yet, she has the soul of a singer.  She first interviewed with me a year ago and it was evident that she needed practice at pitch-matching.  She also wanted piano lessons, so I sent her to a piano teacher who was used to working with singers and could do the pitch matching practice with her, also.  
Now she has returned to my studio.  In our first lesson, we made the amazing discovery that she "hears" visually, so we started drawing out visual representations of the vocal exercises, using colors and shapes.  She is going to keep a visual journal as we work together over the next year.

1/5/2011

I have been teaching singers for over 25 years, for all kinds of music.  Each lesson is an individual experience, both for myself and for the singer.  Some amazing things can happen during a lesson.  Under encouragement of some of my singers, I am going to share my perspective of some of their experiences.  All names of singers are changed, of course :).