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Two weekends ago, I had an unusual experience: I sang as myself!
In most productions, I am playing someone else: in an opera, musical, or church piece, I am trying to become a character from fiction or the past. While being on stage is always nerve-wracking to a certain degree, pretending to be someone else gives you a little emotional armor. With the cabaret performance, all that armor was gone, and I have to admit I was very nervous. I pride myself on my acting skills, but how do you act as yourself? While I sang well and got lots of compliments, it is a new skill that I will have to develop in myself: HOW TO BE ME on stage. DWS In my previous blog post, I described the basics of registration for female singers. But a big question is why should a female, soprano or alto, develop their head voice? It is a legitimate question, since some of my young singers have amazing belts.
Here's why: 1) New Tone Color: The head voice gives a completely new vocal quality to a female voice. Compared to a belt on higher notes, it tends to have a more warm and less strident quality. 2) Expands your range: There is a limit to how far the 'belt' can go. While everyone is different, most sopranos find it difficult to stay in their chest-dominated voice beyond B flat, and while altos can go a little higher than that, there comes a point when using head voice is simply more practical and efficient. More importantly, head voice gives you access to pitches that are simply impossible in a belt. 3) Safer Singing Style: While belting can be done in a healthy and safe manner, it is very typical in young girls for their belts to turn into screaming, which is not good for the voice! DWS It is very typical for beginning sopranos to have 'registration' issues. Here are some definitions before we get into details.
Belting - Carrying the Chest Voice/Lower Register beyond the first passaggio and sometimes even past the second passaggio. This produces a trumpet-like sound on the higher pitches. Head Voice - Using your Upper Register for higher notes. This 'obeys' the correct registration rules in classical music. Registration - Simply refers to which muscle in the larynx is 'dominant/more important' in vocal production. If you are primarily using the lower register, you are using the thyroarytenoid. For higher pitches, it is the cricothyroid if you are using head voice.; with belting, you are trying to extend the use of the thyroarytenoid beyond where classical technique suggests that the cricothyroid should become dominant. The reality is that girls have to be able use both techniques if they want to be versatile singers: Classical singers only use their head voice for higher pitches, but most other music genres encourage some use of Belting technique. In my next blog, I will discuss how and why I help my young sopranos develop their head voice. DWS While I will be posting the rankings on Friday for my high school students, the thing that makes me most proud is the tremendous jumps in rankings many of my students had. It makes me feel good because I know my students work hard, can handle very difficult music with ease, and that I help my students improve. Just as an example, I have 3 Bass II's who ranked in the top 20 for the first round of judging (16th, 17th, and 20th) . All three of these students are now in the top 6 (2nd, 5th, and 6th)! And I had one Bass I go from 30th to 11th! Similar jumps in rankings occurred for my sopranos and tenors.
This year I had a record number of students make a Region Choir, and the vast majority of these students will be going on to Pre-Area Auditions. I am so very proud and happy for all my students who did so well. So now the process begins again with a very difficult Mozart piece and a Brahms song. All of which must be learned in a month. Whew!! DWS I am performing in a cabaret-style concert with Lone Star Lyric Theater on Friday, Nov. 16th (8 PM) and Sunday, Nov. 18th (5 PM) at the Ovations Night Club in downtown Houston. Visit the site at www.ovationsnightclub.com or email [email protected] to reserve tickets (it's an intimate venue of 70 seats, so reservations are highly recommended!)
I will be singing some Cole Porter, Hammerstein, and other Broadway tunes with my fellow singers. It should be a very fun, relaxing night of entertainment! DWS One of the common occurrences in a voice lesson is when students find that they sound different on certain notes; these notes often sound muffled or too 'dark' for men, and women often find certain notes 'too quiet' or 'shrieky.'
Before you start to worry that you cannot sing a certain note well, the best bet is to ask your voice teacher what you sound like. Many times, what a singer hears is VERY different from the audience due to the fact that the singer's body is their own instrument, and greatly affects how the singer perceives their own sound. In particular, there are certain areas of the voice where one's perception is radically different from the actual sound. These areas are called 'passagios,' Italian for passageway. On a few pitches, the physical changes in the singer's instrument and acoustical effects are so dramatic that singers must learn to understand that what they think is perhaps muffled or shrieky may in fact be a well-produced sound. When you sing through your passagios, it is truly critical to have a trained voice teacher to help guide you in understanding how to perceive your own sound. DWS For the last two weeks, our choral region has undergone auditions for Region Choir at both the high school and junior high levels. I had 24 students auditioning in the Soprano, Tenor and Bass sections. All but two of my students made a Region choir. Yippee!
As I have mentioned in my previous posts, our region is super competitive. Many decent singers in our area are passed over simply because our standards are so high. So congrats to all my students made a region choir. It takes a lot of hard work, luck and talent, and I am so proud of you all! DWS This is how good our Region is: last week, I judged a District level audition for another region in Texas. The District level auditions allow judges to remove singers who are not prepared for the Region auditions. This consists mostly of people who have not learned their music.
In all honesty, the top 5 girls from this region would have barely been middle of the pack for our Region. While 30 of the girls from our room were 'passed' to go to Region, I doubt half of those would have made it past district in our Region, which consists of schools from Clear Creek ISD, Friendswood, Texas City, and Pearland. This is one case where geography stinks: some very competent singers in our area will get passed over simply because they live in one of the most competitive regions in Texas. Getting to audition for Region, let alone State, is quite the accomplishment in our Region and should be celebrated! DWS Musicality is not just the realm of the performer; most composers after the 1750s give us very specific directions on how to appear 'musical' to an audience. In many cases, musicality is simply the ability to perform what is written on the page! While this takes great technical ability obtained through voice lessons, it does not require 'creativity.'
This lesson was illustrated to me today when a female high school voice student came into her lesson today. She is relatively new to lessons, having started only a few months ago. Yet even though she is just learning how to use her voice, I was blown away by her musicality. She was not trying to be 'musical;' she was simply singing what the composer had requested the singer to perform! DWS While most people feel that artistry or musicality is natural talent, the reality is quite the opposite. Most professionals are so musical because they listened to a TON of music, and whether consciously or unconsciously, absorb the musical style of that genre.
You can learn how to be artistic. "Manufacturing" musicality is not unnatural. Here are some ways to sound 'musical'. 1) Listen to as much music as you can. Try to identify certain elements of a singer that make that singer unique. Then copy! For example, Frank Sinatra loved to add vibrato on held notes after a beat or two, and that style has become essential to the big band type of singing.. 2) Love the words you have to sing. Figure out how you can shade each important word with a different vocal color so as to give the word(s) more meaning. 3) Always add more elements than what is written on the music page. If composers wrote down everything they wanted us to do, where would artistry be? The job of the performer is to add things the composer either did not think of or did not write down. 4) Above all - be willing to take a risk and make a mistake. Try something crazy, record it, and see if it works. In all likelihood, it may take 5-6 tries of doing something different before something works, but it is worth it. DWS |
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