Good Mental Concept

I've often said that one of the jobs of a voice teacher is to learn how our students think. Sometimes, what a word means to me, and what it means to my student are very different things. I've had to learn how to present vocal ideas to a man who suffered 70% hearing loss as a child. I've had to learn how to speak so that a dancer can comprehend vocal imagery. I've had to learn how to follow a young woman who grew up speaking Mandarin Chinese. Sometimes I wish I could read minds; it would make the job so much easier.

Studying in Germany, I met a lot of singers; professional, successful, struggling, amateurs, you name it. I remember one day a tenor was coming in for his lesson as I was leaving. He was walking with a limp, and apologized for  even being there, since he knew he wasn't going to be able to sing that day. Our teacher, Mike Rhodes, asked him what was wrong, since there was no hint of hoarseness in his speaking voice. No, no, it wasn't his voice. He'd hurt his right foot, and so, couldn't sing. Asked what that had to do with singing, he replied that he sang with his right foot. I suggested that perhaps he could try singing with his left. And, while that made our teacher laugh, the tenor did not appreciate the comment.

Mike had an open studio. This meant that his students were allowed, even encouraged, to sit in on one another's lessons. You can learn a lot from someone else's problems. I was sitting in on a tenor's lesson. (Why is it always tenors?) He was really struggling with one note in an aria. Not a verse, not a phrase. One note.  It was a high note. As I recall, it was a B, just a half-step below the infamous high-C. This particular note needed to be very soft, and hang effortlessly in the air. 


Or that was the idea. After 20 minutes of struggling with this effortless note, the poor tenor was just about ready to give up. Either that or throw our teacher and his piano out the window. I felt for both of them. Mike had tried just about every technique he could think of to pull this note out of this tenor. And the tenor was failing, in front of an audience - me. Finally, in desperation, the man volunteered to try one last thing. He didn't care if it worked or not, they were going to finish the aria this time. I still remember how that note sounded: it was so soft, it hung on the air, as if it had always been there, just waiting for this man to pluck it out. It was effortless, it was beautiful. He finished the aria, and asked if that had been right. Reassured that it had been, he turned to Mike, and demanded: "Why didn't you just tell me it was a green note?"

These two stories have a couple of things in common. They both took place in the studio of my teacher in Germany, they both involve tenors, and most important for the moment: they both involve mental concept. 


Unless the singer knows where the note should be in their voice, and unless they know how it should sound, they are merely rolling the dice in the crap shoot of vocal production. A pianist has it easy. I can go to any piano in the world, and find middle-C. And provided that piano is in tune, it will always sound exactly the same. Voices are different. Middle-C may be out of reach for some basses, or bottoming out for some sopranos. And, to make things interesting, it will be in a slightly different place in your voice from one day to the next. All of this will depend on how much sleep you got, whether you had tea or coffee with your breakfast, what kind of green-growing-thing is currently blooming, and the relative humidity. All of this combines to make singing on pitch unbelievably complicated.


This can be dealt with simply by trial and error. And let me tell you, there's a lot of error! When I miss a note, the entire neighborhood knows about it! Fortunately, by this point, I don't miss that many. 


The singer also needs to know how much of the chest voice to carry up into each note, and how much of the head voice to carry down. This can not only change by day, but can be different in each song. Are you getting the feeling that this is a very difficult skill? 


Good. Because it is, and it needs to become automatic. Someone told me once that the number of computations that we accomplish each moment we are driving a car is literally mind-boggling:  speed, trajectories, Newton's laws, the list is almost endless. And, yet, we do it, day in, day out. The same for singing - except that hopefully, no one's life is endangered when we sing.


And on top of all that, there is the quality of the note: not just hitting it full out, but that elusive green note: the note that just hangs there, softly and effortlessly. And without a qualified teacher to tell you when you have found that note - to be your ears outside of your body - you can't be certain that you've found that quality.

Hmm. . . what shall I post about next week? Tune in and see!