Sing OUT, Louise!!!
Yesterday I had my first voice lesson in twenty years. Teo came with me and was nearly invisible with angelic goodness (and the aid of my 3DS.)
We didn't do much actual vocal production. It was mostly a "get to know you, can we work together?" sort of hour, where I sang some scales, followed some instructions and Maestro and I talked about our experiences and knowledge and goals and all that jazz. And yet, in the course of an hour, I had my tiny little mind blown four or five times with "AHA!!!" revelations that put some puzzling things about my voice into perspective and gave me the start of some concrete tools to get my voice back into shape for singing more publicly. (Because, you know I miss performing.)
The question kept coming up. "You say you haven't sung in the last ten years?" The answer is, of course, yes and no. Sure I've sung. I've sung lullabies and endless rounds of "The Lass of Richmond Hill" but I haven't learned any new challenging music and I haven't gotten up in front of people to perform. Sure, the shower has heard me warble a bit, and I spent some time at Cordelia's piano making noise, but that's just… you know… accidental music. A bit of fun. A phrase here, a bit of a verse there… I have sung nothing focused or directed.
Though I don't quite understand it myself, I'm beginning to think this was a good thing for me.
When I first took lessons twenty years ago, my teacher gave me a lot of instruction that, in hindsight, was counterproductive to my voice. Whether this was faulty knowledge she was passing along to me, unwittingly, or whether I was misinterpreting her teaching, it doesn't matter. I learned a bit, made some improvements, and then hit a hard plateau, then started sounding worse. When I stopped studying with her, I was my own worst enemy, vocally. I spent so much mental energy focused on keeping my mouth in awkward and unnatural-feeling positions, I didn't have any left over for singing. I choked myself a lot. I always tensed up too much, pushed too much air… it was pretty bad.
It was only after I stopped taking lessons, and started feeling rebellious and experimental that I made some personal progress with my voice. I was starting to like the sound of it. I sang two roles with Stanford Savoyards. And then I got married and stopped singing almost entirely for ten years. Why?
I think on some level I knew that if I continued fumbling my way along this self-blazed vocal path I might do my voice harm. I wasn't really in a place where I had the confidence or the time or the drive to find a good teacher and work on it. I also had some other work to do, emotionally, which was as difficult as it has been useful. In fact, the lesson of the last ten years was hammered home in yesterday. I need to trust myself. If something feels wrong, there's a good chance it is. If an expert tells me something that my body refuses to endorse, trust my body. If I'm spending my energy trying to "think" my way to better resonance, I'm never going to improve. I have to feel the voice in my body so that I can shape it to my will.
"Why are you standing like that?" "My last teacher said to." "No, stand like this instead." "Oh, that's how I stood before I had lessons, and my previous teacher was always yelling at me for it." So I stand like Maestro says, and suddenly I have all this breath support and my neck muscles relax.
"Where's your tongue?" "At the bottom of my mouth." "In opera, you want the tongue like this instead." He demonstrates. "Oh. That's what I used to do with my tongue, and my previous teacher was always yelling at me for it." Suddenly, I had this richer, fuller sound pouring out of my mouth.
"Your jaw. Don't open it like that. Hinge it open and back like a turtle, and not so wide." "That's so much more comfortable. That's how I used to do it, but…"
And suddenly, with these technical changes that were relatively easy to implement, I could feel sound coming out of my mouth and it felt so good. Also, instead of being told to just "think" the high notes into place, Maestro gave me a couple of concrete exercises that, even just doing them once before hitting a scale again, improved my tone measurably. It was AWESOME. And although the discussions got a bit technical, once I opened my mouth to sing, I was able to feel the sound provide its own feedback. I didn't have to THINK so damned hard to keep myself in the right position for resonance. The resonance was it's own reward.
I felt comfortable. I understood what I was trying to do. My limitations are pretty obvious, but instead of yelling at me for them, Maestro said, "Okay, this exercise will help with that. Do it." For every issue there was an exercise that seemed, even in a very short space of time, to help something. I left feeling better than I had when I arrived, which has never happened to me in a voice lesson before.
Maestro classifies people according to the fach system. He is a totally geeky opera fanboi, which gives him the otaku advantage in having information to dump on me at the least hint that I might want it. (He's also great at explaining things in a way I grok, so for that alone, I love him.) We discussed chest vs. head voice, hearing vs. feeling the sound, and music vs. staging in the recent production of Brigadoon I slaughtered in my last post. After some scales, he remarked on my passaggios and range and said I was (in his opinion) a Dramatic Soprano.
And the world made sense suddenly.
In straight plays, I've always played the old ladies, the witches and the insane people. I've played the occasional trouser role from the chorus as well. It always seemed a cruel joke of nature that I should have the body and attitude for these roles, but my voice was supposed to be singing light young lady pieces. O Mio Babbino Caro, and the like. I thought I was just a failure. My previous teacher spent a lot of time working to "brighten" my tone and change my image to better reflect my actual age.
I was a potato, and my previous teacher was trying to teach me to sing like a cauliflower.
To her credit, dramatic sopranos are notoriously hard to classify when younger. It could simply be that my voice wasn't mature enough then to do what it can now. But I've always been jealous of people with high, bright voices. Because I was *supposed* to be doing that and never really could. And I always felt vaguely ashamed of wanting to sing my own way, because the leading ladies always had bright, shining voices.
Maestro Fanboi came to my rescue, though. He said to look up Eileen Farrell and listen to her. She is to be my idol. So I went home and YouTube spit a couple playlists at me and I started listening. "Hey! That's kind of like what I sound like on recordings!" You know, except she's much better. But it's a sound I think I could achieve, whereas I was never sure how I was supposed to make some of those coloratura sounds a "soprano" is supposed to. More than that, she wasn't only a dramatic soprano singing opera, she had a career singing jazz and was a popular recording artist singing all sorts of big band and standard songs (Gershwin, Cole Porter, and other Broadway stuff) which I looooove.
So, there's hope for me yet.
I plan on enjoying some lessons. When I'm ready to perform again, I'm determined to enjoy the hell out of that, too. Most of all, yesterday's lesson laid to rest a lot of demons. I've spent the last ten years learning how to be true to myself, instead of taking someone else's word over the evidence of my senses. If the expert's opinion doesn't produce the results it's supposed to, I need to accept that maybe that bit of advice doesn't apply to me and try something else. Even if this voice thing goes nowhere after this, yesterday's lesson was worth everything I put into it, and then some.
I'm so happy.
We didn't do much actual vocal production. It was mostly a "get to know you, can we work together?" sort of hour, where I sang some scales, followed some instructions and Maestro and I talked about our experiences and knowledge and goals and all that jazz. And yet, in the course of an hour, I had my tiny little mind blown four or five times with "AHA!!!" revelations that put some puzzling things about my voice into perspective and gave me the start of some concrete tools to get my voice back into shape for singing more publicly. (Because, you know I miss performing.)
The question kept coming up. "You say you haven't sung in the last ten years?" The answer is, of course, yes and no. Sure I've sung. I've sung lullabies and endless rounds of "The Lass of Richmond Hill" but I haven't learned any new challenging music and I haven't gotten up in front of people to perform. Sure, the shower has heard me warble a bit, and I spent some time at Cordelia's piano making noise, but that's just… you know… accidental music. A bit of fun. A phrase here, a bit of a verse there… I have sung nothing focused or directed.
Though I don't quite understand it myself, I'm beginning to think this was a good thing for me.
When I first took lessons twenty years ago, my teacher gave me a lot of instruction that, in hindsight, was counterproductive to my voice. Whether this was faulty knowledge she was passing along to me, unwittingly, or whether I was misinterpreting her teaching, it doesn't matter. I learned a bit, made some improvements, and then hit a hard plateau, then started sounding worse. When I stopped studying with her, I was my own worst enemy, vocally. I spent so much mental energy focused on keeping my mouth in awkward and unnatural-feeling positions, I didn't have any left over for singing. I choked myself a lot. I always tensed up too much, pushed too much air… it was pretty bad.
It was only after I stopped taking lessons, and started feeling rebellious and experimental that I made some personal progress with my voice. I was starting to like the sound of it. I sang two roles with Stanford Savoyards. And then I got married and stopped singing almost entirely for ten years. Why?
I think on some level I knew that if I continued fumbling my way along this self-blazed vocal path I might do my voice harm. I wasn't really in a place where I had the confidence or the time or the drive to find a good teacher and work on it. I also had some other work to do, emotionally, which was as difficult as it has been useful. In fact, the lesson of the last ten years was hammered home in yesterday. I need to trust myself. If something feels wrong, there's a good chance it is. If an expert tells me something that my body refuses to endorse, trust my body. If I'm spending my energy trying to "think" my way to better resonance, I'm never going to improve. I have to feel the voice in my body so that I can shape it to my will.
"Why are you standing like that?" "My last teacher said to." "No, stand like this instead." "Oh, that's how I stood before I had lessons, and my previous teacher was always yelling at me for it." So I stand like Maestro says, and suddenly I have all this breath support and my neck muscles relax.
"Where's your tongue?" "At the bottom of my mouth." "In opera, you want the tongue like this instead." He demonstrates. "Oh. That's what I used to do with my tongue, and my previous teacher was always yelling at me for it." Suddenly, I had this richer, fuller sound pouring out of my mouth.
"Your jaw. Don't open it like that. Hinge it open and back like a turtle, and not so wide." "That's so much more comfortable. That's how I used to do it, but…"
And suddenly, with these technical changes that were relatively easy to implement, I could feel sound coming out of my mouth and it felt so good. Also, instead of being told to just "think" the high notes into place, Maestro gave me a couple of concrete exercises that, even just doing them once before hitting a scale again, improved my tone measurably. It was AWESOME. And although the discussions got a bit technical, once I opened my mouth to sing, I was able to feel the sound provide its own feedback. I didn't have to THINK so damned hard to keep myself in the right position for resonance. The resonance was it's own reward.
I felt comfortable. I understood what I was trying to do. My limitations are pretty obvious, but instead of yelling at me for them, Maestro said, "Okay, this exercise will help with that. Do it." For every issue there was an exercise that seemed, even in a very short space of time, to help something. I left feeling better than I had when I arrived, which has never happened to me in a voice lesson before.
Maestro classifies people according to the fach system. He is a totally geeky opera fanboi, which gives him the otaku advantage in having information to dump on me at the least hint that I might want it. (He's also great at explaining things in a way I grok, so for that alone, I love him.) We discussed chest vs. head voice, hearing vs. feeling the sound, and music vs. staging in the recent production of Brigadoon I slaughtered in my last post. After some scales, he remarked on my passaggios and range and said I was (in his opinion) a Dramatic Soprano.
And the world made sense suddenly.
In straight plays, I've always played the old ladies, the witches and the insane people. I've played the occasional trouser role from the chorus as well. It always seemed a cruel joke of nature that I should have the body and attitude for these roles, but my voice was supposed to be singing light young lady pieces. O Mio Babbino Caro, and the like. I thought I was just a failure. My previous teacher spent a lot of time working to "brighten" my tone and change my image to better reflect my actual age.
I was a potato, and my previous teacher was trying to teach me to sing like a cauliflower.
To her credit, dramatic sopranos are notoriously hard to classify when younger. It could simply be that my voice wasn't mature enough then to do what it can now. But I've always been jealous of people with high, bright voices. Because I was *supposed* to be doing that and never really could. And I always felt vaguely ashamed of wanting to sing my own way, because the leading ladies always had bright, shining voices.
Maestro Fanboi came to my rescue, though. He said to look up Eileen Farrell and listen to her. She is to be my idol. So I went home and YouTube spit a couple playlists at me and I started listening. "Hey! That's kind of like what I sound like on recordings!" You know, except she's much better. But it's a sound I think I could achieve, whereas I was never sure how I was supposed to make some of those coloratura sounds a "soprano" is supposed to. More than that, she wasn't only a dramatic soprano singing opera, she had a career singing jazz and was a popular recording artist singing all sorts of big band and standard songs (Gershwin, Cole Porter, and other Broadway stuff) which I looooove.
So, there's hope for me yet.
I plan on enjoying some lessons. When I'm ready to perform again, I'm determined to enjoy the hell out of that, too. Most of all, yesterday's lesson laid to rest a lot of demons. I've spent the last ten years learning how to be true to myself, instead of taking someone else's word over the evidence of my senses. If the expert's opinion doesn't produce the results it's supposed to, I need to accept that maybe that bit of advice doesn't apply to me and try something else. Even if this voice thing goes nowhere after this, yesterday's lesson was worth everything I put into it, and then some.
I'm so happy.