Hit and Run!

Yesterday afternoon I had the pleasure of teaching a vocal master class at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. I taught voice at Smith from 2008-2010 and continue to work with two members of the voice faculty and one undergraduate at Rood Hill Farm.

I call this kind of class a 'hit and run' class because in twenty or so minutes one must hear a new singer, decide upon the most salient point you can work on within a very brief space of time, and send them home un-bruised. Afterwards I told one of the faculty members who was present that it is like compressing seven hours of teaching into two. You have to kick-start yourself all over again every twenty minutes.

I heard seven young women, one of whom is studying with me currently, and one of whom studied with me when I was teaching at Smith. With the latter, it was interesting to see how her voice has grown in two years.

The various vocal problems that we worked on included body posture with the first woman to sing for me. She had a good low breath but was moving her upper body around with every inhalation. I tried to calm this movement down. I never want a singer to feel that she is 'holding' her body in good posture, but constant moving interrupts the flow of sound and is very tiring.

One woman sang an aria that was filled with difficult runs which she was not executing very well. Actually, I guess if you 'execute' a run, you are killing it. She was not killing the runs but was often sliding over pitches. It was as if she knew the territory but not the details. I do not ever advocate punched out runs where each note is issued as if from a machine gun (see Cecilia Bartoli). I like an articulated-legato run. I asked her how she learned her runs and she told me that she listened to the aria on UTube many times. This is definitely not the way to learn a run- or anything else. One has to build coloratura passages, or any musical phrase, into the ear and body carefully, bit by bit. To help her learn how to do this we took one run and divided it up into patterns. I then had her repeat the pattern over and over until it sang easily. Then we added a bit more. By the end of the session she sang the run perfectly. You must do this kind of nitty-gritty work with any florid aria you intend to sing. Then it will flow effortlessly. (See Lorraine Hunt Lieberson)

Several of the singers sang songs in English. Well, thanks to my work with Madeleine Marshall a hundred years ago, English diction is one of my fortes, or I guess it would be forti. For some reason, people tend to put stronger vowels in weak syllables when they are singing than when they are speaking. Kindness (with a schwa in the second syllable) becomes kind-NESS, as in Loch Ness. This is what Madeleine used to call 'singers' English'. If you do this enough, your audience will assume that you are singing in a foreign language and stop listening.

One young woman, who had a good sized voice, was incorporating a lot of facial and jaw tension into her singing. We tried to find ways to loosen these problems. I also encouraged her to move about the room while singing. This frees the body and, as a result, the voice.

The young woman who has been studying with me this year sang very well. She has gone from singing with great discomfort to singing effortlessly. With her I worked on the very high notes in the aria she sang, including a couple of high C's. I basically used her to demonstrate various ways I suggest to a singer to free the body as you sail up to the top of the voice. The body should really go in the opposite direction from the pitch. I had her do a gentle knee-bend as she went up and then also had her move forward as if she were going to ice skate. Both of these techniques allowed the high notes to resonate perfectly and soar into space. It is easy body movement that enables you to free the sound.

Teaching this sort of class is beneficial to me as a teacher, as I hope it is to the singers. Dealing with seven distinctly different voices with seven different approaches to singing in a limited time frame, keeps me on my toes, to say the least.

Thanks to Karen Smith Emerson who arranged for me to teach the class and to all the young singers who performed for me. You were all great!