Here’s the thing. Most people don’t know they’re scarring you for life when they’re scarring you for life. Some people are actually mean. Let’s discount the mean ones right now. I mean, if someone is taking the time to make sure that you know that they think you stink… they’re probably dealing with their own scars.
At some point you’ve probably been told that you aren't good at art. Or dancing or yodeling or any other art form you want to substitute here. Maybe you haven’t specifically been told that you weren’t good at it, but whatever was said or happened nipped artistic inclination right in the bud. Actually, it’s very common for adults to have had some experience in their childhood that has since kept them from expressing themselves through an artform that they used to like. Talk about stating the obvious! Because unless a child is a savant there is no reason for that kid to be good at...anything, really. Because kids are beginners at everything. They’re not supposed to be good at anything yet. As a result of some loudmouth, rudy-pants McGee, teens or adults later experience anxiety whenever they’re asked to draw or dance or sing or whatever. When is a grownup asked to do something artsy you ask? Well, not everyday. But I can tell you that I avoid weddings because I might be expected to dance. I avoid auditions where I will be expected to be more than a singer who can move, but I digress. It’s not like I think I’ve missed my calling in life. Was I ever going to be a Fred Astaire? No. I’m not a guy. Also, I’m not as talented. Not even close. But I used to love dancing! Still do if I’m not feeling too shy. When I was ten I was in an after school choir. We were doing a review of popular music through the decades. I was super into it. We had choreography for every song and I. loved. It. I got weird looks because of my enthusiasm. Then dress rehearsal came. I’m not sure what exactly happened. I think maybe my assigned spot was between two older boys and they had wanted to sit together? I don’t know. But one of the boys turned to me and told me that I should go jump off of a cliff. Ah, the creativity and intelligence of tweenagers. I was a sensitive kid and, let me tell you, I did not handle it well. I didn’t handle it at all. All of my energy went in to not crying in front of this punk. My enthusiasm was gone. No smiling, no singing, no dancing. So the director stopped the rehearsal, pointed to me, and said, “You don’t know the choreography. Change spots with (child whose name I forget).” I felt so humiliated to be pointed out like that. I kinda felt betrayed by the teacher because I totally knew the dance, the songs, and I actually wanted to be there! … and she assumed I was just clueless? After numerous rehearsals with me enthusiastically singing my little heart out? We all know there were kids there because their parents wanted them to be, and she didn’t notice the kids who were loving this choir thing? These are the questions that keep me up at night. Not really, but my heart goes out to the many, many people who have had similar experiences. I regret not taking dance classes after that. I regret hiding my enthusiasm during rehearsals for the other stuff I did do. It would be pretty easy to blame the teacher. Maybe I even should, but… she was also the only adult running an after school program for, like, 30 kids. I now sympathize. Big time. So, things are hard for everyone. If you were scarred for life by something like that, I’m sorry. It’s super sucky. If it was a misunderstanding or just a dumb, unthinking moment… please, please, oh please don’t quit doing the things you love. I stopped taking dance classes when I was a tween because of stupid things that other people said and did, and I regret it! Often! I still haven’t been able to find an adult beginning dance class that isn’t actually intermediate. I mean, these classes are filled with people who took ballet for years, took a break, and just want to brush up. Not beginners! (In my defense, I can dance and not look like I’m having a seizure. But can I learn a brief dance sequence in 5 minutes with which to impress the director? Like Fanny Brice on roller skates, I sure can!) Let that little light of yours shine, shine, shine. Try that one thing one more time. Be vulnerable. Be okay with feeling scared or stupid at the beginning. Someday you will find a more compassionate or less harried teacher. Someday you will find the right beginning dance class for adults, and have to take it three times in a row before you can move on. Which is okay because everyone starts somewhere. Maybe you loved singing and some jerk told you to stick to frisbee. Or whatever. Sometimes people really are rude. Sometimes they’re trying to be funny. Sometimes they have no filter. It’s rude. Move on if you can. Throw that frisbee in their face if you want. I won’t judge. But I hope you keep singing.
0 Comments
I just want to speak in defense of the coolness of opera. Let me be brief: The Phantom of the Opera is a musical.
It’s a musical that happens to take place in (and under) an opera house. It also has some scenes and characters that act operatically. But opera it is not. The biggest reason that it is not an opera is because there are microphones. The actors wear microphones on their bodies so as to be heard at the back of the theater. An honest to goodness opera involves no microphones. Meaning the actors are able to project their voices to the very back of the theater and be heard. Josh Groban and Sarah Brightman, beautiful voices though they have, are not opera singers. I know. What?! Yep. It’s true: they have a classicalish sound, but they still need microphones when they sing at a concert. I’m not saying the sound of their voice is less beautiful because it has to be amplified, I’m just saying it has to be amplified. Why so snobby, you ask? Well, I’m the first to admit that I love listening to Mr. Groban or other ‘popera’ singers, but I kinda feel like it’s a major disservice to actual opera and actual opera singers to say that what they’re doing is being done by people who… aren’t actually doing it. I’m not bashing pop singers. Annie Lennox and Billy Joel come up on my playlist before Maria Callas or Placido Domingo. It’s just that actually watching an opera… is just a whole other ballgame. I mean, have you ever seen an opera? With professionals? Live? If not, you’re missing out. I know that sitting down and listening to a recording of a fat soprano is boring for most people. I get it. Snooze fest. Do yourself a favor: do a google search, buy a ticket, and get your butt in a seat because live opera is about to knock your socks off. There are shows out there that blur the genre boundaries. Phantom, Sweeney Todd, and my personal favorite: the 1983 film of The Pirates of Penzance starring Linda Rondstadt are all delectable examples. Just don’t assume you know what gnocchi is like because you’ve had mashed potatoes. Take your ear out of the seashell and go to the ocean. Better yet go eat gnocchi on the beach. Or if you’ve had enough mixed metaphors go to the opera. When I first started singing I heard teachers and older students talk about ‘technique’ a lot. ‘Good’ technique. ‘Healthy’ technique. I didn’t know what they were talking about, but it sure sounded pretentious. The singers they were applying these terms to all sounded completely different to me. I couldn’t hear the common thread they all shared that could have been the ‘technique’ they were talking about. To make it more confusing I heard dancers and visual artists talking about technique too. It wasn’t until I was in graduate school—studying technique—that someone explained it to me.
Simply put, technique is how you do what you do. When people refer to ‘good’, ‘healthy’, or ‘correct’ (they’re all the same thing) singing technique, they’re referring to how someone is able to sing for extended periods of time with ease and comfort. If a person is singing with ‘bad’, ‘unhealthy’, or ‘incorrect’ technique then they won’t be able to sing for very long before they get tired or start to lose their voice. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard people say something along the lines of, ‘Oh, I used to sing but it hurts my throat now.’ After some questioning I usually discover that these people started lessons with an inexperienced teacher who re-enforced or created bad habits. The good news is that technique is a habit. So if singing feels tight, tiring, painful, or all of the above, it’s possible to break the habits that are causing the discomfort. That’s where voice teachers come in. It’s our job to help students break unhealthy vocal habits and build healthy ones. Teaching people to use their voice is not like teaching people to play… pretty much any other instrument. As someone who also used to teach instrumental lessons, let me tell you. Learning to sing is weird because you are your instrument. You. Your body. With instrumentalists I was able to manually correct posture, finger placement, demonstrate a phrase, etc. With the voice there’s a lot more that’s internal and psychological. There’s also a much wider variation from instrument to instrument when we’re talking about the human voice. It takes time to learn to sing healthily. It takes time to build a common vocabulary between student and teacher. It takes time for a teacher to really know a student’s voice. I have a lot of young students come to me and expect to hear immediate, dramatic improvements. It’s just not gonna happen. I’m able to manually correct a singer’s physical alignment, but it ends there. For everything else I verbally guide a student to make corrections themselves, on themselves. On muscles that they’ve never seen and weren’t even aware that they had. So it takes time, my friends, because singers are learning to sing based on internal sensation. Here’s what I tell my students day in and day out: (at this point I should probably needle point it and frame it above the piano...) If it feels good and you feel energized, then it’s right. Maybe you’re thinking, Energized? Why energized? Actually you’re probably thinking: I know some people that sing horribly and I’m pretty sure they think it feels good. You’re right. That’s why voice teachers exist. Many people are relatively unaware and unconnected to the rest of their body. They can’t yet feel when they’re wreaking havoc on their vocal folds. In those cases lessons begin by building awareness so that eventually they can recognize when singing feels good or bad. Once students have gained some awareness I tell them that singing should feel relaxed and energized. Insert Star Trek joke here. I say ‘energized’ because using the measuring stick of ‘if it feels good then it’s right’ doesn’t take it far enough. Most people carry layers and layers of tension so when they finally break through one of those layers they immediately feel better. They feel good. But I know that they will feel even better once they learn how to let go of more tension. When all of the unnecessary tension is gone then the singer gets a rush of energy as their body is producing sound with the most efficiency. You’ve heard of a runner’s high? Well this is a singer’s high. I started taking voice lessons because I loved to sing but I didn’t love my voice. I struggled for a long time because I knew I had a talent for music but I was never really able to sing the songs I loved because of my vocal limitations. The discomfort I experienced when I sang made me kind of mad. I wanted to figure this singing thing out! I felt so close to being able to sing the way I wanted to, but I didn’t actually get there until relatively recently. I finally worked with a teacher who made it all ‘click’ for me. I came away knowing what good technique felt like and I could finally sing without constant input from a teacher. After years and years of trying to figure it out I could finally sing what I wanted to sing. I felt relieved. I had known I could sing but now it finally felt like it. I’ve been a bit of a technique evangelist ever since. There are more well rounded teachers out there than myself. Teachers that teach multiple instruments, write symphonies, and fly to Australia every weekend for their engagement at the Sydney Opera House. I’m not one of those teachers. I’ve had the great fortune to take a lot of fancy pants classes. A lot of it has gone in one ear and out the other. I mean, I know some music theory and history factoids and stuff, but the technique is what has stuck. It’s what I went in to my schooling fiercely determined to understand and by George I think I did it. I know this post has been kind of abstract and weird. That’s probably because singing can be kind of abstract and weird. I talked a lot about technique without specifically telling you how to sing with correct technique. That’s what voice lessons are for. Maybe that’s what another blog post or two… or five... will be for. For now I just wanted to take the pretense out of technique, tell you why I care about it and why you should too. Maybe it still seems pretentious. So let’s end with a well known singer using UNhealthy technique to really drive home my point. I’ll just say that I KNOW she does not feel good or energized in this video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4QvCK6cnHI It’s cold and flu season which means that I get a lot of students canceling lessons and a lot of students asking me ‘how do you sing through being sick?’
Well, let me tell ya. The short answer is to use correct technique. Correct technique being the thing that singers go to voice lessons to learn. It’s also something I’ll be blogging about more in the future. When I get a cold or a flu my speaking voice sounds scratchy and not unlike the late, great Alan Rickman. Unfortunately I don’t get an english accent when I catch a sniffle, but my voice is usually low enough to merit learning some tenor repertoire. When I try to sing with a cold or flu… my high notes don’t sound their best and sometimes my voice cuts out altogether. All of these lovely symptoms are due to mucus sitting on the vocal folds. When you get sick, especially with a cough, the vocal folds become inflamed, so your body covers those vocal folds with mucus to protect them. But if you’re trying to sing or talk it’s annoying because suddenly the voice feels completely unpredictable and much lower than usual. Most of the time I can sing through an illness by relying on correct technique. If you can give your voice a rest and allow it to heal, that’s obviously the best. But. (And there are two ‘buts’ here.) If you have a performance for which other people are relying on you, don’t be a diva. Show up and sing. The other ‘but’ is this: you need to be prepared for the day when you have to sing sick. So practice when you’re sick. It’s a balancing act and you have to figure out what works for you. Always give your all and do your best, but know when to stop. Here are some general rules:
What are your favorite cold/cough/flu remedies? Any Mucinex evangelists out there? So you know you’re supposed to be practicing, but you don’t want to. Is there another alternative? The answer is yes-ish. In my opinion, nothing is going to take the place of actually opening your mouth and singing. But there’s also nothing that can take the place of listening and watching other performers. There’s also nothing that can take the place of silent practice, or as the athletes like to call it: visualization. Actually, I spend way more time doing the silent/watchy/listeny type of practicing than I do actually vocalizing.
If you want to practice but don’t want to actually use your voice, here’s some things to consider: Have you memorized the rhythms of the song? Have you memorized the lyrics? Do you know the context of the song? Is it from a show? What was the composer thinking about when she/he wrote it? Improving your voice is a whole hell of a lot easier if you have your song memorized. Really, these are all things that need to happen with every song. But isolating specific elements of a song only improves the piece as a whole. And if you’ve already checked off everything on your checklist and you are having one of those I don’t want to sing days… Think about your technique. Visualize it. What does correct singing feel like? How does if affect your body? I fully appreciate that there are times when practicing is the pits. Sometimes very long stretches of time. There’s a time to give yourself a break and there’s a time to learn to do it anyway. Habits are powerful. Practicing even when we don’t want to is good for your voice. Hell, it’s a good life skill. But if it is really one of those days. Use your best judgment. Sometimes life happens. Sometimes big, scary life happens. Don’t sing while you’re fighting down a panic attack. Maybe don’t set a timer and sing because you have to sing for 30 minutes. Or for however long. If you’re just going through the motions, without any awareness, it’s not going to do any good. You ARE your musical instrument. Tend to that instrument in a way that feels loving. Let that mean to you what it may. During the second year of my undergrad, one of my immediate family members died. I didn’t sing for 3 months because I just couldn’t. Years later having moved to a strange city where I didn’t know a soul… practice was a solace. Singing was something I had control over and gave me peace and joy at the end of the day. There were plenty of good and bad days in between. On the bad ones, sometimes I went to a practice room and sang… and sometimes I didn’t. It’s good to have goals and work towards them. But some goals take greater precedence at different times in our life. Sometimes my larger goal is to not be buried in dishes and laundry. So that at the end of the day I still have my sanity. Sometimes my goal is to memorize a script so I can kill it in rehearsal because that makes me happy. As a teacher I do think it’s my responsibility to teach students discipline in the form of practice, attendance, or punctuality. But I also think that their personal lives are none of my business. Unless they choose to share personal business with me. I just remember when I was an undergraduate and grieving the loss of a loved one… I loved that my teacher never hounded me about practice. Later I had a different teacher who DID hound me about practicing, and I didn’t improve as quickly. I’m not sure why. I think that while I was juggling a major life event and trying to push through a rigorous bachelors program I figured out methods that worked for me, and setting a timer for my allotted practice time wasn’t one of them. In lessons I talk to students about practice occasionally. But I think, especially adult students, should have the freedom to figure out what works for them and what doesn’t. So choose your own adventure. |
AuthorLarisa has a Master's Degree in performing arts and has performed and starred in numerous musicals and operas. She has also taught vocal performance for more than a decade. ArchivesCategories |