From: Margaret Harrison
To: VOCALIST <vocalist>
Subject: Re: TECHNIQUE: singing "ah" -THANKS!
Send reply to: VOCALIST <vocalist>

Jessica wrote:

This whole bad habit of mine comes from days of
> junior high school and high school choir singing when the teachers would say
> "drop your jaw" and "make your mouth form the vowel you are singing". It
> seemed to make sense at the time.

There are some choral instructions I'd have problems with, but there's nothing
intrinsically wrong about asking singers tp drop their jaws and get theirs mouths to form
the vowel. The problem, as you deal with below, is that it's impossible to monitor how
every individual in a large group responds to a general instruction. The choir director
can only deal with the group's sound, as a whole.

There probably isn't a good vocal instruction that exists that an individual singer can't
turn into a bad habit (I'm the champion - I have overdone every good instruction. I
didn't just drop my jaw, I opened it as far as possible!).

Perhaps this is an excellent reason to
> put young singers into some kind of training early on - even if not to train
> them in specific technique, but only to catch the formation of bad habits
> early on and halt them before they do damage.

Yes - there's no substitute for individual voice instruction. But you'll get past this
"ah" thing soon enough - and personally, I think the problem for many American singers is
more the way we say our vowels in our speech, rather than instructions we've gotten from
music teachers.

Peggy

--
Margaret Harrison, Alexandria, Virginia, USA
"Music for a While Shall All Your Cares Beguile"
mailto:peggyh-at-ix.netcom.com