Here is my concern with teaching young singers to sing with microphones: Do teachers of singing really think that volume will "come in" with age?
Volume, as perceived in an opera house, is a function of the ring (singer's formant, call it what you will -- it's the coordination between correct breath control and focus/vowel/placement/formant -- it's the optimal coordination between breath and resonator) in the voice. This is a fundamental building block of the voice. It is the first thing to be trained into a voice. It is the health of the instrument.
If you are producting voices with tonal beauty, lovely diction, expressive musicianship, but not the ring, what are you thinking? That the ring will suddenly drop in, of its own accord, at the age of 30? How are these students going to "get" ring in the real world, and what in the world are you teaching them in university if not that important first step of singing?
I'm not suggesting that a 20-year-old needs to be singing in a 3000-seat arena with a 100-piece orchestra. But micophones necessarily teach students to back off of ring and instead emphasize fullness, warmth, expressive coloring, tone manipulation that uses inadequate breath control -- recording tricks, in short. This does not teach the most important building block in the process of training a voice for an operatic career -- to wit, how to produce a healthy, sustainable tone that will cut through an orchestra.
Isabelle B.
===== Isabelle Bracamonte San Francisco, CA ibracamonte@y... ibracamonte@y...
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