In a message dated 5/15/2001 6:32:58 PM Eastern Daylight Time, kjensen@c... writes: kjensen@c... writes:
<< does she sound different on sustained notes than she does on moving >notes? Not at first. It just flickers briefly, then quits. >>
karen,
i suspect if it were something wrong with her, her voice would cut out in the moving passages. if it is only happening to her on sustained notes, she is probably thinking of 'holding' them rather than continuing to sing them. in his books on tenors and sopranos, richard miller explains the importance of agility, not just for the fast moving passages, but for sostenuto as well. what your friend may be doing is akin to giving a car gas when going around all sorts of turns and then taking her foot off the gas when coming to a straight-away, as if she were waiting for the road to end.
the only solution that i have ever found for this problem (as it is a conceptual one) is to have her stretch a rubber band while singing (or, do some kind of continuous motion). if she's doing what i think she's doing, she'll probably stop stretching the band when she gets to a sustained note. in other words, the motion she feels when singing faster moving passages she associates with the changing of pitches rather than the continuous production of sound. so, when she comes to a sustained note, she stops the motion. if she stops the motion of singing, her sound will cut off. so, the solution is to have her pay attention to continuing to stretch the band while singing the long notes.
a clearer analogy might be to the violinist. in order for the violinist to maintain sound, he/she must continue bowing regardless of whether playing a passage of fast running notes or a long sustained note. if the violinist stops bowing, the sound stops.
mike
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