In a message dated 2/3/2002 1:36:11 PM Pacific Standard Time, thomas8@t...
writes:
> I, too, would like you to expound on that theory. As one who teaches both
> from the top down AND a narrow air column, I find that the opposite
>
Shew! I feel like I have expounded upon it in depth. Would you do me a favor
and please let me know if some of the past posts aren't enough, and I will do
my best to explain it further?
I can add one thing, though: For me, with the advent of this discovery for my
own voice, my dynamics and expression have improved DRAMATICALLY, and mainly
because now my singing is based on my natural registration and speech, and I
don't feel like I have created some head-based artifice that always felt
contrived to me. When I tried head-based balances, it felt to me that it was
such a struggle to keep the voice in that balance, that it was always
precarious, and all my emotional and expressive headroom was being taken up
by trying to maintain that artifice. Like the proverbial tapping your head
and rubbing your belly at the same time.
Once I settled into my heavy mechanism-based balance, that sensation of
artifice and over-exaggerated attention to coordination immediately went
away, and I was all of a sudden in command of my vocal apparatus, to express
at will, with full color and resonance and evenness of tone.
Now, according to my teacher, in her experience, most women are not
constructed this way, and are perfectly content to approach their voices from
the head down perspective. In addition, she tells me that most students she
has had are also not even willing to open their voices in this way. (Although
this particular discovery I did on my own, and brought in to her and said;
"What is this?" To which she replied: "Oh my god!! That is IT." And then I
proceeded to explain to her my perceptions, which she acknowledged as
corresponding to exactly what she was working on teaching to me, but was in
slightly different terminology. Now we check consistently back and forth with
each other to make sure we are talking about the same phenomenon.) Perhaps it
is due to the fact that this heavy mechanism based tapering is not a common
feature for most people, that you have such success with your students using
the light-mechanism basis.
It is for that reason exactly that I brought this whole (and albeit, rather
long-winded!) topic up on the List. I have had years of struggling with the
majority of teachers who who do teach a more head-based technique, and I
contend that there is a portion of us out there, mostly the larger, lower
voices, who find that disorienting and thrive more from the bottom up
approach. And I wanted to bring that to the surface, as another option for
teaching if any of you are finding with any particular student (including
yourself) that the head-based approach isn't working.
TinaO
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