Trills:
It's only been in the past 2 years that I've discovered and really begun
to enjoy the fact that my voice, while very BIG, is also very agile. And
it's only very recently that I have discovered that the "trick" to being
able to sing with agilita easily is to stop trying to make it happen, and
instead to just allow it to happen...while, of course, being absolutely
scrupulous to maintain a constant, well produced flow of breath, good
posture, lack of jaw tension, etc. etc.
The only thing I "control" the notes with is my brain. I think the notes.
The breath phonates the vocal folds. And voila! Coloratura.
Trills have been something that have always eluded me, as well...until I
realised that doing (or in a sense NOT doing) exactly what I do to allow
my coloratura to "soar free" is what I need to do to trill. I THINK the
trill, and I also think very hard about letting things just happen - not
trying to make them happen. As a result, I've actually managed to produce
some trills.
This is probably not the "conventional" approach - I know about starting
to sing the alternating two notes in the trill slowly, then singing them
faster and faster. That's a lovely notion - and one I've never, ever been
able to get to work (though I'm inclined to try it now that I CAN trill,
just to see if I can make it work). I also find that in the baroque
repertoire, which is where I'm needing the trills, the trills are
virtually always very short in duration - not those long Bel Canto trills
that would allow one to "set them up". If you only have a quarter note
duration to trill in, there's not much time to get the trill going. So I'm
using the "think system" (remember Harold Hill, the Music Man?), and it
seems to actually be working.
High notes:
Another bugaboo for me. And another case where I've discovered that trying
to hard, preparing too much, etc. is virtually always counterproductive. I
find that my high Bs and Cs simply come flying out when I don't "hunker
down" in preparation, when I don't even think the usually "oh, oh, here it
comes". When, in fact, I just keep the musical line going, drop my jaw a
bit further, and THINK the note - and also think about shooting a laser
beam right through the top of my skull.
There is definitely a different aural quality, in my own inner ear, to my
notes in that "super-register", which for me starts with the high B flat
and, to date, ends with the high C (I'm still working on squeaking out a
high C# - just to see if I can - it's not exactly a note a contralto will
use very often). For the longest time, this change in sound quality threw
me. The notes in that super-register don't sound as rich, textured, deeply
resonant, etc. And yet, even more recently, I've found that if I think
about deepening the resonance even as I'm "shooting the laser beam", the
notes have not only sounded richer, but have been even easier to sing. I
think of it, using very helpful imagery that my teacher gave me, in terms
of an elevator type counterweight system - to make the note go higher, the
bottom of the resonance also has to drop lower at the same time.
I also find that if I overextend the "drop" of my jaw (vs. my sense of the
resonance), it's harder, not easier, to sing in the super-register. It's
the difference, I discovered, between allowing the jaw to simply drop open
as far as it will go on it's own, without any muscular effort, and
actually thrusting or pushing the jaw down beyond that natural "bottom" of
the drop. I've relearned something I think I always knew intellectually,
but never quite got my body to do before, which is that to open the
vertical space of the mouth, it's much more helpful to think of LIFTING
the upper molars, rather than dropping the lower ones. Again, it's that
lift/counter-lift idea - if you need to drop the jaw, think of lifting
away from it.
Finally, posture is really important, as it is with all singing, but
particularly singing that involves either extremes of range, dynamics, or
agility (very slow legato or very fast agilita). And if the high note
comes after a release during which you allow more breath in (what I call
"passive inhalation" - releasing the intercostals and jaw to create a
vacuum that breath will automatically fill), it is very helpful to release
the mouth into the shape of the vowel that you will be singing the high
note on so the inhalation is "in the shape of" the next vowel you sing -
this is, in fact, true of ALL inhalations, but particularly important for
inhalations preceding high notes, I've found.
Finally: don't obsess. Obsession, for singers, equals physical tension,
and mental blocks.
I also find that it helps sometimes to vocalise without having a clue what
notes you're actually singing. I think this is the reason I never have any
trouble singing my top notes in my lessons - I'm not the one plonking on
the piano, so my only sense of the actual notes I'm singing (in exercises,
obviously, not in arias/songs, where one knows the music on the page) is
from how they FEEL in my body. And given that different times in my
"cycle" will affect the way my top notes feel (due to edema and vascular
congestion), even this isn't a totally reliable gauge of what note I'm
actually singing. This is also helpful to remember: top notes are harder
to produce during those "PM" days. It's just a simple fact of physiology.
This is why, in some European opera houses, female singers are
contractually granted a few days each month in which they are not called
on to sing. It's that pragmatic European recognition of the facts of life
that America, in her strangely inconsistent puritanism, refuses to admit.
Anyway, I hope some of these ideas might help you.
Karen Mercedes
http://www.radix.net/~dalila/index.html
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I want to know God's thoughts...
the rest are details.
- Albert Einstein
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