| Dear Laurie, Colin, John, Mr. Hanson (Lloyd?) and list, For Colin and others who want to know how I did it: you can skip this email, and just do the two octavo-arpeggio's Lloyd (D. Hanson) suggested for the (mezzo?) soprano in distress. Just try to keep the relaxed feeling deep in your throat and sing the A3 at a relaxed but not too soft mf and go up two octaves without getting either too soft or too loud (the high notes will be much louder than you think): it is great! Even the D5 came out as a nice clean tone, no breathyness or grinding sounds. I always hated exercises but I love these, because they really help (and I can do them succesfully). I tried them on A2, C3, D3 and even E3. (I did not experience any breaks, neither when going up, nor when going down, but then again I am in a different situation compared with the girl.) Laurie wrote:
Has this persisted? If it has, I'm glad.
> >
Yes, it has, although it got less easy after a few days, because then I had a fall back, while working on 'Ich grolle nicht' from 'Dichterliebe', which has two mean a's (even for a tenor, you see John!). But I managed finally and thanks to the above mentioned exercise I know now how to find the feeling back very easy. But let's go back to my learning process before knowing these exercises. The most difficult aspect of this new openess, lies in the easyness, if I am not too cryptic. When I force myself to open the throat, it does not work: things are difficult, the throat does not want to stay open and the tone-quality is not good. But when I open my throat in a relaxed way, the tone gets a quality I envied so long in tenors I knew from cd's: one I always thought my voice simply did not have. I'll try to give a few reasons why this happened now and did not happen before, although I still don't completely understand it myself (that is also why I did not answer immediately; I did not want to submit bull excrementals):
1. Mainly it is just an accelaration in a process that started a few months ago, when I started to see my complete vocal tract as resonator (thanks to Lloyd (D. Hanson)) and stopped experiments with forward placement. 2. For at least two years I have been trying to hide a dark component in my voice, thinking this was the result of bad placement. I also hated it, because when I started to sing, a few years ago now, it caused people to say I was a baritone. And since I was convinced I was not, and can be sturdy as well, I started to hide it and after some time I did not even know anymore how to sing lower tones. This kept me in fact from opening my throat and made my voice sound lighter than it was. 3. The other thing that was blocking me was purely psychological: for whatever reason I had developed some kind of shyness when singing after the mutation (after turning a tenor from a soprano and/or alto), which kept me from singing with a real open throat, and even kept me from singing at all for may years, well, except for under the shower. Maybe this also has to do with the fact that I come from a family where people don't speak loud, and that I don't like to speak loud myself.
I tried to overcome the before mentioned singing shyness by adding air and support, but that's not the way it seems to work: apparantly I was pushing the accelaterator by giving air and support, and pushing the brakes at the same time by closing the throat. And since I was convinced after some time, I was a light tenor, I thought it was normal that I could not sing loud. 4. So when the opera singer mentioned in my last email, told my pianist my possibilities were not as restricted as I thought they were, I started to believe I could produce a bigger tone without forcing, which helped me to open my throat a lot more, and then everything was in balance: the amount of air, the amount of suport, and of course the opening of the throat. In fact it felt like my belly muscles moved by itself.
But also this was an acceleration of an existing development, a psychological one, that was initiated when I started to work with my pianist, who had helped me a lot by giving me the feeling that she liked my voice and interpretations. 5. I started to work on my onsets (attacks) and that caused in fact the room beneath my larynx to be filled with air while singing. That helped a lot as well. 6. But a very small beginning of most of this was born when I went to Verona in November last year with a girl who had to participate in a singers's contest. Here happened three things:
a. I saw a picture of Pavarotti singing, photographed right into his mouth, a little bit from above. This picture was the answer to the question none of my singing teachers ever were able to respond to: how to keep your tongue (A: not only against your front teeth but also rounded towards your palatum, otherwise if you have a big tongue like Pavarotti (and me), you will close your throat with it).
b. Since the girl was a soprano and I like soprano's and this one even more, I wanted my speaking voice to sound attractive and relaxed, and to have such a speaking voice you have to open your throat. c. I did not sing for a few days, so started again without the frustration of things that did not work out the day before (I don't have that kind of frustrations that often any more, by the way.) In fact I am experimenting now with the resonance in my pharynx, as it is called I think, I would just call it my neck. I also think that is what Caruso meant when he said 'I sing with my neck' (maybe a bad quote). I learned in the past weeks that different vowels have different resonances there, and I am also learning to vary the resonances more and more, in order to make as many colours as possible, within a range of what I think are still beautiful tones. So although it started as a big progress for my higher notes, it turned out to be in the first place what I needed to get complete control of all notes up to the highest passagio notes, especially when it comes to colouring the tones. Now I finally can make a complete diminuendo on the '(Ver)langen' in 'Im wunderschoenen Monat Mai' (G4 to F4sharp) while keeping the tone completely relaxed and beautiful, and there is nothing that makes me so happy (musically spoken) as to be able to sing a note exactly as I think it should ideally be. (And nothing that irritates me more than if I know how I want to sing it, but I cannot!) Best greetings, Dre |
