Hi, Ken --
I just wanted to tell you that your instincts are right in line with my own training and my understanding of a healthy tone production. The singers I see who go for round spacious richness at the expense of ping and bite and edge and cut generally end up blowing out their voices long before the operatic stage. My understanding is that a forward, lean tone is healthier and more beautiful and exciting than a rich, fat, dark and covered one. Many people prefer the latter tone; many prefer the former one. To my knowledge, the "bitey" singers last longer in a career than the artificially darkened ones.
Before making any drastic changes in your singing life, though, I would get a tape recorder, play with your different modes of singing, and assess the sound with more objective ears. If your feeling is still the same, ask your teacher why she is having you do this.
Teaching/learning singing is often like making a pendulum swing -- first you go too far in one direction, then you correct it too far in the other direction, but all the while you are honing in on perfection, with the goal always in sight. Often, I have had to "walk through" difficult places at various stages of my training, because my teacher needed me to learn skill X, immerse myself in skill X, live/eat/breathe skill X, until it was ingrained, even at the expense of sounding "pretty" while I was immersed, and after some weeks/months it would be integrated into the rest of the voice and all would sound good again. One of the most common of these is teaching young singers the all-important concept of focus, which often results in a tight-sounding, edgy passaggio and top. I envied the teenagers whose teachers let them put a lot of breath and mouth-space into their voices and produced lovely, soft and spinning head tones. Now, however, they are all air and wimpiness, while my voice, in maturing, is filling in the bloom and richness naturally, leaving me (I hope -- I mean, it certainly seems to be happening) leaving me with a solid core of focus and the blossom of natural relaxation/age. But I had to walk through some years of a tight sound -- teaching me to relax it all too early would have been to the detriment of teaching the focus.
That was a long ramble. My point is -- maybe you have gone too far in some direction, and your teacher is using this "woofy" technique (which you naturally dive into 100% to get it learned, and then back off and add it to the voice in the needed ration after you've got it) to add some other vocal ingredient to your voice. Sometimes you can swing too far in the "bite" direction and your throat gets caught up in the production, with tension -- to fix that, you might have the student sing all open and spacious for a couple of weeks, to erase the muscle memory of throat-tension, and then add bite back in without the throat. I obviously don't know what the reason might be with you, but that's one possibility and an example of why she might be doing this with you.
On the other hand, maybe she just likes the other sound better. There are teachers who prefer the darker, more covered sound. I, personally, find that creating a lot of space in the throat/mouth in the middle voice results in an artificial darkness and false, hollow sound. Many people like the "plumminess." If her esthetics and yours fundamentally disagree, it may be time to interview other teachers. A good way of finding this out is to have a discussion with her about what this new technique is going to give you, and the type of tone she wants you to end up with. Bring recordings of singers whose tone production you like/hate (I don't know much about CTs, but I hate Horne, whose voice I associate with hooty darkness and lack of edge) and see which singers she prefers. Have her give you a lesson in a large hall, with you at one end -- a "large" sound in a small room isn't necessarily the sound that will carry in a theater or over an orchestra. Let us know how it goes, what she says, and what you decide.
Isabelle B.
===== Isabelle Bracamonte San Francisco, CA ibracamonte@y...
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