Joel Katz Voice Studio

Where's my EEEE?

I read somewhere that the "ee" vowel, correctly produced, is the foundation of singing. And therein lies the problem.

I spent my whole career as a singer unhappy with my "ee" vowel. It was either too shallow, too "spread" or too dark. I never could get the balance right. The best singers seemed to produce it without spreading the mouth and with considerable space in the jaw. It was clearly "ee" but had all the beauty of "ah".

One teacher advised me to feel my tongue at my upper teeth on both sides. That just made me uncomfortably tight. Dropping the jaw made the vowel more like "ih", too neutral, too heavy and too far from speech.

Eventually I realized that for a good "ee", the one that can become the foundation of your singing, the jaw has to be released rather than dropped. It is the quality of the released opening that is important, not so much the quantity. Of utmost importance is the feeling of "hollowness" behind the corners of the jaw and the release of the hyoid bone in front.

Once you have this three-fold release, you can aim for an absolutely clear, frontal "ee" and the voice will be balanced. You may notice that the tongue now takes the classic position where the sides are high and near the upper teeth, without you trying to cram the tongue into a position.

My advice? Don't mess with the tongue, it doesn't work. Instead, release the hyoid, release the jaw and enjoy that hollow feeling. The rest is natural. Oh, and by the way, I think my "ee" is pretty good now! Just sayin'.

voiceandoperatraining.blogspot.com

A tale of two tenors

I have two tenors who have come to me recently for lessons. They share a similar problem: they have no approach to the passaggio area, blasting their way up to the top. This means that neither have high notes.

The first tenor sings as a baritone; the second finesses everything above a “g” in a light head tone. Tenor 1 works as hard as he can to keep his larynx down, to no avail; inevitably, it goes higher as he ascends the scale. Tenor two “puts it forward” as a method: of course, his larynx is up around his eyeballs.

Is there any middle ground between trying to force the larynx down (don’t even try it, it never works) and just letting it the larynx do what it wants, which is to lift as you ascend the scale? Mercifully, there is a natural function which releases the throat; it is called yawning. Unfortunately, no one ever taught us how to yawn and sing clearly at the same time.

If we examine the feeling of a yawn very carefully, we find that it consists of several aspects. The most obvious one is a release of the jaw; next to that, a feeling of release behind and through the corners of the jaw, which is not quite the same thing as simply dropping the jaw. Rather, it is a kind of loosening which leads to a comfortably hollow feeling in the throat. This loosening is best achieved by imagining the response rather than by physically trying to manipulate the throat. There is no feeling of “spreading” or deliberately widening the throat.

Finally comes the least obvious part, an internal tilt behind the tongue, at the level of the arytenoid cartilages. The throat seems to tilt back, and the root of the tongue releases around the hyoid bone. It is this backward tilt of the larynx which seems to release the whole apparatus into a full yawn. Again, this is best achieved imaginatively, by “seeing” the release.

With a comfortable feeling of the beginning of the yawn as you phonate, make sure the voice is well forward, at the point of clear pronunciation. Do not let the voice fall back or be swallowed. Do not let the onset become glottal or airy. It is helpful to practice this forte, then piano, without taking a breath in between. Piano then becomes a matter keeping hollowness and clarity but modulating the exhalation from compressed breath (with an active support response) to gentle air (with a feeling of suspension).

In all of this it is well to be guided by the Taoist maxim, “Doing nothing, everything is done.” This means that the most productive approach to singing is not physical, it is imaginative.

That Old MId-Life Crisis

On August 21st 2011 at the age of 59 I went back to school. I began a two-year distance degree in Psychology for Musicians at the University of Sheffield in England. Of course, I had all kinds of anxiety about the program. On the plane on the way to Sheffield, I remember thinking “Is this the dumbest thing I have ever done?”

This whole venture was prompted by an increasing sense of failure in mid-life. You know it’s bad, when you get a twinge of remorse every time you see a certain poster on the subway (“It’s not too late to do what you were born to do!”). When I was at school in my 20’s, a Master’s degree was not that common for performing musicians. I was more focused on trying to get work as a singer than on getting more degrees.

I did register for a Master’s degree from a small American Conservatory back in 1981, funded by the Canada Council. The experience was not a happy one. I had already spent 10 years as a post-secondary student (BA, Performance Diploma, Opera Diploma), and found myself in serious conflict with my studio teacher. The result: I never got the degree. Instead I went directly to Germany, where I worked in the opera house system for several years.

Well, from the vantage point of life in 2024, that decision to go back to school was one of the smartest things I have ever done. Not only did I love the program at the University of Sheffield, where I graduated with Distinction in 2014, but I went on to a PhD in Music, with a research project in the cognitive psychology of song memory that was published in 2022.

So here’s the lesson; Don’t be deterred by shame or inertia from doing what you long to do. It actually is never too late to start.