Claim Your Voice and Sing

12/14/2023

Life is a shipwreck, but we must not forget to sing in the lifeboats.

Voltaire

I agree.

11/30/2023

I'm always learning from my students. I have one who's been with me about 6 months. He'd worked with another teacher for about 2 years before that. All he'd learned to do was scream and shout. He strained horribly. He never sang on pitch. He was loud. That's about all that could be said.

In the last 6 months, he's really learned to sing on pitch. He's disabled, and seems to live in a perpetual brain fog, but he's improving very impressively. He can sing reliably on pitch for about 20 minutes of a 30 minute lesson, and he's gotten his range to just under 2 octaves. He loves the lessons.

Early on, he told me he was surprised and very pleased to find that he was capable of real singing. I have no idea what he thought lessons would be if not real singing, but his last teacher certainly wasn't teaching him.

I frequently ask him if he can tell when he sings something well, particularly if he can tell when he's on pitch.

A few weeks ago, he told me it was very interesting to him because before working with me, he had no idea that there were right and wrong notes. It didn't occur to him that there were specific notes to be aimed for. It was just all noise.

This really shook me.

I've worked with hundreds of so-called tone deaf people. Most of them start singing accurately on pitch at least some of the time in the first lesson. It just takes slowing them down, getting them to think gently and calmly, allowing them to tolerate their mistakes, and modeling good singing for them.

I always thought they could hear the note, and hear that they weren't there. This idea that he even if he heard a melody, and he obviously did, he didn't know that those notes were the right notes, deliberately chosen, not just randomly happening, is so bizarre to me that it's scary.

The most important thing for me is that even though we both understood the situation so completely differently, he still improved.

I asked another one of my tone-deafs, and she said the same thing. She never knew the concept of right notes. They both do now. Since the way I've always taught has worked, I'm not sure how I'll take this in, but it amazes me how differently our brains work and how flexible our thought processes can be.

11/16/2023

I have a student, a man in his 30's-40's, who's never studied before and been with me about 2 months. He's going to end up singing easily on pitch, but at first, he didn't have any idea what to do, and needed patience. He's fairly reliable now getting to the right note eventually, but he starts every phrase with a major slide. Not surprising, but has to be addressed.

When I was talking to him about it, he came up with a concept I'd never thought of. I've never in my life had an issue with tone deafness or even singing flat or sharp. Pitch is just a given in my brain that I can't get away from. I try to help people think about pitch the way I do, because it works. I never thought much about how they were thinking about it, because how they were thinking didn't work.

He said that he'd always thought of himself as a monotone, even in speech. Now that he was finding that he could control and change pitch and that he has access to much more range than he knew, he still starts with the frame of mind that he's a monotone. He's just a monotone trying to do something different. His starting point isn't just that he can't sing more than one note, which he now accepts isn't true, but that he's always doing a variation on his monotone. He always has to start on that single note that he knows he has, and then he can change it. In a way, it's like a perfect-pitch-monotone. He always starts on the same note, and he pretty much always does, then finds the note I'm asking for.

I think he's incredibly self-aware to figure this out. I would also say that while he thinks of his speech as monotonal, I never did. I think of him as subdued and very careful in his speech. He's ex-military, over 6 feet tall, very muscular. He's also the father of 4 children who are the center of his life. I've known other men like this who are aware of how much power they project and don't want to be intimidating. The most soft-spoken man I've ever known was 6'5", and his shoulders filled the doorway.

I think this man is, in his way, doing the same thing. He's worked to make sure his kids feel safe with Dad, and not afraid of the officer he clearly is. He tamps his voice down. His voice is full but still not going to be the loudest in the room. I'm louder than he is. He sticks to a limited range.

Now that he's figured this out, we have tools to work with, and I'm sure he'll stop sliding quickly, but it makes me wonder how other people's pre-conceptions carry over. Students who are sure they're slow studies are apt to slow themselves down. Students who are sure they have small ranges are apt to suddenly diminish their ranges after they've had a great lesson where they just doubled it.

For me, in singing, when I got a new ability, I always couldn't wait to go into it again and again. For some people, their concepts of themselves, even when they're limited, are secure, something to go back to rather than cope with being better.

I really do think there are people who take lessons hoping to be told that they can't learn. It's a safe place. It's wrong, but safe can feel good. Singing better feels good, too.

11/13/2023

This is from a Covid Halloween concert. It was great fun. I doused my hair and face with baby powder. I wore a cape I'd use to color my hair. Then they had me stand on the organ bench, so I'd look disembodied. On top of that, I love the aria, The Black Swan from Menotti's The Medium. Enjoy

https://drive.google.com/file/d/12qMgQYOg61g7Y37Qo5OhgAi5-hqI5udV/view?fbclid=IwAR2PMFa30KEBZBXMxfR6xFT4-G3tyLXEg-julUFh9wV51aWR2n109LplTEQ

10/20/2023

I was just working with a wonderful student. She's been with me for probably about 8 years, and she's a joy, a really lovely person. She's also so tight in her jaw that she's going to physical therapy. It makes me so sad that people assume they should be in pain. Her tension extends down into her chest, and greatly inhibits her breathing.

I'm finding that I say something to her once, and she really listens, and remembers, but over time her understanding of what I said can get very convoluted. It usually ends up somewhere along the lines of this is what I need to do and this is how I can do it tightly. Seriously relaxing comes in minuscule increments for her.

I've explained breathing many times. It has to be easy. She breathes all day long. She knows how to do it. She still manages to make it very complex and tight.

Here goes. Breathing has to be easy. I had a student who was a pediatrician. She got a phone call during a lesson, so I had to overhear it. It turned out a mother had told her child he couldn't leave the table until he ate his vegetables. He was holding his breath until he blacked out. What should she do? My student told her to stand next to her kid until he blacked out, catch him so he didn't hurt himself when he fell, he'd start breathing. And never say anything so stupid to such a stubborn kid again.

Breathing is that easy. We can't stop it. We breathe in our sleep. We breathe when we're unconscious. When in doubt we breathe.

I always ask my new students why do we breathe. I'm amazed how many people say we have to make a sound, we breathe to get through a phrase.

No we breathe to live. At any given moment in our lives, breathing is the single most important thing we can do. It has to be easy. We can't forget to do it. It is the sine qua non of life. When in doubt, breathe.

Now that I've taken care of that, here's the how to. It's a play of air pressure. It's the same as a wind. There's low air pressure and high air pressure. The air from the high air pressure area rushes in to equalize air pressure with the low air pressure area.

When we exhale, we create low air pressure inside of us. Unless something blocks the airflow, air has to come in to equalize the air pressure. In the 1940's-70's or so, we had things called iron lungs. The patient, who would now be put on a ventilator, was placed in a metal tube, sealed around his neck and somewhere at his lower body. The air would be vacuumed out of the tube creating a low pressure area. Air would enter the only way it could, through the patient's nose and mouth. The patient would inhale. Then the air pressure in the tube would be increased pushing the air out of the patient, making the patient exhale. It was horrible, but it kept people alive until they could breathe on their own.

All this is to say that breathing is simple, it's easy. It has nothing to do with putting the air anywhere. It has to do with getting out of its way and letting it flow.

To get out of its way, posture is critical. Air won't turn corners easily. I encourage breathing open-mouthed for singing, only for singing. It's a larger opening, so the air comes in easier. The tongue does nothing. Expanding in the small of the back is one thing we can do that does create more space for the lungs to expand. The diaphragm attaches to the spine low on the back, just above the waist, so stretching there can really help. It's always stretch and release. Don't hold open. The air pressure has to be constantly changing.

Your upper chest does nothing. It should never rise and fall. Your shoulders have nothing to do. You want to be open and relaxed in your upper torso, but you can't use those muscles to breathe. That's like vacuuming while you stand on the hose. It doesn't work.

The exhalation comes from your groin. Never your ribcage. It has to start below the diaphragm to push the air out of the lungs. Then you relax the muscles maintaining the low pressure area, and air comes in.

It's much more complex to explain than to do, but it's so easy. We do it all day long. Give it a try.

10/16/2023

This is a very memorable moment. There wasn't a tenor onstage to sing the part, so an opera student in the audience filled in, very well. She acknowledged her gratitude by changing her words to grazie.

https://www.themusicman.uk/liu-jianwei-oropesa/?fbclid=IwAR0CV9jGtlqVCbqlcikOJXN7dXqre9Z8GUzYTQZhGLGoyd-YaKSaefnLIKA

Opera student Liu Jianwei was enjoying Lisette Oropesa’s show when he realized there was no male singer onstage to complete the full lyrics to Sempre libera. The 24-year-old student decided to sing…

10/14/2023

I just finished a lesson. This man is really a lovely man, whom I've worked with for years. In the last couple of years he's become much more focused and made amazing strides. I'm very proud of him.

Now he's coming up against a normal, very frustrating problem. I always tell my students when we learn something, we learn everything, whether we want to or not. That means that we don't just learn the things we intend to learn. We learn the things that are slipping in unnoticed. We learn the sliding into pitches. We learn the mispronunciations. We learn the wrong notes. We learn the bad posture. Most of all, we learn not to pay attention.

It can be much easier to learn something new than to take out something you did 2 years ago and rework it. It's embarrassing to come up against those old mistakes and they're all there, just waiting to show themselves.

This student had spent years really not paying attention. For the last couple of years, he's worked hard and improved enormously, but that old habit of sleepwalking through his singing is very hard to beat.

He told me he'll tape himself singing and think that it was great. It was. He's developed a wonderful, rich, full tone, that he never had. It's exciting and beautiful.

Then he listens a second time. This time, he hears sliding into pitches, outright missed notes, very weird diction.

He thought he was better. He is better. He didn't just start doing these things. He's always done them. People told him he was good before. They weren't lying. They were his friends and they listened in his favor. They're not singers.

He's better now. The mistakes that he could ignore before are glaring now. If he didn't sing on pitch most of the time, the sliding into pitch on occasion, and it is on occasion, wouldn't be noticeable. If he didn't have decent diction, the occasional really strange pronunciation wouldn't matter.

He told me he sang for his mother, and for the first time ever, she corrected his pronunciation. She said to him exactly what I say. He says the word well. He just sings it completely differently than he says it. That means that his diction is good enough to make the mistakes obvious.

He genuinely is much better. He needs to hang in, forgive his mistakes, and fix them. He can now.

10/10/2023

I always teach my students to read music. I know many singing teachers don't do that, letting their students learn by wrote. I tell people I don't have the patience to work with people who can't read. That's true. Also, I think it's incredibly unfair to people who can't read.

Music is a whole wonderful world. People who can't read tend to see its complexity, its mystery, but they don't see its order.

When someone can't read, they tend to assume music is random, that it's dumb luck that someone picked one note to follow another, and another. They don't realize that there are patterns that have been used for hundreds of years, maybe thousands, that sound good to us, and we function within those patterns.

Even if we haven't studied every pattern ever written, every possible style, certain patterns make sense in our brains, both melodically and rhythmically. Harmonically, too. My personal bias. I tend to ignore harmony, but I'm very glad other musicians pay attention to it for me.

When you read music, you can see how the composer is following the rules, and when they're breaking them, and why breaking the rules in that way is perfect. Anyone who's seen Amadeus knows about Salieri and Mozart, although much of that was fictional. For me, the biggest difference between them as composers is that Salieri played by the rules. His music is at times wonderful, but always predictable. Mozart knew how to break the rules. His music is genius, but if you don't know the rules, you never understand why, so you can't grow your own musical skills.

I've been on a Frank Loesser kick. I love his song "Spring Will be a Little Late This Year". It's very tender about the sorrow of a break-up, but also that we survive, and recover. There's one line in it "Winter continues cold". The word "cold" could cadence beautifully on a d. You'd just sing it, slide right past it, never particularly notice it. It would be perfectly fine. It could also cadence equally well on a b-flat. Again, it's an obvious note, no sweat, exactly what a singer would expect. Sing it, get it over with, keep going.

Loesser doesn't use either of those. He goes to a c-flat. As a singer, I have to slip that c-flat in right where it isn't expected. It leaves everything out of balance, not exactly wrong, but very strange, and it gives me chills. It's exactly like a break-up where the world is out of balance, and routine things aren't right anymore. For me, that one note is pure genius. On the other hand, when people don't read music, 9 times out of 10, they go to one of the obvious notes, and life is boring and safe.

I had a wonderful moment in a student's lesson. She's been resistant, shall we say, to reading, but she's starting to make sense out of things. we were working in the Ottman Music for Sight Singing, the stuff of my undergraduate nightmares. I tell my students that to get through those stinking exercises, I'd always promise myself if I got through those 4 measures right, I could throw the book across the room. Then I'd do it right and I was brilliant, I was amazing and wonderful. I couldn't wait to try the next one.

Well she was doing one, just rhythm, and suddenly I could tell she was reading. This wasn't what she'd carefully counted out, written in the numbers, practiced. This was what she was reading. I didn't dare say anything. I didn't want to distract her, but she stopped herself and said Oh, my God. I'm reading!!!

I don't think she thought it would ever happen, but suddenly she was brilliant and amazing and wonderful, and couldn't wait for the next one.

Learn to read. It's worth it.

10/03/2023

09/30/2023

I think most people assume singing is about the sound. Many people assume singing loud is always good. Wrong on both counts. Singing is about the feeling, and singing softly takes enormously more strength, artistry, and control.

Singing loud can be fun, but if you stay there you're going to end up hurting yourself and wearing out your audience. I want something that make the audience sit on the edge of their seats because they don't want to miss a moment.

I also want a sound that makes everyone vibrate with me.

Once, years ago, I sang for a friend. When I finished, I asked him what he thought. He said it was good. I was disappointed and said I hadn't done it right. If I'd done it right, he would have felt it. He said "Oh, it was visceral!"

That's what I want. That's always what I want. Singing is activating a vibration inside ourselves that spreads all around us, and makes everyone around vibrate with us. It should never feel as if it assaults us or bounces off us. It should always feel as if it shimmers through us.

I had to take my dog to the vet. He's a sweetheart, until you start to hold him firmly to take blood. Then he's all teeth, 200 or so. I arrived with him muzzled and warned the vet's staff. When it came time to draw blood, 3 of them gathered at his rear end to hold him. I went nose to nose with him and started to sing. His eyes just glazed over and he never budged. I've never seen anything like it. Yes, he's my dog. If I'm teaching online, he frequently sits on the piano bench next to me. Still, he was scared, but my voice was something he could tie his mind into, and he trusted in spite of his fear.

More than any instrument, the human voice goes into us, makes us vibrate together, binds us to each other.

Noticing how we FEEL when a beautiful voice is near us, is incredibly important. It's not how it sounds. It's how we feel alive in every molecule. It's healing to our souls.

09/21/2023

I don't think I've ever talked about this one before, but this one is fun. It's when the voice flips.

Everyone experiences this, or at least the need for it, but might not recognize it.

If you start on a simple ascending scale on a comfortable note, for me, around a middle-c, and just start gently going up, you'll reach a point where your voice says no. It says you have to do something. It says this is impossible. It threatens to crack.

At this point, you have options. You can say, ok, it's time to turn around, you're not meant to go that high. You can clamp down, and lock, and force your way through, with your jaw practically jumping off your face with the fight.

I'm sure there are other options, but the one I choose is to talk back to those voices in my head telling me it's impossible. I tell them I'm sure they're absolutely right, but I don't care. I'm going to keep doing exactly what I've been doing and keep going anyway.

After all, there's great joy in doing the impossible. No one can blame you if you make a complete disaster of it. It was impossible to begin with.

I just keep saying the exact same vowel I've been saying. I don't pull up my tongue. I don't spread my throat open pretending there's an orange in the back of my mouth. I don't raise or lower my head. I don't grab in my chest.

I just keep going in a straight line forward. Never up or down. There is no up or down in music, only forward through time. I will that straight forward line so hard my head feels as if it will explode, and my voice does something.

It feels like a somersault inside my head. It's very weird. I can't make it happen, and I certainly don't want to stop it from happening. I can't determine where it will land or how far it will go. It just does it. I call it a flip.

Once it does it once, I can't relax because it will need to do it again in another note or two, and then again and again and again, all over the place. It's as if Simone Biles is doing a floor routine inside my skull. Once I realize it won't kill me, it's enormous fun. It sort makes my eyes feel as if they'll pop out of my head. They haven't yet, but it can fell like that.

My explanation for it is that the sound, the vibration that is my voice needs a soundboard to vibrate and amplify itself, just like the soundboard of a piano or harp, the top of violin or guitar. My voice needs something that can strengthen that tiny original vibration in my larynx, so it's looking for the exact right thickness, density, vibrational qualities in my skull. Those vibrations are just whipping all around trying to find the perfect spot to vibrate their little hearts out.

The first time I felt it, I was sure I'd be dead at the end of the phrase. When I finished, I had to feel my head to be sure it was still attached. Staying in that place and letting those vibrations happen was the most terrifying thing I've ever done.

Now it's just FUN!!!