There is much that you can do to ensure good, healthy singing and there are certain obvious aspects that you can look out for and steer in the right direction. It requires a great deal of patience and commitment to correct deep-rooted bad habits.
Try this
Get everyone into pairs - label A and B
A is observer and there to help B discover a well balanced posture.
B flops forwards, knees unlocked, neck and shoulders free (try a gentle swing)
A walks their fingers slowly and very gently up B's spine. B should use this
to direct their mind to uncurling one vertebra at a time, keeping head, neck and shoulders free (A should check this constantly).
Eventually, allow shoulders to drop into place and finally, head to balance on the spine.
The overall feeling is one of openness and length without unnecessary tension.
Once this has been experienced in pairs it is something that can be done individually and can be beneficial as part of a warming-up routine.
Head / Neck alignment and their relationship to the spine are of vital importance in promoting a free voice.
Keep ankles loose, knees released and unlocked, hips free, and head balanced on spine.
Alexander technique, Tai Chi and Yoga are all good examples that can be used.
It is important to release tensions in the tongue, neck and jaw. These three characters rear
their ugly heads and are the bain of most singers' lives. When one becomes tight, so the other two
join in.
The tongue takes up most of the vocal tract and is connected indirectly to the larynx itself
via the hyoid bone.
The neck is the primary resonance chamber and supports the larynx itself.
The jaw is also quite capable of taking control as it moves both from side to
side and up and down. The muscles of the jaw are also the strongest in the body and a place where
we store many of our anxieties.
The most common problem is that each of these areas become fixed and tense.
The best remedy is motion.
Do all of this while singing and then try to imagine the motion without doing it. Sometimes the thought of water being drunk under the tongue or sprayed
at high pressure between the back teeth helps as well.
Be aware that everyone's jaws open naturally
to a different degree and should feel free and not forced open.
This is a good general position for an [a] vowel in the middle to upper middle of the voice.
The jaw should be allowed to open at the top as it wants to but never forced.
Another good indication is a thumb or finger slid between the back teeth.
Most consonants can be produced with the jaw in this position.
Have a good understanding of how the mechanism works
Be wary of yawning, although it stretches the soft palate and surrounding muscles, the larynx is lowered and sound unfocussed. Try speaking like it!
Any vocalise is a breath management exercise.
Control of the breath is synonymous with control of the instrument.
Support is a misleading term and can induce unnecessary tension or too much muscle activity in the torso and can exacerbate the muscle balance. Terms such as "fill out like a rubber tyre", "expand the balloon", "open out the spine" usually cause unnecessary tension in the trunk. Thrusting out the abdominal wall & squeezing the buttocks also inhibit freedom of breath control.
Control over the speed and ease of inhalation and exhalation is the important factor - the call for "more support" will tend to cause driving of the breath and "save the breath", the breath to be stopped from moving freely. The term "pace the breath" is better.
Always draw on what the body has learnt from childhood and does as a reflex action.
Observe, whilst lying on your back, knees bent up, feet flat on the floor,
hands placed in the abdominal region, what happens naturally.
Extend this to allowing the breath in on different counts and hissing (gently like a leaky tyre)
on the exhalation. You can even try vocalising in this position.
Discover with the help of lip or tongue trills (either a continuous vibration of the lips or
rolled r) the amount and speed of breath needed.
A buzz on vvvvvv will also enable this to be discovered. Everyone should be encouraged
to experiment with the tongue and lip trills, as an inability to do them suggests that there are
tongue or facial tensions.
Good speaking will pave the way for good singing and the speaking voice is a vital link in
the development of children's voices. It is generally poor speech habits that result in vocal
nodules. Children need to be encouraged at a young age to experiment with their voices, initially
at a young age imitating animal noises in all parts of the voice, modes of transport etc., bombs
dropping in large swoops or whoops imagining the motion of a roller coaster (these encourage the use of the upper voice) and
creative vocal music or vocal sound effects for poems.
Also encourage expressiveness of intonation in poetry recitation.
Humming, making sure that the lips are buzzing, is a very good warm-up and develops a forward focusing of the voice.
Use it
You can also add physical activities such as
Also use
Exercises which enable a clean start to the note (or onset) - can be quite difficult to keep a check on in a choir situation but can be a useful way of discovering how to begin a note, avoiding glottal stops and the closing of the throat.
Have a good knowledge of how we produce each vowel and consonant with a released jaw.
Singing, above all things, is a communicative act and a way of expressing emotions. Having dealt with all of the technicalities you can see how closely singing is related to speech. Every phrase has a speech rhythm, every millisecond of a note has a direction, either leading to or from a high or low point in the phrase. If you can speak a sentence with all of its inflections, nothing changes when you sing it. Our natural speech is legato, so why shouldn't our singing be. It is the most natural thing in the world.
Dynamics cause all sorts of problems and demand a great deal of technical assurance.
Again it can be a problem of language and perception. I'm sure you are all familiar with the
feeling that you get when asked to sing pp, tightening the throat and squeezing the
breath out in almost a squeak. Or, on the other hand, having a good blast through a ff phrase.
Young voices have less control over dynamic range and should, if possible, be allowed to find a
natural, easy volume in which to sing most of the time even if you have to make some small musical
compromises. Singing pp requires just as much freedom and movement of the breath and
should never be a whisper (this can actually be damaging to the voice and should be avoided at all costs)
as ff singing. Use an emotion to encourage quiet singing (intimacy perhaps) or imagine singing f from a
long way away.
Piano singing should have the same vocal colour as other dynamics and need not be the
breathy "off the voice" sound that it so often is. Forte singing should merely be more energised,
intense or even ecstatic. There is always an emotional reason for any dynamics - get your
students to use their imaginations to discover them. This also promotes more engaged, energised
and free singing which is deep-rooted in what we already know.
Much time in choir practices is spent on the blending of voices in order to create a uniform choral sound. You might say that if you allow your students to sing out in the way that I have outlined, certain voices will stick out and impair the overall quality. If you allow a vibrato into the sound, they will clash with one another. These statements are not necessarily the case.
Refering back to how we the sound and vowels are produced. It is purely a matter of acoustics and what must be worked on for a blend that can express a wide range of colours and emotions is uniformity of vowels and consonants. It should not be necessary for those with larger voices to feel that they have to hold back and even stifle their voices so that they do not stand out. Balancing voices is of more importance. Awareness of how the vowels are produced and listening to one another, tuning in literally to one another's frequencies is what will produce an even healthy sound. You may occasionally want a specific vocal effect, go ahead of course but please be aware that these are young voices in their formative years.
An even vibrato is the result of a free larynx and an inherent characteristic of freely produced vocal sound. Choral singers should not be asked to remove vibrancy from their voices in the hope of blending with non-vibrant voices.
Consonants need to be immediate, clear and incorporated into the sung line. They should never be separated from the vowel in the hope of getting the choir to sing them together.
If they look normal, or as they do when speaking, they are probably doing the right things.
There are always great demands on choral directors to get the notes learned and of course this will take up a large proportion of time in a practice. It is, however, very beneficial to have a structured method of warming up and attention to developing specific areas of technical proficiency.
I always encourage a short physical warm-up of
Attention to posture
Breathing exercise.
Vocal exercises
Be inventive with your exercises but make sure you have a specific reason for doing each.
Try to start simply and gradually develop them so that they become familiar, attention can then be payed to how they are being sung, rather than negotiating new patterns.
Be aware that sight reading can be very tiring for the voice, especially for those that are not very confident, so if possible allow time for the music to be "sung in" and encourage singing out, even if it means wrong notes rather than hiding in the background.
Encourage memorising as quickly as possible. Getting out of the copies will improve posture, contact with the conductor and enable the choristers to think about how they are singing both technically and interpretitively.
If you find that certain phrases lack direction or become tight or strangled there are a few tricks that sometimes work. They are all merely distraction tactics, releasing tension and directing the attention away from the problem, they include such things as;
Always remind yourself that singing is as much a physical activity as it is musical and intellectual and it should be fun. Singing in a choir can be a wonderfully exhilerating experience and is of equal importance to orchestral experiences. But remember there is no instrument behind which to hide and it can be scary.
Go with your instincts but make sure that anything you say is based on factual knowledge and try not to use stock phrases that you have picked up. Express your own personality rather than using someone elses voice.
Introduction, Technical Aspects, Practical Ideas, Vocal Ranges, The Healthy Voice, Bibliography, Front Page.
©Anita Morrison October 1999