Add a comment

I spent Saturday in Milton Keynes where I had been asked to deliver a workshop on Vocal Health and Developing Resonance with Junction 14 Ladies A Cappella. I have worked with the group every so often over quite a few years, but always previously in the more standard coaching format. It made an interesting change to approach the day through a single theme. It was overall probably physically less tiring than a coaching day – there were many more opportunities to sit down – but also more cognitively tiring as we were dealing with information as well as skills.

The day was structured around exploring the fundamental elements of vocal craft, introduced in the order in which one needs to get them established in order to set up the instrument: body, breath, phonation and range in the morning, moving onto the resonant cavities in the afternoon. Each involved some sharing of concepts, some exploring in exercises, and some application to repertoire.

One of the recurrent themes of the day was that, when in doubt, go back to the fundamentals of body and breath. These are the elements that allow all the others to work, underpinning both musical success and physical wellbeing. You can reduce your tongue and jaw movements in order to maintain a more consistent resonant space, but if the phonated sound you are sending into that space isn’t free and supported, you get limited reward for those efforts. Open up the posture and activate the breath again, and suddenly the sound comes alive.

Another theme was putting the healthful vocal practices we were looking at for rehearsal night into a wider context: you are only singing with the chorus once or maybe twice a week, but your vocal apparatus lives in your body every day. If you are short of sleep, or tense, or under-hydrated in your daily life, that will also impact on your chorus experience. So if you find yourself experiencing vocal problems during rehearsal, while you certainly need to consider how you are using your voice to sing, you also need to think about what else is going on in your life.

During the last session of the day we considered various problems that you might want solve in rehearsal or individual practice, and identified which of the areas we had covered might be useful in each case to focus on. This was a useful way to process the information and exercises we had been working with, taking them out of the logical structure used to establish the concepts and connect them with the ad-hoc discovery process you go through when rehearsing. It also helped identify where people had securely grasped a concept, and where they were still furtling around in their heads for what to do with it.

It was at this point that we discovered quite how often the answer is, ‘check in with the body’ for trouble-shooting. Whether the issue is a breathy tone, strained high notes, or a sagging tonal centre, you are going to help the situation by getting you feet rooted into the floor, your chest and shoulders open, and your head poised. You may also need to go on to consider things like the relationship between airflow and vocal fold contact or tongue root tension, but sometimes actually just resetting the overall physical set-up for singing is enough also to reset other elements that were also out of whack.

Writing about this afterwards, I find myself making a comparison with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Just as you aren’t going to get much by way of useful results by adding twang to a tense or under-supported sound, you can’t usefully address people’s aesthetic needs if they are feeling uncomfortable or unsafe. I’m not sure at this point whether this is just a metaphorical connection arising from homologous structures, or whether the structure we used to explore the concepts is in fact a specific instantiation of Maslow’s general principles. I shall enjoy mulling over the thought though, and mention it so that you can too.