Singing Above My Vocal Cords

Back when I stilled worked in the insurance industry, I did quite a bit of public speaking - mostly continuing education classes about insurance coverage for property/casualty agents. Generally this meant traveling in the upper Midwest during the winter, and on one memorable trip involved losing my voice.

I had been suffering from a cold and was a little hoarse at the start of the trip. After two days of talking virtually nonstop for 6 hours each session, my voice failed. We cancelled the third speaking engagement, and after two days of rest and making my wishes known in writing, I was (barely) able to finish the fourth class before my voice checked out again for an entire week.

After yesterday's lesson with my new voice teacher, I now know what I was doing wrong. In the past, whenever I've started to get a little hoarse, I've tried to power through by speaking in a lower voice and a little more loudly. Apparently this puts a lot of tension and stress on the vocal cords, and makes a bad situation much worse.

This week I took my Dad to a walk-in clinic for tests and came home with a 48-hour stomach bug, which was not so bad in itself, but set off a nasty asthma episode. After several days of hard coughing I went to my voice lesson with a hoarse singing voice and a plea for help. Patti, my teacher, did not fail me.

All of the warmup exercises we did were designed to keep stress out of the throat and tension off the vocal cords. When I was finally ready to sing, she told me to visualize "keeping your voice as far away from your vocal cords as possible." Well, that sounds pretty weird, but in general I've been learning to sing so that my voice resonates in my head spaces instead of coming from the back of my throat, so this was more of the same, and it worked really well. In the past an hour of singing with a hoarse throat would have killed my voice completely; after yesterday's lesson my throat actually felt better instead of worse.

 I am so glad that I decided to look for a teacher specializing in problem voices; as in most areas of life, learning from a real expert pays off in many ways. I am learning to sing better, but also to breathe correctly and keep my throat healthy. Amazing!

"Crying is really bad for your vocal cords." ~Adele

Breathing Not So Deeply

Today I had my first lesson with my new singing teacher.  I found her through the National Association of Teachers of Singing.  I chose her in part because, among other things, she has lectured on the health and care of the singing voice at the university level, and I wanted a teacher who could help me sing despite and through my asthma issues.

When my asthma is really bad, taking a deep breath sets off a coughing spell.  In the past, I have been told to fill up with as much air as possible before singing.  Unfortunately, filling up with as much air as possible sometimes precludes singing at all, so I was thrilled when my new teacher explained that she teaches the bel canto style of singing, in which the goal is only to take as much breath as you need to get through the next phrase of the music.  She spent much of the lesson telling me not to consciously breathe in before the next exercise.

This will take some getting used to, as will the facial expressions needed to sing pure Italian vowels. I guess I will spend the next week practicing singing in front of a mirror and trying not to crack up at the fish face that goes with "oooo."

"...the overall concept of bel canto started ... with a consensus among opera enthusiasts that there was nothing more ravishing than a beautiful voice singing a beautiful melodic line beautifully ...." ~Anthony Tommasini in the New York Times, Nov. 28, 2008

Coming Up For Air

My mother came from a musically talented family.  My maternal cousin Lola and my mother's half-sister Kay both have gorgeous singing voices; when Kay was in college, in fact, she won the talent contest in the Miss South Dakota pageant.  Unfortunately, although I loved to sing, I always thought I hadn't inherited the family vocal cords.

Just about a year ago a woman from my parents' church choir heard me singing in the congregation and talked me into joining the choir myself.  I was frankly astonished that they took me, but hey - they were desperate for additional bodies.

Since joining the choir I've learned a lot about singing, the most important of which is this - having the vocal cords isn't enough; good sound is based on air flow.  This last year has been the first extended period in my adult lifetime when I wasn't either managing other people or coping on a daily basis with Barry's Asperger quirks.  In other words, this is the first time I haven't been living in a constant state of tension.  It's no wonder I couldn't sing when my entire body was always clenched like a fist.  Now that my throat and my diaphragm have relaxed, I have a much bigger voice than I ever expected.

The choir is a small, close-knit group and I love them all, but I am particularly grateful to Vonda, the woman who originally recruited me.  Sadly, her wonderful husband Glenn - one of the kindest people I've ever known - died last week.  His memorial service was this weekend, and I sang one of the solos that Vonda had requested.  It was hard to get through it without bursting into tears, but it was the best way I could think of to partially repay the friend who has given me this incredible gift.

"I should like to see you free as a bird, singing for the joy of it." ~Joan Aiken, The Five-Minute Marriage

Cultural Cooperation

I talked yesterday about last weekend's performance of The Abduction from the Seraglio by the Arizona Opera.  What I didn't mention is that after most of their afternoon matinees the opera company holds a "Talkback" session where the audience can interact with the director, the conductor, and some of the performers.  We didn't stay for the Talkback this time, but we did hang around after The Pirates of Penzance back in October.

The most interesting thing we learned was that Arizona Opera belongs to a group of opera companies that borrow sets and costumes from each other.  That makes a lot of sense; not only are sets and costumes expensive, but they also take up a lot of storage space.  Why not keep them circulating around the country until they are needed again by their owners?

Armed with this information, I checked the fine print in the program for The Abduction from the Seraglio, and sure enough - there at the bottom of the page showing the schedule were the following paragraphs:

"The scenery for The Abduction from the Seraglio was built by Artefact/Michael Hagen Inc. for L'Opera de Montreal and is owned by Arizona Opera.

"Costumes are owned by the Santa Fe Opera."

Pretty cool.  I wonder where they're going next.

"In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed. " ~ Charles Darwin

An Unexpected Abduction

One of the cultural advantages of living in Arizona is that we have a professional local opera company that performs in both Phoenix and Tucson.  This weekend they presented the last opera of their 2010-2011 season, Mozart's Abduction from the Seraglio.  I had never seen Abduction, either in person or on TV,  but reluctantly decided that we couldn't afford to go.  I was overjoyed, therefore, when our good friends Jo and Jim offered us their tickets.  They had just returned from a trip and were too tired to sit through a three-hour performance.  We spent a very enjoyable Sunday afternoon thanks to their generosity.

Mozart wrote Abduction when he was only 26.  If you saw the movie Amadeus, this is the piece of which the Emperor Joseph said, "Too many notes."  The plot of Abduction is pretty simple: Belafonte, a Spanish nobleman, wants to free his fiance, his servant, and the servant's girlfriend from the clutches of Turkish Pasha Selim.  The first act is in fact a little lengthy, but the second and third acts are witty and much faster-moving, and the music is of course Mozart.  The Act II quartet involving the four main characters is particularly fine.

In addition to the musical passages, Abduction contains a fair amount of spoken dialogue.  This production translated the speaking parts into English, while retaining the original German (with surtitles) for the songs.  This was a little disconcerting, although it did make the action much easier to understand. 

At any rate, the principal singers were in good voice, the dancing girls were beautiful, and the period costumes were colorful and attractive.  I'm not sure why this piece is not performed more often;  I think it's a wonderful example of light opera.  It seemed to me to be the spiritual forerunner of Gilbert and Sullivan's Mikado and Pirates of Penzance.

"I have always believed that opera is a planet where the muses work together, join hands and celebrate all the arts."  ~Franco Zeffirelli