You've got to stop associating emotion with tension

 

I just recently came across this quote from Mark Knopfler - one of the most influential rock guitar players over the last 50 year:

- You've got to stop associating emotion with tension.

And it hit me as something extraordinarily relevant also for classical singers. Too many student singers mix emotion with tension. Tragedy or love manifests as lifted shoulders, tight hands, stretching up towards heaven, getting up on your toes, pushing the head and neck forward or tensing the voice. 

But too often this comes out as theatrical expression that does not add to, but takes away from the emotions where it should be - expressed in colors in a free and relaxed voice. A free and relaxed voice comes from a free and relaxed body. This doesn't mean we cannot express emotions through the body - on an opera stage you will need to act in addition to sing - but it still will have to be conscious, relaxed movements free of mannerism and tension.

Mark Knopfler pro tip and guitar warm-up exercise: "You've got to stop associating emotion with tension" | MusicRadar

Some thoughts on repertory and interpretation - Frauenliebe und Leben & Winterreise

 

Why do we sing what we sing?

Sometimes, of course, it is ok to want to sing an opera aria or a lied simply because you find it beautiful. 

But sometimes you should try to work a bit harder to understand and do justice to the music and the lyrics that you are singing, and sometimes you even have to justify why exactly YOU are singing these songs, how you - in your body, at your age and with your experience - can infuse something into the music. 

The questions are many: who is singing this song - who are you when you are singing? Where are you when you sing it? To whom do you sing it? Why do you sing it?

Right now, I have one student - a soprano - singing Schumann's Frauenliebe und Leben, and one student - a mezzo - has chosen a couple of songs from Schubert's Winterreise.

The first choice is an obvious one: Frauenliebe und Leben for a soprano. But it also raises challenges: The cycle is full of intense, deepfelt, honest emotions of love, sensuality, longing, happiness and devastating loss. To go into these emotions is in itself an enormous challenge. But on top of that - to which degree are the poems and the music colored by the social and emotions conventions from the time it was written, and can that possibly be done by a "modern" woman.

The second choice is a more unconventional one - Winterreise sung by a woman? It is not without precedence: Christa Ludwig and Brigitte Fassbaender, among others, have recorded the cycle. But still - even though the cycle deals with general, existential questions, it is still a HE singing it, so how should a female singer approach it? WHO is singing? Why? And for whom?

And completely by accident, as I am working with these two students, I come across a thought-provoking article and a new recording.

The wonderful soprano Joyce DiNonato has recorded Winterreise. Her approach to it is to read the poems from a book, as if she is reading the left-behind letters of a man gone to pieces. Without doubt, it is a performance interpretation that also colors the way she is singing the music.

The article is by the soprano Carolyn Sampson, who discusses why to perform Schumann's Frauenliebe und Leben at all? These poems are about a woman that sees her whole life through the prism of her relationship to a man. Without him, there would be no songs. How can a modern performer relate to that and justify that? Have you ever thought of it this way, young student? (Or - older teacher, for that sake??)

These are - in different ways - two wonderful and thought provoking examples, showing that the basis of interpretation can be so much more than beauty. There are musical layers, literal layers, historical and sociological and psychological and religious and sexual layers. It is not a small responsibility or a small work to dive into this, but it can give both the performer and the audience so much more if we are willing to take the jump!

Why would any self-respecting woman perform Schumann’s Frauenliebe und leben? | Classical music | The Guardian

Schubert: Winterreise review – high drama from Joyce DiDonato | Joyce DiDonato | The Guardian

Listen to music - use streaming services!

 In my third year at the Norwegian State Academy of Music in Oslo, I had piano lessons with a legendary pianist of the old school. I was a horrible piano student, so we ended up spending most of the time talking about music, singing Schubert's Winterreise and talking about older Norwegian singers. He was dismayed about my lack of knowledge about the older generation of singers and about students' general lack of interest in performance and performer history. In his opinion, this should be a compulsory subject at the academy. And he was of course correct, for many different reasons!

I am subscribing to Youtube Music (which has replaced Google Play Music). It costs me 7 Euros per month, and this is well spent money. In fact, I think this is money that any music student should spend. It could be that Spotify or other streaming services offer an equally good or even better product. I simply do not know, so I do not specifically recommend Youtube Music.

But the fact is that: Recordings are our books! Recordings of operas, lieder, romances church music, oratorios, operettas. Any singing student should spend hours pouring over recordings. It is not only about learning the six songs that is on your list for this term (and I find many students restrict themselves to the absolutely necessary - what is on their term list) - you should get to know as much music as possible during your years at academy. As a musician, it is your academical and professional duty to know your subject! And curiously and inquisitively listening through hours of music will expand your knowledge about repertory, introduce you to new things to sing.

And equally important - and this is where this blogpost started - is to discover new singers, both from newer and older generations. They will have different approaches, different interpretations and different techniques. This is especially true if you to 50-60 years or more back in time. Singers had a different technique then. I might talk more at a different time about what the difference is, but there is a lot to learn from singers of older generations. These will be your teachers!!

I did a random search on three singer names in Youtube Music: Lotte Lehmann, Apollo Granforte and Lauritz Melchior. If you do not know any of these names, it only shows how much there is to learn - these are legendary names. It would be tricky to find any of their recordings in CD shops, libraries or even music academies. But there it was - recording upon recording, CD upon CD. A fantastic treasure trove to listen through. It is simply amazing to think that all of this is now so easily available, wherever you are.

As a singing student you should spend a lot of time listening to music and other singers. Find a good streaming service for classical music. Dive into it - discover music and singers and singing styles! Pay the 7 euros per month gladly, even if you are on a tight budget, it is way more than worth the money!

Diction - the neglected art

One thing that many students seem to find difficult, is to incorporate good diction into their singing.

There are several aspects to good diction that makes it fundamental to good singing. One aspect is of course the transmission of text and meaning in vocal music, and this is something that many students - and no doubt many professional singers - take too easily. To be frank, it is scary to see how many students that have little or no knowledge of the text they are actually singing, and that do not incorporate working on text and lyrics as a natural part of their daily routine.

The art of singing is unique in the sense that incorporates music AND text, and ignoring the text is ignoring an important part of the piece of art you are performing. Composers have put a lot of effort into finding and choosing words for their music, and into giving the text and the words an expression in music. To ignore the text is also to ignore the intention and the work of the composer (not to mention disrespecting the poet!). 

Furthermore - a good understanding of the text and a good pronunciation will make you a much more interesting and complete singer. A beautiful sound only can only take you so far.

But good diction is also important for your sound. There is no contradiction between good pronunciation on one hand, and a beautiful, resonant, legato sound on the other. 

Here are some thoughts on good diction in singing:

• Good diction in singing is more than good diction in daily speech. Your daily diction is far from enough for good singing!
  
  
• Good diction is hard work (but as always - the work has to happen in the right place). There are muscles in the lips and in the tongue that need to be trained. This means that good diction is something that has to deliberately and consciously trained and exercised every day.
  
  
• Consonants are called exactly that - CON-SONANTS. They are something that is supposed to resonate together with the vowels.
  
  Tomas Hampson points out in several masterclasses (available on Youtube) that all consonants should be sung. We usually divide consonants into voiced  (m, n, v, as example) and unvoiced (s, f, t), but they all should have an intonation and a resonance.
  
  
• The consonant should - must - already contain the vowel that comes afterwards. If you sing Mutter, the M must already contain the intonation, the resonance and the opening of the following vowel. When you go from the M to the U, you simply open of for a sound that already is in your mouth - the U is already there.
  
  And here is maybe the main point - clear and good diction - and clear and correctly done con-sonant - do not obstruct the legato line and the vowels. Quite the opposite - they support and help the vowels. If the m (in our example) is clearly pronounced with intonation and resonance, the u does not need to be established anew - it comes naturally and prepared out of the m.
  
  On the other hand - sloppy and unprecise diction is in my opinion difficult to reconcile with legato singing. First of all, you will often have air leaks and gaps in sound before and after the consonants. Second, if the vowels are not prepared in the consonants, the first fractions of each vowel will be without the proper resonance and clarity.

• For me, then, it seems fruitful to me to think of the relationship between consonants and vowels as that of a diphthong! When you sing "meine", there is no absolute place where the e ends and the i starts, it is a sliding transition. The same should be with any combination of consonant and vowel. Even with a combination like ta, the t should already contain the following a, and the transition between them should not be a stop-start, but a gliding transition like that of a diphthong.
  
  
• I am trying to make my students pay more attention to the feeling of the consonants, and not only "diction". Every consonant (and combination of consonants or consonant + vowel) has a physical feeling in your mouth: a tingling in your lips, a thrill in your tongue, a resonance in your nose. Pay attention to that feeling, what the diction feels like. Diction should be a sensual thing!
  
  
• Good diction requires good support! Clear diction is not pushed or beaten, but created in the mouth on a steady airstream.
  
  
• Much more diction than what you think is necessary. And an "airtight", gliding transition between consonants and vowels. These things demand quite a bit of concentration and hard work to get used to.

Claudia Friedlander is one of the most valuable singing teachers online, covering all aspects of singing through a long row of fantastic and instructive videos. I will come back to her a lot through my posts. This video on diction is very much worth watching,

How do we breathe?

 Singing depends on breathing. No breathing, no singing. And good singing depends on good breath management. If anyone should know something about how we breathe. it is singers.

And still, over the last couple of years I have become aware of - and really slightly amused by - how many that do not know the basics about how we breathe. Now I am not talking about breathing as singers, or the elusive "support", but how we as human beings breathe. We breathe approximately 20.000 times per day, and most of the time we are completely unaware of it. But how?

Air comes into the lungs. We breathe in. Air goes out of the lungs. We breathe out. 

Air comes into the lungs because the lungs FIRST expand and become bigger. When the lungs become bigger, a vacuum is created inside the lungs, and if the airwaves are open, air will stream by itself into the lungs to fill the vacuum. When the lungs are compressed, the air is pushed out. Repeat - the lungs are expanded, so air streams into the vacuum. "Breathing in" is the simple term we use for this, but somehow it gives a slightly wrong picture. What we do, is expanding the lungs!

The lungs are connected to other parts of the body: They are connected to the ribs, so when we expand our rib cage, the lungs are pulled to all sides and are expanded. The muscles that contract and expand our rib cages are located between the ribs. They can be consciously activated, but they also work continuously and unconsciously.

And even more important: The lungs are connected to the diaphragm, this peculiar dome-shaped muscle that separates the chest cavity from the stomach region. When the diaphragm contracts, it flattens, it lowers. Because the lungs are connected to the diaphragm, they are being pulled down and expanded. Air comes in. When the diaphragm relaxes, it rises higher, and by doing so, it pushes the lungs. Air goes out.

We all know the heart - the muscle that throughout our whole life beats and beats to pump blood through our bodies. But the diaphragm is an equally marvelous muscle that throughout our whole life contracts and relaxes, contracts and relaxes without our conscious control. 

Having this basic knowledge about the mechanisms of breathing should be just as obvious has having a basic knowledge about the heart. And for singers - knowing how to use your breath correctly and how to "support" your voice, depends on knowing what happens when we breathe!

Body position - Thomas Hampson masterclass

Singing starts with and in the body, and for singing to function optimally the body must be in balance to avoid tensions, to provide good breath support and to optimise the spaces for resonance.

When it comes to body alignment, one of the mistakes I often see is the tendency in young singers/students to bend forwards, stretch the head forwards and tilt the neck, especially in softer, "cute" sections of songs, instead of keeping a tall, erect and balanced position. It is almost an intuitive reaction - to "follow" the music with your body, but the result is inevitable a less resonant and more unstable sound.

A great singer does not necessarily make a great teacher, especially not in open masterclasses, but one of those that excels both as a singer and as a teacher, is the American baritone Thomas Hampson.

There are lots of masterclasses with him available on Youtube, all of them really interesting and informative to watch. Maybe his "pet project" - the topic that he comes back to again and again, no matter if the singer is a male or a female, is exactly this: how to hold and use your body in a natural way.

• how to stand
• how to elongate your back and your neck
• how to use the chest and the diaphragm and the muscles that you normally use for breathing in also when you breathe out - aka "sing."

The video below is a very good examples of how he works and what he focuses on, but this is a recurring topic in all his work with students. It is a lot to pay attention to and to learn here! 

Edward L. Johnson - The "complete introduction" to singing

There are so many thing to talk about in this journal, and some topics that we will return to numerous times is apoggio, bel canto, chiaroscuro and diaphragm. We will touch all of these topics through several videos, explanations and links, but I want to start out this journal with a series of 5 videos where the tenor  Edward L. Johnson (1923-2008) discusses singing technique, what parts of the body we use (and don't use) for singing, how breathing works and how resonance works.

These short videos are a fantastic "introduction" to the mechanisms of singing. When I say "introduction", I don't mean to say that this is for beginners only. It was useful for me to see it, and it can be useful for many professional singers to see it. I call it an "introduction" because he covers a lot of topics and information in a very short time, and in an eminent way. It is clear, thought-through, understandable and clear.

Lets start here! These videos are highly recommended both for beginners and professionals, for students and for teachers!

An introduction to bel canto

Lesson 1 - Parts of the body used in singing

Lesson 2 The Diaphragm and Intercostal Muscles

Lesson 3 Relaxed or Open Throat

Lesson 4 Resonation of Tone

Lesson 5 The Mask of the Face

Lesson 6 The Inhalation of the voice

Lesson 7 Vocal Ranges

Lesson 8 Breathing Exercise

Lesson 9 Concluding remarks and Singing exercises

THE SINGING TEACHER'S JOURNAL - WHAT, HOW and WHY

In 2017 I was invited to start working as a lecturer at the Lithuanian Academy of Theatre and Music. This has turned out to be one of the most challenging, awarding and interesting periods of not only my "art life", but in my work life in general.

To be able to answer questions from students - or to answer all the unasked questions - I have had to revisit, restudy, reread and improve on quite a lot of my own knowledge of vocal theory and physiology from my own years of studies and singing. Hopefully, this has been of some help to my students, and it has also had a huge impact on my own singing. 

There is no doubt that I knew too little of vocal theory (through no fault of my own teachers), and there is no doubt that improving the knowledge about how the body is built, and how it affects the singing, about traditional vocal theory and vocal schools can greatly improve the way students are able to understand and approach their own singing, voice, body and problems.

I do not adhere to the theory that singing should be "intuitive". Like any art, it should not be bogged down and restricted by theory, but theory applied correctly is liberating. At the age of 20, some students are studying advanced mathematics or physics. There is no reason vocal students should not be able to study and understand the functions of the larynx and the diaphragm :)

This blog will be my attempt to collect information - and maybe write myself - about these aspects, as well as about interpretation, musicianship and other things. I will try to post videos of singers, masterclasses, lectures about singing of physiology, link to articles, books and further. I will try to give the posts a pedagogical angle, not only post a concert because it is "good".

The internet is FULL of all information - about singing as well. Not all of it is good, though, and on this field, as on all fields, it is easy to be led astray and get lost. My selection of information will of course be subjective, but I will try to present information that I find artistically and scientifically solid, in hope that the blog over time might become a useful source for inspiration and information

20.10.27

Stein