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!