Emily C.: Joint Practice, 9/30/13

Emily C.: Joint Practice, 9/30/13

Shalayna and I started the practice with discussion of warmups--before she arrived to the practice room, I had the opportunity to warmup without her, so I described how I ease myself into practice for about 10-15 before working on my songs. She added some interesting insight into how she prepares to practice as well; from the very start of the day, she beginnings warming up gently and does silent practice by going over her music in her head, so when she gets to practice, she knows immediately what parts of the song needs to be worked on. I went over my piece “La Serenata” by Tosti with Shalayna because I figured it would be the best song to get some help on because the high notes can be difficult for me. She pointed out that a lot of my problems came from lack of breath support, so she helped me identify strategic places to breathe. Also, we talked about keeping a forward resonance instead of pushing the tone back into the throat by relaxing the tongue in the back. Shalayna then had her turn and started working on one of her French pieces, and she told me a problem she had was that she often pushed her jaw forward. It was a little tense, so I showed her some techniques that I learned from Brianna to keep it loose when she spoke the diction (this included putting an “L” shaped hand on her jaw to monitor that it didn’t push forward). I also showed her an exercise I learned from The King’s Speech (movie), where you relax your jaw and shake your fists; if you’re unable to release your jaw, then it’s too tight. By doing that, we discovered that her jaw was too tight, so this helped as a method for her to check herself. Overall, I think this practice session was very insightful and helpful.