Sam Lesson Summary 9/27

I felt fairly well prepared for my lesson today. I was warmed up and ready to go when I walked in and although I've been a little sick this week I think I've done a relatively good job keeping my voice as healthy as possible. We started by reviewing some of the things that I learned in my lesson last week with Thomas and then we did some exercises that helped me further apply those principles. We started by doing some vocalizes that were designed to help me keep consistency in my vowels. First we did one where are sang a consistent tone and practiced the transition from a closed 'o' vowel to an open 'e' vowel. It was a lot harder than I expected. It was very difficult keeping the light easiness of the 'o' vowel and the brightness and resonance of the 'e' vowel consistent. I really had to concentrate on keeping the good qualities of both vowels throughout the exercise. This taught me that all of the vowels I sing need to be as similar as possible. There will obviously be some slight differences from one vowel to the next, but the gap probably isn't nearly as big as I think it is. My goal for my next lesson is to keep doing that exercise to gain more consistency in my vowel articulation. The next vocalize we did involved me singing an 'ah' vowel on an ascending scale, newly articulating the vowel with each new note. I learned the same lesson from this exercise that I did from the last one and was once again surprised at how easily my vowel deteriorated into something not so pretty. I want to continue doing this exercise because that vowel comes up a lot in my repertoire and I want to keep that vowel pure when I sing. After the vocalizes we jumped into working on 'sleep.' We worked mostly on proper interpretation of the music and on achieving consistency in the timbre of my voice. Once I let the music move me more, the interpretation and expression was much better. That's something that I've been working on a lot in practice lately and it has been effective so I will definitely continue with it between now and my next lesson. As far as technique is concerned I had some trouble keeping my tone consistent during some of the phrases. There are a lot of lines in the piece that are overall descending, but have brief ascending moments that were robbing my timbre of it's consistency. So, we worked on the phrases without those parts, turning them into purely descending passages. The tone was a lot more consistent when we did it this way. I still struggled once we tried singing the phrase in its complete form, so between now and my next lesson I will probably just be practicing those phrases without the notes that are making the timbre change so I can find more consistency there.