Emily C., Ashli H., Lesson Record/Reactions, 2/18/14

Emily C., Ashli H., Lesson Record/Reactions, 2/18/14

As a small note before I start writing this: I totally forgot to press record for this lesson, so this account may or may not be as detailed as it’s supposed to be… 

Lesson Record:

• I asked Ashli how she has been feeling vocally this week, and she said she’s feeling about normal. She has started taking yoga classes, so she feels she’s gotten more release in her body. She told me that she practiced working a lot with her jaw this past week, being conscious of when she gets tight so she can correct herself. We started out the lesson with lip trills on 54321 starting in F major. Initially, she had a sort of harsh push of breath to get her trills started, but she’s getting better, so I think I’m going to keep doing these with her. After doing only a couple of these, I had her do a couple of yawning motions, and I explained to her the difference between “good and bad” lip trills. If the back of the tongue is tense and we do the lip trills and suddenly open our mouths to let the sound out, it sounds noticeably tight and just gross. If we have a sense of space and release in the back while we trill and open our mouths, it sounds good. Basically, I said that there isn’t a huge difference between singing and lip trills—the only difference is that we closed our lips to trill. The space should be “the same” for both. 
• As she was doing these, she accidentally made this really weird squeaky sound and we both started laughing because it was super random and it just sounded without her even trying, so we couldn’t go back to making the lip trills because we couldn’t get serious. So, I moved on to “thaw” because we could sing that and let out a laugh or two without ruining the vocalize. 
• After doing a couple of those, I moved on to do “thee” going down on the 54321 scale, telling her keep things gentle and having a sense of glide down the vocalize. I didn’t like the way she tensed up on the vowel, so I switched it to “they.” Her jaw has a tendency to set/lock into place, so I changed the vocalize to “ng-ahhh,” sustaining the “ng” sound a little bit before going down on the 54321. The “ng” helped to loosen the back of her tongue and the vowel encouraged her to loosen her jaw, but just to make sure, I had Ashli put her hands on either side of her face so she’s aware of releasing her jaw. (This method works really well for her; my only problem is getting her to do it without her hands on her face.) In between each little vocalize, I had her making a yawning motioning and release her jaw, just in an attempt to “reset” before each one. 
• After she got the release I wanted from her, I decided to try a 13-54321 on “li-lah.” I told her to apply the jaw release I got in the previous exercise to this one. She still struggled a bit because her jaw was moving to change the vowels, so I told her have her mouth in the position of “ah” while thinking of saying “ee.” It was really horrendously worded on my part, but she got the gist of what I was saying after I modeled it for her. It still didn’t sound quite right, so I did what Cindy recommended earlier for me, which was to try using real words like “please, ma.” That seemed to work really well with her. 
• In the process of focusing on her jaw, the rest of her body got a little stiff, so I stopped the vocalizes and just had Ashli dance around all crazy with me, letting go of any unnecessary tension. I had a small talk to her about using the skeleton as the main weight supporter, and how we need to find the standing and/or sitting position that utilizes the skeleton’s usefulness to its fullest. She told me that in her yoga, they’re actually working a lot on that, so I didn’t have to elaborate much. I told her about the sitting position that’s using proper alignment that she can practice when she’s in class. I then told her about the application that it has to singing; because the skeleton diverts the effort of the muscles away from holding up weight, it frees up the muscle for musical expression. 
• I then returned her to the vocalize of “nya” on 54321, utilizing the same principles of released jaw and bodily release that we discussed. I don’t think this worked as well for her as the “ng” exercise, so I didn’t do this one for long. 
• To be honest, I had a bit of a brain fart at this point in time because I could hear her tongue tension in the back, but I couldn’t exactly think of what to do that was much different from the vocalizes we had done before, so I tried something that Brianna does with me on occasion. I brought in a hand mirror and had Ashli sing with a “fat tongue” that “filled up her bottom jaw.” I told her to sing the [a] vowel going down on 54321 (again… ugh), trying to maintain that released tongue position. Even though it was sort of strange for her, she did pretty well with it, so I told her to experiment with that in her practice time, working on different vowels and keeping a fat tongue. (Yeah… Didn’t really know where I was going with that one.) 
• Before I knew it, we only had 10 minutes to work on her piece, so we started on that. She’s singing “A Change in Me” from the musical Beauty and the Beast. First thing I noticed was that her work with her jaw in her practice time (though it’s still obvious that she has some jaw tension) really had some positive effects. Her tension has gone down, but it definitely needs some work still. Whenever she has to go up in pitch, she cranes her neck forward. There were some moments where she went into her childlike voice, and it was released and sounded good and I forgot to tell her that it was good. *facepalm* Other times, she got tense and craned her neck instead.
• After what Cindy told me in Amanda’s lesson today, I decided to change my word choice more to “legato” rather than speech, and I had Ashli sing it as legato as she could make it (because her melodic line was a little pitch-to-pitch sounding). This worked well because she engaged her breath more, but I found that she still had a shallow, tense sound. So I had her do some yawns in between each of the phrases, and I told her to have a sensation of depth and openness upward as well. I know this isn’t the best way to explain to the student, but she responds well to it (more so than Amanda). The articulation of the language was getting a bit in her way, so I had her sing the phrases on [le] instead. On the areas where she still struggled with getting the higher notes, I went to my default word “swoop,” despite what Cindy told me (sorry). 
• I told her on the mini “jumps” in the music to pause and make a swoop motion upward until she found a sense of easiness in reaching her pitches. I had her do a couple and pointed out to her where exactly in the swoop it sounded the best. I then told her to trick herself into singing the swoop and then continuing the sound in the swoop that felt the best (so you start with the sensation of swoop and then elongate the sound in the swoop that you want for your singing). She seemed to respond well to this, so I just went with it and did it a couple more times with her. 

Lesson Reactions:

• First thing’s first; I love how much more comfortable my students are getting whenever they’re working with me. They’re more willing to look ridiculous with me and try weird stuff. It just makes me happy.
• A lot of the jaw tension that I saw from last week has gone down, but it does have a habit of coming back every once in a while. I’m going to have Ashli keep practicing in front of a mirror and work on releasing her jaw. I’m glad she’s taking yoga as well; it’ll really help her to release her rest of her body, I think.
• I need to remind myself to allow more time to actually work on her music so we can apply what we did in vocalizes. Her jaw becomes wonderfully released, but when we get to music, she goes right back. 
• I need to figure out a way for her to practice accessing her childlike voice for her higher notes. She has a tendency to constrict whenever she tries to sound like a child. That’s why I use the swoop so much… Perhaps I can apply the swoop sound/motion to her childlike voice or something.
• I’m going to try and do more of her vocalizes higher up so I can test out her higher notes more often. I need to become more comfortable with exploring that range with her (because I get tentative in that area as well). 
• Cindy pointed out to me earlier today that my lack in facial engagement really shows up in my students, so I need to work on becoming more animated and engaged in my teaching and modeling as well.