Sam Meredith Lesson Summary 2/18

I feel like my preparation for my lesson today was only decent. I didn't have much time to warm up before my lesson (only about 10 minutes) and I didn't practice quite as diligently over the long weekend as I would have liked to. We started by doing an exercise for release. We talked about releasing our shoulders on to our skeleton. We raised our shoulders as we inhaled, released the shoulders, let out some air, and then added in a sigh. Next we added a pitch thought in the exercise so that my larynx was in the right position to sing a descending scale. Cindy told me that I need to get better at thinking pitch before I sing it so I can be more well-prepared to sing. Next, we got rid of the action in the shoulders and just sang the notes. Cindy asked me to think the top note of the scale and just let the voice come in when it wants to. I was having trouble during the exercise finding a good balance on my A-O joint. I was really feeling a temptation to hold rather than just letting my head rest on top of my neck. I think in my concentration on the pitch being there and sounding free I added some unnecessary tension in my neck. Next we sang a vocalize starting on scale degree 1 on [a], jumping up to 8 and changing the vowel to [o] and then singing a downward arpeggio, changing the vowel back to [a] on the bottom note. Eventually we added a glissando in to help me better navigate the break between head voice and chest voice. Next we sang a descending 5-tone scale switching between the vowels [u] and [i] once on each note. Once we reached the bottom note of the scale we sang a full 5-tone scale (ascending and descending) on [i]. After doing the exercise a few times Cindy asked if I could have a sense that the top note of the scale has a very heady quality. That seemed to make the exercise smoother. There was still a temptation to hold the head-neck joint in place during this exercise. Next, we did some ascending/descending scales on [i] and [e], switching vowels every two notes. There was a slight pinched quality at the top. Cindy asked me if I had noticed it and asked me to adjust accordingly. The next time I sang it it sounded a lot better. She asked me what I changed and I said that I just had a realization that the pitch should be the thing that determines the amount of back space, not the vowel. Every time we did the exercise we sang the scale twice. The second one was consistently better than the other at first because I had a better sense of free flowing air for the second scale since I had already come down. So, Cindy directed me to sing the first note of the scale with the top note in mind. Next, we continued with our 9-note pattern but changed the vowels to [a] for the first four notes, [e] for the next four, [o] for the four after that, back to [e] for the next four and ending again on [a]. One problem that I struggled with during this vocalize was keeping an engaged feeling in my eyes and having a pleasant, conversational look on my face. I think the timbre really improved once I did better in that department. There was also some tongue tension that we alleviated with the hairball noise. Next we looked at some music. We spent that time today going through the pieces I'm going to perform for NATS in a couple of weeks. We started with 'si tra i ceppi' and then moved to 'wohl denk ich oft.' I essentially had the same problem on both pieces: tension in the back of my tongue. Cindy gave me a couple of good strategies to get rid of that. On 'si tra i ceppi' we did a lot of hairball expulsion noises before phrases in the middle part of my range, especially ascending ones. That seemed to relieve the tension in the tongue and give my voice a freer sound. We employed the same strategy when singing 'wohl denk ich oft.' We also added another strategy where I sang the notes on the word 'nang.' That also seemed to free up the tension and give the resonance in my voice a higher feeling. It really felt like I had that magic horn resonance that we've talked about before in vocal pedagogy. My goal is to use both of those practice strategies for all of my songs--especially my NATS songs.