This was my sixth lesson with Anna. I started by asking her how her voice feels. She said it felt just fine. Next, I asked her if the rest of her body felt okay. She said that she wasn't having any pain. We started by doing the 'teacher, teacher!' stretch to get our shoulders loosened up. Next, I reminded her that we don't need our shoulders to breathe. I used that to preface our next exercise where I had her inhale and raise her shoulders and then release her shoulders upon exhale. We did it a few times after which I asked her how it felt. She said it felt good. I asked her for the next few repetitions to also include a sigh. After that I instructed her to just let her neck fall forward onto her chest as if she had fallen asleep. I asked her to massage the muscles of her neck gently. After massaging our muscles I instructed her to just let her neck fall from side to side in an easy, tension-free motion. I asked her how that exercise made her neck feel. She said that it made it feel a lot less tense. Next I asked her to pretend that she was a cow chewing its cud. I told her that this should be a fairly exaggerated chewing motion, but not exaggerated to the point of being tense. Next I asked her to just let her jaw fall to an open relaxed position and gently manipulate it with her hands. After we moved our jaws up and down and in a circular motion I asked her if she felt like her jaw was at all fighting against that movement in the beginning of the exercise. She said that she felt that a little bit. I told her that this is normal and that we do this exercise to teach our jaw that it doesn't need to be so tight. Next we did some vocalizes. First we did a few sirens. I told her that I would do the first few with her. I instructed her to start in a comfortable, low register with an easy, light tone. After we did the first one I asked her if she could pay attention to how the rest of her body feels when she does the exercise because with this exercise we aren't so much concerned with how the voice sounds, but with the freedom with which the voice is able to move, which is dependent on the rest of our body being free of tension. I asked her after our next repetition how the rest of her body felt. She said that she was trying to be more relaxed. Next I asked her how her knees felt. She said that they felt a little locked. I told her that this is something that we want to avoid. I went on to say that having tension in our knees will add tension in other places in our body and will make breathing more difficult. I asked her to have her knees in a balanced position. I told her that she doesn't need to have the knees bent, but they don't need to be locked either. We did another vocalize. We started at the top of a 5-tone scale in her child like voice, bouncing off of scale degree one in full voice and going back to the top of the scale in the child-like tone. We alternated every two notes between the syllables [be] and [de]. I told her before we began that this exercise is meant to strengthen the muscle in our voice that works in opposition to the muscle that we use for speech and that strengthening this opposing muscle will help us sing in a higher range with more ease. We started on E4 (top note of scale) and did three repetitions in each set. After the first repetition I asked her if it would help if we paused slightly at the bottom and top of each scale to give her time to readjust. She said it would. We moved down to Eb4. After that she commented that this was a weird exercise. Next, we moved down to D4. After that I asked her if it was harder to make the transition from full back to light when she was lower in her voice. She said that she felt that. I told her that this is probably the result of our muscle that we use for speech not wanting to let go. We did a few more repetitions and started at F4. After that set I noticed that it was hard for her to maintain breath energy for the duration of three scales, so I lowered the number of scales in each set to two. We did our next set with F-sharp4 as our top note. Then we moved to G. The last set was done again on F-sharp. I asked her after that set how her knees feel. She said that she wasn't really paying attention. I told her that I noticed that they seemed to be a little bit locked again. I told her that I didn't really want to give her something specific to do to make it so she couldn't lock her knees because I think that it would be more useful for her to just learn to be aware of that. I clarified by saying that she certainly knows how to not lock her knees, so developing an awareness of it is probably the key to fixing the problem. I also told her that developing an awareness of the rest of the body will make her a much more independent singer. Before we continued I asked her how those previous vocalizes felt in her voice. She said they felt good. After that we moved on to some music. I started by asking her what types of things she does to study for tests. She said that she practices, makes flash cards, and memorizes things. I told her that learning music is the same way: when we do the right thing repeatedly in practice the right thing will happen when we perform. We talked about chunking. I told her that if we try to learn all the aspects of the music at once we are likely to make mistakes and make them repeatedly, thereby learning to do the wrong thing. We started by separating her song into chunks. I went through the music with her with a pencil asking her where she thought good chunks would be. Once we had our phrases and verses separated out, I told her that she can then separate different aspects in the music into chunks like rhythm, text, pitches, etc. I told her that I find the most effective thing to be learning the rhythm first. I asked her to sit down next to me on the piano bench so that she could see the music. I told her that we were going to start by speaking the text of our first chunk in rhythm. I counted her off and started with her and stopped speaking after the first few words. She did pretty well, but there were a few rhythmic mistakes throughout the duration of this first phrase and there were some words that she had trouble with. I got the feeling that she was having trouble seeing the text, so I asked her if she could see it alright. She said she could, but that she was concentrating mostly on rhythm so she missed a few words here and there. So, I asked her just to speak the text once. After that I told her that I wanted to work on the rhythm some more, but that I also wanted to just point out a few things to her before we did. I noticed in her first attempt at the rhythm that she had some trouble with a syncopated pattern that appears regularly throughout the song. I asked her to just be aware of that as we repeated this exercise. I kept time for her again and had her again speak through the text in rhythm. After that I asked her what parts she had trouble with. There was still one part where the rhythm wasn't quite right. I told her that this another place where chunking can be good because we can make chunks as small as we need them to be. I went on to say that there are many parts of the song that she isn't having any trouble with at all. So, it makes sense to focus chiefly on the parts where she isn't doing as well. So, we focused in on the few measure where she was having trouble. After our first attempt at that I told her that she had improved. I asked her if there were any places that she wanted to focus on more. She pointed out a few, so we accordingly downsized our chunk so that we could focus in on the most important parts. She didn't make any mistakes in her next repetition. So, I challenged her to then speak through the entire first verse in rhythm. She went through the whole verse without making any mistakes. I told her that now that she's done it correctly once, she just needs to go back and reinforce that correct behavior. I also told her that since there is a lot of repetition in music, when she chunks things properly it will make it so she only has to learn certain rhythms and notes once instead of thinking of herself having to learn them several times. Before we ended our lesson I asked her if she had any questions. She asked what we are going to do next time. I told her that I needed to schedule a lesson with Cindy.
I think this lesson went more smoothly than some of my other lessons with Anna have gone. I think I'm getting better at recognizing problems in her voice and in being able to vocalize a female voice like hers. There are still a lot of things that I want to improve on, though. I'm still talking way to much. I think I just need to find a way to give her directives that she can understand in 5 words or less. That way, I could give them to her even while we are still vocalizing so that she can make adjustments then rather than us having to stop completely between reps and talk for a little bit. I think Jake did a really good job with that in his lesson in class a few weeks ago and that is something that I want to apply better. I've toyed with the idea of giving a lesson where I'm completely silent, but I don't know how productive that would be with my inexperience as a teacher and Anna's inexperience with voice lessons. The main problem I noticed with Anna today was her tendency to lock her knees. I think I might just have her vocalize and sing in different postures so that she can get used to singing without tension there. Maybe sitting on the piano bench would be a good exercise for her. That way she will only have to worry about her posture from the hips up. Other problems she is having include jaw and neck tension, so maybe some alternative postures will help her with that as well. I think implementing that along with some sort of word substitution will help her sing this song with less tension. I'm also hoping that chunking and focusing first on individual components of the music will be a preemptive strike against tension in her body when singing.
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