Sam Meredith Lesson Summary 4/15

I felt well prepared for my lesson today. I had been practicing and was warmed up when I got to Cindy's office. We started by doing some lip trills on a 5-tone scale. When I started I was having trouble finding a timbre that was appropriate and I always feel like it takes a lot of air to get my lips started, so we switched to a trilled 'r'. After a couple of repetitions, Cindy encouraged me to give the pattern a more bounce and float technique. As we went higher on the keyboard, there was a tendency on my part to lift my larynx for pitch change. We did a few repetitions lower and then went back up, asking for the same mechanism for both repetitions. That seemed to help. After that we broke it down even more. Cindy told me that she was seeing a slight increase in pressure before I left the top note. She encouraged me to get rid of this by just letting my voice fall down to the bottom note and and bounce off of it. She encouraged me to incorporate the exercise in my daily vocalization and also asked me to to the same trill with an [o] posture in my lips. After we did that a few times, she told me that this would  be a good way to start vocalization every day. Next we did an exercise on the word 'ning' doing ascending turns in thirds over the course of a 5th. After a few repetitions Cindy told me that the goal of this exercise was to have the consonants help improve our tongue posture on the vowels without incorporating nasality into the vowels. We did a few more reps and Cindy asked me to take my neck out of its concentration position. Next we changed the pattern to 564534231. After a few more repetitions she asked if I could try breathing through my nose by just letting the air. After a few more repetitions we took the 'ng' off of the the word and eventually started switching between [ni] and [ne] every two notes. After that we did a vocalize on the word 'please' over 1 1/2 5-tone scales. She encouraged me again to have breaths that give me a feeling of more upward space in order to make the sound more pleasant. After a few more repetitions we changed the vocalize so that 'please' was at the top of the first scale, 'let' came at the bottom of that scale, and the word 'me' came again at the top to end the exercise. After a few repetitions Cindy said that breathing through the nose is an easier way to find that sense of space and singing at the top of the breath gesture, but that the same sensation could be found even if I were breathing through my mouth. We did one more rep with me breathing through my mouth. After that we did a vocalize on 'my o my!' with 'my' being on 8, 'o' being on 3 and the other 'my' being on 1. After my first rep Cindy told me that I needed to have as much of sense of space and height as I could for this exercise. I noticed on my first repetition that there was a tendency in my neck to tighten up, so I tried to loosen it up with some gentle neck movements. The movements, however, were really rigid still, which Cindy pointed out to me. She said it would be better to just make it a more bobble-head-like motion. We changed the vocalize to 'may o may I'. I did a lot better after I was able to really feel the increase in space during the breath gesture. Once I did that, the neck problems I was having went away and there wasn't any tension in my jaw either. Cindy told me to remember that the breath is the real space maker, not the jaw. Our next vocalize used the word 'fly' on a 1335588553311 pattern with a re-articulation of 'fly' on every other note. After a few repetitions, we added in the word 'flow' to the middle of the exercise starting on the second occurrence of scale degree 5. The vocalize went pretty well, but I was feeling a bit of laryngeal elevation and Cindy told me to just make the [o] for 'flow' by just rounding my lips. To fix the laryngeal elevation problem, she encouraged me to just have a bigger sense of free flowing air in the sound. After that I continued to have some problems with tongue tension, so we went on to another vocalize where we sang 3 5-tone scales in a row, the first on [ja], the second on [jo] and the third on [ju]. After a few repetitions we inverted the exercise by starting at the bottom of the scale on [ju]. It seemed to make the tongue problems go away. Next, we separated the three vowels and made each of them an individual exercise with a descending scale on [ju] followed by an ascending scale on just [u]. After that we did the same thing but with [o]. Cindy told me that when that gets easier I could do a full 9-note scale instead of a 5-tone scale at the end of each repetition. She said that the key on those would be to let the breath carry the sound and not elevation in the larynx or tension in the neck or jaw. After that we worked on some music. Cindy asked me what my most problematic piece was. I told her that it was 'the golden willow tree.' We decided to work on that for a little bit now to see if I could maintain some of the healthy space that I had during vocalization for the high notes in this piece. We sang through a couple of phrases. Once I got to the really high point in the song, I noticed that there was a tendency to brace. Cindy asked if it felt like the sound was running into the roof of my mouth. I said that it did. She said that it would be helpful to thin that the roof of my mouth was a sound permeable structure. With that in mind we tried it again. Again there was a desire on my part to brace. She asked me to try it again and just asked me to not care about how it sounded. Once we did that, it was a lot better, it still wasn't great, but it felt and sounded a lot better than it had before. We talked about how challenging it is to keep the nasopharynx open. She said that a good feeling to maintain is that of the beginning of a sneeze. After that we took some time to decide what four pieces I was going to take to juries. We decided to go through all of my pieces and see which ones were the best. We started with 'psyche.' Next we did 'Le Bachelier de Salamanque.' Next we did 'Der Mond hat eine schwere Klag erhoben.' Then we did 'Wenn du zu den Blumen gehst.' Next, we did 'troppa briga a prender moglie.' After that we talked about which ones we liked the best. I said that I would like to take the two french and the two german pieces, but that after my performance of all those pieces I didn't really feel like taking any of them to juries. Cindy asked what I meant by that. I said that everything just felt really tense. She said that this was possibly a result of the fact that I felt so free during vocalization. She asked me to sing 'wenn du zu den Blumen gehst' again and asked me to have a sweeter feeling of my voice as I sang. That seemed to help a lot. I think that is something that I really want to incorporate that kind of visualization into my practice in the future.