Kat was a bit distracted today since she's going to prom tomorrow, so it was really hard to keep her on task. On top of that, she forgot to bring her music, thus nullifying her homework from the previous lesson.
For vocalizes I had her hum and chew and then go into "shy" 5-4-3-2-1. As she progressed she had a much clearer tone than she's had before. She mentioned that she's so used to singing low now that that was all that sounded good. I responded with 'interesting', and said that I actually thought her higher notes were more clear then the rest.
*"who's new blue shoes" 8-5-3-1 on EM* I'm not sure what I was thinking, but I thought this would help get a more forward presence. Instead she tended to pull the presence more into her throat. She did lose some of the breathiness in her sound, but at the cost of pushing the sound out. I asked for more happiness and more of a bouncy feeling. Poor Kat is so apologetic, that she kept saying sorry for doing it wrong. I told her that she didn't need to apologize since it had been a while since we had sung together. I then gave her the example of jumping on a tramp to help get her to dump low into her body for the energy. I also used the example of butterflies in her stomach, as if she was really excited about something. After a few more I had her start wiggling her body to try and distract her at the same time as activating her body. This worked really well and she started getting more spin to her sound.
She did mention that I made her nervous by playing the top note of vocalizes too fast. I'm really glad that she thought to say something, since every student is different.
*"thee" 5-4-3-2-1 on FM*
Me: There should still be two dumps in this one. So remember your tramponline feeling.
K: "thee"
Me: that was a little too punchy. It needs to feel down into your body, not like you're forcing it out of your body.
K: "thee"
I had her squat a little bit on each tramp moment and that started helping.
It came time to start working on a song, and since she'd forgotten to bring her music, I thought I'd try to find a hymn that maybe she would know. Finally we realized that she knew silent night, and she asked if she could sing the German lyrics in stead of the English. I thought this was a perfect replacement of her other song, since she would be singing in her native language, and it was a song that was a little more personal and meaningful.
As she sang, she was so much more calm about her singing. I commented to her about how much easier it sounded and looked with her singing. Once we got to the second verse we had a good laugh about how she totally mispronounced a word and I corrected her. She laughed because she's been reading only in English for so long that she couldn't remember how to say "Christ". We had a lot more fun in this lesson then we'd ever had before
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