Before starting to sing, I asked her a few questions about her day, and what kind of vocal use she had done. Mostly I was trying to size up what her body language was telling me as far as where tension was and what was having a hard time releasing. I discovered that the reason she has really tight shoulders and neck--more so on the day she has lessons--is because she has ballroom practice right before she comes to voice lessons. We then talked about ways that she can still have good form in ballroom, but that won't be forced into position--thus creating the tension. She agreed that she could work on being more aware of how her movements were affecting her body in general when she wasn't dancing.
After our chat we worked on finding balance. Starting at the head and working our way down, I tried to help her find a correct posture. I payed close attention to what she would say in response, and then tried to address those areas. I talked about how good posture would feel weird at this point because her body wouldn't be used to it. I then challenged her to pay attention to how she sat outside of our lessons and to apply what we talked about today.
I'd say a vast majority of this lesson was dedicated to becoming more acquainted with our body and how to react to it.
To start the vocalize portion, I had her do some yawns and then some sighs, with the sighs varying in length and pitch. The main idea behind these sighs was to achieve simplicity.
*"oo ah" starting on the 5th degree and gliding on "oo" to the tonic where you would say "ah"*
-FM was beginning chord and then I went down by half-steps until about AM. Then I went back up to EM and sequenced down again. At the beginning she would nod her head down as she would descend down the scale. When I went back to EM the first time, her larynx went really high going from the A and then the quick transition to E. I had her imagine standing next to freshly blooming lilacs before singing. (I realize now that that isn't the best way to address a high larynx, but rather problems with the nasopharynx). It took me a while to catch this before I addressed it, but she was really only singing the 5th degree and then the tonic. I didn't handle this very well. I told her to imagine falling through the scale and the pitches. That itself was good, but as I'm listening back, the way I played the piano was not conducive to the sound i was asking her for. Would giving her a visual help withh this next time? Something like a trombone and have her imagine its slide motion. I also think maybe a hands on approach of pretending like she is eating string cheese and she is peeling off a new strip with each vocalize. I mentioned in the lesson that she was doing weird things, but most of the things she was doing incorrectly were due to my teaching that day. This lesson, if nothing else, taught me just how much a student picks up whether or not we intend them to.
I tried making up this vocalize of having her do "fine" on 8-5-3-1, and that was a huge fail. Finally she asked if maybe she could try lying down. Here I had her do "Who's new blue shoes". It worked ok. She started to apologize and I realized that she had nothing to apologize about, because it was my responsibility to come up with effective vocalizes. Maybe I had given her too much info on body mapping before, because she also mentioned that she felt uncomfortable in her own body. That was a big red flag for me, and I decided to just have her shake it out because I was giving her too many things to "do" and not enough of an opportunity to "let". After she wiggled around a bit, I simplified things and told her that I only wanted her to think about two things: 1. We provide air and 2. Pitch happens. That ended up being her homework since her lesson time was up.
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