Sam Lesson Summary 9/11

Sam Lesson Summary 9/11
I felt pretty prepared for my first lesson with Cindy today. I was warmed up and I had a good set of music to work on. We started by looking at 'Come Raggio Di Sol.' I just recently picked up that song again for Voice Recital Hour tomorrow so it had been awhile since I had anyone offer feedback on my performance of this song. There were a lot of things I was doing that I had never noticed. First we worked on making sure that I was breathing properly. Some of my breaths were too loud and tense, which led to problems at the ends of phrases. I need to start thinking of breath as more of a release and just concentrate on getting out of my own way when it comes to breathing. I think my goal from now on is to never be satisfied with a sub-par breath when I'm practicing. It's really important that I go back and fix those problems so I can have proper breathing in performances. Next, we worked on my diction. I was having trouble properly pronouncing my double consonants so we practiced those. We took one word at pronounced it first as a word with a double consonant and next as if it had only a singular consonant. This really helped me see the difference in the sound and make a good adjustment. I have one Italian song in my repertoire this semester, so I'm going to look for all of the double consonants in that piece and pay extra attention to how I'm pronouncing them in both singing and simple recitation. We also worked on my vowels. On my 'i' vowels and 'u' vowels my jaw was tightening slightly and changing the tone. So, we practiced first singing all of the notes on the same vowel and ensuring that my jaw position remained consistent and relaxed. Then we incorporated the vowels back into the words and did the same thing. I really feel like it helped me achieve greater resonance and consistency in my tone. For the future I'm going use this technique on other songs where my voice becomes tense on certain vowels. We also worked on getting more consistency in voice between the lower and upper register. We did a vocalize where i mimicked the wailing of a ghost and moved my voice up and down. I had some trouble keeping the tone where it was supposed to be for the purpose of this exercise, but I still felt like it was very beneficial in helping me bridge the gaps between notes in my lower and upper registers. I'm going to continue using this vocalize trying to keep the tone where it should be in order to make my voice more accustomed to singing large intervals. To wrap things up we went over the translation of the piece. Other than the goals already mentioned I have a goal to really dive into the translations of my repertoire this next week and be really prepared to translate, recite, and express the songs properly.