Sarah Boucher Lesson Summary 9/6

Sarah Boucher Lesson Summary 9/6
     This was my first lesson of the semester with a brand new teacher. To prepare I went through some of the music that I had talked about learning for this year's recital back in the spring. I had a list of rep I wanted to work on for my recital but needed more guidance and coaching with it. I warmed up before the lesson, mostly just trying to "find my breath" by doing lip buzzes. Most of the lesson was spent deciding on rep and Laurie gave me a lot of pieces to look at and listen to. The last ten minutes or so she did some vocalizes with me that really helped me. We did some more descending lip buzzes, and I focused on finding my breath and making it more "balloon" then bucket. Then we did some trill exercises where Laurie had me very lightly sing a trill and emphasize the lower note. I was terrible at first because I wasn't singing lightly enough and we had to take it very slowly. This helped me to focus on not moving my larynx or my jaw to change pitch. The last warm up we had time for was the one that helped me the most. It was a descending scale in which she had me pantomime the notes until I was sure that my larynx wasn't raised. It was such a good warmup for getting focused on what my body was doing, instead of just focusing on the sounds that were coming out. I found an awareness of what it feels like when my larynx is too high and forced me to "think" about the pitch. For my next lesson, I will have picked between certain pieces that Laurie had me look at and have them IPA-ed and ready to go!