Sam Meredith Lesson Summary 11/1

Today I had my memory check. I think I was well prepared for it. Most of my songs are pretty short and I've been practicing diligently. First we did my recitations and word by word translations. They went well and I had all of the texts memorized, but I still need to spend more time with the text and with the word by word translations just so I can insert the proper emotional color into my songs. After that we sang through some of my songs. All of the singing went well for the most part, but there are still some things that I need to work on. 'Sleep' in particular has some problems. I still need to spend more time getting to know my part relative to the accompaniment and memorize it more fully so my entrances and cut-offs are more confident. This and all of the other songs I sang all had the same problem of my posture. I tend to let my neck jut out a little when I sing and my chest cavity always wants to return to a collapsed position so I have more trouble maintaining free flowing air. Cindy told me that I need to develop some more upper body strength to fix that. I want to find a way to do that this week. Also she suggested that I spend 20 minutes of my practice each day on the ground with my head resting on books that are in total about two inches thick. We tried it at the end of the lesson and it seemed to relieve a lot of the tension and made it really easy to determine when I wasn't keeping my jaw loose enough. So, this next week I'm going to practice like that for 20 minutes each day and practice singing only the vowels of my songs so that I can make sure that each one maintains the same space and the same release.