Sam Meredith Lesson Summary 11/15

I felt well prepared for my lesson this week. I've been practicing hard lately and I feel like I've been getting what I want out of my practice. We started with some vocalizes singing 5-tone scales on the vowel [i]. It wasn't going as well as we would have liked it to, so Cindy had me do the vocalizes using a shorter articulation, 'bp'. It was better as far as intonation is concerned, but I was still getting a lot of elevation in my larynx when I would reach the top of the scale. So, to fix that I would sing the vocalize, repeating the bottom note of the scale on the syllable 'bp'. Directly after that I sang the vocalize on all the pitches with the 'bp' syllable. Then, I sang it on pitch on the vowel [i]. It was really helpful. Repeating the pitch that was lower in my range helped condition my larynx to stay down and singing the shorter articulation conditioned my voice to move more freely and relieve itself of the dragging feeling that it had when I was first singing the vocalize. I want to do more of these vocalizes in my practice to help utilize these benefits in my repertoire. After the vocalizes we sung through some of my repertoire. We first looked at 'si tra i ceppi.' It was a lot better this week. Writing out those narratives for the interludes really helped me get into the piece more and made it a lot more fun to sing. That made the singing a lot better. There were still some diction problems like me transitioning too early to consonants. I want to fix this just by speaking the text more. There was also some elevation of the larynx on upward leaps. I am just going to use that vocalize we did today and apply it to the pitches and rhythms in the song to condition my larynx to stay down. Next we worked on 'wohl denk ich oft.' I haven't looked at it in awhile so I wanted to see what the 'first attempt rule' would tell me about this piece. I think I have retained most of what I practiced, but there are some things that I'm going to need to work on more. I also need to apply today's vocalize to this song just so I can avoid laryngeal elevation and make things easier on myself. There were also some pitches that I need to go over a little more. I also want to make my diction more clear. I think it has taken a step back since I haven't really looked at this piece this week.