This was my second lesson with Rob. I started by asking how his voice felt. He replied that it felt fine and that he hadn't used it very much. We started by warming up a little. First we did some stretching. I told him to raise his hand as if he were in a class, knew the answer to the teacher's question, and really wanted the teacher to call on him so he could answer. We did that with both arms. Next, we did some things to loosen up the neck. I had him stand up straight and act like he was nodding off to sleep by letting his neck fall forward. Then I directed him to have it fall from left to right a few times. After that we did some exercises to loosen the jaw. I told him to picture the free feeling in the jaw that he would feel if he had a cavity filled. Once his jaw was in a nice, open, free position, I had him place his hand on his chin and gently move the jaw up, down, and from side to side. He yawned during the exercise and replied that often when we yawn we have good jaw posture for singing. Next we stretched out our shoulders. We did the toaster stretch 5 times. Next we did a short vocalize to help loosen him up a little more. I played ascending and descending 5 tone scales. I told him to hum the pitches and make a chewing motion with his mouth. I told him to not worry so much about the tone quality, but to be more concerned with just covering the range of all the pitches and achieving a feeling of freedom in the jaw. I started on Eb, playing the scale down to Ab. We repeated the pattern three times and moved up to E. We repeated the exercise and moved to F, then to F sharp, then back to Eb. I stopped and asked him how he felt after the exercise. He said it felt good. I then told him that I wanted to teach him how to better prepare to sing. I told him that posture was an important part of preparing to sing well. I asked him to assume the posture that he feels would be best for singing. He stood straight up and mentioned how he need to keep an open chest cavity. I praised him for knowing that this was a key part of good singing posture. I told him that it is in fact very important to have an open chest cavity so that we are giving the lungs a good amount of room to expand. His legs were a little wide-set, so I told him to bring in his legs so they were about shoulder length apart. I told him that he also needs to relax his shoulders. I told him to imagine that there is a hook in the middle of the top of his head and that he is a puppet, suspended from the ceiling via a string attached to this hook. He seemed to understand the analogy, but I think in the future I want to come up with another analogy to use. I told him that a big key with posture is to just be aware of our posture because it is easy to forget to have good posture. Next, we talked about breathing. I asked him if he could describe the difference between breathing for singing and breathing for things like playing sports. He said that breathing for singing is deeper and that for singing we are supposed to breathe through our stomachs. He said that for other things he doesn't think about breathing as much. I told him that when we sing we do take in more air than we would under other circumstances, but we still want the breath to feel natural and not feel forced. Then I addressed his comment about breathing through the stomach. I told him that there are some voice teachers who claim that we do want to feel expansion in the stomach. I also told him, however, that I personally feel that we breath better when the expansion takes place chiefly in our lower back. I told him that we really don't want any visible expansion in the shoulders, chest, or stomach. I told him that we can picture that our body is like a big fireplace bellows with the open end pointing up towards the ceiling, i.e. the expansion in the bellows is mostly noticeable in the lower part of the bellows. We then did some breathing exercises. We did so by taking a quick, deep breath and then quickly blowing out all the air we could. We mimicked the breath gesture with our hands. We did so by pulling one hand away from the chest during inhalation while the other hand remained near the chest. During exhalation, we brought the hand away from the chest back and moved the hand near the chest away from the chest. We performed this pattern 4 times. I then stopped and asked Rob where he was feeling the expansion. He replied that he was feeling it mostly in the area of his sternum. I told him that we were going to do the exercise again. I asked him this time to put both his hands on his lower back. I told him that each time he inhaled I wanted him to imagine that his hands were holding onto and pulling on the handles of a bellows. On the exhalation gesture, I asked him to pretend that he was pushing the handles to let the air come out. We did it 3 more times. He commented that the breath gesture did feel like it was lower. I also noticed that the gesture was lower. I asked him then if he had any questions. After that we did some more singing. I told him that I wanted to do a few things that would help him get more comfortable singing high notes. I first told him to imagine that he has had a long day at school and work and then came home and plopped himself down on the couch and let out a big sigh of relief. I demonstrated the sigh a couple of times and had him do it. I did it again and raised the inflection of the sigh. He mimicked that. After we let out a couple more sighs I asked him how that felt. He told me that it felt natural to him. He said it didn't feel like it normally does when he sings high. I told him that this was the purpose of this exercise. I next had him imagine that someone told him something really shocking like he got a really good grade on a test that he didn't expect to do well on. I demonstrated the "what?!" with an ascending inflection that I would imagine in such a situation. He repeated the gesture. We repeated it a few times. I asked him if that felt natural. He said that it did because he does that all the time. I told him that we can do other things that help us find easy access to the high range of our voice. I had him imagine that he was a ghost. I demonstrated a spooky ghost-like wailing noise. He repeated it. I had him to it for an extended period and I directed him with my hand telling him if I wanted him to raise or lower the pitch. At first when he was doing it it sounded a little constricted when he did high notes. In order to encourage a freer sound I asked him to make it more spooky. That cue didn't seem to catch on. Eventually he switched into falsetto, which is what I wanted. I told him that I wanted him to not be afraid to switch into falsetto because I was more concerned about getting the voice to move easily rather than ensuring full timbre on all of the notes. It got a lot better after that. Next we sang some descending 5-tone scales. I told him that I wanted him to start on falsetto on the vowel [u] and then bring in his full voice on the last note and change the vowel to [a] at that point. We started on middle C, moving down the scale to F. I told him that he doesn't need to worry about how pretty the vowel is on the last note because the purpose is just to practice the transition from falsetto to full voice. After that we moved up in half steps. I moved up 4 half steps and then stopped to ask him how it feels in his voice. He pointed out that there is a slight glitch when he tries to switch from falsetto to full voice. I told him that this is a normal thing and that one of the purposes of the exercise is to get used to that. I told him that being able to make a smooth transition between registers will be a very useful skill. He mentioned how he doesn't like singing falsetto, but he does like the feeling of coming out of the falsetto and letting his full voice come in. Before we did the exercise again I wanted to correct his breathing a little bit. It didn't seem like he was getting a full healthy breath, so to encourage that I had the idea that I could have him take a breath that would be similar to the mechanism used when one is sipping a thick shake. We started where we left off. We went up progressively until the bottom note of the scale was middle C. After that I went back down and made Eb the top of the scale. At that point I had him turn to face the mirror so he couldn't see the pitches I was playing on the piano. We started a little higher and went until the bottom pitch of the scale was Eb4. I told him afterwards that the highest note he sang to in the exercise was Eb. I told him that it is really good progress because that shows that he really can sing notes in his upper register. To wrap up our lesson I asked him if he could summarize some of the things he learned. He said that he learned about how posture and breathing are important and that posture should be relaxed and open, that the expansion when we breathe should take place in our lower back and that many different practice tactics are needed in order to learn to extend one's range. He also said that he learned that the goal in singing is to have all notes in our voice have the same feeling of freedom. I confirmed those things that he learned and added that the muscles we need to sing high are tiny and therefore don't create a perceivable sensation in our body when we use them. So, if we feel like we are doing something extra to sing high notes, we probably have some sort of unnecessary tension in our body--all we need to do is be prepared properly, think the pitch, and provide airflow. It might not always come out, but even that is better than forcing it out. He commented that he's proud of himself because Eb is probably the highest note he's ever sung without being in falsetto.
Overall I think this lesson went really well. I think I made some improvements compared to the last lesson I taught. I think I did a good job talking less, but I still think I would like to talk less than I do. I think I explain the purpose of exercises too much. I think I started doing it just because I feel like I would want to know the purpose of the exercises that my voice teacher has me do. I have to remember, however, that my students are not vocal performance majors who are training to one day have a vocal studio of their own. I think they trust me enough to just perform a vocalize or exercise whether I tell them what the purpose is or not. I don't mean to say that I'm never going to explain the purpose of my vocalizes, but I think I could stand to do less of it. I liked some of the exercises I did with Rob. I think I want to do a lot more descending patterns where I start in falsetto and end up in full voice. One thing that I feel was successful in my lesson with Anna this week was pantomiming one part of scale and singing the other part. I think that is something that would probably be beneficial to Rob as well. I think I want to help him have better posture more as well. Overall, I just need to be more aware of more than one thing at a time. I feel like I'm good at directing the student to model behavior when I am concerned solely with breathing, posture, or tone quality. I need to develop my skill as a teacher to the point where I can be aware of all those thing simultaneously, which I think starts with being aware of all those things simultaneously as they take place within me.
No comments:
Post a Comment