Date sent: Mon, 31 Jan 2000 09:43:48 EST
Subject: Re: Respiratory Therapy (longish)
To: vocalist
Send reply to: VOCALIST <vocalist>

laura,
i suspect the answer to your question lies in the exercices your student
showed you. i doubt there is any magic in respiratory exercises, other than
returning a double-bogey breather back to par (shoot me now). i suspect the
tension you observed in his exercises may actually be neccesary. not all
tension is bad. your heart is tense when it's pumping blood, after all.
perhaps what we should all look at, is not a reduction in tension but, a
change from static tension to dynamic tension.
respiratory therapy, as with all therapies, seeks to isolate the
essential mechanism of the action involved and teaches the patient to use the
mechanism thusly. when i find something that seems to contradict my previous
concept of how things work, i go back to the anatomy books. it usually turns
out to be something small, that i had always accepted as a given, that turns
out to be the wrong thought screwing things up.
i had a student in a band who is a very good singer. his problem was
singing harmony. when he sang harmony, he sang poorly, sometimes blowing so
much air, he would blow himself sharp (heating up the rocks in his head,
before he sang, seemed to be the best solution to this problem).

mike