Ian Belsey wrote:
>
> Hi Linda,
>
> I will say one thing tho'. Breath management will have
> little to do with a hernia. By God, you will always be
> aware of it, of course. But the reason for bad breath
> management is larynygeal. No more, no less. That's
> what I think you need to re-address. If the cords are
> blown apart with loads of gas, you'll have no air to
> do what you need to do. And if you can't sing quietly,
> then you just shouldn't!! It's a hard one that, but
> it's the truth! I think it was Melba who said, "If you
> can't sing your highest notes pianissimo, then you
> shouldn't sing them at all!" I'd be dead interested to
> know what you perceive to produce a tone.
>
> Anyway, I digress!! The real reason for this post was
> to ask a lister how the acid thing feels. . .
>
> I look forward to hearing about it.
Well, in my case, it feels like nothing whatsoever. I can't detect it. I
had heard of asymptomatic reflux before, but not realised I could be
suffering from it. And in this case it's only what the doctor _suspects_
is the cause, due to the hiatus hernia. Which I also can't feel. I used
to suffer from occasional heartburn and oesophagitis, but I have had
absolutely no symptoms of this since starting a serious weight loss
regime in April of this year. Yet the cords are still oedematised (is
that the right word?), which tallies with the experience of the upper
voice disappearing.
I first noticed it happening in 1987, when I was 39. I had sung as a
soloist in a semi-private coma-and-sing (I've just noticed the typo when
checking this, but didn't have the heart to delete it) performance of
Haydn's Creation, and although I cheated and avoided the one top C,
which had never been very secure anyway, all the Bbs were easy, floating
and comfortable in a light mix. That was in the summer. In December I
tried to sing With Verdure Clad on tape for a friend, and could I find
that part of my voice? No. I had recently moved to the other end of the
country and I wasn't singing every day anyway, so I put it down to
rustiness, but I didn't like the fact that the only way I could get a Bb
was by pushing up the registration I was using for an F - as you say,
you should never do it - so I stopped attempting that note as it
wouldn't come the way I knew felt right.
The next year it was an A. And the year after that an Ab, and so it went
on. I took over a couple of light opera societies as MD, and used to
make tapes of the various chorus lines to help them learn them, singing
the tenor and bass tapes in my own octave. I found these a great trial
because getting the correct pitch was the first priority, which meant
compromising my technique while I was making the tape, and tenor lines
stay up there for much longer stretches than sopranos do! Other than
that, I tried to leave it alone if I couldn't reach it. I wasn't
performing anyway, and I spent a year teaching class music in an
unspeakably bad comprehensive school in Liverpool which pretty well
broke my spirit.
I wasn't taking lessons at this stage, and ddin't see a doctor: I
believe now that I was seriously chastising myself over something which
was not entirely due to getting fat and not practising enough, as I
thought at the time.
I did see a laryngologist in 1993, who found some oededma on one cord,
prescribed two months' vocal rest and then told me (using only a mirror
this time) that it had cleared up.
The oedema thing does seem to tally with what I feel happening when I
sing: as I go into a lighter registration the cords don't seem to
"speak", and after years of no sound up there, I can still go through
the motions of producing head voice, by feel, as it were, but get
silence, because the relevant section of the cord is not vibrating. I do
feel the resistance to the breath, so there is no whispering sensation
and the cords are together, just not vibrating.
When I say I sing my Ds and Es loudly, I'm not pushing them: they are
exactly as I would have sung them at that volume when I had my full
voice. It's just that the children I teach are mostly aged from 7-11 and
at that age, unless they're being worked with individually, they will
tend to try to copy sounds, and I'm not sure that this is the sound they
should be copying. Up to around B or C I can sing with a full range of
dynamics, it's only the few notes above that are the problem.
As to the breath control matter, I like the notion of the cords being
"blown apart with lots of gas" - this brings images of a mighty rumbling
furnace belching forth fire and fumes like a dragon (which I am, oh I
am!), but it's not actually like that; acid is in the stomach and not
the lungs, so any gas it might give off is not going to affect the
breathing. And I don't get the impression that breath is falling out - I
don't produce a breathy tone, and the problem is not so much
short-windedness (I mean, when have I ever been guilty of that?) but
rather that a short phrase will leave me feeling too exhausted to hold
on, as though it has taken a lot more energy than it felt like. Which,
of course, if I am having to keep cords adducted which don't want to get
together, may be the case, though I was wondering if the diaphragm was
also having to work harder because of the hernia. So, I am hoping for
some improvement in that area if this latest diagnosis proves to be
correct. There is no sign of any lesions or nodules, by the way.
So, meanwhile I am soldiering on, and feeling fairly optimistic at the
moment. We have only just started back to school this week. Yesterday I
had 120 4-to-6-year-olds all together, and because I had just cycled for
40 minutes through strong winds I had written them a Windy Day song on
the way (a stretched and twisted version of the William Tell Overture
with swooshy sounds added) which they premiered for me :) and today I am
teaching two classes of 7-year-olds to sing This Old Hammer and All
Night All Day. I think I can manage that without drawing blood (from me
at any rate)
chirps
Linda
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