Dear Friends, I paid for my own lessons from my first voice teacher when I was 17 in 1963. Madam Bela Resek, was very much a traditionalist. She taught placement and diaphragmatic breathing pretty closely adhering to the Marchesi method. She was truly a wonderful teacher with a bright and bubbly personality, even in her70's! I have many fond memories of her. I will always be grateful that she taught me; how to take a nearly instant and silent breath so that the musical line would never be interrupted, to start, sustain and end a tone with good resonance, to produce clean, easily recognizeable vowels, launching them with energetic consonants, sustain them and connect them seamlessly one into the next and use delayed articulation in order to ensure crisp, clear diction.
Fortunately, I learned these things from her in spite of the traditional language she used to try and convey them. Most of my understanding came from trying to figure out what she was talking about when I was practicing at home. It didn't hurt that I was on the swim team and had enormous lung capacity either (Check your history and you'll see that Caruso and Bjoerling were also strong swimmers. I really belive it's an advantage.)
"Put it in the masque!" she'd say, while shoving the tips of her thumb and forefinger under the points of my cheekbones, sometimes quite painfully. I would think to myself: "What am I supposed to put there? I can't put my voice there because it comes from my throat, everybody knows that. What am I supposed to do to get it to go there and how will I know when it is there? She keeps talking about feeling something, but I don't feel anything. Sometimes I feel vibrations around my face and nose and my lips tickle when I hum, but the tickle appears inconsistently on different pitches. There's just no reason or predictability to it."
The problem was, there had been no clear connection established between cause (proper placement) and effect (a resonant, robust tone) in my mind. There is a logic error in such a method. The singer is required to know what to do to place the resonance BEFORE acquiring an ability to sense it. Reverse engineering!
The secret to successful resonance management is to remember what every function affecting the process feels, looks and sounds like when you are making the right sound. The development of an impeccable proprioceptive memory is essential to any kind of physical activity. Ask any Alexander or Feldenkreis expert.
When you can repeat the desired behavior with absolute predictability it proves you've mastered the technique. Any terms and descriptions used in achieving this goal are only good if they are helpful.
I still use words that could be interpretted as "placement" terms in my teaching today. Sometimes I find myself saying things like: "We need to move the resonance from the back of your throat toward the front of your mouth more. You're holding the space in the back of your throat too wide open and that makes a sound that's too 'hooty'. We need to find a way to open up more room in the front of your mouth in the area above the tip of your tongue, while relaxing the distention of the soft palate and pharynx in the back of your throat a bit. That will help you produce a more balanced tone. Let's try opening the front of the mouth a bit more vertically and make sure to keep the lips away from the teeth. Think of the way a trumpet bell is shaped. Try it like this. . ."
The example above could still be interpretted as placement, at least in the sense that it names specific anatomical locations where resonance events are to take place. I hope that I give the singer an idea about what to do to make a difference in the sound they produce by telling them what kinds of physical actions they can control to change them.
The "trumpet bell" is about as far as I go with mental imagery, in that I ask the student to imagine the bell of a trumpet as an example of approximately how the lips are to be shaped. I also show them. My students tell me that they form a picture (image) in their mind. It seems to have a practical application to what we are doing.
I avoid telling a student what they should sense as the traditionalists did. I ask a lot of questions instead. It will often be something I like, "What was that? That was absolutely wonderful! What were you seeing and / or feeling and / or hearing when you did it? Exactly how do you think you were able to do what you did? What did you do differently from what you were doing before? Do it again, right now and let's make sure you have complete control and can do it as often as you please."
All the lessons I give are recorded. I immediately make note of any serendipitous event so that I can document the discovery in detail later. Failure to document is a horrible waste of often hard - won discovery. If you stay in this business long, you'll inevitably run into some other situation where stuff you the threw out would have been useful. Avoid reinventing the wheel. Warmest regards, Les
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