On Thu, 30 Mar 2000 RRicciardi@S... wrote:
> Anyway, here's my dilemma:
> I am interested in finding out some of the ways singers, tenors in
> particular are able to reach high notes, particularly for dramatic or lyric
> tessitura, such as in Tosca, or Manon, any other time when the Tenor has to
> hit high notes in a manner that powerful, clear and beautiful. I am also
> wondering if it's different for other voices, do sopranos do it differently
> ? or mezzos ? or baritones? I realize as a tenor who still hasn't completed
> perfecting and stabilizing my vocal technique, this issue is always in my
> mind as well as the minds of a lot of tenors that I know, whether they are
> beguiners or advanced singers. I realize that for some people hitting the
> high notes dramatically is a piece of cake and for others (like me) hitting
> them correctly takes a lot of hard work.
Learning how to produce big, lush high notes has been a two-stage process
for me. First, I had to learn how to produce easy, unforced high notes
that "spin", without squeezing ribs, tightening jaw or tongue, or doing
any of the other things that would "force" out the note and make it harsh
and edgy. To this end, my former teacher and I spent a lot of time
teaching me how to truly "float" the high notes way up in my cranium
(that's the imagery and sensation) - it was a combination of images,
actually - the first was the "floating" image, the second was a laser, the
idea being that the sound was very precise and focused, rather than
spread. When I accomplished this, I was able to produce very "lyric
soprano-like" high notes (in my mezzo range, of course) - clear,
bell-like, very easy to sing, almost "whistle-like" but with vibrato-spin
on them. In my head, the notes sounded very small and focussed, but my
teacher assured me that acoustically they were definitely audible and rich
enough sounding.
I started with a new teacher a little over a month ago, and one of the
first things she started working on with me was to get to the next stage,
which was to, as she put it, fulfill the promise of my middle register
when I moved into my upper register. The idea here is to bring the weight
of my middle register into my high notes. This is a matter of adding
compression and support, and also allowing the larynx to descend more when
I move higher - basically, the imagery she uses is that of a counterweight
- as the note ascends, there's a kind of vocal counterweight that must
descend, so the whole aural spectrum actually gets wider as the notes get
higher (and the result is that wonderful texture of overtones you hear
when big voices sing high notes well). So the idea isn't to take exactly
the same production you use on the middle register and move it, like a
ball bouncing up a stair step, to the upper register; instead, it's a
sense of opening up and down vocally as you sing higher.
It's very hard to convey these ideas in writing, but one thing I do know
is that I could NOT be doing Stage Two without having first succeeded with
Stage One to the point where I was always producing those "floaty" high
notes consistently well, without tension ever.
Hope this helps.
KM
=====
Ich singe, wie der Vogel singt,
Der in den Zweigen wohnet;
Das Lied, das aus der Kehle dringt,
Ist Lohn, der reichlich lohnet.
- J.W. von Goethe, WILHELM MEISTER
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http://www.radix.net/~dalila/index.html
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http://www.radix.net/~dalila/shicoff/shicoff.html
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