�Round tones, Miss Lamont, round tones!�
9:06 p.m.
My annoying student was especially irksome today. I yelled at her again, although this time I didn�t swear, I was just trying to make a point. For some crazy reason, she actually respects me, even though it is so difficult for her to do what I ask, even when I tell her in minute detail what I want her to do, which muscle to twitch even. I sometimes feel I should write my own book on vocal pedagogy, but my methods are so unorthodox that it would be a laughingstock, I fear. For instance, this girl is primarily a clarinettist, and not a bad one at that. So I will often use wind-player imagery to evoke the singing responses I�m looking for. Unfortunately with her it doesn�t always work.
Today we were working on a short Mozart song (one page, that�s all) in German. She sang it through in this tiny little voice, totally at odds with the huge sound I know she is capable of and which I hear every time she lets loose that horsey laugh of hers. So I tried to get her to sing each note and melisma with a Ho!, punching out the sound with her epigastrium. This worked for about three notes, and then it died again. So I asked her, �When you play forte on your clarinet, what do you do?� I already knew the answer, even though I�m not a clarinettist. She couldn�t say, except that she commented that she needed more support to play quietly than loudly. So I told her that when she plays her instrument loudly, she makes her throat bigger, when she plays softer, she narrows her throat. She thought about it for a moment, and then agreed that this is in fact correct.
I then went on to say that with the clarinet, she needs more air pressing on the reed for more volume, less for less. With singing, however, the air has already passed over the �reed�, i.e. the vocal folds, but the production of dynamics remains the same. A bigger throat produces a larger sound and vice versa. I then demonstrated what I was talking about.
Another analogy I made was the position of the different registers. In a clarinet, you have three registers all contained within one long cylinder of wood. In the human voice, you have at least that many (don�t forget the coloratura soprano whistletone, folks) and they are all contained within one instrument as well. Just as a clarinet is a long, narrow column, the best way I have found of describing the placement of the singing voice is a plumbline hanging from the top of the head where the flat part of the skull starts to bulge out again towards the back down to the voice box itself, a line which runs just behind the ear. I tell my students to place the sound on this line. As it rises in pitch, it climbs upwards, as it lowers, it descends. Of course, this is all a trick, because singers don�t have conscious control over their instruments per se, and it is very difficult to tell someone to expand, contract, shape soft tissue to minute specifications. Hence, octave leaps and register changes occur on the line, they are directly �above� or �below�. It is a very economical way to use the voice, it requires less air, and is always going to be in tune. I�m not just making this up, this is something I have worked out through years of teaching and personal practise, and it really does work. I see immediate results in most of my students.
However, this poor girl just can�t do it. Today I tried something different with her. I had her imagine a ball on her tongue at the front of her mouth just behind her teeth. As she ascended in pitch, the ball was to expand, as she descended, it was to contract. This actually did help get the sound out of her nose for a while, until she got into the head voice region, where the soft palate slammed down again and she sounded like an old-fashioned telephone operator. I�m almost ready to call it quits.
In other news, I still haven�t found my sunglasses, but my book of Latin verbs arrived in the mail.
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