Buskers in the quad
9:37 p.m.
Both of the students I taught today were with me last year as rank beginners, and one of them is actually a music minor doing her required hour-long lessons this year. She’s a very sweet girl, enthusiastic, most desirous of pleasing me, and yet she is one of the most frustrating people I have ever had to deal with. I don’t know if I explain things poorly, but she simply does not get what I say. She confuses things, thinks I have said one thing when I have said another, and it drives me insane.
For example, she has a tiny, held-back sound throughout her range. Today I finally figured out why and what is causing it. When I said to her that it sounded held back, she agreed that it did to her as well. Then I explained again (I already did this at least once last year) about vocal registers, comparing them to strings on a violin.
Every voice has at least three registers, and for sake of argument, we will use the soprano as our model in this case, as this is the case at hand. There is the chest voice which extends from the singer’s lowest possible sung note to about a G in the middle of the staff. After that point, when pushed further, the chest voice will break into middle voice with a dramatic yodel. I always demonstrate this for my students because I think it’s kind of neat. After that the middle register continues up to the E-flat on the top space of the staff, whereupon the true head voice begins. This goes on for another fifth (to B-flat) before the coloratura “whistle tone” starts.
I compare them to violin strings because you can play many of the same notes on two adjacent strings, but at some point you have to switch to the next string, be it the higher or the lower one. In the voice, the laryngeal opening can only accommodate so many sound frequencies before it has to change shape. The higher the register, the smaller the opening. You can do a certain amount of fudging, but at some point, the larynx has to adapt for the higher or lower notes.
The middle register is also called voix mixte, which is French for mixed voice. We call it this because when a singer goes below that yodel point, the G above middle-C, she doesn’t suddenly plunge into chest voice, but brings the lighter, more feminine quality of the higher notes with her. Sopranos can generally do this to the middle-C and sometimes lower if they have a great deal of control. This section of the voice is the scariest for sopranos because it is the most difficult to support and make a consistently good sound throughout. The blending of the chest voice with the middle voice is found most often in classically-trained singers. Pop singers either use their chest voices or end up with a breathy sound in that part of their ranges.
So my student was not using her middle voice at all. She was singing in head voice and bringing that sound down into the area where she should have had the most power, i.e. that portion of the staff between G and E-flat. As a result, the sound was puny and whiny, unsupported and inconsequential. Not very nice things, all in all. If she went below that G, she practically faded out of existence, or you heard the break. I explained this to her and forced her to sing in her voix mixte by having her produce a sound on the F just below that crucial G, supporting it to the max and opening her throat and raising her soft palate.
Lo and behold, she made the best sound I have yet heard come out of her. We continued the exercise by having her sing three- and four-note rising step-wise melodic lines, keeping the support steady and the pharynx huge in order to get her up to the D and E-flat without going into her head voice. I was actually quite thrilled at my success, or rather, at her success. However, she didn’t really know what we were doing, and why we were doing it, and I ran out of time and patience trying to explain it to her yet again.
We’ll see what she’s retained at her next lesson. Why is it that I spend the most time and energy on the students who seem to benefit the least from it?
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