Voice and Human Potential update!

I find ... constantly ... that the most important bit of information needed to understand a concept or complete a task, or that one really necessary step in a process on the computer, was not listed nor mentioned by those writing or giving the instructions. It can be frustrating, but then, it's just like real life, isn't it? Sometimes the lack of that one thing is simply an oversight on the part of the instructor. Sometimes it is because they do that one thing so naturally it never occurs to them that for someone else struggling to learn this ... whatever it is ... that one little self-obvious step is instead something totally hidden in the fog of confusion and darkness.

But how many of the really important lessons of life can you learning by hearing someone talk? We seem to need the pain of failure, the disappointment of hopes and dreams, before we completely internalize and live by a lesson. Though why this should be true of computer program instructions I do not understand! Ah well, maybe I've not learned that lesson yet?

In this week's voice lesson, I had another major "A-ha!" moment. We are taking me ever higher in pitch, and as a tenor, that is where I need to learn to "live" vocally. Yet I have always felt pressure build up in my head as the pitch gets well up there, and it forces me to strain against it, to force the sound somewhere. But no forcing is allowed in vocal production, as tension always causes even more strain upon the listener than the singer! So, I've been working with trying various methods of avoiding the buildup of back-pressure in the head on higher pitches.

Along the way, of course, I made the most gorsh-awful squawks and squeaks. And what seemed to work, to be the answer, worried me. We've been working so hard at getting the sound out in front, and not swallowed inside me. But what seemed to work involved letting the resonance, the vibrating pulse of the sound, stay inside the center of my head, and go right up through the center of my head to my skull. It was just so wrong from everything I've been working on with Jackie and Kevin!

So, as we worked on scales and vowels into the passagio (passage into head-voice) and head voice (that bizarre area that isn't "regular" chest voice nor falsetto where tenors and sopranos go to get high), I talked of the process and findings I'd achieved, and noted my concerns that I'd been going down the wrong road. Yet as I was singing, she was very impressed with the reduction in tension and improvement in sound quality up high. And we spent some time there.

And then, she just sort of absent-mindedly noted that while the pitch resonance needed to go up through a pipe through the center of the head clear to the top of the skull (as I'd noted it felt it was doing), the vowel resonance (where in the head or mouth of the singer the vowel "feels" to be) needed to keep coming forward in (or even out front of) the mouth.

Whoa, we gotta stop and talk here!

All along, over all these years of singing in choirs and taking lessons, EVERYONE has always said the upper parts of the voice are produced quite similar to the lower parts, and should be as unified as possible. Now I'm being told that above a certain point, the pitch sensation goes one direction and the vowel another ... at a perpendicular angle, getting farther from each other as I go up. This is ... WRONG.

Isn't it?

Jackie sat there very quietly for a moment, and just looked at me while thinking through something with her hand over her mouth. No, she said after a long minute's thought, it isn't wrong, it is correct. The sensation of pitch resonance goes right up to the top of the head for tenors and sopranos ... as the vowel comes farther and farther forward. They start out very similar in "feel" but begin to diverge somewhere on the path to higher pitches.

And it was so natural for her that she had never thought of mentioning it. In fact, neither of us could think of ever hearing or seeing anyone talk about this. Which seems bizarre, as it is one of the MOST needed bits of understanding to gain access to a beautiful and easy sound while singing those high notes!

It was amazing, as we worked at adopting the mental and then the physical applications of this realization, how quickly I could sing my high scales, repeatably, and with vastly reduced tension. And at such altitude! We've worked up to the "tenor" high Bb before, though it was produced with enough tension to sound quite strained. We went to Bb, softened and lightened the vowels and got them forward, then to B, then to C. The tenor top "C". Stable, on command, and repeatable. Not at all "pretty" yet, but then, I was up there fairly easily, and now we can work on learning how to sing pretty up there over time.

So, how much of LIFE is like that? We struggle, we fight to gain an inch of progress, we feel stupid as we just can't find a way to do or be what seems so easy for others ... and then, we find that one little thing that isn't what we'd thought it must be. Suddenly, what was such a great struggle to get even close to doing is doable with only a reasonable bit of effort and attention. Soon, it will be a natural motion, an easy step, an effortless process.

And after a short period of enjoying the new-found ability, it starts all over again. Welcome to the world!