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Style Conscious
Jeremy Fisher
suggests seven
ways to change your singing style (without changing your sound)
[this article first appeared in the March 2006 edition of the
Music Teacher Magazine]
"For the purposes of
this article I will assume that you are a classically trained singer
wishing to sing (in English) in a more contemporary style.
Let’s look first at one of the most misunderstood
concepts in classical singing:
Line
Cutting or interrupting the line is probably the biggest single
thing you can change in your singing.
A standard classical phrase usually arches up from the
first note and arches down to the last note. The ideal is
uninterrupted sound, evenly matched throughout. In more contemporary
styles, matching the sound throughout is less important, as words
and specific emotions take centre stage. There is usually no inbuilt
need to sustain projected tone over a large orchestra, so delivery
is more colloquial. Actors compare this to delivery for stage and
for screen acting.
Take the first few lines of a song, and speak them as
if on the phone to a close friend. Notice where you breathe (many
people take breaths in the middle of sentences) and which words you
emphasise. The important thing here is to be intimate.
You are allowed to cut the vocal line whenever you
like, as long as you have a good dramatic reason for doing so. This
often goes completely against classical training so I use the
following simple exercise to introduce breaking the line.
Exercise:
Choose a phrase and speak it several times, using a different word
to breathe after each time.
If you are successful on the first attempt, you can add
that each breath point must make sense dramatically. My clients are
usually surprised at the number of dramatic reasons you can find
doing this exercise – chasing a thought, panicked in-breath, awe,
lost for words, pause for emphasis.
Repeat the exercise using the break but without
breathing.
Now sing the same phrase using the gaps, hesitations or
cutting short of words that you have discovered in the spoken
version.
The results include a more authentic use of text, a
change of focus from sound to meaning, and a freedom in performance.
If you are running out of breath in a particular performance, you
can cut the line and alter the shape of the phrase without losing
the dramatic intensity.
And it’s not cheating!
Breath
A highly contentious subject; almost everyone has thoughts about
breath, whether it’s what they should be doing or can’t do, or
whether they don’t have enough (very rarely do they think they have
too much).
I wish to lay my cards on the table – one size does not
fit all. Different phrases require different amounts of breath, as
do different voice qualities, different vocal styles and different
tessituras. There is not even one particular breathing pattern or
habit that can successfully sustain all the different vocal styles.
The most important points of breathing are:
Many budding
crossover singers are locked into a single breathing pattern, taking
in a specified amount of air and holding it back until the end of
the phrase (however long). You may have already discovered from
cutting the line that breathing patterns in contemporary music are
much more flexible. How do you notice your own breathing patterns?
Exercise:
Take a musical phrase and sing it through in one breath. Then take
in half your normal amount of air and sing it again. Then take in a
quarter of your normal amount of air and sing it again. What do you
notice? Can you feel yourself going into negative pressure? Where
you are squeezing to find the air?
Now take in a much larger amount of air than normal and
sing the phrase again. What do you notice at the beginning? At the
end? This exercise helps my clients find the optimum amount of air
for the phrase out of context.
Exercise:
Take the same musical phrase and use the 'cutting the line'
exercises to discover different shapes in the phrase. Each different
shape will require a different amount of air, because you have
numerous opportunities to top up. The same phrase can require
different amounts of air depending on its meaning, volume and
setting.
Decay
Decay focuses on the shaping of individual words, particularly on
long notes. The emphasis in classical generic terms is on a full
sustaining of the sound to the end of the note <=====, or
occasionally <======>. But decay can be used as an expressive tool
and usually becomes more exaggerated as the music becomes more
contemporary.
There are various shapes you can follow, including long
sustain with late, medium decay ======>>, or swift increase of
volume/tone followed by long decay <===>>>>>>.
More extreme versions can include =>----------
or ====>-------
or even =>--------<==.
Experiment with the positioning, the length and the
speed of your decay.
The use of decay is bolder in contemporary singing,
with adjoining words often having completely different decay
patterns. Listen to Frank Sinatra for a stylish and effective
combination of word decay.
continued
©
2006 Jeremy Fisher
Click here to read Style Conscious
page 2
Jeremy Fisher is a performance coach, writer, director of Vocal
Process and author of the free ebook
86 things you never hear a singer say
This article appears
by kind permission of
Rhinegold
Publishing Ltd
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Giving the student broader knowledge about the structures of the
larynx can be effective on many levels of their training and
understanding. The 'moveable larynx' has long been the starting
point of Vocal Process courses including Singing and the Actor Training.
Download:
build_your_own_
tilting_larynx.pdf
[2-page PDF, 294kb]
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