New dates for your diary!

We'll begin with a whole raft of dates for courses new and familiar for 2009 and 2010. Occasionally we get emails about our training days saying "Oh, if only you'd given us more notice!". Well, we always pay attention to your emails and comments, so we're including in this eZINE the next six months of new dates... Before you start reading this next paragraph, make sure you have your diary in front of you!

2009

"What a wonderful three days - I am still feeling so excited by the  work that we did, I feel like ringing all my students and telling them  to come for a lesson immediately,  I can't remember the last time that I felt so motivated as a performer and a teacher - it is really quite extraordinary especially as I came expecting to gain more confidence in my teaching and went away believing in myself as a performer."
Teresa, opera singer & teacher on Singing and the Actor Training July 09

Find Your Power Voice is happening in central London on Saturday 7 November. This is one of our newest courses, and this will be the first time we have run it in London. This is a practical "do it, feel it, understand it" workshop to help you find and support more power in your voice. So if you need more "kerching" in your money notes, click here now to read about Find Your Power Voice

The brand new course How YOUR Voice WORKS hits York on Sunday 22 November. We're bringing the course to the excellent Millers' Yard venue a short walk from York Station. This is a perfect course for singers who don't have time for regular lessons, or who want to improve their choral singing. We'll be focussing on breath (finding and using, and what to do when you want more), resonance and stamina.
When we ran this course in Cambridge (see the report below) we had to close the booking at 90 people. The York venue is much smaller, so make sure you do not miss out. We're already booking up!
Click here to read more about the course and to book your place. And remember to bring your singing colleagues with you for a discount.

2010

Into 2010 and the beginning of our Integrated Voice^TM Training Programme Module One.

The first three days are open to anyone, and we begin with the popular Muscles Alive! course from Jacob Lieberman. This will take place at RADA on 23 January 2010. The day will begin by debunking some of the myths about posture - what it is and what to look for. Discover how posture affects the voice, and when to leave it alone! The day includes some hands-on exercises and tips to help you identify possible problems and tensions in your students.

Also at RADA on the following two days (24 and 25 January) is the Vocal Anatomy and Physiology In Depth course from Tom and Sara Harris. This is designed for people who want to know more about the mechanism of the voice and how it works - it really lives up to its title! You will discover why breathing is so important to singing, how to "deconstruct" the parts of your voice, why articulation is not just a load of old vowels, and how the entire complex structure fits together and works "as a team".

Computer Voice Training will happen on 27 February, and for this Jeremy will be joined for the first time by Jude Brereton. Jude is highly experienced at handling voice analysis programmes, and the event is shaping up to be an exciting one.

The Developing Voice will take us to March 27 2010 at RADA. Jenevora Williams' day is always packed with people wanting to know more about the training and care of child and teenage voices. We'll be telling you more about the day in a later eZINE, but in the meanwhile, make sure you award yourself the time to attend.

We're always adding new dates to our forthcoming courses page as they become available, so make sure to check the page regularly.

How YOUR Voice WORKS in Cambridge - Jeremy reports

"On Saturday 12 September we gave the first ever run of our How YOUR Voice WORKS training day in Cambridge, sponsored by the prize-winning Cambridge Chord Company.  Since the day was aimed mainly at choral singers and their trainers, we had participants from 14 different choruses, and a wide range of musical tastes and singing styles, from Barbershop to Classical Choral, to Show Choirs and Pop choruses. With more than 90 people in the room, and booking closed several days before the event, anticipation was high.

The day began with a vocal warmup which included waking up and working the voice itself, activating and connecting the body, and tuning in the ears with sing+listen exercises. Then one of the solo quartets from Cambridge Chord Company taught the whole group a Barbershop Tag (the coda to a piece full of tasty harmonies), which we used throughout the day. As one participant said later:

"The warm up was amazing: my voice came out of me with ease and clarity...it felt as if someone else was singing!"

Thanks to the excellent AV equipment we were able to show the How Does Your Voice Work? video that I made for the Science Museum in London - it's a five-minute film designed for people who have never seen a voice in action, and contains some fun footage of me singing My Way with a camera up my nose.

We covered quite a range of topics during the morning, including Constriction and Release of the false vocal folds.

"I could feel the throat open and suddenly I had 'resonance'".

We worked with breath, sound, finding where "space" occurs in the voice, and different ways of starting and finishing together. In addition to the Barbershop tag, we used the opening of the Hallelujah Chorus, which worked well for the standard SATB and the more unusual TTBB and SSAA Barbershop lineup where the tune is often in the second part down.

In the afternoon we were given a special performance of It's Impossible from Cambridge Chord Company (a great rendition from the guys, although when it comes to singing technique it's not a statement I agree with!). The rest of the afternoon was spent working on connecting the voice and the body, and playing with different resonances. A Your Burning Questions session rounded off the day.

We have had the most amazing feedback from the participants since the day, with 95% of our respondents saying they gained from the course, and 75% saying that the day has changed the way they think about voice.

"Thank you so much. I can't wait to try out my new voice at my next choir meet!"

We've got a few little film and sound snippets from the day which we hope to put up on the Vocal Process YouTube page in the near future. We'll keep you posted."

Remember, if you would like to know more about this training day, you can read about the forthcoming How YOUR Voice WORKS event in York (November 22).
 

The new "Hosting a Vocal Process Course" pack

The Wellcome Trust - an update

You may remember back in July that Gillyanne and Jeremy gave a presentation for the Wellcome Trust in London. The evening was called Vocal Limits, and was part of the Apparatus collection of lectures.

It was a heady mix of performance, lecture, interactive presentation, interview and audience Q&A, facilitated by popular science communicator and standup Timandra Harkness. We've just received the feedback from the audience members, and there seems to be a real thirst for knowledge in the area of voice and vocal mechanics. Here are some of the comments:

Entertaining + informative + good audio-visual material.

Good mixture of education and performance.

The event had lots of different activities - performance, presentation, video, questions and answers, take home activities, audience participation etc, all of which made for a stimulating evening.

Lots of very useful information delivered with verve. The speakers were very knowledgeable and there was a good balance of facts and practical examples. I thought the inclusion of live performance (piano/songs) made the lecture very captivating as everybody could instantly connect to the examples given. The paper cut vocal cords were a bonus!

The speakers were incredibly knowledgeable about their subject with excellent presentation skills.

Really engaging, authoritative and 'vocal' speakers, delivering a wonderfully full and finely tuned, aided and abetted by an extremely able and amicable chair.

Very unusual event. Learnt quite a lot. The speakers were very funny and answered our questions with knowledge and common sense.

And the negative comments?

More time given to this subject and these particular speakers - we couldn't get enough of them and didn't!

That's the sort of negative comment we like! We've just been back to the Wellcome Trust to discuss future plans, including the possibility of taking the presentation out on the road - we'll keep you posted.

Coaching in central London

Gillyanne and Jeremy are now coaching regularly in Central London, in addition to their work at the studios in Forest Hill. So many people we are working with have told us they are excited to be able to see us in the studios at Marble Arch. We have just a couple of spaces left on a few of our central London days: October 13 and November 10-11.

If you'd like to take up one of these coaching spaces, please email Tawny as soon as possible to book.

Gillyanne talks to VASTA about breathing

Breath and the Vocal Folds - A Musical Theatre Perspective

Rena Cook (RC): I had the privilege of working with Gillyanne Kayes in 1999. As part of the Voice Studies curriculum at the Central School, we were introduced to Vocal Process, an approach to voice training advanced by Kayes in her book Singing and the Actor. Through numerous workshops and private tutoring, I began to see that her very specific and detailed approach to the vocal tract was an extremely useful component to the comprehensive voice training model I was in the process of integrating.

I was delighted when Gillyanne agreed to be interviewed about her views on breath for VSR. Her pedagogy is widely recognized for its practical, immediate and accessible techniques now used throughout the world, not the least of which in London’s West End where many of her students regularly perform. Her work on the specific subject of breath and its relationship to the vocal folds provides a fresh and unique take on traditional performance breath approaches. What follows is a portion of that interview.

RC: Could you start by telling me about your journey with breath? I mean, as a singer, then a young teacher, and now as a world-renowned voice trainer, what has been your process to awareness of the voice and, specifically, breath?

Gillyanne Kayes (GK): The voice and breath, yes, it’s been a fascinating trip so far. My original training was as a singer and musician: I played three instruments including voice and opted to take a Bachelor’s degree in music. After taking a degree I went to study singing more seriously. Having always sung quite naturally, not really having to think much about technique. I just “sang.” So looking back, it seems as though some of my early teachers rather obsessed about breath.

And I don’t mean in a positive way. You know, that way of talking about “the breath” in a disembodied way, as though it was some mysterious “external” that I had to find. I think I wrote in Singing and the Actor that it was like a “holy grail of breath.” The effect is to makes the student focus on and about breath so that any intuitive awareness of breath and voicing are in danger of getting lost. The whole thing becomes a mystery that only the teacher can reveal.

But there were some good things in my early training too. Ilse Wolf, who was my teacher for several years, introduced me to the idea that learning to breathe was best done by breathing out. Her catch phrase was “breathe-out-to-sing.” At the time that was an eye opener. She wasn’t keen on filling up with air and that was certainly refreshing in the environment of classical singing, where “getting through the phrase in one breath” seemed to be a defined goal.

Ilse’s approach to breath and phrasing was that you could take a breath anywhere you wanted if the interpretation was right and that an audience would not notice but just say “what expressive phrasing!” This approach stood me in good stead when I came to work with actors, where the focus is much more on breath being aligned with intention.

So, returning to the catchphrase “breathe-out-to-sing”, I suppose, up until that point, I must have either been told, or had assumed, that getting the air “in” (and plenty of it) was the key element of breathing technique. Without having the language that science-friendly singing teachers have today, Ilse understood that breathing is a “reflex” action, which you will mess up if you focus on filling up with air; and she also understood on an intuitive level that the key element in phonation (whether singing or speaking) is breath and voicing—a balancing act between the breath and the vocal folds. So, we come to one of my personal hobby-horses, which is that phonation is interrupted airflow.
 

To read the rest of this interview, please click here to go to the Resources section of the Vocal Process website.