In memory of my wonderful singing teacher, Mollie Petrie, I thought I should try and encapsulate some of her many words of wisdom. Although she too had an inspirational teacher, much of what Mollie knew about the singing voice was distilled from trial and error, working with singers of all capabilities. She did not mind teaching the ‘ungifted’ as she would be determined to give them a beautiful sound and help them discover the voice within. Thus she learnt how to ‘build’ a voice and so much instinctive knowledge one can never find in books!

She was charismatic and focussed but fierce in her judgement. Her ears may not pick up the doorbell but even in her eighties she was able to detect the slightest change in tone quality or a dull vowel or a miss-placed pitch. Everyone of her students from the wonderful Susan Chilcott to the humble rest of us was submitted to the one note lesson, yes you needed to have stamina learning from Mollie and to be fearless! You rarely got a ‘good’ from her but then she only really worked hard those she felt had promise. I waited 20 years for a ‘well done’ and then I thought she must have been unwell!

In her last years she taught from her home, a rambling Georgian farmhouse in Dundry, full of treasures like Mollie herself. Sadly her loving and adorable husband Eric passed away when they were at the ICVT in New Zealand. But Mollie never stopped thinking about the voice, “you know all that crying has made me realise how much I need to use those lower abdominals”. Her singers were her family, as she had no children of her own, though she dearly loved her sister in law and her nephew and nieces. And of course we all loved her as our singing mother!

So what words of wisdom amongst the many that pop into my head as I teach or adjudicate:

The fingers around the eyes to help lift the sound

The ‘sniff hum’ to get the ring

The ‘bunged Ooo’ to release tension and to feel the resonance

The cat pose – on the floor like the yoga exercise- to let the larynx hang and release tension again

Italian open vowels from Tina Ruta’s great friendship and advice BANANA and double consonants!!

I know there are more but this will do for a start. It was as much the way she taught that inspired me, no fancy jargon, but lots of well thumbed scientific knowledge, no fads or ‘methods’, she even hated the word ‘technique’. Her love of words and language and the music that meant so much to her, singers were just the vehicles or vessels for the music and the poetry. She could not stand the teachers who claimed they had all the answers, she was constantly learning herself and we all benefited from her drive to understand how the singing voice really worked.

 

Talking in the car, on the way to the University to teach I started trying to explain to my dearly beloved husband about using the voice. Poor fellow is trying to learn the tenor part of the Messiah choruses and his wife, who teaches everyone else to sing, is not being much help to him.

… So here are some of the ten tips she should offer:

1. Try not to focus too much on what is happening in your throat. There are various teaching methods that will try to persuade you that you can really control the muscles and fine tune the vocal folds, but this is not my approach as I think you can end up with a tighter sound that is not truly free.
2. Start by getting the breath free and the lower body loose.
3. When you do scales start at the top and go down. If you are trying to get higher with a free sound, use the idea of a falling sigh.
4. Shaping the vowel spaces at the back of the throat can change the colour of your sound so work on Italianate vowels over the passaggio areas. Feel the difference between OO and Ee and Aa with your tongue shape and soft palate. Do that on different areas of your range and observe and listen and feel.
5. Use forward resonance to help focus the sound, hums and bright E’s can help. It can help to feel it as if it is a mask, although that is quite an old fashioned idea, it still has some merits.
6. Practice the parts without words, if you feel tongue tightening or shoulders or jaw use a kissy OO shape. Yawn if the throat tightens.
7. Always release breath and tension before you sing and let the whole body take over the singing.
8. Keep eyes and ears pricked as if listening for something exciting to happen.
9. When you have lots of Handelian runs, split them up into sections and sing them light with motorbike Rrrrrs or diddle-dums to keep the vocalising light and free and flexible.
10. Work on the higher passages a little at a time and learn the notes an octave lower so that when you do sing them high you can focus on timbre rather than accuracy. Focus on one thing at a time!

1. Confront your judges – who says you can’t do it?
2. Laugh at yourself, it is not the end of the world if it goes wrong!
3. Use visualisation – like athletes do – imagine the whole performance – go through the whole process from walking onto the stage to walking off again.
4. Do you really want to cop out? I always say never again but when someone asks me to sing of course I say Yes!
5. Don’t rely on lucky charms like rabbit’s feet
6. Be prepared- the best cure for nerves is knowing you have done all the preparation you can. Rehearse before not during the performance.
7. Breathe deeply, it calms and centres and prepares you for singing.
8. Walk purposefully, you start performing as soon as you get out of your seat or the Green room, you become a singer, you are not an ordinary person anymore.
9. Enjoy the performance, smile, twinkle the eyes, feel the space around you, fill it up with music, you are just a vessel for the composer.
10. Sing and love the words and the music. You are not the greatest singer in the world, at least not yet, you are not important. Communicate the music, you are the vehicle. Remember very few adults can get up and sing on their own. You are special!

1. Go through the song several times, feel the mood of the music, sense the whole meaning of the song and don’t get stuck with too much detail initially.
2. Listen to a recording, use it to feel the ‘architecture’ of the piece. try to work out where the ‘building bricks’ are for easy learning. Try not to use recordings too much, you can learn other’s mistakes that way!
3. Adopt clear learning paths: words and music.
4. Words: memorise the poem, write it out, look at the way the words are used as a poem and as a song, picture the moods/the story.
5. Music: check pitch/rhythm, examine intervals, patterns and phrases, sense harmonic structure/accompaniments, the links of musical ideas.
6. Use different strategies to learn the same things, i.e. dance as you sing, colour a picture as you sing.
7. Revisit the whole song, REHEARSE.
8. At the same time you must realise that you are learning how to build your instrument, so watch the technical things you are doing while you are memorising, posture, balance, timbre.
9. Don’t sing the notes, sing the music!
10. Concentrate your efforts in short regular bursts, not last minute panicking, make song maps, sing to the dog, sing to the tape recorder and Good luck!

As the Renaissance Choir are using some of these on their website, for which I am very honoured, I thought I ought to put them up on my blog too!

Ten tips to avoid vocal tiredness

1. Keep body balanced, shoulder points, hips and ankles in line (in rehearsal breaks, bend over and stretch  and then build vertebrae up) – do diving board lifts with feet or if you feel extrovert ‘Da Vinci man’ stretches. When sitting in rehearsal try to keep the same elongated posture, you don’t need your legs to sing and when you do stand watch that you don’t lock your knees (difficult in a cold Scottish Kirk!)
2. Move shoulder points in tiny rotations, – no one should notice you doing it but you will feel the muscles even more than large cartwheel movements.
3. Imagine a massage extending from the ‘Clapham Junction’ knot at the nape of the neck to your low back (or even better work in pairs to get the feel of the downward stroke in rehearsal break – not the performance!).
4. Loosen the jaw, try ‘kissy’ lips when you get a chance and cleaning teeth with tongue, blowing bubbles, massage jaw line.
5. Keep the holes behind the eyes as open and free as you can. Face should be loose with ‘ecstatic nun’ expression! Or as the Americans’ say an ‘apple pie’ face.
6. Remember each repeated note is different, same pitch but different, feel it in the soft palate ‘St. Paul’s Cathedral Dome’ and let the acoustic take over (it’s like driving and taking the foot of the accelerator to save fuel). Don’t tighten or push. If you feel that happening tongue trill or lip trill or blow out cheeks!
7. When singing prolonged high notes; use your low back muscles and lift your back teeth (I know it’s impossible but imagine you are!) it will keep the back of the throat open.
8. Use resonance and vowel tuning to create a louder sound, don’t just take a bigger breath –it’s much harder work and you will get tired more quickly. However do keep breath deep when you have the chance as quick snatched breaths are also more tiring in the long run and tend to dry out the vocal folds. Warm up high hums and sighs are good.
9. As singers get nervous  they tend to lean forward; choral singers, in particular, aiming to please the conductor move the head forwards out of balance, this will quickly make your voice tired and tense.
10. Hydration is key; but it starts at least 24hours before concert, a quick swig before you sing feels good but it doesn’t hydrate the body, start the day before keeping water levels up. You should be able to sing all day and never get vocally tired. Don’t take strong throat pastilles, just suck a glucose sweet if necessary. Strepsils have an anaesthetic which means you don’t feel the problems and sing on when you should stop!

Susan Yarnall (Dr. S.J. Monks)

I know this will not always a be a situation singing teachers might find themselves in but having been through a serious illness myself I am aware that singing can still be done and can often contribute to a greater sense of well-being. Prolonged medication, chemotherapy etc. can affect hearing, (more in the way we perceive our voices than any long term damage I would testify). So for my lovely students, some of whom suffer dreadful ill health this is what I have learnt from you. Thank you!

1. Try to get the guts of the singers involved. Breathe OUT first and feel the lower body respond as the air comes in.
2. Try to engage the eyes, the temple area in the skull. Sparkle if you can, the eyes are the door of the soul!
3. Lift the soft palate, that will stimulate the gland that sends around all the positive hormones! Yawning is good, it stretches the back of the throat, your ‘trumpet’ bell of sound.
4. Releasing the whole body from the toes, via the knees, upwards to the shoulders and neck is good for you.
5. Recommend more water- hydration is the key, we are after all made of water and it helps to wash out the bugs from the system.
6. Imagination- try to engage the creative part of the brain to access different sounds, an operatic voice, or try being the Queen, make it fun, play out different roles to shake expectations and access new areas of sound.
7. Short tasks are better than long ones, 5 minutes at a time, plenty of rest breaks to keep the elasticity of the muscles from strain. But keep an interest by exploring musical phrasing etc.
8. Focus on positives.
9. Keep vocal range small initially, though they might be surprised – I could still hit top Cs even through chemo!
10. Mozart, Handel, Gershwin are good ‘healers’.

1. Flexibility – we lose elasticity in our muscles as we age but you can sing well into your nineties so do those Handelian runs, they are good for you! Engage your lower abdomen with trampoline exercise and panting like a dog. (The trampoline exercise is my name for octave staccato leaps.)
2. Connect all your range, do the falling sigh with no breaks, sliding up and down from as high as you can to as low as you can.
3. Release tightness in the jaw and tongue, neck side to side, not rotating but loosen all that area around ‘Clapham Junction’ in the neck.
4. Release the pelvis with hip rotation and release the knees.
5. Extend your breath capacity – we start to lose this from our twenties so we do have to work at keeping it as large as possible. Rib swings are good. Breathe OUT first!
6. Keep the ears alert, upright posture like a hare on its hind legs listening for danger – we lose our hearing of upper partials from the age of 5 so singing from 0-5 years is good because it cements aural memory!
7. Balance Body and Mind, develop your unique colour through resonance.High hums, bright ‘e’s, lip and tongue trills.
8. Keep the basic vowels open and Italian, you don’t need to open the mouth but the back of the throat.
9. articulation needs to be worked on, lips teeth and tongue need to move quickly
10. Try the ‘bunged’ OO sound . Make an OOOO with forward lips and sing on that then put the tongue on the space and feel the sinuses ring.

Having spent the last two years working with an amazing group of European singers and choral directors as part of a pan-European project called LeoSings I have decided to cement some of the ideas into ten tips on various subjects. As a singing teacher I owe an awful lot to my colleagues in AOTOS and EVTA so I cannot claim these ideas are unique to me but I think they are helpful, so here goes with the 1st of my ten tips starting with healthy singing.

1. Know your facts about the singing voice and be very clear, healthy singing does NOT hurt!
2. Keep water levels up, not over doing it but maintaining good hydration in the body.
3. Balance body and mind, “head, shoulders, knees and toes” as the children’s song goes, but watch the jaw, tongue and neck area and the lower abdomen area.
4. Watch the knees don’t lock and over tense the psoas muscle.
5. Freedom in the diaphragm area and space for it to move are essential. Rotate those hips Elvis!
6. Check hearing – as your unique timbre depends on how you use feedback, aural and kinaesthetic!
7. Be aware of the side effects of medication…
8. Deep full body breathing helps you access your full voice, don’t be content with half singing. Even the great ‘crooners’ used more body than they let on. Sinatra was a master.
9. Resonance and focus are the keys to unlock the colours of your voice, everyone is unique, don’t forget that.
10. Enjoy your sound, ‘if they hear the ring, they’ll pay you to sing!’ Now wouldn’t that be good.

I wonder if anyone is like me in searching for new ways of saying the same things. Singing is such a universal and natural expression of who we are that, in many ways, there is nothing ‘new’ to add and yet…

So each break between university terms I search and this year I’ve been reading about porcelain in Edmund de Waal’s The White Road, looking at the art of David Jones, reading Tom Wright on contemplation, and Simon Schama on The Face of Britain. I tend to move towards poetry and art rather than music and song. I hope that my students are also following my suggestions of walking in the countryside, reading poetry and visiting art galleries in the vacation.

What have I discovered? Something about the layers of meaning to all art, the pursuit of the purest ideals. I am going to simplify my ten tips and start putting them on to my blog. Meanwhile the house needs a good clean out too so I’ll sign out now.

Here I am in Paris just after the terrible events of 13/11/15. Here to talk about singing but with tears in my heart and yet it is so important to continue with the work of the European Teachers of Voice EVTA and also LeoSings with our partners across Europe. We celebrate the diversity of singing and how music and song can heal divisions, honour our unique culture, and restore identity.

It feels very strange walking the streets, being brave to have a coffee, sitting on the boulevard, going to the shops, carrying on a ‘normal’ way of life while mourning the loss of so many innocent lives.

Life is about living, being, and trying to be good. No one is good but God and we share with Moslems, Christians and Jews the same God. But He is greater than all the human limitations that we make in our religious responses to our Creator.

So when we sing we pray, even if we are not sure who we are praying too. The unanswered questions like Bernstein and Rilke  spoke about will be with us till we pass to the other side. We must live the questions, live the songs, live the cries of pain and grief and share the love.

The Pelican bares her breast and pierces her heart so that the blood will be drunk by her children that they may live. She sacrifices herself for the future. It does not make sacrifice a good thing but it is the response we make to those who who have been sacrificed that makes the difference.