I’ve just had a student come with a common request. “Please can you help me prepare for an audition in 2 weeks time. I get so nervous – I’m fine once I get started but the first few bars are usually so bad I don’t get the part!”

Having had a few weeks holiday I thought I might be a bit rusty but in fact it was great to get back into teaching. Here are the tips I suggested:

1. Do what the sports psychologists do and imagine yourself going through the audition process as if you were preparing for a race. Get your family and friends to ‘act out’ the audition panel and put you through your paces.
2. You are being auditioned as soon as you step into the space/theatre/rehearsal room so start the deep breathing in anticipation of the ‘fight or flight’ reflex which will kick in making the breath shallow. The chances are you will have stabilised the breath pattern before you sing instead of three bars into the music.
3. Be prepared: know where your music is, mark it with a tab, check the accompanist is playing in the same key, make sure you have agreed a speed.
4. Where comfortable clothes but not so casual that you don’t feel ‘special’. I did an audition once in wellingtons because it was thick snow outside and it just didn’t work!
5. If it is a Music Theatre/Opera piece, you must have the back story in your mind, prepare a picture in your mind of what you are doing and where you are. Think of each phrase in terms of colours or emotions so that every note has a focus and a direction. This applies to art song as well. You need to build up the emotional layers of your interpretation so that your singing is rich and meaningful.
6. Highlight the ‘money’ notes and plan the architecture of the piece even if it is just a a 16 bar excerpt, you will be amazed at how much you can do in just 4 bars.
Watch out for diphthongs and unusual leaps that might reveal a lack of vocal energy or some insecurity in production. Iron out the diphthongs so you can sing really clear true vowels on the notes that matter.
7. Speak the words through. You may not think of yourself as an actor but it is essential that you have made the lyrics your own. Have fun saying them, angry, sad, flirtatiously etc. you will be amazed at how much that will colour your musical phrasing.
8. Be prepared for the unexpected- no chance to warm up??? then energise yourself, do a few high hums, rolled ‘r’s and walk on, catch the lights in your eyes and give all you’ve got!
9. Think about what you want to get from the audition, you might not get the part you wanted, are there any other parts, can they see something in you you couldn’t see yourself? Every time you sing you learn from your mistakes, so view mistakes as part of your learning curve as a performer.
10. Enjoy yourself or no one else will!

I wasn’t sure whether to write about this but a recent article of mine in the AOTOS magazine produced such a lot of interest I decided I should write about some of my experiences. 2 years ago I had a major operation removing most of the bits and pieces in my abdomen. I made a huge fuss about being a singer and indeed I was very well looked after. Blessed with countless prayers and an amazing surgical team at QA hospital in Portsmouth. I then had 6 sessions of powerful chemo but I managed to get to sing in Carnegie hall NYC only a few weeks after that had finished.
I recently met with another fellow singer who suffered a similar cancer experience and we got chatting about how singing had helped us both through what is a very challenging time for anyone.

I wonder whether I should start a self -help group though I have always been rather averse to them, or perhaps just a listening ear to anyone faced with the effects of medication on their singing voice and career. I am still working on it as an idea so if anyone wants to comment I would be grateful for your reactions. We know that singing is hugely beneficial to any cancer sufferers but in this instance I am a singer and make my living through singing and teaching, so it becomes even more crucial to find a way of Singing Through Cancer.

I’ve just got back from a super AOTOS Association of Teachers of Singing in Warwick University where one of the themes was community choirs. It is so good to hear about the resurgence of singing in the community and the enthusiasm of everyone taking part. It is something we are exploring in the LEOSings project in Tours in October.
It made me realise how powerful we are as singing teachers to bring music and song into the everyday lives of the folk around us. I know that my little effort in our village has had a huge impact on some people and it humbles me that for 2 hours of my time a week I can make a difference. I don’t do my village choir for profit so we raise money for local charities and visit nursing homes, provide ‘Come and Sing’ events and sing in special church services.
Everyone can sing, and I have proved that on many occasions with so called ‘tone-deaf ‘ singers. However many people have experienced in their early years so many negative comments about their voices that it is has left them with a severe lack of confidence. Thankfully a spell in a choir can often turn around those negative thoughts and once people have the opportunity to sing really good music ( from any genre ) they can start the healing process towards a strong singing identity.
Our perceptions of our voices is uniquely personal and hugely complex but we are getting to understand a little more about the interaction between internal and external hearing, the science of vocal acoustics and neurological brain patterns when singing. When it’s right it feels good and it feels easy. We over complicate singing sometimes which gets in the way but we are also very tense and physically and psychologically screwed up that getting the voice released needs a careful approach from a sensitive teacher. That is what is so good about AOTOS it is bringing together more and more young teachers and sharing ideas from around the UK and with EVTA around Europe too.
There is a fantastic new Voxpop video out and when I get the link I will note it in a blog for people to look at.

Here I am in Cowes with my husband who is sailing in Cowes Classics. It reminded me of an article I wrote many years ago when I first started teaching about singing competitions. It was called something like “Do I teach my students to win cups or do I teach them to improve their singing?”
My argument was that I could spend time working on building their voice or give them the ‘tricks’ to win cups. I suppose I have always been slightly averse to competition since I was put into so many when I was young. It took me years before I actually won anything and I found it a very dispiriting experience.

In sport it is all about competition, it seems the only way to know how good your skills are and it’s all about winning and climbing up the ladder. Professional singing is like that too and sadly, in some ways, we have lost the true meaning of ‘amateur’ – to love what you are doing – in this competitive 21st century world.

Self-knowledge of one’s skills is a difficult thing to teach and I suppose that is where the new digital technology and real time visual displays and spectrographic analysis can help. I want my students to be self-critical in a positive way- to really be aware of the things they do well and not so well, so that they can work independently of me. We have a ridiculous situation in our University system where I finish teaching my students at the end of April and don’t see them again until September. I know the two semester system is something we have to live with but colleagues in Latvia were horrified to hear that my students had so little contact time with their singing teacher.

There are some amazing summer schools and resources out there. I do hope they are spending their time studying more repertoire. I am having a lovely time getting to know the many wonderful songs of Rodrigo at the moment. What a fantastic and under used resource, such easily accessible songs with subtlety, drama and humour. I can’t wait to put them in a recital.

I don’t want to compete with anyone but myself, to improve and search deeper into the musical meaning of the songs is my goal. I will leave my husband to do the racing!

I tried to copy and paste my last blog but all sorts of things appeared as well so I am sorry.

Colours and why do singers like to darken their sound?

I’m reading a book about colour and textiles, a history of dyeing fabric in Europe and the world. I am fascinated by the way artists and weavers and embroideries know so much about colour, how to make it from different dye stuffs, natural and synthetic. And then there are the names of all the colours in an artists’s palette. I am just beginning to get to know these myself as I dabble in painting. Such wonderful names for all the greens, blues and reds. Then there is the symbolism of colour and the ability of colour to denote power.
Is this power ‘thing’ the same in singer? If I sing Harsh a bye instead of Hush a bye, or “Margnificart” instead of Magnificat, yes choir singers are just as prone as solo singers to darken their vowels…am I doing this darkening because it sounds good inside my head?
It emphasises the deeper resonances anyway in my head but this darkening of the vowel does it even more and I feel strong and important, more masculine dare I say? We all know how Mrs. T darkened and lowered her speaking voice to gain authority.
But if we really think about the setting of a mother singing a lullaby or Mary saying the Magnificat, it is exultant and bright, ringing, yes and soothing but not about power and might.

I heard Richard Goode play the piano live in a concert years ago and heard so many colours from the keyboard I was astounded. Why had no one explained about this when I was learning the piano for all those years? And when I hear a singer who has truly examined every colour in their timbral palette to give life and energy to all those consonants and vowels we have to sing, then I am excited!

We do not do enough on colour voicing, it is so important to make the music come alive. When we get so involved in painting our sounds we can forget our nerves, it becomes a creative exploration of a performance, not a dull regurgitation of previous artist’s interpretation. Yes I know that when we sing in large opera houses we have to maximise the resonance and volume but not to the detriment of the beauty of the sound or the emotional meaning we are trying to convey. We need to make our audience listen!

I have struggled all my singing career to understand the acoustics of singing but something that happened years ago when we sailing across the channel at night looking at the beautiful start gave me food for thought. Not just about our wonderful creation but the sound of the self steering equipment kept ‘talking’ to me. That’s when I realised that all the sounds we make when we speak and sing are down to vibrations, vowels are just a set of different vibrations made by the way we arrange our tongue and soft tissue in the tube above our vibrating folds. No, the self steering wasn’t talking to me but it gave me something to chew over! We need to understand the science behind what we do but not to the detriment of the beauty of sound. When we see the many vibrations that make up a vowel on programmes that show the spectrographic analysis then we should see how many more nuances we can create in our voices.

This is a sculpture outside the opera house in Riga, Latvia. I was participating in a conference of singing teachers in the Music Academy just over the river. A great experience, hearing the singing of young Latvian singers with great power and musical sensitivity. I was talking about the need for taking care of young adolescent voices. We had some good presentations and I even managed to understand some of the beautiful Latvian language.

i am not sure how much of the psychology of singing I managed to communicate. I hope they understood that the mind can make such a difference in terms of performance. Vocal identity is made up of many layers and by examining the layers of meaning we give to the words we articulate when we talk about our singing we can learn more about how we ‘tick’ as singers. 

The singing I heard was emotional and powerful but there is a danger of pushing young voices and while they make a start of an operatic career as singing teachers we are responsible for making sure that the career will survive longer than a few years. One of the presenters, a gymnast, was demonstrating some really good exercises for building strength through deep breathing and I hope we will hear more from him in Eurovox in June 2015.

There will be an opportunity to enjoy the midsummer festivals that take place in Latvia during the summer solstice, lots of flowers, singing and dancing next year so I hope my European colleagues will join me there at Eurovox in Riga!

 

Having just returned from a singing tour along the Camino. Ingles to Santiago – I am fascinated by the power of music and song to inspire the pilgrims over the centuries. Walking and singing feels such a natural thing to do and perhaps we have lost that bodily connection of pulse and rhythm and yet so many songs use that as their underlying beat. 

For me in particular it was a very special moment to feel that I had finally arrived in Santiago and I am taking some time to ponder on what singing and teaching singing means to me. That is what a pilgrimage is all about reflecting on where we are in our lives. And of course, our relationship with our God. The spiritual truths we long for and the sharing of our stories with one another just as Chaucer discovered. All life is there on the Camino and in spite of the inevitable rain, it was a great experience.

We sang in a variety of acoustics and once again I was struck with the difficulty our aural perception can cope different spaces to sing in. It takes a little while to adjust especially when the acoustic becomes so big that we can only hear ourselves and no other parts in the choral mix. 

Still we managed it and it was a good learning curve for the whole choir. More thoughts on this later!

Do we use our core muscles when we sing? Yes we do, we are athletes and we need all the strength our bodies can give us but we must not tighten our muscles unnecessarily. It is a matter of flexing the muscles and being ready to use them, rather than ‘locking’ them into position or ‘turning them on’. So many singers get stuck with knees locking, tightened leg muscles etc. (me included – I’ve made all the mistakes) which stops the diaphragm from working optimally. We need to release more often than we think. Rotating hips is a fantastic way of loosening off the tension in the lower body and yet when we are ready to sing it is all about muscular readiness as well as mental readiness.

So often we are not fully aware of what our bodies are doing, what the muscles need, where we have hidden tensions etc. Singers need to have total kinaesthetic awareness when they sing so that they can target the unwanted tension and focus on release and then positive energising of the sound.

I am off to Santiago de Compostela tomorrow on a singing pilgrimage and the Renaissance  choir is singing in the amazing Cathedral itself. What a privilege! But we have to be on top form and that means being absolutely on the beat at the beginning of every phrase. Release breath, have the body ready and the mind pumped up with adrenalin and sing to The Lord!  

I have always been interested in drawing and fine art and so often my trips to art exhibitions have produced interesting reflections on my singing and teaching. Visual perception is so complex and our colour awareness is such a valuable skill which we can relate to vocal timbre. I have just started a drawing class and although my attempts are rather feeble I have been learning a lot about the relationships between the visual features of a face or a body. I know that my visual perception can be rather skewed. I just cannot see that the space between the nose and the ear might be different to the space between the shoulder and the ear etc. etc. 

So that got me thinking about aural perception and the relationship between notes, intervals etc. and how often I can get those wrong when I am sight singing. I have been trying to work with my little village choir on interval awareness, using some of the ideas from Aalborg and so often it is just a question of pointing out (as my drawing teacher does with me) that it is a step note or a third or part of a triad. It’s the relationships between patterns that is important. 

I have always been an ‘interactionist’ and the older I get the more I can see that the relationships hold the key. So now when I am teaching someone singing out of tune I will think about my own drawing skills and try and help them to see the relationships between the notes rather than talk about tuning which can so often make people feel inadequate and they usually sing worse! 

 

Next week I am off to sing in Santiago de Compostela so I will be talking about that I’m sure. One of the things when I sing in different places that I am always struck by is how the acoustic and feel of a space seems to affect not only my aural perception but my physical sensations as I sing. The connection between space and song is underestimated and yet I know from my own research that the very best singers always talk about singing in terms of space and movement. It is all to do with flow that magical quality that we know when we get it but which is so intangible. Csikszentmihalyi was the great psychologist with the amazing name that did all the research on ‘flow’ – the trouble is that I can never spell his name or pronounce it!