Read Online The Inner Voice: The Making of a Singer by Renee Fleming - Free Book Online Page B

touching the floor. Teachers will do almost anything to encourage the body to release tension in some areas while maintaining strength and energy in others. It’s a coordination process that is technically complicated and difficult to achieve both physically and psychologically, demanding all available resources to get the necessary elements to line up properly. Beverley used to say that tension in your upper lip could ruin your voice for the day, a connection that you wouldn’t even remotely think of making. She would instruct me to take my finger and press down on my upper lip while I was singing, and suddenly the sound would free up. It seemed impossible, and yet I could hear the difference. There are so many different muscles that can affect vocal production that it’s almost impossible to check all of them off in your mind, and even more impossible to control them, since they are largely involuntary.
    Beverley kept a battered copy of Gray’s Anatomy close to her piano among the stacks of scores. She was forever pulling it out to explain something about the mechanism of the voice. “See that?” she would say, tapping on the page. She would show me a drawing of the pharynx and the larynx, the epiglottis and hard and soft palates, the breath cavities and the diaphragm.
    One of the first issues we addressed was fine-tuning my understanding of the principles of breathing and support. To think about breath, I first had to divide it into three parts. I had to learn the best way to take in a breath and to use the space in the lungs and body efficiently; the best way to control breath release; and the best way to support sound with breath. Unlocking the body’s ability to take in the most possible air is a process both of expansion and of releasing tension. Ask a nonsinger to take in a huge breath, and he will usually lift his shoulders and chest, pulling in his abdominal muscles, actions that are followed by a red face and straining neck muscles—not a posture conducive to beautiful singing. Contrarily, a singer learns to release her abdominal wall and back muscles outward, without pushing, as much as is humanly possible, allowing the diaphragm, involuntarily, to release down and the lungs to expand to their fullest. Crucial to this process is a release of the intercostal muscles, the ones that connect the ribs; releasing them allows the rib cage to expand outward and slightly upward as well. The chest rises last, but the shoulders and neck remain relaxed. This entire sequence should be carried out with as little tension as possible. Release, expand, visualize your torso as a barrel, imagine a low breath to begin with, release the back of your neck, make space in your mouth and nose, don’t suck in air, no tension in your mouth and nose either—these and similar instructions began to enable me to develop breath capacity.
    Second, breath control enables the efficient use of precisely the amount of air needed for any given phrase, whether a long, sustained line or a short, powerful burst. Contrary to what one might think, it takes more air to produce low notes than high ones. More air escapes through the vocal folds during the slower vibrations of a lower phrase than in the much faster oscillations of a top C. Think of how different pitches of whistling feel, or even of making sounds by blowing into different-sized bottles. The air flow is more concentrated for a higher pitch. It takes a singer time and physical maturity to develop the deep, sustaining breaths of a swimmer; negotiating a long passage of Richard Strauss is, in fact, a little like being underwater.
    The third requirement, breath support, is both the most complicated and the most controversial part of a singer’s breathing technique. This was one of the most important pieces of the singing puzzle I received from Beverley. Few are in agreement about the best way to support a voice, but it’s the support that allows a singer to manage a “cultivated