The Inner Voice: The Making of a Singer Read Online Free PDF Page B

soul in me. The question was never what I wanted to be, do, eat, or wear but rather what I had to be, do, eat, and wear. I was only too happy to comply and until graduate school never questioned the whys and wherefores of my career path. At that point in time, my voice was a minefield of problems: I couldn’t sing softly, I was physically tense, and I had no high notes. Everyone knows that a soprano with no high notes isn’t going to go very far in the world. Still, Pat recognized that I had innate musicality, real musicianship, and a genuine eagerness to learn and work.
    Pat had short, fine, curly brown hair and usually stood with her feet in perfect turnout, à la Mary Poppins. As she taught, she watched me over her glasses with her chin practically down on her chest, cheeks and eyebrows lifted, humming along as she accompanied me on the piano. She was a crack musician who could play anything. Dressed in crewneck sweaters and plaid wool skirts, she radiated a no-nonsense New England reliability that made me trust her. Somehow she managed to be warm and accepting of me as a person while maintaining a highly critical ear when it came to work, which meant that when she tore me down I always knew it was because she planned to build me up again in better shape. I’d count it as a good day if we got through a page of music in an hour. I’d barely open my mouth before she was stopping me, saying, “Wait. Let’s do that again.” It was incredibly detailed work, and I ate up every minute of it. I never fought her, never said, “No, I think it’s better my way.” Not only would it not have been true, but at that stage I didn’t want to have to think for myself. I wanted her to tell me how to shape every note, what to do with every nuance.
    Pat put a tremendous amount of emphasis on resonance, focus, and placing the voice. These weren’t new concepts, but she worked in such minute detail that I was forced to hone each pitch individually. That in itself was a huge task: to understand the concept of actually aiming sound mentally, and to learn how to place the voice “in the mask.” The mask, I quickly came to understand, meant the nose and cheekbones—the nasal and sinus cavities where sound resonates. The use of mask resonance, as opposed to the natural tendency to speak with mouth and chest resonance, is crucial to every young singer’s development, as it’s the only way to project the voice to the back of a hall without strain. It’s the “buzz,” “hum,” or squillo that develops the nascent shape of a tone into a full-blown operatic sound.
    Pat would further explain that resonance, in simple terms, is a function of the direction of your air. As you’re singing, you actually use your mind to direct the air to combinations of certain parts of your body: either to your head, because there are multiple sinus cavities behind the eyes; or to the mouth, which creates a different sound; or to the mask; or to the chest, which results in the lowest kind of sound. Resonance is easily understood by looking at any instrument. Imagine that the sound made by the vocal cords is the same as the sound that comes out of a trumpet mouthpiece: on its own, it’s nothing more than a buzz—it’s the resonance that creates the tone. What makes a voice what it is, is a combination of the sound from the vocal folds and the blending, or balance, or processing through the resonance tract.
    If I send air into the highest resonating chambers, I get a very light, childlike sound: the head voice. This is all that a lot of beginning singers have, a voice with no body to it. The head voice is something we associate with flaky girls, the high lilt of Glinda the Good Witch discussing the positive attributes of ruby slippers. Aiming at the mask makes more of a nasal sound. When someone has a nasal-sounding voice, it’s very distinctive: imagine Roseanne Barr speaking. A chest sound would be very low. Sarah Vaughan had a beautiful chest voice,