This is a voice, a podcast with Dr. Gillyanne Kayes and Jeremy Fisher.
Hello and welcome to This is a Voice Season 9 Episode 6. The podcast where we get vocal about voice. I'm Jeremy Fisher. And I'm Dr. Gillyanne Kayes. And we are carrying on, we were cruelly cut short, we were carrying on with the Ham StimmSymposium, Hamburg StimmSymposium descriptions. We're right in the middle of the masterclass right now.
This is on day two. That was a cliffhanger, wasn't it? Yeah. So this is we're on day two. This is the master, we're calling it more than a masterclass, Gillyanne and I are working with two singers that we've not met. So we described the first one. This is the second one. This is a woman who was singing a song which I actually didn't know, called Prayer to the Moon from the musical.
Vanara. Vanara, so the music is by Gianluca Cucchiara and the lyrics are by Andrew James Whelan. Song I didn't know, it's a, it's a bit of a blockbuster. And so, again, we asked what the story behind it was, which was very interesting, and then she sang the song. We asked her why she chose it.
And she said that she chose it because it was dramatic. And we also asked her if there was anything that she found challenging that she particularly wanted to work on in the song. And she said, Oh, well, you know, I need to create the drama. I need to, you know, have more power in the high chest voice notes.
She may have even used the word belting. I forget now, but I want it to be smooth so that, you know, that it's, it's not noticeable when I'm moving from one part of my voice to the other. Those were the things that she said she wanted to do. I mean, that's a very interesting sentence to start with.
And it does, I mean, that's the sort of sentence that I would ask questions about because immediately I'm going, is there a classical bias behind that? Which is it's, it's got to sound different, but it's got to sound the same. So we did listen to her sing it, didn't we? We did. And then. I think we might have said how did it go or something and I knew there were things that I wanted to do right away.
And I said, Did you train as a classical singer? I think that's when the idea of the smoothness came out because she said, Oh, a lot of people ask me this. And then she talked about, you know, it all needs to be smooth. Now when you're in a public situation like that, I think it's very important that you listen to the belief and you don't directly challenge it. Because it seemed to both of us that what was happening here was an idea about how the sound should be that was actually interfering with the singer's goals.
It was actually causing her to overload her vocal folds and that meant that she couldn't get the power that she wanted and things were starting to compress. Yeah. Really interesting. So the first thing we did was Get rid of the line, actually. And Jeremy, describe how you did this with her. It's a, it's, it's a fun exercise, actually.
And I will often ask somebody if I can use their, their, I can hold their wrist or hold their arm, because sometimes people need to feel the instruction that I'm giving them, rather than just intellectualize it. So I said to her, can you can I use your arm and I, I held her arm and I mean the audience could see what I was doing and so we would take a line of the song, let's say, I know because there was a specific line it was spirits keep me strong and I said what you're doing at the moment is spirits keep me strong and it's almost like your pressure is constant and therefore you've got this lovely legato line, you've got, you know, connection between the lyrics, consonants less important, all of that stuff, which is the whole legato line thing.
And if you didn't listen to the previous episode How to Sing Legato is a book that I wrote on specifically this. So it's How to Sing Legato and also How to Cut It. And I said, Therefore, what I'm doing with the way that I grip your arm is I am giving you, maybe a five out of ten, I'm giving you pressure that stays constant the whole time.
That is what you're doing with your breath pressure underneath your vocal folds. And I think it makes a high vocal load and if you're at the point where you're wanting to go up to say D5 and you want to make an impact, what you need to do is kind of reduce that vocal load. Well, hang on, you're jumping the gun a bit because The key bit of information that people need to know is that she was in an M1 vibration for this phrase.
She was basically in a chest voice. If you are in an M2 vibration, what I call a falsetto, but this is an adducted falsetto that classical singers use a lot, then flow makes much more sense. So you can, the vocal folds can cope with flow. If you are in an M1 vibration, your vocal folds have more resistance.
They find it more difficult to cope with flow. You'll need to use a different type of flow. If the flow is too high. Yeah, if the flow phonation setup is too high, then you start to overload the vocal folds. And this is what she was doing.
So I said, what I want you to do is to follow what my hand does. And I started to grip and release, grip and release, grip and release, grip and release. And I said, I want you to do this for each word, for each syllable. Spirits keep me strong. So that they were little accents and also let-goes. She got it right away, didn't she?
She was very acute. And it was one of those things, because I demonstrated it, because I'd sung it, and because she could feel it on her hand, she got the whole idea, and she sang it, and it was like, that is what we want to hear. Yeah, the sound lifted, and she also said immediately, oh, that's so easy. Yes. And then what we did, because obviously she can't be working with Jeremy holding her arm all the time.
She could take me on stage if she paid me enough money. I often take a small ball into masterclasses. So I gave her a little ball to hold in her hand and squeeze so that she could explore those different levels of, of pressure, if you like, so that it wasn't so constant. And again, that worked really, really well, didn't it?
And it was good because she was then able to take the smooth choppy smooth choppy into the rest of the song and she was starting to work out when she needed one and when she needed the other and it completely changed the way that she sang the song. And I want to say this is something I'm very hot on.
I don't often change someone's technique but what I do do quite a lot is change their understanding. Mm hmm. And if they go, Oh, is that what I'm supposed to do with this technique? Oh, fine, done. And it is, it's done. It's like embedded straight away. So you learn a technique and then you need to understand the the nuances, the different ways that you apply it.
And that's really what you were doing. And of course, if there is a belief underneath that, then the belief will always take priority over every instruction. And I think, as we said earlier, we didn't challenge the belief, we just gave an alternative. And then the rest is, is really for her to follow up on.
To me, that absolutely reflects the way that the brain patterns work. You don't try and change a brain pattern, you just give it a more efficient one. And then it goes, Oh, I can go down this path instead. And the old, you know, is still there, so if necessary you can use it if it's, if it's relevant. But you've got a new, much more efficient version.
And it's really interesting how quickly singers recognize that what they're now doing is more efficient. In fact, almost to the point where they go, But it shouldn't be that easy. I hear that a lot. She was a really hard worker. You could tell. I talk to my students about this in terms of it's a new route on your Google map.
Yes. Same destination, different route. Yes.
And then there There was one more thing we did with this because actually and we did talk about this in the session, didn't we? We don't think the song is very well written for drama because it sort of rises to peaks and then it drops down again and rises and there's no kind of big overall moment.
Normally that The rise and fall, rise and fall, rise and fall thing is normally a really good thing. Because you don't want to start a song on a 10 and then just stay on a 10 the entire time. First of all, the singer won't because they'll try and go to 11. But it's not very, it's not great writing. This has lots of places where it comes up and goes back down again, but the difficulty with the song is that it doesn't actually have an arrival It it doesn't have one big moment. It has several slightly smaller moments. And the difficulty is you've got a big moment in the text, in the lyrics, but at that point it isn't a big moment in the music. Yeah. And the big moment in the music doesn't last long enough for it to actually hit the audience.
And it's not a big moment in terms of. a lyrical ish type female character voice who needs to belt. It's actually not written in the right part of the vocal range. And I actually talked about that, and particularly for this singer. But that's another podcast about how we manage those situations with different voice categories.
Well, two, two, two podcasts, actually. One is how you write songs, and the other is how you deal with songs that don't fit you as the singer and the performer. And this happens a lot in musical theatre because she might well have been cast in this role and have to sing it. So I mean the first thing I suggested was that there is a potential climax point almost towards the end of the song and I said it's got poco rit which is slow down very slightly, but I said we're gonna have to change that in order to make this the climax of the song we're going to have to slow down a lot in order to really expand at that point and i mean this is this is a decision between the singer and the musical director ultimately
but we took one of the phrases there was a word that she was having real problems with yes was it spirits make me strong Yeah, now that vowel, you know, the tongue is not in a favourable position to, you know, create a money note.
And it's on a C, it's on C5, C above middle C, in a belt. So we turned it into Strahng. Now technically that's S T R A H, STRAHNG. STRAHNG
. Yeah. Yeah. And of course, what that does, because of the tongue position, so the tongue is high and slightly backed it narrows.
It does. I always say, I always say that, you know, there's nothing worse than being narrower. It makes the pharynx a little narrower. It narrows the pharyngeal space and what that does is it boosts some of the higher frequencies in the harmonic spectrum and therefore it makes the sound sound louder and it's easier to sing with less pressure.
It also gets the tongue out of the way so you have less back pressure down onto the vocal folds. At that point you don't need it. A little bit of pharyngeal narrowing was extremely useful at that point. And I know that there are going to be people there going, but that's cheating, but you should sing the proper vowel.
And I'm going, singers change vowels all the time. It sounded like strong. It sounded like strong. That was the point. She was singing strahng, But it sounded like strong coming out. And not only that, it sounded like strong, but actually the sound she was making was so much freer, so much more efficient, and actually so much bigger.
So it sounded like a climax. And it enabled her to have that money note at that point in her range, which is not that high a note for that particular voice. Yes. So that was fun, wasn't it? Oh, it was great. And I mean, interestingly, you know, those that we, we did just those two things, and then we got her to sing phrases just to try those two things out.
And that is, that would be, in fact, it was all that we would do, because
Can we just talk for a second about doing a masterclass? One of the difficulties of doing a masterclass is it's a very unnatural situation. Because if you were doing that in a lesson, you would probably explore lots of things in different ways.
Because you're doing a masterclass you have 15 minutes if you're lucky. Yeah. Working with a singer you've never worked with and an audience watching your every move. So one of the things that you need to do is decide what thing, and it's normally one, what thing you're going to do that is going to make the biggest difference.
We are now hugely experienced at doing masterclasses, so usually we can do two. We do one, we embed it, it works, we try it out, it works, and then sometimes we can go on and do a second one. It's extremely rare in a masterclass that we do more than two, because We did two with each of the singers, didn't we?
We did two with each of the singers, yeah. I think one of the reasons why it works well for us is There's two of us. It's like, you do this one. I'll do that one. And it was also, by the way, energetically, that was quite interesting because with the guy, I was the one who started because I went, I know exactly what to do with the beginning of this song.
Let's go there. And with the woman, Gillyanne started because she knew exactly what to do, and then I picked up on it and went further. So yeah, really interesting. We do two things, one or two things, and that's it. And then we embed. So we repeat and embed. And you, it was very funny, we had two of our Accredited teachers, one who's going through the Accreditation right now, and one who's already graduated and is registered.
And I think that both of them are going, do you really do what you say you do, because we teach them this in the Accreditation program. One thing at a time. One thing at a time. And also embed And we did. So we're very happy with that. We actually did what we said. Yeah, we managed to walk our talk.
It's always good to know, isn't it?
Shall we talk a little bit about I have to say after this, you know, the the two session day, and and all those interesting things that happened in the morning in relation to breath we both went for a lie down after that because we had enough and we also wanted to go out for dinner with with two of our teachers that we'd been working with, who we'd never met in person.
Can I just, can we just talk about this? We have been working online for more than a decade. Yeah. And then when the pandemic hit, obviously everything went online and we started doing group training, which we'd not done before. And it's been so successful. I love doing group training online. And, So the registered trainer that we had there, who'd actually come over from the Netherlands to come to Hamburg to see this symposium, she has worked with us for four or five years.
She'd never met us, never met us in person. A lot of hugging went on. Brilliant. It was absolutely brilliant because there's something about, You get the energy of the person in the room when you're in person and most of the time that doesn't worry me because I'm able to pick up energetic cues across the internet.
I've always been able to do that. You really can. You really can. But it was really interesting to me and of course One of the things that people don't know, if they see us either in the teaching room or on the podcast, if you look at us on YouTube right now, we look, maybe I've got, I don't know, a few inches on Gillyanne, we're actually, but the thing that they don't know is I'm sitting on an extremely low stool so that we can actually get into the camera on the same shot.
I think I come up to about here. Gillyanne comes up to my chest. Yeah, because they said, Oh, you're so small, Gillyanne. There's a big height difference.
Well, should we talk about what happened the next morning? Yes. Now we were particularly keen the next morning of, at for the nine o'clock session to go and support our lovely colleague Craig Anthony Lees with his colleague Declan Davies.
Yes. So, this session was called a morning energizer and actually most people needed the morning energizer because they'd been a party the night before. Yes. So, congratulations to both Craig and Declan for taking the tough gig and absolutely nailing it. It was brilliant. It was absolutely brilliant.
I mean, I don't know how we'd describe Craig, he's, he's a choir leader. He's an enabler within choral settings. And he's a phenomenal arranger as well. I think also with Declan and they do a wide variety of stuff together. What made this so extraordinary was that the first five minutes was basically in mime.
So he didn't say a word. And we all had to copy the actions, and it was so clever. So we were doing actions that would wake up the body, we were doing actions that would support what we were doing, and then he would start to do what are essentially nonsense syllables, and we'd have to imitate those as well, and it got more, more interesting, it got faster, it got funnier, it was just so good.
So, without ever saying the word voice, he was eliciting different prosodies different timbres different rhythms, different volumes. He was sometimes using gestures and, and, you know, communication between two or three people. There, there are a lot of physical gestures going on, which is enormously helpful.
So it just seemed to me that what we were doing was we were using our mirror neurons. And eliciting, you know, kind of emotional responses and communicative responses that they then turned into a little call and response piece, just to allow us to really explore and enjoy our voices and bodies.
And do you know what? I thought it was a, an amazing session. Oh, so good. And we came out absolutely high. And we, we followed it. I mean, standing ovation for five minutes for these two. Yeah, that was really good. Yeah. And and then we followed it. Yeah, we did. We were next. And this was Practical Coaching for Singing Pedagogues.
Yeah. So, this was a room full of, I would say, mostly singing teachers. Yes. Some of whom, it seems quite interesting that there's quite a lot of singing teachers maybe in the EU who are also either logopedic or speech and language therapists. So you've got that cross fertilization already in place between different aspects of voice practitioners, which I really liked.
And again, you know, we were wondering how are we going to talk about voice pedagogy? Because we had a I had quite a big mind map. I always prepare like crazy. I'm one of those people, I prepare for plan A so that plan B can happen. Mm, I just go with plan B. Yeah, and it did work. We kind of, what we wanted to do was pull out of people's brains what it is that they think they're doing.
So, some of our one of our topics was what's our job? What are we doing when we're teaching singing? It's a very unusual question because people really don't know how to answer it. So, let's just put it to you guys. What is our job? What's the job? I mean, I'm a vocal coach, Gillyanne's a singing teacher.
There are also voice trainers, spoken voice trainers. What's the job? And we made a whole mind map about that, we did, which we, yeah, we made a mind map. Actually live while people were saying, and it's a really interesting question because people go, well, you know, we want to give our students confidence we want, you know, we want to make sure that they can do what they're supposed to be doing.
And nobody had spotted that part of the job is to map vocal physiology. onto music as a singing teacher. Well, they sort of had because they went to individual things, but then what I wanted to do, we created this as a separate mind map and I will say this is one of my things that I feel quite strongly about, that we look at, I mean, they're very basic.
If you look at the four elements of vocal function so, respiration, phonation, resonation, and I like to have articulation because singers sing words. And obviously there's all, all the body stuff that goes with that as well. And then, looking at the four core elements of music, let's see if I can remember them today, which is pitch.
duration, which is rhythm, dynamic, which is to do with volume, and timbre. And those are the four. And if you start looking at those four elements, and then maybe for the musical you add expressivity and communication overlaps in both, doesn't it? Then we start to unpack how blooming complicated our job is.
And one of the things I wanted to say to everybody is, do you realize how good you are that you are dealing with all of these elements when you teach and perhaps to open them to the fact that It's one of the ways that we can assist ourselves in, for want of a better word, let's call diagnostics, you know, how do we make a plan for each lesson?
How do we share that plan with the, the student, you know, what are their goals? And how do we sort of plan longer term if we're dealing in a training situation? And we find it's a very, very powerful way of beginning to unpack our thoughts.
So then the final part of the session, and this was your idea, wasn't it?
After we'd mind mapped all of that, then we looked at listened to and watched a video of Cleo Laine. Cleo Laine and I chose this video quite carefully. First of all, it's one of my favorite performances, but Cleo Laine is an extraordinary singer to start with. If you haven't come across her, she's a jazz singer with a phenomenal range.
And I've actually worked with her daughter. She was the star of my first musical, Jacqueline. Anyway, so we played On A Clear Day. which was a live broadcast that was recorded, I think, in the 80s with Johnny Dankworth leading the band. And the reason that I chose it was because she sings in three different mechanisms.
She is playing with music, with timbre, with rhythm, she's adding words, she's changing melodies, she's doing all sorts of things, all of which we talked about in the mind maps. And it was really interesting because I thought people, you know, this can be a very dry subject, and I really wanted people to see the sort of thing that we're talking about in action.
It's really interesting. We're actually going to, I'll put the link to the video in the show notes because it is so worth watching that performance. Yeah, and so we asked them again, you know, What do you see? What do you hear? How are you responding? And there were lots of fascinating insights that came out of that, you know, that once we'd gone through the mind map process of mapping vocal function on elements of music, then people were beginning to think in that way, if perhaps they hadn't been already.
I think it's also very revealing when people give their opinions in, in a situation like that, is that they're coming from their own background and their own background often shows, so that they will focus in on something that they already know, or that they, they, they see and they recognize. And so we also, as, as course leaders, we see where someone is coming from, and we see where their beliefs are, and we see where their understanding is, and where their knowledge lies, and that is absolutely fascinating.
That's really important for us when we're training teachers ourselves, isn't it?
So, I mean, it was good fun, wasn't it? Really good fun. And anyone who's listening to this podcast, who came to the Hamburger Stimms Symposium, we do have the mind maps available, plus another lovely resource for you to access so you have a record of what we did.
Yes, email us please. Yeah, contact us. So after we'd done that, we kind of let ourselves off the hook for a bit, didn't we? Oh, that was what I, something I wanted to say. When you go to a conference like this, obviously you want to go and take everything in and attend absolutely everything. I do. I am not the sort of person who can take that level of intensity all day every day.
So I think it's perfectly okay to go, I want to see that and that and that, I'm tired now, I'm going to go away, I'm going to go and have a coffee, I'm going to sort of chill, I'm going to let it all filter down and then I'm back in the room again. Do you know what, on day three, after doing a presentation, I could be found in the corridor, lying on the floor with my legs up on a chair.
Absolutely, yes. Completely essential.
Do you know what? I had nearly forgotten that there was a very interesting presentation then at 11 o'clock from the laryngeal osteopath Jacob Lieberman. Yes. Where it is fair to say there was a little bit of a truth bomb revealed and It was a fascinating session because I spoke in the previous podcast about the whole thing about, you know, expanding the ribs and holding the ribs up.
I'll try and summarize the main things that Jacob said. He was basically saying we need to be really careful about how we teach breathing and support to our singers because we need to understand how the breathing mechanism works something we don't want to do is to compromise expiratory force.
Do you wanna describe that? I will do my best. First of all, you know, anyone who's read their anatomy books knows that the diaphragm does the majority of the job. In fact, it does all of the job really for breathing, because if you, if neither lobe of your diaphragm is functioning, you can't breathe, you won't be alive.
So even if you see your, you know, your singers lifting their you know, lifting their shoulders and lifting their chest. the diaphragm is still functioning. So that's really, really important. My biggest take home from this was if we do teach our students to raise the ribs and we teach breathing by raising the ribs and then holding them out in order to sustain.
What's going to happen is eventually we're going to lose rib cage elasticity. Your rib cage should be elastic. Flexible. Okay, there should be flexibility in there. Now, I have personally received laryngeal, you know, manual laryngeal therapy from Jacob, and I remember him pushing my ribcage and saying, this should be springy, and it wasn't.
Now, there are all sorts of reasons why we might hold our ribs up, and we do this kind of breath holding thing. But I'm thinking how important it is. because singing is a special act of respiration and therefore we do need to sustain the breath. I think we also need some kind of breath reset because Jacob invited us to breathe out, keeping the throat open, breathe out, breathe out, breathe out, breathe out, breathe out, breathe out, breathe out, until you get to a place where you can go and you know what, it's hard.
But when you have done that, there's a massive sense. of relief. And I hope that this is going to be talked about more because Jeremy, you know that I've worked with someone who trained with Jacob, Ann Coxhead, who is also a laryngeal manipulation person and an osteopath and I worked with her during the pandemic to reset my breathing because lots of singers were very stressed because they couldn't sing. And then we were starting to kind of breath hold because that's what we do when we're stressed. And it was fascinating working with her, even online, and I remember getting to the end of session, the session, and I said, Oh my God, my ribcage has moved.
And it happens to me as well after a Feldenkrais session. I can feel that the angle of my ribcage has changed. So I think there's a lot to talk about here about how we teach breathing and support in singing. I have a lot of time for Jacob. I think he's right at the front of all of this research. And also he has that quite evil sense of humor which is hilarious.
When he puts some of the videos up, it's like, these are so near the knuckle, it's so funny. But what is important is that he's still asking the questions and he's also still making these statements. And these, some of the statements are very challenging when, if you have a belief or if you have a a version that has worked for you for a long time and somebody comes along and says that's actually not what you're doing.
That can be very challenging.
So I hope this is a topic that'll be continued. Yes.
Good. Is there any more that we want to say about that particular day? I'm just having a quick, there were some things. I just want to go back to Singer's Beliefs. You know, we, we spent a long time both in our coaching and in our teaching, examining the whole idea of singer's beliefs, because this is a really interesting one, and I'm going to separate singers and teachers.
Well, I was going to say teacher's beliefs, but okay. I am going to separate singers' and teacher's beliefs, because ultimately the job of a singer is to in wherever they work is to get up and sing. And that can be on a, you know, multi million pound stage or it can be in the pub. It doesn't really matter.
The point is that you're getting up and you are sharing something of yourself when you sing. And from that point of view, anything at all that works for you is absolutely fine. If you believe that your diaphragm is held up by little green men, I am absolutely fine with it. Just do it, because if it works for you, great.
The difficulty happens when singers become teachers. And they bring that, that belief about the diaphragm being held up by those green men. They bring it to their studio and they start to teach other people to do it. Or to think it, or to, to feel it, or whatever it is. And that's a belief system. And you, I think, cannot, impose your belief system onto somebody else.
And it's why I said earlier, well, also your set of sensations. Yes. Yes. Okay. Let's just go there. Your set of sensations. Well, it feels like this for me. Therefore it should feel like that for you. Why aren't you feeling it? Well, you can't be doing it right. I've heard that in lessons. You know, I played for an awful lot of singing teachers.
I've heard it in lessons. This is not a good move because you can't, You can't impose your feels onto somebody else. You know, they have to experience it in the way that they experience it. And that's why we ask a lot of questions in lessons. It's like, how is that for you? And also, by the way, how does that feel?
I have no idea. Because that person is not a feel person. They don't, they don't understand the whole sensation thing they see, you know, they go in their heads and they see pictures. That's great. So you ask questions that are non specific. How was that for you? What happened? Both of those are completely non specific.
So they can describe in whatever they want to. And occasionally I'll say, well, show me in the medium of modern dance, because sometimes people are so bound up with words that they go, well, just you know, move your arms, show me how that, how that works. Yeah, draw it. That might work for, draw it is great.
Draw it, show me the shape. But anyway, bringing your belief system in for somebody else is, it's one of those things that it might work, it might not work. It's probably quite a high miss rate rather than a hit rate, but hey, you know, you could end up going. Well, you know, they got better and therefore. But the problem is that if you don't understand it on a visceral level yourself You're not going to be able to put it into practice throughout So and visceral of obviously I use visceral because I'm a feel person But you know if you don't this is why I said earlier on Often I won't change someone's technique necessarily but I will help them understand it and actually what then happens is they change it themselves because they know exactly why it's doing what it's doing and what the context is.
The idea comes into alignment and you know this is taking me very nicely to a session that Markus did after lunch, which was a round table perception and reality. Can I see what I feel in the vocal tract? And actually there was a very heroic speech and language therapist, who was also rather a good singer.
She had a phenomenal range and she sat there for an hour with a scope where again, Markus, first of all, orientated us. So we knew what we were looking at, got it to go through various protocols. And then, you know, bless her, the audience was shouting, show us this, show us that, I want to see this. And, and it was good, wasn't it?
It was a really interesting session. Oh and by the way, it was packed. When we walked into the room on the first day, and I'm going, there are so many people here. So if you get the chance to go to the Hamburg Stimm Symposium next year, please do it, because it is so good. Yeah.
Well, we are very grateful that we were invited to contribute to it. And that we were there and all the amazing people that we met. It was a fabulous experience. Yes. Yeah. Okay. So, we have some special guests coming up in the podcast, but we're not going to tell you because we're like that. We want to surprise you.
Yeah. So we will see you next time. Stay tuned. Okay. Bye.
This is A Voice, a podcast with Dr. Gillyanne Kayes and Jeremy Fisher.
