I Repeat Myself
Four years ago I decided to write a book about singing and teaching. I started it with a series of blog posts. But life intervened and the writing I did that year was mostly on CaringBridge and will lead to a rather different book. But here is the first of my singing/teaching pieces.
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There is a scene in the classic film Ninotchka in which Melvyn Douglas, as a suave Parisian, woos Greta Garbo, playing a sour and stony Soviet. He coos, “Oh, Ninotchka, Ninotchka...” and she deadpans back, “You repeat yourself.”
That’s what I do: I repeat myself.
And that’s an enormous part of what voice teaching is: repeating things until they stick.
That I should be a voice teacher is undoubtedly a cosmic joke played on me for my Mother’s enjoyment. She always complained that I lacked patience. She loved to quote at me:
“Patience is a virtue
Possess it if you can
Seldom found in women
Never found in man”
And patience is exactly what I need most, as a teacher and also as a student. Patience to repeat each instruction until not just the brain but also the body has internalized it. Patience in my own studies to do the work to make that internalization happen.
And even then the progress that happens in the studio may take months to show up in actual performance, with the added pressure of an audience (or worse yet, an audition panel).
Another image for the process of voice teaching and study is Sisyphus. But not so hopeless! I push the boulder uphill, and the whole point is to have it slide back not quite as far. Sometimes it only goes a few inches upwards and some days there’s a breakthrough and it rockets up a half mile. Sometimes it simply plateaus and stays obstinately in place. For the student one thing to watch out for is the boulder going backwards. If that happens it’s time to ask questions and possibly to consider another teacher. And for the teacher if that happens it is a red flag to try something different.
Patience requires commitment to the process. Students often want rapid, indeed instant, results. And it is possible to make a huge stride forward in the first lesson as the student finds that technique enables possibility. The second lesson, and sometimes quite a few after that, is almost always about consolidation. Too often I have had students come to me expecting miracles right before a show or an audition. Vocal work is just like going to the gym — it is a long-term, slow, steady process. I do what I can when students have little time to achieve some goal with a looming deadline but I try to convince them to put in the time to develop chops and keep them up.
If there’s one thing I have learned from studying with a long series of teachers and watching my colleagues do the same it is that one size does not fit all. This doesn’t refer to the basics of technique but rather to the methods of imparting technique. Some students can be taught by description and some require modeling. I sent a perfectly wonderful student off to find another teacher once when I judged that she needed someone who could model sounds in her octave more than anything else. I can do a lot by instructing but that is one thing I cannot do. And since singing involves many moving parts that can only be operated indirectly the words of instruction that resonate for one student may fall flat with another. I have to ask them what their sensations are and tailor my method to them.
Instructing is the thing that makes for all the repetition. I sometimes joke that I am going to construct a cardboard model of me with a bunch of buttons that I can push to blurt out the usual things I say:
Unhinge your jaw
Join those two notes
Make Home Alone face!
Breathe in the shape of the vowel
And so on. Notice that I try to make each instruction a positive action, rather than a negative:
Don’t clench your jaw
Don’t put an “H” there
Don’t puff out your cheeks
Don’t clench your jaw (see what I did there)
The. cardboard model won’t give the backup explanation that accompanies the first iteration of each instruction. Hopefully the repetitions can be in shorthand. But the first time “unhinge your jaw” happens it is of course followed by a full demonstration of how that’s supposed to work:
“Put your fingers on the spot where your jaw and skull meet. Now put your thumbs on your chin. Use your thumbs to draw your jaw down and slightly back. Feel the space that opens under your fingers? That’s your singing space: make that with every in breath.”
I confess I fail to stay positive sometimes, particularly with those extra Hs. But I find that giving the student a positive action gets better results than allowing negative energy into the process. There was a not-very-successful anti-drug program back in the 1980s with the motto “just say no!” I believe that giving people something to Yes to works better.
And so I repeat myself, offering as much positive energy, instruction, and feedback as possible, and I tailor what I do to the student as much as I can. If the boulder is moving in the right direction we are good.
You are welcome to visit me at my teacher website:
http://richardtheteacher.com/