This last couple of weeks I have been teaching a very talented soprano with a lovely voice, a lovely personality, great pitch, expressive, pretty… what more do you want?
I want two more things! The first one is
a rock-solid technique
This is an absolutely indispensable condition if we want to sing well, in a way that’s pleasing to us and our listeners and healthy for our voice in the first place. Even more so if we’re considering becoming a professional. Every time we are learning new repertoire, rehearsing with colleagues, doing an audition or performing, we have to know for sure that our technical bits are in place.
The human voice is a musical instrument which like any other instrument needs a precise technique. Some will argue that singing is a god-given thing and that you either have it or you don’t. I absolutely, strongly, firmly disagree with this! Some will argue that you cannot really teach it or learn it because large parts of our instrument are hidden inside our bodies and this complicates things a lot, but I don’t agree with this either. As is the case for any other instrument, there are many clear, objective, observable things about singing that have to be taught and learned properly. There are people who just know how to sing, who are born with a more or less ready-to-use voice, but even these people need to become aware of what they’re doing, otherwise they risk to destroy their voices.
Building up a solid technique to cope with the requirements of opera, oratorio and chamber music takes a lot of work at the best of times — and even more so for more problematic voices. And only once we achieve good control and good functioning of our instrument, real vocal awareness and security, can we at last start thinking about our art. It’s a long and sometimes tough way, but it’s a beautiful discovery and an exciting conquest.
The second thing is
great preparation
We need to know our music perfectly. The exact length of the notes and of the rests, the dynamics, the tempo indications. We need to know our texts perfectly, no matter whether they are in our own language or in a foreign one. We need to understand the words, we need to pronounce them correctly, we need to put every syllable exactly on the note where it belongs. This can be a painstaking bit of work, but it is absolutely indispensable. Anything sloppy in the diction will take the level of the performance down dramatically.
We might need to listen to native speakers singing the pieces without looking at the text on the page, because often the printed letters are pronounced in completely different ways from one language to another. So if we’re not very advanced in that language, we’re much better off relying on our ears than on our eyes. Reading and associating certain sounds with certain letters is so automatic for us, that it can become an obstacle. Listening and just imitating the sounds — after we understood the words, that is! — will often take us much further. I taught languages for many years before becoming a full pro, and I observed that over and over again. I often had to just close the books, have my students listen to me with their eyes shut and then look at my lips and just imitate what they heard and saw. The results were always great. I’m still doing it with opera singers.
You will meet people with great talent from time to time. Some add a great technique and great preparation to that and are simply great great great.
Then you’ll meet some with enough or great or extraordinary talent which is not backed up by technique and preparation. They will cause you to go wow for the first 3 minutes and after that you’ll start missing something very badly. And then you’ll meet people who have nothing special at all, but who really got their technique and their preparation together, who built a really solid set of skills and knowledge, and they might be some of the best you ever heard.
I plead for great work and great discipline no matter who you are. This will allow you to unfold your full potential, not so you can become the best compared to everyone else, but so you can become the best you can ever be.
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