Elizabeth Parcells Talking with Dina Soresi Winter about singing, June 2005
Dina: Elizabeth, Yesterday I asked,
what question would I ask to get you started on this topic and you said to ask
about what it takes to run a Master Class.
Elizabeth: Students respond if you take a
sincere interest and they believe you see more in them than they are seeing. If the student acknowledges you as an
authority figure all you need to do is give them permission to do what they have
been wanting to do which is get better.
Dina: You told me about the troubles
Maria Callas had teaching a class.
Elizabeth: Those Juilliard students wanted adulation and Callas
wanted to teach them something. When I
auditioned for Juilliard I was 19 years old.
I was told I wasn’t ready for that school. I said I thought the point of going to school was to get ready to
sing. What
I realized later is that the people who excel there are Masters and post
Masters students who are seeking a professional career. They are already finished, or at least
they’ve been told they are. They are at
Juilliard to make connections.
Dina: To learn how to sing is one
thing. The other is to sing
artistically and beautifully and know what you are singing and perform as an
artist and then you go to the third stage?
Wouldn’t you find that at Juilliard?
Elizabeth: A student is teachable if they
think they have something to learn. A
student is not teachable when they believe they’ve got it all and now all they
need is an opening. May be the students
who were chosen for Ms. Callas' Master Class believed they had reached that
stage and they were looking for a recommendation from Madam. She was there to teach them not promote
them. She came away from the class
thinking she’d failed. She said perhaps
what she does is not teachable—as a singing actress. She wanted teach the intangibles she brought to her art, timing for instance.
Dina: What can you say about that?
Elizabeth: The next time I saw someone
who really taught timing was Warren Jones giving a Master Class and the kids
would get to a fermata and just keep going and he would pound on the piano and
stand up and say, “Wait!” Silence is
part of music and you time that like a heart’s breath and to reach the
audience--also by this (quick breath) and a pause. What’s the rush? The
audience has paid their money. They are
not going to walk out because of a two second pause to make an effect.
These
intangibles, these timing things that actors train, the way they learn to
manage their dialogs—they have no composer putting the timing in.
Dina: But some people have this gift
innately, isn’t that so?
Elizabeth: We call it talent.
Dina: Is it teachable?
Elizabeth: You can
teach
the techniques. To teach that when they
see a fermata they are supposed to wait.
Now--how long to wait—that feel?
If you don’t want to turn out a bunch of machines, eventually you have
to let them in on a little secret, that it isn’t all on the page. You start there but that’s not the end of
it. One of the things that Callas was
trying to teach was performance skills like timing and how to grab and hold an
audience.
Actors
learn their techniques too. They learn
to keep it interesting they’ve got to do a loud bit and a soft bit and they do
contrast, drama—the range of emotions, the range of dynamics, and the
timing. Those are techniques you learn
but the mastery of those techniques means they don’t feel like techniques any
more, they feel like spontaneous original thought every time. You go out there and it’s like the first
time.
Dina: What I’d like to get from you
is the starting point of a person coming in for a lesson who may be has a nice
voice, wants to become a singer, could become a singer—there’s something
there. How do you build this from day
one?
Elizabeth: The basis of everything is the
breath. The breath is the beginning and
the end because what we just talked about is also a product of the breath. In timing, the breath is the metronome of
that and it’s a living thing. The first
thing you have to do as a singing musician is to train and discipline the
breath so that it will support the voice, get you through the phrase and serve
the music.
Dina: How do you do that?
Elizabeth: Begin with exercises like
any other athlete. If you want to be a
good
gymnast or a good dancer, it’s all about the training. You don’t want to be a singer where the
spirit is willing and the flesh is weak.
You want to make sure that whatever commands your brain is sending out
the body will be equal to so you begin with a course of training. I studied about 10 years, the last 7 years
with one teacher. I spent the first few
years with several teachers. They were
all good and they all had the same message, build your breath and
support the voice.
My
voice at a young age was tender, not well projected, soft--and not much range
either. So you really have to start
from scratch with that. The first thing
you have to realize is that if you are working with a voice that hasn’t been
trained, be careful to build it appropriately and slowly. Never exceed the capability of the voice in
the exercises you assign. Never push so
far that they go home with vocal fatigue.
Remain within the parameters of the voice but keep pushing little by
little. That’s the time consuming part.
Dina: What I found interesting is
you’ve said you shouldn’t do breathing exercising alone.
Elizabeth: True. The breathing exercises are necessary but
boring. Who wants to sit around and
heave-and-haw all day? So you try to
connect the exercises for the breath to tone so that the singer has the
impression he’s working on his tone while he’s still building the breath. The exercise I’ve used throughout my career
is simple-- 4 staccatos, then a 5 tone legato scale (demonstrates).
Dina: The staccatos are on one tone?
Elizabeth: Yes. You have to learn to attack that note again and again, so that
it’s the same pitch each time, which is not easy. You are learning breath control of the voice because the staccato
is an impulsive thing and voice needs to react spontaneously to it. You learn control of the attack on the
breath because you don’t have time to clench and if you do, it doesn’t work
anyway. Then you do a legato scale
following that, which relieves that little pressure.
A
lot of times you will find a student unable to do the staccatos or unable to do
the legato closely following so you might get ‘ah-ah-ah…’ or you will get
‘ha-ha-ha-…”. The first thing they need
to learn is the flexibility to change from the staccato mode to the legato mode
very quickly. That too is a product of
the breath so the singer is pretty much obliged to draw on the breath to
achieve that in the first place. Such a
simple little infuriating exercise.
Dina: What about professional
singers who come to you after many years, who have done roles, studied songs,
etc. and they come in with a mature voice and a mature presence and doing a
staccato is almost impossible for them and they’ve got so much pressure in the
diaphragm when they do the legato that it’s weighty. Every note is weighed down with what they think is a necessary
appoggio. What do you do with them?
Elizabeth: Tell the truth, that we are
going to go back to the beginning. Back off the performance schedule until
we straighten this out. If they can’t
accept that, toss them out.
Dina: For them it’s more difficult
than for the beginning student
Elizabeth: It’s far more difficult. I love working with beginners.
Because you can start nice and clean and build them up so that the whole
body language that they learn is correct from the beginning. It’s like trying to get rid of a foreign
accent when you are working with an older singer because they have done this
that way for so long and their body knows how to do it.
Let’s
go back to the Master Class—the other thing you look for is—in the couple
minutes I had with this person, were they able to absorb and utilize the lesson
I gave. You zero in on one thing that
they need to correct and work on that one thing.
Dina: Give me an example.
Elizabeth: For the purposes of the class,
to hold the attention of the others you might choose a different topic for each
student. Usually it will be something
that is obvious, say they have a diction issue. The first time I met JW he was singing Da la sua pace from Don Giovani, pronouncing it ‘dah lah souah
pah.chay…’ with a big diphthong at the end (laughs). It was extreme. I told
him Italian is made up of pure vowels.
Let’s work on those. He was very
apt. The text of the piece is about
those “schwas” at the ends of the words.
It had to be pronounced correctly.
He learned it in 5 minutes and the next time he sang it, he didn’t drive
everyone from the room.
Even
when they get it in class, in front of a crowd they may fall back on the
familiar and what ever you told them was lost.
That’s why you’ve got to get them young. The older students can be coached and there’s room for
improvement but if they want to change anything they have to be very
determined. Is that student coming to
you for reinforcement and adulation or for true remedial help?
Dina: If they are coming for true
remedial work the question is how to help them.
Elizabeth: The first thing to do is untie
the knots. They are usually tied up in
sailors’ knots. The first thing to start with, on the breath, is the attack. You start looking for that pure, true tone. You go right back down to that original
tone. You ask them to make an attack
with a clean breath-meets-tone, without any coloration, without any vibrato,
without anything. Just make what you
would call your “dial tone,” the thing you first hear when you pick up the
phone. Often times they are so tied in
knots, it takes several weeks just to get there.
Dina: What do you think is the right
vowel?
Elizabeth: “Ah” will do nicely.
Dina: Some people can’t do the
“ah.” Would you think that an “oo”
might work?
Elizabeth: No, “ah” is the problem. The reason they can’t do the “ah” is because
they don’t have a feeling of grip on the vowel. They have to cover it or do something to it. The “ah” is a very honest vowel. It’s difficult to sing on an “ah.”
You can’t focus it the
way you can “e” or “oo” because it’s wide open. Your mouth is wide open and to center an “ah” through out the
range is difficult.
Dina: Can you ease them into
it? Some of them just can’t get the
“ah.”
Elizabeth: Cold turkey, because it kicks
the crutches out from under them. They
have to deal with it. They have to find
the resonance points they’ve been missing.
By dulling the tone they are missing out on a lot of the overtones of
the voice that should be there. I think
a problem is that a lot of singers, especially with richer voices, have a fear
of their upper partials. They think
that it sounds twangy or clangy or something.
Dina: What do you do with this
absolute dependence on what they call, support? Which is, tighten it, and grip it, and then sing? And unless they are in this torturous
position they don’t feel they are working or the voice is coming out
right. Can you say, look, let’s start
with no support?
Elizabeth: You can say this. There’s a big difference between what you
are doing as a singer and what you do when you are exercising. An exercise is an exercise! It’s not supposed to be lovely! So stop being so lovely when we are
exercising! We want to see your
weaknesses here and work with them.
They have to see they aren’t there to impress you with their gorgeous
sound. Like the spoof on the Hollywood
director—hate me, now love me. Do the
same line and hate me again.
In
singing, when you are exercising you are looking for very different things from
what you are when you are performing. A
singer who gets right to his repertoire and doesn’t bother to exercise is more
prone to problems down the road. You’ve
got to ask, do you warm-up, and with what--the trumpet voluntary of
Purcell? Do you warm-up the same way
everyday? Do you use the same combo of
stuff and how long do you warm-up? What
does warming up mean to you?
Dina: What does warming up mean?
Elizabeth: My colleagues used to be very
upset with me because it appeared that I didn’t warm-up at all. Well, that wasn’t quite true. I would do a warm-up at home before I got to
the theater. I would make sure I was in
good disposition. Just before I went
on, if I felt a little phlegm or something I might do a few of my glides and a
few things—a sip of water and I was ready to go.
Some
of these so-called dramatic voices were talking about “Durchblutung” a
lot. You know the Germans and their
“Durchblutung?” They had to get the
blood in everywhere. Their circulation,
their “Kreislauf” stuff. They were all
hung up on that. They felt that since
they were so big and bulky that they had to work that much harder to get their
Durchblutung going! I’d think that’s a
funny way to sing, with all that blood everywhere. That was their idea of warming up.
Warming
up means getting warm to the job so you aren’t singing cold. They are so afraid that first tone isn’t
going to hit it. They get all puffed up
and then they hesitate and the minute you do that nothing comes out and it’s a
self-fulfilling prophecy. Instead of
getting on the Ferris wheel and hitting the tone right at the top and just
sliding down.
Dina: So the glide, the glissando
idea is one that you think is a good warm-up?
Elizabeth: It’s vital to coordinate the
breath and the tone so that they meet at the same instant.
Dina: Without having to make it
beautiful?
Elizabeth: Sometimes we will work
temporarily with the so-called silent “h” so that the breath precedes the tone
slightly, just so that we know that it’s moving. We need to know that the breath is the thing that’s triggering
the tone and not the tone with the breath pouncing after it. The breath needs to be moving all the
time.
A
big part of the precision of singing is being able to set the note right on the
beat, right where it belongs in the music so that the conductor doesn’t come
down with the stick and your voice comes a second later. Then he’ll tell you, you’re dragging. Well, you thought the tone at the right
moment but it didn’t actually arrive until too late. Then the singer tries to come before, so you anticipate. Ideally, you want that tone to come right on
the beat. We go back to our little
staccato exercise.
Dina: What do you do with a student,
old or young, to get rid of this idea of this “rock” that has to be there, I
would say, in a very uncomfortable and unnatural way which supposedly supports
the tone before the tone comes out?
Another question, should a lighter voice, a coloratura soprano, have
different exercises and a different approach from a Helden Tenor for instance,
or a dramatic soprano or a dramatic mezzo?
Elizabeth: Well, I’m very democratic that
way. I start them all off the same.
Dina: What do you tell them about
the “rock.”
Elizabeth: If I can tell them that
tensing up all those muscles isn’t productive and if they trust me on that you
can begin to relieve the tension and get them to concentrate on the actual
productive muscles so you can clench your fist over here and do this (relax)
over there. So that you can be singing
and still walk normally—not look like Boris Karloff.
As
Olympia I’m supposed to look like Boris Karlof. So I’m back stage in my doll costume with the blond ringlets, in
a deep voice, going “F-r-i-e-n-d, good, good, duh...” Everybody laughs. But if
you have to play the Zerbinetta’s of the world and turn a cartwheel and go up a
trapeze and sit on a swing… The singer
who is all tensed up should ask himself, am I wasting a lot of strength and
energy on this while other singers don’t need that. I think that bulky approach is a security blanket in many cases.
Dina: It prevents them from soaring.
Elizabeth: Absolutely. Michelangelo said he sculpts by chipping away
everything that’s not a lion and eventually the lion comes out. Sometimes with these remedial people you
have to chip away what is not tone. Alright, if you’ve got tenor thumbs or buy my flowers or these other mannerisms
and you want to be rid of those because the directors don’t like you because
all you can do is be the Incredible Hulk and you don’t know how to act because
you can’t move—who told you singing was so hard? When did you get the idea that you needed all that to sing?
Dina: That’s what they call breath
support. This “rock” is what they call
breath support.
Elizabeth: And it’s a fallacy because you
have the muscles tensed to that point the breath stops moving. If the breath isn’t moving, neither is the
voice and then you can’t move anything.
So how do you alleviate that?
First, the singer has to believe it.
He has to be willing to take a chance and drop some of that stuff. It can be retrained but you have to back
way, way off.
I’ve
had some singers like that who were very difficult to train. You have some success but the first thing
that happens on stage is all the tension returns. They go back to the familiar.
If this thing is really ruining their career, if their voice is that
locked up, they might have to take a year off.
How about swimming lessons?
Dina: Don’t you think dramatic
sopranos, mezzos, basses, tenors, all have to do these fast exercises that Lamperti has in his book.
Elizabeth: Absolutely. When the exercises were written they were
written for every voice type and coloratura was not a voice type. It was a technique that everyone had to
master.
Look
at all the operas from the Baroque on up through Rossini—everybody was singing
coloratura—every part. I don’t like
talking about vocal size. That suggests
one singer is driving a VW Bug and the other’s got a MACK truck—that there’s
something bulkier about that voice, or the volume. I say, look, you are not a gallon jug. You have a tone.
Dina: And it happens to be what it
is, what God gave you.
Elizabeth: Right. Your tone fills the room you are in. You don’t have to BE the room, you just have
to fill the room.
Here
is the scientific approach my teacher Mark Pearson used to give us. Go back to the physics of acoustics, the way
waves work. Light waves and sound waves
follow the same laws. We have all these
color/light analogies with sound. A
dark sound is a dark color; a light color is a light sound. The way that sound and light reflect can be
absorbed. Light is just faster than
sound. Then look at the physics of what
the breath does. What creates the lift
and the loft and the flight that drives the voice? What are the physical laws?
Once you understand you can rely on them.
Dina: How do you get students to
experience that lifting, almost from above?
Elizabeth: The student needs to understand that there are these physical laws that, if the breath isn’t moving—if the wind isn’t blowing, the flag can’t wave. If the breath isn’t moving, the vocal cords can’t vibrate. How does that work, what creates a tone?
So you go right back to
a body that vibrates and creates these waves in the air which reach your ear
drums, causing the ear drum to move, which sends a signal to the
brain. That’s it, that’s all there
is. All the rest of it is dissipated so
whether you make a big “fist” or not doesn’t change the way your eardrum reacts
to the tone. Also there are efficiency
laws that opposing forces tend to cancel each other out.
Dina: How does that work in singing?
Elizabeth: If you have one muscle
tussling with another muscle energy is wasted because it’s going no
place—they’ve canceled each other out.
Energy that’s not resisted creates an effect that you want. That energy is used not wasted.
Dina: How would you deal with
somebody who seems to have a nice voice but the tone is very breathy.
Elizabeth: In a young singer I don’t mind
it because I know that will close eventually with good training. Up to the age of 20 they shouldn’t worry too
much about it. At 20-22 the voice
should be sturdy enough to start making more demands. Then you begin to balance the breath and the tone with specific
exercises.
Dina: For instance?
Elizabeth: I like the Messa di Voce a lot
for that balance because you begin with a small clean tone and you use the
breath to expand it. If the tone is
breathy, you probably won’t make it to the end of the exercise.
Dina: On one note.
Elizabeth: Right, you crescendo and
decrescendo on one breath. That is the
Messa di Voce. It forces the student to
consider his timing and how he is dealing with his breath over a longer
phrase. You make the exercise at least
3-4 seconds long. “one one thousand,
two one thousand, three…, it's got to be at least that long to do any good and
as the student becomes more proficient he can sing that over much longer
distance because that’s an exercise that promotes breath control. When the student fails to make it to the end
of a phrase you ask them, well, did you waste the whole top of the lung on the
first part of the phrase and you had nothing left at the end?
Through
these exercises, they learn how to save a little at the beginning and have
something for the end. I love the old
trick of being able to sing a long phrase then on the very last note crescendo
slightly. Wonderful effect, so
impressive, because it shows that you not only have ample breath for the phrase
but you have more than you need and you can afford to crescendo slightly on the
last note.
Dina: Some of these exercises, including
Messa di Voce, are in the Lamperti books.
What do you think of the Marchesi books and the Concornia books?
Elizabeth: I wish that the books had more specific
information on each exercise and what they are for—to know why the teacher put
it together just that way. I think that
the teachers who put those books together thought it was all self-evident. It was the prevailing singing style of the day. Modern singers today are dealing with
numerous singing styles throughout music history. A good singer might tend to specialize in a particular style.
Dina: What Lamperti books do you
suggest?
Elizabeth: The two I have are Francesco
Lamperti the father, which has a treatise and exercises, and there’s the book
by Brown on Giovanni Babtista Lamperti the son, called Vocal Wisdom. Those are the two that I know about.
Dina: What about you creating your
own exercise book?
Elizabeth: It would be a very thin book
because there are books 4” thick on singing.
Dina: Are they good?
Elizabeth: I don’t know because I haven’t
read any of them.
Dina: What about the famous story of
the one page of exercises that was given by a great maestro of the past and he
said take this page and do these exercises?
That’s all you have to do and if you keep on doing them for three years
you will be the greatest singer in the world and you can sing anything you
want.
Elizabeth: Well, I’d put a few on the
other side of the page too. (laughs)
Dina: Was there a greater instinct
for singing in the past that was not pushed or forced?
Elizabeth: We love to look back on a
“golden age” and we think that everybody sang wonderfully. Well that’s not true either.
Dina: Well what is true?
Elizabeth: There were a handful of great
singers in each generation, just as there are today. And the rest of them were kind of workaday, tenured—the opera
warhorse…
Dina: Why can a great teacher of the
past give one page to a student? Would
you have that happen today? Would that
happen at Juilliard or some other great university? That teacher would say, here, these are the exercises from the
greats of the past. We will work on
these only for two years and you won’t do any arias or anything else, just
these exercises. Then in two years
we’ll talk about what possible aria you’ll sing. You don’t have that today.
Elizabeth: I find an alarming number of
teachers who don’t pass out exercises at all.
One page would be useful. If you
get it down to the essence it’s really rather simple. Once you have the basic thing down everything is a variation on
that. The principles come in
three’s.
Dina: What would they be?
Elizabeth: The ideals of the bel canto
come in three’s-- pure vowels, flexibility, and legato. You could write a doctoral thesis on any one
of those. How do you achieve a
legato? What is a legato? How come we don’t have a word in English for
legato? There is no single word in
English or German to describe it.
There’s a typical hand gesture and that’s about it. What would we call it, line? That doesn’t quite say it.
Flexibility has to do with range, from soft to loud, from dark to light, from slow to fast. It’s one of those principles that we train into the voice.
Then the pure
vowels for bel canto--from the very beginning, the language was at the center
of it all. Italian is mostly vowels
anyway. The vowels determine the
colorations in the voice. All the
variety of color you have is derived from those vowels. We have the 5 basic ones that we exercise
but if you go through all the various languages there are dozens of them.
Dina: What about modifying the
vowels?
Elizabeth: For exercises I don’t let anybody modify a vowel.
Dina: Don’t you modify it somewhat
as you are going up to give it space?
Elizabeth: You can open your mouth but
the tongue position is the same. The
two formants are the lips and the tongue.
The jaw is not a formant, the throat is not a formant. The vowels are formed only by the tongue
and/or the lips.
Dina: But as you are going up you
have a low G for instance, or even a middle C, it’s going to be different from
a G above the upper C. Of course the
mouth gets bigger sometimes. The E I
think definitely.
Elizabeth: The queen of all exercises is
the double octave twice. For the
soprano, you might start on the A below middle C, sing the double octave up,
sing it down, and sing it back up and down again. That’s a good breath control exercise by the way, and also for
flexibility, strength of the tone. Work
on the purity of the vowels and try not to let the vowel distort too much on
the way up and down.
Dina: Not too much, you said. I’m glad you made that somewhat modified
statement.
Elizabeth: Keep it to a minimum. At least give the impression. Have the vowel keep it’s integrity even
though you have to make certain corrections for it so that you are not singing
“uh” when it’s “e.” It should still
sound like an “e”.
There
could be doctoral thesis in the subject of vowels. Each of those three ideals is several volumes. But how much can you be thinking about while
you are singing? Get it down to
something simple and real. Get it down
to three ideals. So we’ve got the ideal
of the bel canto. How about the nature
of a musical tone? That comes in
three’s also.
Dina: The musical tone, that’s
something else?
Elizabeth: It’s another three
principles. What does a tone do in
music? It has an attack, a sustain, and
a release and each of these need to be trained. We don’t want a disorganized dismount at the end—have a lovely
tone frizzle out at the end. You have
to learn how to release. Remember that
little crescendo I like at the end.
That’s also a little double dipping there, a little trick. The sustain is everything in between. These are simplified concepts and yet if you
delve into any one of them it’s another doctoral thesis.
Dina: Are there exercises that deal
with the attack, sustain, and release?
Elizabeth: Every time you open your mouth
you are dealing with those three things.
Any exercise you do has all three.
You may be stressing one or another.
You can use the same exercise and stress a different aspect each time
you do it. Say the student is having
trouble with the attack then concentrate on the attack. It’s still the same exercise.
How
many notes do you have in your voice?
You can count them up. You might
have 25 notes in your voice. They all
become your good buddies over time. The
subject isn’t endless. Here’s the
beginning of my range, here’s the end.
I have a certain duration I can sing in. I have a certain breath capacity I can sing in and these things
are finite.
Dina: You said, when you first
started you didn’t have much of a range.
How was your range extended?
Elizabeth: I had a 4 octave range when I
was a little girl and the minute puberty hit the range collapsed to about 9
notes. At sixteen, you’ve got hormones
raging that fog up the voice. I lived
with that until I was able to train through it. I didn’t sing high C or high D in public until I was close to 22
years old. It took several years of
training to carefully expand out to those ranges. You begin in the middle and work your way out in both
directions. You look at the center of
your voice as a youngster between F and A above middle C.
Most
of my exercises begin on an F for soprano then I transpose them for the other
voice types depending on how the voice lies.
You just find the center and work your way out from there. You may start with a Messa di Voce on the
five vowels. It’s kind of an “e-a-e-ou”
on one tone. Then you begin with small
intervals on a third (demonstrates).
Then start doing octaves. That
would be a nice warm-up because it draws the voice out without asking for a lot
of range at the very beginning of the session.
Dina: That’s warming up the voice
too.
Elizabeth: Yes. Each time you start with that little taffy pull from the center and you pull it in both directions slightly and just kind of stretch. It’s a light stretch.
I’ve read books teaching that vocal cords
aren’t supposed to move. That is to
say, the vocalis stays in one position in the throat. I’m sure you’ve heard this one.
One of the things you realize when you place a hand over the
cricothyroid, which is your adams apple, and you begin this kind of rocking
motion you’ll notice that something’s moving.
We are training the voice for something it’s already disposed to
do. Otherwise it’s like asking a horse
to walk on it’s front legs. It can’t,
that’s not its nature. But teach a
horse to jump. That’s very much in his
nature. You are just building on
something nature gave that beast and you are teaching him to do it on command
in a disciplined way. You are
cultivating what that talent already is and that’s what singing lessons do. You have to do things that are native to the
voice. You can’t ask it to do things it
was never built to do.
Dina: That’s why some voices are
ruined.
Elizabeth: Because they think in training
the voice they are supposed to change it in some way. You are not supposed to change it.
Dina: Some voices are very beautiful
initially and then they go for singing lessons and depending on what butcher
takes over they can ruin a voice that could have had great potential.
Elizabeth: What I tell the singers is
it’s buyer beware. You are the student
and nobody can rip the arm out of its socket unless you give them permission.
Dina: With young singers it’s
hard. They are under the age of reason.
Elizabeth: I was told it’s silly to start
voice lessons at the age of nine. You
should start them when you are at least half way to being a responsible adult
so if somebody is feeding you a line you might have the intelligence to back
away from it.
Dina: At 15 or 16 they have had no
experience with singing. It can be
quite detrimental.
Eric: I remember reading Pavarotti’s autobiography
and he talks about meeting up with Joan Sutherland and putting his arm around
her diaphragm and somehow feeling the tension and the pressure she developed
there which enabled her to soar to her high tones. Would you disagree with that?
Elizabeth: Not at all. The diaphragm is a subject on which we could
go on and on. The
diaphragm is a muscle, which divides the thorax from the abdomen, like a big
upside down salad bowl. It is responsible
for the inhale side of breathing. When
it contracts it pulls air into the lungs.
It’s the abdominal muscles that push air out. If you are doing an active exhale it’s the lower abdominal
muscles that do the pushing. The
diaphragm at that point is passive.
In
the singing tone, where the diaphragm comes in is that you don’t want an
uncontrolled rush of breath out of the lungs when you want to sing. So the rather large and untalented abdominal
muscles give the first push and then the diaphragm counters that with the
“ne..ah-ah…”. It says, not so fast and
doesn’t allow the muscles to push up so fast.
So the diaphragm’s job on the exhale is control. It isn’t an active muscle during exhalation
except by controlling the rate of exhalation.
The
reason to the use the diaphragm is that you don’t use the vocal cords to do
the job of the diaphragm. If the breath
is coming uncontrolled up against the vocal cords they are a valve and they
will just close. Their original purpose
was so that you close the valve and create downward pressure through the
abdomen for things like childbirth or lifting.
If you didn’t have that, all the air would escape from your lungs and
you’d have no leverage. These things
have their mechanical use.
Now
how do you turn that into a musical instrument? Vocal cords can be completely open, completely closed or
somewhere in between. In speaking and
singing, they are partially open. A
controlled amount of air goes through and creates this vibrating effect and the
tone is the result of that vibration. The vocal cords stretch or contract
back. The vocal cords respond to the
breath then, as far as pitch is concerned, they respond to the ear.
Dina: So you sing with your ear?
Elizabeth: Yes. A singer with no musical ear has no hope. You can’t take their money, can’t teach them
a thing. Even in most talented people
the ear has to be trained.
Dina: Recently I heard a performance
from San Carlos di Napoli of Aida and the singer playing Aida was quite
good. She had a method of singing which
was always this way (demonstrates), every tone. Sometimes she freed herself and the tone would be splendid. She trained herself to go (demonstrates). The tenor had a similar method but less of a
good voice I thought. In her O terra
addio
I notice when she went (demonstrates) that first note was always flat and yet
the one that came after was beautiful.
Every time she sang that tone it was flat. You can’t say she didn’t have an ear. Why does that happen?
Elizabeth: Sometimes the inner ear--if
you are modulating the vowel too much, it can become distorted. The tone will bend down outwardly but it
sounds right to the singer. Leading
tones are always difficult because they are higher than other tones. The singer might have to sing that an 8th
tone higher than usual because it’s a leading tone (demonstrates). It might seem right but it is too low
because in the context of the phrase it is a leading tone. I haven’t met an Aida that isn’t scared of
that phrase. Usually they try to get as
far offstage as possible so they can sing it out. It’s very exposed. That’s
where the ton of bricks approach doesn’t work.
Dina: I believe the “ton of bricks”
always brings down the voice.
Elizabeth: If the diaphragm becomes too
contentious with the breath then it will tend to starve the voice of air and
the tone seems a little starved. It’s
hard to find the right balance. But it
is the endless practice and doing those “bouncy bounces” because one of the
things the staccato does is to coordinate the abdominals with the
diaphragm. They become one reflex.
Dina: You remind me why great
singers are great, because they can do the staccato and if you can’t do it
something is wrong. It’s all in
Lamperti—you’ve got to do staccato.
Elizabeth: A page of exercises that
includes scales, some staccato work—got to sing triplets, and you’ve got to
sing quads. You’ve got to have some
exercises for the various ranges, pianissimo, forte, and you have to have
exercises that take you through the vowels.
You can do all that on one page.
All the other exercises are variations on that. I remember a book where the exercises were
built into these cute little arias that were written for the purpose. I thought those were rather sweet.
A
teacher was trying to take some of the drudgery out of these exercises. He said, if the things my students need to
learn methodically are not in the music that they like, I’ll write some music
with the method written right in. That
was a way of combining vocal method with musicianship and dealing with
language.
Dina: Tell me what you think about
the possibility for dramatic sopranos and mezzos, the heavy voices, to sing
pianissimo tones. Does that come easier
to a coloratura voice?
Elizabeth: I don’t think so. Coloratura voices, by nature, are a little
smaller. Their voices tend to stay in
the same range. Every voice goes
through a hormonal change at puberty but of all the voices the soprano stays in
her same range. Whereas many male
voices start high then drop low so they have a whole different resonance point
to deal with when their voices change—say, by an octave. The mezzo voice will tend to change by 5
notes. She’ll go from childhood to
being a mezzo and the center of the voice might drop 3-5 notes where the center
of a soprano voice is going to stay pretty much the same throughout her
life. So a mezzo has a head start.
I
think what happens is the so-called dramatic voices feel they have to color
their voices. By doing that they are
burdening the tone with aesthetic demands that, for a young singer, are not
appropriate. They skip a step. They don’t ever find out where their true
voice is because they are too busy coloring it to sound like a mezzo.
Dina: I love the idea of finding
your true voice that you speak of.
Elizabeth: Well, everybody puzzles over
the “fach” thing. What fach am I? Am I a duck or a swan? At a certain point you have to demand that
the student forget all about that and say, all we are looking for is “ah” on
concert tone. We are looking for
concert tone. That’s A-440 on an
“ah.” When you can do anything that’s
on that page of exercises with an “ah” in concert tone you will find your voice
is unfettered by these colorations. The
modulating of the pure vowels might be okay in certain situations in arias but
it’s not acceptable in an exercise. You
want to know where those flaws are. How
are you supposed to fix it if you keep pouring gunk on it.
Dina: So what do you do if it’s
flawed?
Elizabeth: If it’s flawed you work it
through. Just about every question a
student asks can be answered in one word—breath. If there’s a bump in the road, let’s say they have a break they
are having trouble getting over--it’s breath support that will lift the voice
over that.
Dina: And, by breath support, you
mean…?
Elizabeth: I mean that the voice is
sufficiently unencumbered that it can sing a musical tone over a break. You might have to back off a little
bit. You lighten up and go over the
change. If you’ve got a bump in your
voice in a certain note you may have to begin your transition two or three
notes earlier. You may have to spread
the registration over several notes as you go up and down and not allow it to
come to what I call a rubber band where it just snaps on you. Where you don’t allow the voice to snap
back. You keep the voice SUPPORTED.
Dina: When you speak of support that
way it’s different from what many people regard as support?
Elizabeth: I don’t mean the approach where they jab you with a broomstick.
Dina: If you say more support
singers have to understand what you mean
Elizabeth: What I mean by support is the
moving breath.
Dina: It’s important to define the
word support so singers understand what you mean and don’t end up doing the
opposite of what you mean.
Elizabeth: Remember the
discussion that took place when women stopped wearing corsets. Of course, men were wearing them too. In Lillie Lehmann’s book Mein Gesangkunst,
she talks about the corset. There were
singers who swore by them and others who rejected them and said, I don’t care
about fashion, I’m not going to wear a corset ever. There were schools of thought on it. Some people thought the corset was a wonderful thing to promote
breath support. But, could anything be
as immobilizing as a corset? So what do
you do? You lean on it and then you
have to breathe high because you can’t move your lower abs and your diaphragm
is at the skinniest bit, so where is it supposed to go? So, you expand through the top. If you had learned to sing that way then
take the corset off, you would have no support at all.
I
think Madam Sutherland was unique in that she had all that flexibility, all
that range but she was, as a singer, on the chunky side for a coloratura. You look at her and you think, well this
woman could sing a Brunnhilde or Liebestod and I’m sure she could have. The amazing thing about her voice was that
she could get it down to this very hot little blue flame. There was an incredible amount of energy in
that voice. When she sang coloratura
she’d do that back off thing. She’d
never sing her coloratura full voice, nobody does. But, when she was singing sotto voce it sounded like other
people’s voce piena because she was bigger in that sense than anybody
else. She was like the Niederwald
Denkmal (a huge heroic female warrior statue along the German Rhine
River). She was larger than life that
way.
Dina: You said such an important
thing. Nobody sings coloratura full
voice. It’s impossible.
Elizabeth: Sotto voce is a very important
technique. People who aren’t capable
of a pianissimo, how are they supposed to move the voice around. If they can’t do those things
they have lost one of their bel canto ideals which is flexibility. Bel canto is supposed to be a three-legged
stool, take one leg out and it cannot stand.
You are not complete as a singer if you don’t have those three things
(pure vowels, flexibility and legato).
If you are not complete as a singer then let’s get to work. If you have to come as a remedial, and you
see these big suitcases coming in the door, “hi, I’m the ton of bricks…” then
the first thing to work on is flexibility.
Dina: May be that’s a good way to
start these people who think they know so much, to do the fast exercises which
they have to be able to do.
Elizabeth: Keep the whip handy because
they are going to be hard to motivate at first. They are going to wonder, why do I have to do this? It’s because you skipped it at the beginning
and we are going back to it now. You
were supposed to do it 20 years ago.
We
covered the bel canto three principles and the three principles of the tone, which is
attack, sustain, release. Another set
of three principles is, the voice is made up of breath, tone, and
resonance. You can get a tone out of
somebody and it’s not resonant so you still have to work on your resonance, to
get what we sometimes call placement—and all that talk of singing in the mask.
Dina: Yes, what you think of that?
Elizabeth: I think it’s a marker for the
singer to know if his voice is resonant or not but not a reliable
one. Because certain notes will be
palpable in the mask and others are not.
It doesn’t mean they are not ringing.
You have to sing past the mask.
The mask to me is confining.
Dina: Anything you box like that is
going to be confining.
Elizabeth: If you are introverting your
tone to the point where you are really only thinking nowhere beyond the bridge
of your nose I think you are cheating yourself. The minute I get above a certain point the frequencies are so
quick and close together I can’t feel anything anyway. If anything I just feel a kind of outward
pressure around my eardrums as I’m singing.
It kind of like my head is being expanded, it’s a push. It’s radiating outward when I’m doing it
right. But it’s not a vibration. People are sitting there going “ne ne ne
ne”, “na na na na”
Dina: Every note they put there so
to speak which is kind of like forcing…
Elizabeth: Very limiting. How about put it over there. (points across the room)
Dina: Well some people try to tell
you to do that too.
Elizabeth: How about put it in the second
balcony, that’s where the dinner dates are.
That’s what they used to say. I
loved the Master Class at the (MOT) opera house because it was a chance for a singer
to get into an actual room and see if he could make the voice fly, let the room
carry them away.
Dina: Now that’s a wonderful thought
that you mentioned yesterday. That the
place that you sing in helps you to find your voice as it should be—that it can
be allowed to expand in space.
Elizabeth: That’s the space where the
voice lives. All these are just
actuators, initiators. I initiate a
tone, I get it developed. Only after it
leaves me and develops in the hall and is heard by the listener is it really the
tone. Once it gets out of me I don’t
have as much to do with it so I have to make sure I follow my three step plan
all the way and make sure that what I put out there is efficient, fully
developed, and viable. Another three
legged set of principles.
Dina: How would you explain viable?
Elizabeth: Well, that it lives in space,
no opposing energy canceling it out.
You allow the tone to get out there but you don’t try to suppress it in
any way. Any energy you put up to
oppose the tone will tend to cancel elements of it out whether or not you know
it. That effect might happen after it
leaves you.
Dina: It’s your responsibility to do
it right so when it does leave you it sounds right in the space.
Elizabeth: Efficient, fully developed and
viable. Efficient means there is no
opposing energy. Fully developed means
I’ve gone through all the steps. I’ve
got a moving breath. I’ve got a good
pure tone. I’ve put a cool vowel on
it. I’ve got a good sustain going
on. Viable means the continuance right
on out into the hall—that I’ve allowed for that. The tone is viable in the hall.
People can hear it and enjoy it.
Dina: What do you think of Lilli Lehmann’s idea of her ladder around the head—that was her experience.
Elizabeth: Lehmann was a great singer and
she was also a teacher and her book has been much criticized. I read it a couple of times and I read it in
the original German because I felt the English translation might have
flaws. Every time she described one of
these effects she said, remember, this is how I experience my voice and you
should explore your voice and you should come up with your experience. You shouldn’t begin to sing with a specific
idea of how it’s going to come out. You
should see what comes out then stand back and say, what was that?
Dina: That’s a wonderful way to put
it. Every tone has to be rediscovered.
Elizabeth: Otherwise you are a miserable
control freak. How many times has
anyone told a singer that their tone was fascinating, not pretty, not crystal,
but fascinating? I’ve been told that
many times. The tone is a living thing. Fully developed means I have allowed it to
be fully developed by following all of my steps and making sure I’ve served the
tone in every aspect with the breath and the actuator here and the
resonance—make sure that it is fully developed. Beyond that, once it gets beyond the end of my nose it’s got to
live in the hall and if the tone is alive that means it’s reflecting, it’s
deflecting, it’s amplifying, it’s traveling around. Once I’ve let it go I can’t suddenly put a cap on it on the way
out the door. I would be like an
overprotective mother who has a rambunctious natural child and he’s all set to
go and when he gets to the door she says “don’t forget your scarf and your hat
and your boots and your gloves and your coat.
Then he gets out there and he can’t move. So at the last minute you’ve taken all the spontaneity out of it,
so here you’ve got this tone coming on and you say, “before I let you go put
this muffler on” because, in the last analysis I’m so self conscious I can’t
allow anybody to hear the real me..
I
once asked Boris Goldovski, “was that good, is that right?” and he responded in
his charming Russian accent, “doss it haff to be bad?” (laughs) Why should I have to crunch it down and
cultivate it to pieces until there’s nothing left to fascinate?
Dina: Isn’t that one of the great
joys of singing—singing right? It’s a
creative process and every tone is born anew and you are giving birth to the
voice. You’re not making it you are
freeing it. If you are doing it right
there’s a feeling like no other experience.
Elizabeth: I always hope the audience
will come along on my little journey.
It’s okay with me if they don’t.
Dina: When the voice is free the
audience generally goes along.
Elizabeth: I’m never insulted when
somebody falls asleep because they’ve usually been dragged there by a wife
after a long day at work and it’s far better than to think that poor exhausted
man was kept awake by shrill, awful noises.
I would rather have a soothing effect on people than to be one of these
yellow canaries so you couldn’t sleep in a windstorm. When someone nods off I could say, “shh, don’t wake him, just leave him
alone. If I stop singing he might wake
up.” It’s all in how you see yourself
fitting into the larger scheme of things.
If self-consciousness causes you to be apprehensive of the audience that
can be pretty damning too. That’s the
wrong approach.
Dina: Isn’t that the fear of
auditions?
Elizabeth: Auditions are the worst.
If you are out there trying to
sell people a bill of goods and you know in your heart it’s not so, if you are
trying to be somebody else, trying to sound like somebody else, trying to do
something that you know is unobtainable they will find you out. In 1977, I did the Met Auditions. I took third place in that, which,
considering who was singing, wasn’t half bad.
Vincent Cole got first, a wonderful tenor. Some lyric soprano was
second, I forget,
because it was a casting call for Barcelona, I was third place. There was another singer who I admired
greatly, she was from California, I thought she was terrific and should have
placed second if not first but she didn’t get the second and I picked up third
but there were a couple things wrong with her performance apparently.
Today
she is an American opera icon—Carol Vaness.
Today she’s a great star. At the
time we were about the same age, in our mid-twenties maybe. She came out in a specially made dress which
was kind of a chocolate velvet and she sang Tosca, Vissi d’arte. I thought she sang very well, but what I
heard floating around was that she had sung the wrong repertoire, that the jury
was expecting her to choose something a little more age and development
appropriate and that they took points off for that. How could I sing anything inappropriate, the only thing I know is
coloratura and I did a good job. I
think I’d have walked off with the whole thing if I’d been allowed to sing what
I wanted, but be that as it may, she chose Vissi d’arte, I don’t remember what
the second one was, something dramatic.
Dina: What did you chose?
Elizabeth: What was chosen for me was
Blondchen from Abduction, and the Bell Song from Lakme. The Bell Song is a bad piece to audition
because it’s so exposed at the beginning and if you’re little heart is going
like this (pounding) it shows.
Dina: And what did you want to sing?
Elizabeth:
Zerbinetta! Which I was very strong at but they decided
it was too long. If I’d been more
assertive, I would have said, I’ll skip the first round and sing Zerbinetta for
the second round. I didn’t have the
nerve then, which is why the cut off age is 30, because after that you know
what’s what. It’s better to sing these
competitions when you are clueless.
Carol Vaness went on to Europe and devoured all the Mozart first
ladies, Donna Anna, Konstanze, all of them, and she was terrific at it. She sang a lot of Baroque and Handel
too. Then years later she began moving
into the heavier Puccini ladies and the Verdis when I met up with her it was
almost 30 years later.
I
was in Houston singing an audition and she was debuting as Norma. I went back stage to say
hi. I hadn’t seen her since the
Auditions. I knew what had transpired
with her in the mean time, that she was a major star at this point. In spite of that the Auditions were still
strong in her mind. She recognized me
and asked, what are you doing here? I
said I’m auditioning and I bet they don’t make you audition any more. She agreed they don’t. I said, so much for the Met auditions as far
as influencing the future of a career.
That made no difference to us either way.
Your
winning ticket is you, not who you hope to be in 20 years. The reason she didn’t place apparently was
that she was skipping a step. She was
anticipating. She wanted to show them
where she was going instead of where she was at the time.
Dina: What do you think she should
have chosen at that time?
Elizabeth: Donna Anna.
Dina: That’s also tough material.
Elizabeth: But it was the right type of
singing for her voice at that time, in her 20’s.
Dina: But they gave her that aria?
Elizabeth: No, she chose it.
Dina: They didn’t let you choose your Zerbinetta.
Elizabeth: Because it was too long. Vessi d'arte is nice and short. In the competition setting or any place
else, honesty is the best policy. Be
who you are right now and not what you were or what you are going to be. You have to re-evaluate yourself on a
regular basis and find your true voice.
If you go out there as something you’re not, they’ll know.