How to survive in a choir
The key thing to remember is that you own your voice and you are responsible for the health and longevity of your instrument.
The journey from surviving to thriving is full of goodies. It’s about getting to know yourself and being your voices best friend. It sounds trite, but it is a real and wholly rewarding experience.
When singers join choirs, it is usually for social reasons as well as the opportunity of having fun and singing great music. It’s scientifically proven that singing in groups has so many benefits, mental, emotional and physical. Did we ever need a scientific study to know this ?
Did you also know that singing in a chorus can be way more fatiguing than singing solo ! This is dependant upon the style of music and the composer of course, but if you look at the choral parts of Handel’s Messiah or Beethoven’s Choral Symphony for instance, it is fairly relentless. The popular Rock Choirs and modern day Musical Theatre have their own challenges. So, my question is:
Who is looking after the voices ?
In my years as a voice coach and Musical Director of choruses, I’ve heard many abused voices in ‘last hope’ street facing an audition or possible work loss and I know firsthand that the process can be brutal with no prisoners held.
Musical Directors are usually up against a heavy concert schedule and often do cursory warm-ups which focus on the entire chorus of voices with little consideration for specific needs of the different voice types. They are also, and understandably, very results driven.
So……. how does this affect you ?
It affects you when you’re rehearsing a passage of music over and over and you feel your throat tightening on each repeat. It affects you when the M.D asks for a pianissimo and you find that your voice can’t sustain it without tightening in the throat. It affects you when you come away from the rehearsal feeling hoarse, or with no voice at all!
What can you do about it ?
Here’s 3 simple steps:
Get to know your voice
It’s vital that a singer become very familiar with healthy vocal production both in speaking and in sustained sound. What does it feel like to make a breathy sound or a tight sound? Where’s the balance point ? Where are my register breaks ? How can I manage them ?
We could think of it in terms of having a new phone. You paid for it, bought a nice case to protect it and you know pretty well how to use the basic functions. So, why are we so absent minded about getting to know the basic functions of our voices ? What’s more, we’re willing to hand them over to the rigours of a rehearsal process without properly understanding what happens underneath the bonnet.
Would you hand your phone to a stranger and ask them to play with it ?
2. Get to know the external influences
External influences for the singer are stress, pressure, environmental toxicity and the acoustic.
Stress can be a silent invader. If you have a stressful situation in your life and you sing to relieve some or all of it, that’s great. But spare a thought for your voice as it is placed between the heart and the head and can end up in the firing line of our emotional out-pouring. Warming up properly, with due consideration and care is key !
If we believed that we had a Stradivarius in our throat, we would definitely be taking better care of it !
Pressure is almost unavoidable in our daily lives. It can come from unexpected places for a singer. The pressure to perform and the mindset that runs alongside that, such as the pressure of expectation, often self-imposed. If you have noticed this tendency in other areas of your life, it will seep into your singing and performance if you’re not mindful. When we experience pressure our breathing can become shallow, the voice restricted in the throat and the sound quality is then affected. Musical integrity is lost.
There is another pressure that choral singers often experience and this is linked to the feeling of letting down your peers. The singer next to you may have oodles more experience than you which can add fuel to the fire of inadequacy, leaving you overly dependant on your neighbour for cues or tuning. Dependence and independence are both required aspects of good choral singing and being aware that these are real and progressive skills is the first step. I like to think of these two ideas as co-habiting harmoniously.
We are all exposed to toxicity in our food, water and in the air we breath. Staying properly hydrated is very important for the singer. Eating good nutritious food goes without saying. Training a singer for the operatic stage is akin to training an Olympic athlete, so it stands to reason that we must take care of what goes into the body.
The last external influence is the acoustic. A surprising one I know, but I remind my own students about this whenever they start to get fussy about the feedback of rooms. It’s not about the acoustic. We have awareness of an internal and external acoustic, for instance anyone can sound pretty awesome in the bathroom but rubbish in the dead acoustic of a heavily furnished living room. This perception of our sound is present when we rely on the external sound through our ears instead of feeling it course through the deep resonating chambers of our bodies. The feel is very important and one that is overlooked by the singer as we are seduced by the end result. Every other instrument has a visual physical structure which involves a physical action and can be felt. Give yourself the time to feel the speaking voice first; the flow of the breath passing through the throat, the feeling of producing a balanced sound and the resonance as sound travels through the body.
Sound should come from the inner most part of our physical and spiritual bodies. The surprising fact is that when it does ……. fear disappears
3. Get to know the internal influences
Internal influences are linked to our perception, emotions, thoughts and physical movement. This is the biggest topic and too in depth for this blog. One of the most obvious problems that singers face is that the voice is intrinsically linked to our physical structure and our emotional responses. We have to learn to rely on feel.
So, who is looking after the choral singer…… ?
Is the choral singer preparing the instrument through a mindful process ? I can tell you that professional singers will be or should be! From my own experience, when my voice finally came into balance and I understood and felt how it operated, I would experience a thrilling feeling when standing up in front of an audience because I wanted to show off an instrument that I had worked at over the years. This feeling is very attainable for every singer, but first you must embrace the treasure that is in your throat as if it were your best friend.