The Liberated Voice

Equanimity, or Why We Must Fail in Order to Succeed

 

e·qua·nim·i·ty /ˌikwəˈnɪmɪti, ˌɛkwə-/ –noun

Mental or emotional stability or composure, especially under tension or strain; calmness; equilibrium. Synonyms: serenity, self-possession, aplomb.

Equanimity is a fundamental skill for self-exploration and emotional intelligence. It is a deep and subtle concept frequently misunderstood and easily confused with suppression of feeling, apathy or inexpressiveness…[it] means attempting to let go of negative judgments about what you are experiencing and replacing them with an attitude of loving acceptance and gentle matter-of-factness.

Shinzen Young 

 

Singing is an incredibly fulfilling practice, but it is also quite humbling. As I recently commented in a New Forum for Classical Singers post, singing is an open-ended endeavor. However great your technique and artistry become, each new success reveals a higher potential level of achievement. You have to become capable of simultaneously celebrating your success and acknowledging how much you still have to learn.

On a grand scale, this means that while your debut in a major new role may be a huge triumph, performing it for the first time reveals how much more depth and nuance there is to be found as you become increasingly familiar with it. On a more private scale, a technical breakthrough in the practice room or a voice lesson is a definitely a personal triumph – but it also swiftly gives you an idea of what the next challenge is going to be!

Perhaps the most important thing you can do as a singer, or as a person, really, is cultivate the ability to respond with equanimity to all your triumphs and your challenges, great and small. 
A good way to work on this is monitoring your reactions to your own voice when you're practicing technical exercises or learning repertoire.

I've been thinking about the frequency with which many of my students express disappointment or frustration with themselves in small habitual ways after each repetition of an exercise – a dismissive grimace, a shake of the head, a muttered expletive – despite the fact that in my view, what they had just done was quite successful! 

Why do so many singers do this?

Well, no matter how awesome you may be, you come to me because you want to get even better. Getting better usually means changing something. So I teach you an exercise designed to help you make a useful change; I explain what it is for; and I direct your attention to the movements and qualities that will determine whether you've done it successfully. Because I'm asking you to do something that is different from what you are used to doing, it may result in sensations and sounds that are unfamiliar, unstable and/or uncomfortable to you, even if when you later listen to the recording of your lesson you realize that in fact you were making a spectacular sound. The law of homeostasis says that we are programmed to react negatively to change of any kind, so even though you're paying me good money to get you to do something different, your subjective reaction to successfully making changes may initially be one of great discomfort.  

You may also criticize your attempt at the exercise if you think you didn't do it right, but the true success of the exercise isn't really determined by whether you executed it perfectly. It lies in your making your best attempt to perform the exercise and then notice what happened when you tried. 

Your job is to form a clear intention, attempt the exercise, and then notice what happened. You lose this crucial opportunity if immediately after performing an exercise you negatively assess your own sound, balk at an unfamiliar sensation, or criticize yourself for doing it "wrong" because your awareness is not being directed at the thing you intend to change.

Awareness by itself is often curative. Say you habitually close your jaw on an [i] (ee) vowel. If you're trying to redefine your [i] so that your jaw stays relaxed but find that you somehow still can't seem to help closing your jaw, the most important thing you can do is catch yourself in the act of closing your jaw when you don't intend to. If you can observe yourself doing in real time something that had previously been an unconscious, habitual movement, you're that much closer to being capable of making a choice not to do it and choose to do something else instead. But if your inner monologue goes "damnit I closed my jaw again," or "that sounds terrible", you've missed the chance to get valuable information about how to make the change you want to make. 

Making any change in your life almost always begins by trying, failing, learning from the failure, and trying again. Seth Godin eloquently explains the reasons that the most successful people are the ones who fail most often in this blog post. A great example of the truth of this is the career of baseball legend Ty Cobb, who still holds the highest career batting average of all time: .366. The highest career batting average belongs to a guy who hit the ball less than 4 out of every 10 times at bat. 

Even if you're in complete agreement with me about the importance of refraining from self-criticism while you're working on your voice, it's easier said than done! 

So here is how I'd like you to think about it: Included in the price of your voice lesson is permission to fail, as well as absolution from all harsh self-judgement, for the 60 minutes that we're working together. 

For the hour that you're with your teacher, let us direct your awareness and assess the success of what you're doing. 

With practice, you'll become capable of doing more of this for yourself. Give yourself permission to fail and absolve yourself from harsh self-judgement. With greater equanimity, you will become better able to direct your own awareness and skillfully assess your work in a way that will not only make practice much more enjoyable but will massively speed up your progress. 

Taming the Wayward Tongue: Workshop Recap

I would like to thank all of the singers who made last night's workshop such a success! You were all so willing to risk making strange noises and do some pretty yucky things for the sake of improving your awareness of how your tongues work and enhance your powers of articulation. 

Here's a recap of the major ideas we covered in the workshop.

The tongue serves us in many ways in addition to the work it does for articulation in speech and singing, including eating, drinking, tasting, yawning, sucking, gagging (prevents choking and swallowing something you don't intend to), and French kissing (thanks, Evelyn!). 

The major job of the tongue in singing is articulation. Other major articulators include the jaw and the lips. It is possible and desirable to be able to move your tongue independently from the jaw and lips.  

You can view and download the handout from the workshop here. 

 

Notice just how large an organ the tongue really is! 

The tongue is composed of extrinsic and intrinsic muscles. The extrinsic muscles attach it to the jawbone, the hyoid bone, and the styloid processes of the temporal lobes (i.e. the side of your skull). These are the muscles that move the whole tongue around. The intrinsic muscles originate within the tongue. They cause it to expand and contract with great versatility, enabling us to articulate an incredible variety of speech sounds. 

We worked primarily with two of the major extrinsic muscles of the tongue: the genioglossus, which protrudes and sticks out the tongue:

and the hyoglossus, which depresses and retracts the tongue:

The hyoglossus is attached to the hyoid bone. Depressing and retracting the tongue is going to exert downward pressure on the hyoid bone. Your larynx is suspended from the hyoid bone, so you can see how depressing and retracting the tongue can limit movement of the larynx and create resistance in your singing. 

When we talk about tongue tension, this is mostly what is meant: retracting and depressing the tongue creating downward pressure on the larynx, crowding your resonating space, and making itself less available for highly specific articulation work you need it to do.

If you take your thumbs and gently feel under your chin, the tissue in this area should be relatively soft and pliable. If it becomes rigid and pushes back against your thumbs when you start singing, this is primarily the hyoglossus retracting and depressing the base of your tongue. It is possible to do pretty much anything you need to do as a singer without this muscle contracting to the point that this area noticeably stiffens.

However, most singers do this to a greater or lesser extent and have to train themselves to keep the hyoglossus much less active. The major reasons for this include speech habits, chronic or habitual tightening associated with learning to "hold your tongue" as a well-behaved child, and using the tongue to do vocal technical things that can best be accomplished other ways. 

Most of our discussion centered on two things singers sometimes use the tongue to do that are not related to articulation: 

 

Using the base of the tongue to push the larynx down and hold it in a low position. 

I myself was trained to do this by one of my first voice teachers. Holding the larynx down with the base of your tongue increases the length of the supraglottal tract. We all want to maximize the length of the supraglottal tract because this yields optimal resonance, contributing bloom and power to the voice. Pushing the larynx down with the base of the tongue is a quick and dirty way to do this, but you'll pay for it because:

• It requires a lot of consistent and unnecessary effort
• It keeps the tongue from being able to perform its articulatory duties well
• While it will keep the larynx from moving up, it will also keep it from tilting efficiently and will likely compromise your range
• It also diminishes resonance because the tongue is taking up space it shouldn't be and the whole area will be stiffer and less available for enhancing your sound.

 

Using the tongue to help with breath management – increasing subglottal air pressure by pushing the tongue down and then driving breath against the resistance it creates. 

This is one of the issues I addressed in my recent post on breath management. While it may seem a more expedient way to achieve greater subglottal air pressure, it creates more problems than it solves.

It is possible to maintain a low relaxed position for your larynx and maximize the length of your supraglottal tract without retracting and depressing your tongue; it's also possible to increase and regulate subglottal air pressure without doing this. However, strategies for both these concerns touch on wider issues of vocal technique. Different voice teachers will propose different solutions, and I wanted to be able to present as much information on tongue anatomy and function as possible to a wide audience of singers without prejudice for one technique or another. 

Of course, anyone who wants to learn more about what my solutions are will find a lot of information elsewhere on this site, and you're always welcome to come see me for a lesson. 

 

If you were unable to attend the workshop this time but would be interested in attending one in the future, please email me to express your interest. If I hear from enough people I will gladly arrange to give another soon. 

Rock and Roll Never Forgets

 

So you're a little bit older and a lot less bolder than you used to be,

So you used to shake 'em down

but now you stop and think about your dignity 

So now sweet sixteens turned thirty-one 

You get to feelin' weary when the work days done 

Well all you got to do is get up and into your kicks 

If you're in a fix 

Come back baby 

Rock and roll never forgets

- Bob Seger

 

My old friend Philip Price has been remastering the songs I recorded with him a very long time ago on his old 4-track cassette machine, back when I was eking out a blissful bohemian existence in Vermont. I had become interested in singing but I hadn't done much about it yet. It's wonderful and bizarrely haunting to listen to my voice on these tracks again.

Romance by Philip Burke Price

(I was primarily a clarinetist at the time, so that's me on the clarinet, but this track is also the only surviving evidence of my brief, sad career as a bass player…who knows, now that Rock Band is finally teaching me how to separate my hands, perhaps I'll give it another shot!) 

 

Misinterpreted by Philip Burke Price

Cover art for the cassette tape. The band was Feet Wet, album title Tender Skelter.

Velveteen by Philip Burke Price

 

I have such incredibly fond memories of working on these songs, and it has me wondering how many classical and "legit" vocalists first fell in love with singing through listening to and performing popular music. A quick survey on Twitter turned up colleagues and students with rock 'n roll origins, including Susan Eichhorn Young who says she "started in pop - and punk!!" 

Even for those of us who have never wrestled with a Fender, pop music plays such a significant role in our creative and personal lives. And while there are certainly some singers who are drawn to classical music from a very early age, I suspect that most of you first identified more with the singers you heard on the radio, at parties and dances, on film and television soundtracks. For many of you, the music you listen to for leisure and the music you perform may have little overlap. 

Most of you love at least one style of popular music. Do you ever sing it yourselves?

It often happens that one of my classical students is called upon to sing a pop tune for one reason or another. And in most cases, they are at first completely freaked out by the whole idea! 

Classical music is so highly structured that it's easy to get overly invested in "getting it right" – delivering a perfectly accurate performance of the notes, rhythms, dynamics, and diction. But in pop music, this kind of accuracy is far less of a priority than coming up with your own personal interpretation of the material. You have to let loose and express yourself – if your rhythms are too accurate and your diction too precise, it will just sound wrong. 

But of course, getting to the point where you can let loose and express yourself is just as important for classical music. 

Working on a pop tune can be a great way to reclaim real spontaneity in your singing. Your first attempts at pop ornamentation or R&B-type flexibility might expose some stiffness that is also keeping your classical singing from being as free and expressive as it could be. But stick with it, and getting some skill with the style will in all likelihood translate to greater flexibility and spontaneity in your Handel and bel canto rep as well. It's also a fantastic opportunity to sing in colloquial English. Experiencing the kind of naturalness that goes with this will show you how much more naturally you may be able to communicate when singing in stylized English or in any other language. 

I don't think I could ever be nearly as good a pop singer as I am a classical singer, but I'm so happy to have had the opportunity to sing with Philip back when I had no concept of what the differences even were! 

I still love his music as much as ever. His band, Winterpills, now has the benefit of far better recording technology than that old 4-track, as well as the wonderful voice of Flora Reed. 

Winterpills sampler by Winterpills

(My favorite at the moment is "You Don't Love Me Yet")

Philip claims that somewhere he has a recording of me singing Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting with the cover band we put together when we were particularly desperate for money one Christmas. 

If he ever digs that one out, sorry, I'm not posting it here! 

Workshop: Taming the Wayward Tongue 4/19/2011

 

If you're in the New York area next Tuesday, April 19, I hope you'll consider joining me for a workshop on tongue anatomy and coordination.

The tongue is an incredibly strong and versatile muscle. For singers, a well-coordinated tongue is essential for clear, nuanced diction and optimal resonance.

Many things can develop chronic tongue tension, including:

• Habitual patterns of speech
• Faulty vocal technique
• Swallowing or eating disorders

In this 90-minute workshop, I will cover basic tongue anatomy and discuss the role of the tongue in singing technique. I will also teach a series of exercises to identify and relieve tongue tension and develop excellent coordination. This workshop is being offered without consideration for any particular approach to vocal technique, so all singers and voice teachers will be able to benefit.

The workshop will be limited to 30 participants.

Taming the Wayward Tongue

Tuesday, April 19, 2011

7:00pm - 8:30pm

Ripley Grier Studios, Room 4A, 939 8th Avenue, New York, NY

Admission: $18 advance purchase price through Brown Paper Tickets  or $25 at the door.

Anatomy of Breathing, Part 3: Breath Management

 

You're reading this blog on a computer, so hopefully you've got that can of compressed air that you use to clean your keyboard somewhere nearby. Grab it and give the nozzle a quick press. An intense burst of air will flow out of the can. 

 
Why does this happen? The air pressure inside the can is much greater than the air pressure outside the can. When you pushed the nozzle, you created an opening for the air to release, and this difference in air pressure caused a significant amount of air to rush swiftly out. 

Breath management is the ability to increase subglottal air pressure – to compress the air in your lungs so that will behave more like the air inside the can – and then regulate the level of subglottal air pressure while singing. 

Increasing subglottal air pressure means that when you release your breath, it will release more swiftly and powerfully and have a potentially greater impact on the vibration of your vocal folds. Regulating this air pressure while your breath releases enables you to determine how much of the surface of your vocal folds proximates while singing, providing control over dynamics and vocal color.

 

There are several ways to maximize subglottal air pressure, not all of them ideal for singing:

1. Create a lot of resistance for your voice by over-adducting your vocal folds, pushing the base of your tongue back and down, and/or tightening up your constrictor muscles. Then force a lot of air through by pushing with your abdominal muscles and/or squeezing your rib cage shut. (not recommended!) 

This is an exaggerated description of what passes for "breath support" in the concept of many singers, and there's a good reason that so many people do it to a greater or lesser extent. You can see how creating excess resistance and then pushing against it will indeed serve to compress the air in your lungs, increasing subglottal air pressure. The result may be a more powerful, vibrant and resonant sound, but this producing it this way leads to fatigue and hoarseness (or even injury). If you're really good at it, your face will turn red and the veins and tendons on your neck will pop out. And you won't be able to do this throughout your entire range, because singing with this much resistance elevates and limits range of motion for your larynx and compromises resonance space. 

 

2. Gain a lot of weight. (also not recommended!)

As I discussed in the previous post, when you release your breath fully the natural elasticity of your lungs causes them to return to their default, un-stretched state and the diaphragm returns to a high relaxed position. Gravity causes the extra weight in your viscera to exert a significant downward pull on your diaphragm and lungs as they strive to return to a relaxed state. The diaphragm ascends more slowly and this creates a kind of vacuum, resulting in greater subglottal air pressure. So extra weight in the abdominal area can indeed contribute a lot of assistance with breath management. This is one reason why heavier singers are sometimes able to produce a more dramatic sound, and why it is so important for singers to carefully retrain their technique after losing a lot of weight. But while a heavy abdomen does help to increase subglottal air pressure, it still doesn't give you any help with regulating air pressure (it's exerting the same downward pull at all times – you can't vary it) and excessive weight may keep you from maintaining optimal health and energy, both very important for a singing career.

 

3. While singing, keep the inhalation muscles associated with costal respiration engaged and maintain dynamic good upper-body alignment. (bingo.)

If you want to increase subglottal air pressure and regulate it as your breath releases, this is the safest and most organic way to do it. Any other strategy creates a lot of stress for your voice and body without being nearly as effective. 

Breath management means doing something to inhibit the outflow of air as it releases. But achieving this by creating resistance in your throat will keep your voice from functioning freely, and slowing the ascent of the diaphragm will keep the breath from releasing fully. This is why it is so important that, to the best of your ability, you learn to sing with relatively little resistance and master releasing your breath fully before you work on breath management – if you haven't gotten these skills down yet, you won't be able to tell whether or not what you're doing to manage your breath is creating more entanglement or keeping your breath from releasing.

With good upper body alignment, take a full, deep breath.

Allow your sternum to rise and your ribs to expand in all directions.

When your lungs are at full capacity, continue trying to inhale.

Hold your breath by continuing to do this for 10 - 15 seconds.

Release your breath fully. 

You should now be able to sense where the effort was being exerted as you were sustaining the movement of inhalation.

Where do you feel it?

Repeat this process.

Do you feel the effort in the same places the second time?

Different places?

Additional ones?

While you were using all of your muscles of inspiration to inhale, the ones where you are likely to feel the exertion are probably related to costal inhalation (the diaphragm contains so few nerve endings that it is difficult to feel its work directly). Everyone senses this movement differently, and you will probably be more aware of some of your inspiratory muscles than others. For most singers, it takes repeated exploration to figure out how to voluntarily engage these muscles independent of the breathing process, but with practice you will get an increasingly clearer sense of how they all move. 

Many elements of good alignment also contribute to inspiratory movement and help keep the muscles of costal inspiration active. 

Blandine Calais-Germain points out that "Because it is rigid, the skeleton provides a well-defined structure to breathing and stabilizes certain actions." With good alignment, the spine is more in a state of extension than flexion. Spinal extension is very helpful for keeping the muscles of costal inspiration engaged while singing:

This illustration is from Calais-Germain's excellent book, Anatomy of Breathing.

 

Keeping the sternum in a high, stable position is useful for many aspects of singing. It contributes to good alignment. A number of the muscles that move and stabilize the larynx are attached to your sternum, so when your sternum stays in one place it helps anchor all of that movement. And maintaining a high, stable position for your sternum while singing requires you to keep some of the costal inspiratory muscles engaged. 

What are these muscles? Any muscle that helps open the rib cage is considered a muscle of costal inspiration. We tend to think of the intercostals as the main muscles of costal inspiration:

However, there is a complex network of muscles around the ribs that keep them open and assist with inspiration. These include:

Pectoralis Major & Pectoralis Minor 

Serratus Anterior
Levatorus costarum

Serratus Posterior Superior

These inspiratory muscles can potentially all work together to stabilize the rib cage in an open position while contributing to good alignment and doing nothing to create resistance anywhere near your larynx and vocal folds. Cultivate the coordination and power to do this consistently, and you will improve your ability to increase subglottal air pressure and become capable of regulating it by varying the intensity with which you engage these muscles. 

Skillful breath management yields great vocal power and dynamic variety. However, I cannot overstate the importance of mastering breath release before building skill in this area. There are countless ways that you can compress your breath and regulate its release that create tremendous resistance and entanglement in your body and your voice.

A free voice powered by the full release of the breath is all you need to sing very, very well. Achieve this, and breath management skills can greatly expand your power, stamina and expressive palate.

Anatomy of Breathing, Part 2: Releasing the Breath

 

Where vocal technique is concerned, there are two distinct categories of breath activity: 

• Releasing the breath
• Breath management

This post will address the anatomy and movement involved in releasing the breath.

It is crucial that you understand and master the process of releasing the breath fully before working on breath management. If you're in the habit of using your abdominal muscles to move your air up and out, learning to release the breath fully will lead to much freer, less effortful and more resonant singing. But this presents a major paradigm shift for many singers, and it can take some time and practice to get comfortable with it. Don't address breath management skills until you actually have some breath to manage, or you may end up  singing with more effort and resistance than before!

 

Take a full, deep breath.

Pause for a moment.

Then let it all go, like an unvoiced sigh of profound relief.

It should all fly out pretty swiftly.

Don't do anything to either hold back or speed up the release of your breath – make sure you're not pushing air out with your abs, squeezing it out with your ribs, or deliberately doing anything to slow it down. 

First, practice this without any concern for alignment, allowing your chest to collapse.

Then, when you feel that you are able to release your breath fully without either pushing it out or holding it back, try releasing your breath while maintaining good upper body alignment, with your sternum high, your spine stable and your shoulders relaxed back and down.

 

When you release your breath fully while maintaining good upper body alignment and without doing anything to push it out, there are two main things contributing to the swift release of air.

 

Pulmonary Elasticity

Like rubber balloons, the lungs are made of highly elastic material. They resist inhalation, and once you've inhaled and stretched them out, they strive to return to their original state. Blandine Calais-Germain calls the lungs themselves "the primary force of expiration". The natural elasticity of the lungs is enough to generate plenty of airflow if you don't do anything to inhibit it.

Releasing the Diaphragm

The diaphragm contracts and descends on inhalation. After inhaling fully, if you simply release the diaphragm and allow it to spring back up into a relaxed state, this movement will contribute to the release of your breath similar to the flight of an arrow when the bow string has been released. If instead you inhibit and slow down the ascent of the diaphragm, the effect will be similar to slowly releasing the tension on your bowstring – rather than exploding with lethal force, your arrow will fall to the ground at your feet. 

 

Releasing your breath brings your vocal folds together and sets them vibrating due to a law of physics known as Bernoulli's principle. Have a look at this terrific segment on the Bernoulli effect from Dr. Carlson's Science Theater. 

 

 

Hopefully you can imagine how skillfully releasing the breath to create this effect can yield tremendous results with minimal sense of effort!

This process is truly effective only when your airflow meets minimal resistance from your vocal folds as well as anything near them that could inhibit their vibration – tension in or around the larynx, tightness in the tongue or jaw, or poor alignment of the cervical spine. So for the breath to play its rightful role in your singing technique, you must resolve anything that creates undue resistance to the flow of air.

Releasing the breath is so simple that it's more like keeping yourself from interfering with your own body than an actual technique. It's a non-doing. The inhalation is the active part; then it's up to you to maintain good upper-body alignment while allowing the natural elasticity of your lungs to expel the air and permit the diaphragm to spring back up into a relaxed position. 

However, this is easier said than done. Anything that creates undue resistance in your voice will trigger a temptation to push with the breath. Nervousness, habits of self-censorship, and faulty technique can lead to holding back your breath. 

Both pushing the breath out and holding it back will keep you from releasing your airflow in a way that is adequate to generate the Bernoulli effect in the most advantageous way for singing.

Therefore, to learn to fully release your breath, it is also important to become aware of anything you may be doing to manipulate your breath and to inhibit it. 

You can't release and push at the same time. You may have to learn how to stop pushing before you're able to have any concept of what the results will be when you do become capable of releasing your breath fully. 

But trust the principles of physics and take the time to cultivate this skill. You'll be amazed by how much less effort you need to sing and how much more payoff you'll get from your breath. 

Anatomy of Breathing, Part 1: An Introduction

 

This will be a three-part column on the anatomy of breathing as it relates to singing technique. This post includes some general information and observations; the second post addresses how releasing the breath stimulates the vocal folds to vibrate (the Bernoulli effect); and the third discusses breath management. 

 

Respiration is an incredibly fascinating and complex process. All physical and emotional experience affects our breathing to a greater or lesser extent. And there is very little in our physical and emotional experience that is not influenced by the quality of our breathing. 

Here are some important things to keep in mind:

The diaphragm, the major muscle of inspiration, contracts on inhalation. The diaphragm is a dome-shaped sheet of muscle that goes all the way around the bottom of the rib cage. When it contracts, it descends, sucking air into the lungs. The admonishment to "Sing from your diaphragm!" makes absolutely no anatomical sense because as we sing, we exhale. If you're actively pushing air out while singing, it isn't the diaphragm that's doing the pushing. 

There are two essential types of breathing: Costal breathing, through opening and closing the ribs; and diaphragmatic breathing, which works with the abdominal area. These two types of breathing impact on the lungs in completely different ways, and both are very important for singing. A singer who is overly dependent on costal breathing and needs to cultivate diaphragmatic breathing may get the idea that the ribs and upper torso should not be involved in breathing at all, but optimal breathing for singing requires that you master both types of breathing and skillfully coordinate them together. There is a good description of this on the first page of this lesson on The Respiratory System , plus a neat quiz you can take to test your understanding of respiration in general.

It can be very difficult to see, feel and control the movements of some of the major muscles of respiration. You can't really see the diaphragm working because all of its movements are internal. You also can't feel it well, as there are very few nerve endings providing you with any information about its activity. On the other hand, it's much easier to feel many of the muscles in the rib cage that are involved in breathing. This is one of the reasons that so many singers instinctively emphasize costal breathing at first – you can see and feel the movement of the ribs, whereas it's difficult to tell what the diaphragm is up to.

When singing, is NEVER necessary to forcibly exhale (i.e. push out the breath) using the abdominal muscles, ribs, or any other means. I discussed this in my earlier post, Resistance is Futile but it bears mentioning again. Driving the breath out like this is what some singers and teachers still refer to as "breath support", but to me that is a heck of a euphemism for what they're really doing: using aggressive breath pressure to override areas of resistance and entanglement in the voice. It's a quick fix that seems to compensate for poor intonation or lack of volume and vibrancy, but it deserves no place in your concept of healthy singing technique. Pinpoint and release the resistance, disentangle whatever needs disentangling, and you won't be tempted to engage in this kind of "support".

Breathing is a crucial means of regulating your emotions. When breathing is full and expansive, you experience physical sensations and emotions fully and expansively as well. When your physical sensations and emotions become intolerably strong, shutting down your breathing will dial back the intensity. This is true for both pleasant and unpleasant sensations and emotions. We tend to think that only the unpleasant ones can become intolerably strong, but think about it: if you find yourself moved to laughter in situations where it would be considered inappropriate or realize that you're excited by something you think you're supposed to find repellent, you may shut down your breathing to restore a sense of self-control. If you habitually shut down your breathing to maintain self-control, it creates chronic muscular tension in the muscles of respiration, and full mobility needs to be restored to these muscles in order to optimize your breathing for singing. I would argue that even the healthiest of you need some rehabilitation in this area, because in our culture even the most trauma-free childhood usually still involves many years of having to sit still and be quiet in elementary school classrooms when what you really want to do is run around wildly! F. Matthias Alexander, the creator of the Alexander Technique  so beloved by performers of all kinds, emphasized balancing our dual abilities of volition and inhibition. He spoke eloquently about how relatively bad we are at cultivating healthy powers of inhibition – the ability to experience an impulse and then choose not to act on it, without judging yourself for having the impulse in the first place and habitually restricting your own movement to prevent yourself from acting on it.

Habitually restricting movement and breathing in this way will compromise full range of motion in your muscles of respiration. Fortunately, it is possible to regain full mobility and flexibility in these muscles. Various forms of exercise and bodywork can greatly accelerate this process. But keep in mind that anything that restores mobility to your breathing will probably bring up a lot of intense emotion. If you've ever found yourself inexplicably moved to tears or laughter in the middle of a voice lesson, this is the likely explanation! Full access to your breath capacity naturally means getting full access to other parts of yourself. In the long run, this will certainly expand your expressive vocabulary, but short term, it can feel like you're on an emotional roller coaster! 

While there may seem to be nearly as many different methods of breath management and support as there are voice teachers, our anatomy is what it is. Understanding how all the parts work should give you a clearer idea of the reasons behind your breathing strategies. It's my hope that this series will shed some light on what is working for you in your own technique, what isn't, and why.