Vocal Dynamix | Newsletter

Welcome to the LifeDynamix newsletter. I will be using this as a regular forum for ideas, with Feldenkrais awareness 'experiments' for you to try out, recommended books to pique your interest, and performance tips for singers and others. Your questions and comments are welcome. Do let me know if you would like to be on the mailing list to receive the newsletter by email.

N.B. I am going to stick with female pronouns, in the interest of cosmic balance, and to give you boys a taste of an experience that women have from the moment they start to read.

Body Language: 1

It is something all Feldenkrais teachers are familiar with: a client turns to you at the end of their second or third private lesson, and says something like, "I have a friend who would really benefit from coming to you, but when I start to talk to her about what you do, I realise that I don't know how to explain it, or how it works".

Practitioners know the method is difficult to explain because we experience the same challenge ourselves; finding a clear, jargon-free way to describe what we do is a popular topic of conversation at all our gatherings, usually from the first day of the training onwards. The problem is that it really isn't like anything else that people already know about. I find that if I say something about "movement" or "posture", I will often be asked, "Is it like yoga /Pilates / physiotherapy / The Alexander Technique?". Well, no, it isn't really like any of those things, but if you bundle us all together, and call us something like "bodyworkers", then our similarities become apparent. Indeed, bodyworkers tend to have similar goals, but widely diverging ways of achieving them. As responses go, this particular question is welcome, as talking about how Feldenkrais differs from these other techniques is a useful jumping-off point. However, if instead I were to say something about Feldenkrais being "neuro-muscular re-education which aims to increase self-awareness, via the kinaesthetic sense, in order to encourage the achievement of full human potential", the description is accurate, but for most people it would require another full explanation all to itself. And it does sound rather pompous, especially considering how much time we spend rolling about on the floor.

The difficulty is twofold: the method is too sophisticated to be described in simple terms as it works on more than one level at a time; and in addition - and more generally - we don't yet have a suitable vocabulary to talk about these things without resorting to the kind of specialised language that many untrained people find obscure and off-putting.

Moshe Feldenkrais was himself notoriously fussy about the words used to describe his work. He expressed a dislike for both "relaxation", and "exercise" - the latter a particularly hard word to avoid. The sharp-eyed among you may have noticed that three of my four chosen quotes on the Moshe Feldenkrais webpage include it; Yehudi Menuhin, Peter Brooks and Will Schutz all use it, despite the fact that they each worked directly with Feldenkrais during his lifetime, and were probably as familiar with his arguments as graduates of Feldenkrais trainings are.

Essentially, however much we avoid describing the Awareness Through Movement lessons we teach as exercises, this word is so strongly associated with movement work that our efforts to disassociate ourselves from it will probably always be unsuccessful. "Exercise" tends to indicate mechanical, repetitive movement, even in sophisticated modalities like Pilates. It may change your body shape or your fitness level, but it won't help you to change who you are and how you think. Feldenkrais work uses repetition in a distinctly non-mechanical way; performing variations on a movement several times, with attention, awareness and sensitivity, is actually the ideal way to learn how to learn, and thus make a greater range of choice available to yourself in all aspects of your life.

This is exactly why language mattered so much to Feldenkrais; his intention was to change the way people think, to enable anyone who wishes it to develop the kind of mental flexibility that allows for true creativity and continuing self-expansion. Throughout his long life he never stopped learning and exploring and discovering, and the most exciting thing about him for me was his certainty that we all have the capacity for this kind of self-development, that everybody has the ability to maximise their potential, and to realise what he called their "unavowed dreams", no matter what physical limitations they might be dealing with.

Feldenkrais also found the word "posture" problematic, because to him it conveyed the idea of stillness; humans are rarely still for more than a few moments, especially when standing. He suggested the word "acture" as an alternative, in order to contrast the idea of how we "act" with the idea of how we "pose". Mostly, however he tended to talk about efficient "organisation" of the moving self. His definition of good organisation was "being able to move in any direction, without preparation", one of the many ideas embodied in his work that reveal the importance to his thinking of his extensive experience of judo.

Observe yourself right now.
Are you sitting on a chair?
Can you come to your feet immediately, or do you need to shift your weight onto your "sitting" bones first?
Notice that it is really quite difficult to come to standing directly from a slumped position, without beginning by lengthening your spine and shifting your weight onto the lowest part of your pelvis. We lack a 'proper' word for this part of our body - Feldenkrais called it "sitting on your sex".
Perhaps you need to come closer to the edge of your seat, and move your feet so that they are flat on the floor, and positioned closer to a place beneath your pelvis before coming to standing?

*Feldenkrais contrasted the idea of 'sitting on your chair', with 'sitting on your skeleton', and considered only the second as evidence of efficient organisation.

If you are sitting on the floor, congratulate yourself for choosing a position that will help you to maintain the flexibility of your hip joints, which is an important factor in the prevention of hip fractures in old age. On the floor, which positions enable a similar lengthening of the spine to that described above? Discover which sitting positions make it easiest to come up to standing.

Observe yourself standing.
Can you move freely, or do you need to unlock your knees and bring your feet to a position more directly below your hip joints?
There are some people who promulgate the ill-conceived idea that we humans are somehow poorly evolved to stand on two feet. This idea is itself worthy of a whole discussion, so I will just mention for now how magnificently "designed" we are for turning around our axis and running away in any direction - a technique for survival that is still useful both in the wild, and in the urban jungle. Think about it, play with it, maybe practise running away from imaginary predators, and let me know what you think. I will be continuing with the vocabulary theme in later issues.

The Art Of Performance

Taking the Mic
The microphone is an indispensable part of the jazz singer's instrument. Yes, I know it sounds a touch obvious, but it isn't always so obvious to the audience. I have often found myself explaining that, just because a gig is a) quiet and b) outside, this doesn't mean that I can dispense with amplification - indeed the opposite is true, which is why we needed to invent artificial reverb.

The apparently natural sound of an accomplished jazz singer is the result of years of practise developing clarity, and the ability to access the whole of her vocal spectrum while avoiding the exciting but rather 'mannered' sounds that an opera singer bases her career on. Most jazz singers use a voice that has their own speaking voice as a foundation (although familiarity with American singers can lead to a - conscious or unconscious - preference for American vowels, particularly as these vowels shapes are easier to project than the standard English vowels). Opera singing is quite simply too loud for the kind of intimacy that most jazz singers strive to cultivate; it is designed to be audible over an orchestra, without amplification. In the subtle acoustic environment created by the kind of ensemble that most jazz singers prefer, the classical vocal quality would sound bombastic and dominating.

There is an element of generalisation here, as the lower pitched, deep-voiced vibrato of the vocal quality sometimes called 'sob' works well in both musical environments, however it is opera singing at its quietest, and is only used when the orchestra has dropped down to its lowest volume. Sarah Vaughan and Nina Simone are both fine exponents of this sound, which is very effective for the emotional intensity of ballad singing. Cassandra Wilson uses the lowered larynx that is an important element of this quality, but her preference for a breathy tone lowers the volume further still, and inhibits the production of a natural vibrato, creating a kind of soft musical version of white noise, as if the ebbing sea were singing. This vocal posture prevents any kind of projection, and is totally reliant on amplification for acoustic richness in public performance. Many jazz singers restrict themselves to a breathy tone in order to achieve a soft, sweet vocal quality that is as inflexible in its own way as the very loudest singing can be.

As a jazz singer grows in skills and experience, she usually reaches a place in her development where going higher in pitch demands either a dramatic drop in volume and richness (the thin, hooting "falsetto" quality), or a difficult-to-avoid increase in volume, which may not suit the kind of material she is performing. To resist this rise in volume requires an - apparently paradoxical - increase in muscular effort which enables greater control over the behaviour of the vocal cords. If we don't resist this rise in volume, we may find we are producing the powerful, exciting and extremely loud vocal quality known as "belting". In fact this is the loudest kind of singing humans do (screaming may be fractionally louder, but it is impractical for sustained performance). It is most commonly used by musical theatre performers, and soul and gospel singers, and, when done well, it is both exciting for the audience and safe for the singer. When done badly it is very risky for the vocal health of the performer. When used in an inappropriate musical setting it is like being shouted at, which is probably why it is - in my experience - the least popular vocal quality. At the same time it is probably true to say that many people are unaware that singers as various as Aretha Franklin, Chaka Khan, Elaine Paige, Barbara Streisand, Sheryl Crow, Shirley Bassey, Celine Dion, Whitney Huston, David Bowie, Tom Jones, Prince and Stevie Wonder are all skilled belters. I tried to come up with more male examples, but many loud male singers work in rock, where the risky 'husky' version of belting is more popular. It is also true that Tenors are belting when they hit their highest notes - that fabulous note in "Nessum Dorma" comes to mind.

Belting is a wonderfully useful ability to have - it enables singers to turn themselves up to 11. We all have a natural loudness mechanism in the larynx that requires little effort to activate, and gives us a flexible natural volume control (called 'twang' by my teachers, 'squillo' in classical singing, and 'projecting' by stage actors) but some music requires the extra dynamic that only belting can give.

A jazz singer rarely needs this kind of volume - though for a truly magnificent exception, check out Ella Fitzgerald's big band work. We usually find ourselves belting only when hitting the high notes right at the end of the song - which brings me to the observation that triggered the writing of this article, something I see often on the London stage. Many jazz singers dilute the power of their belt by over-estimating how loud they actually are, and pulling so far back from the mic that all that can be heard is a distant squeak, and the part of the song that naturally requires a climax, becomes instead almost inaudible. It can be really difficult to gauge your volume from the stage, so if you are a jazz singer, let me encourage you to be bold, and enjoy the intensity of your belting voice.

This is one of the many reasons why it is such a good idea to record yourself performing live, distressing though it may be at first to get used to how you sound to everybody else's ears. For this particularly habit a video of your performance may be less useful, as belting usually looks exciting and this may distract you from truly listening to yourself.

If you have any questions about performance that you would like me to discuss in future newsletters, do let me know.

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