Wednesday, September 22, 2010

Vocal Tech

I'm having a trying week at cap, but it's ok. As I told a fellow student, we have to have these moments where we can look at ourselves and just embrace where we are at. Give yourself a hug and say, "I love you Beverley. I love where you are at in your process to become an artist, and I'm going to continue to stay open and allow myself to get better." The self deprecation only hinders me. I felt defeated before I even began AAAALLLLL the time when I was in undergrand, and I developed a very awkward relationship with the head of my theater department. I'm trying to move past that with this conservatory experience. I'm trying to accept that brilliance cannot be achieved 100% of the time, but constant focus can be there for me.

This is what vocal tech has been like thus far: on the first day we each sang a song of our own choice. Then we learned together a group song which was "Goodnight my Someone" from the Music Man. Then we each had to sing the group song on our own. Then we learned our first song which was chosen by our teacher. We each sang that song on our own twice now. This past week we were working on the pelvic floor and today we had vocal health day.

On pelvic floor day, all the women went into one room and the men went into the other room for obvious reasons. Anyway, the whole concept was completely new to me. I have discussed opening the rib cage, but opening the hips and the pelvic floor. I have no idea how to do that or even how to feel that. We tried sitting down, squatting over and standing up. I didn't even know how to begin to think about it. After the class, I was honest about my experience discussing the pelvic floor, but then it was my turn to sing. So, my teacher had me singing in the squatting position, which apparently was an amazing sound to everyone else, but I just didn't hear it when I listened to the recording afterwards. I felt deflated because to everyone else that seemed like a breakthrough, but then I heard the tape and thought - I've sung better than that. I felt awful after class.

Today we had a class on vocal health. I think we could have talked about vocal health a lot longer than two hours. We saw some awesome vocal folds actually working. We saw what damaged vocal folds look like and what they would sound like if it happened. That was useful information, but Julie Andrews story is enough to terrify me because she was an incredible singer. How could she not know that she was singing incorrectly? We haven't started working on the belt yet, and truth be told, it's scaring the crap out of me. Plus, my voice doesn't feel like it's in good form now as it is. I'm hoping it was just the song and that it will get better with this second song that I'm singing.

No comments: