Ian Sidden

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Training Singing, Practicing Strength

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In the past few years, I’ve begun viewing my singing work in a similar manner to my weight training. And vice versa.

The two share obvious similarities. We use time and effort to get better:

  • We want more power.
  • We want more endurance.
  • We want more agility.
  • We want to be more durable.
  • We want to recover more quickly.

Here a couple cross over ideas between the two.

Technical Work

An argument against scales and other such technical exercises is that they aren’t musical. “Why not just learn a piece that incorporates these challenges?” Before you scoff, I have encountered passionate arguments in favor of that view. And I believe it’s a fair question, and I’ve found that bringing in my weight training experience helps answer it.

My philosophy is being shaped by a series of rhetorical questions:

  • Would we make the same argument for strength training?
  • As in, would we tell someone that the best way to get strong is, for example, to help people move their furniture since that’s a real world “functional” use of strength akin to a composition being more “musical” than scales?
  • Were we to follow that path, how would we deal with the inevitable imbalances and sub-optimal movement patterns that would occur?
  • How would we deal with the higher risk of injury?

It’s clearly safer to get strong by doing reps in a gym and slowly raising the intensity over time. Once trained, we can use that movement in the real world more safely and with more skill than if we just began with the real world application. I think everyone can see that.

When I pick up a heavy box now, I pick it up with the same movements I practice in the gym. I’m much more aware of what I can safely do. I’m better at the real world activity because of the training.

Likewise when I sing repertoire, I use the skills developed from training scales and arpeggios. When I train scales, I’m doing my “reps” because it’s safer, and it’s easier to fix a poorly performed scale than to unlearn bad habits in a repertoire piece. I can then transfer that skill to a piece of music. The transferability makes the technical work worth it.

In fact, I honestly should be doing more technical work than I am. I like doing it, but I could probably increase the rigor with which I approach it. With my classical guitar practice, my abilities go up noticeably when I reliably do rigorous technical work.

Beating Ourselves Up

Let’s reverse directions to help our fitness mindset.

There’s a masochistic aspect to fitness culture. Training harder, longer, or to failure gives us the sense that we’re accomplishing something: “Man, that workout kicked my ass,” or “I’m so wrecked from yesterday’s workout,” or “I’m still sore from last week’s leg day,” are the kinds of things we might say. Another rhetorical question though:

Would we ever deliberately sing “until failure”?

If we did, I don’t think we’d feel proud of it. I think we’d be worried.

We practice singing and experience growth without this masochistic instinct, so maybe we can beat ourselves up a lot less in the gym and still improve. In fact, if you search for “sub maximal training”, you’ll find a lot of resources around that concept. Check out “squat every day” too, which we could easily swap with “sing every day”. The basic idea is that we grow even without pushing to extremes. That’s obvious when we sing, but for some reason, in the fitness world we’ve decided that we have to suffer to grow.

If I think of my workouts as a kind of practice rather than a workout, it’s easier to let go of the “until failure” grindset. I’m practicing movements and making them harder when they become too easy. Just like how I’ll occasionally sing at max volume, I will occasionally test my strength limits but not with the goal of beating myself up. We can push ourselves but perhaps not to the absolute edge.

Cross Pollination of Ideas

My summary takeaway is that I’m viewing parts of my singing practice as training, and my strength training as practice. This framework lets me use concepts from one realm to help guide decisions in the other, and I’m sure that you could make other helpful connections that I didn’t spell out here.

Likewise, I’m sure that you have areas of your life aside from singing or weight training that can provide helpful lessons for your singing life. And vice versa.

One Year Later

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On March 13, 2020, we had our last large premiere at Theater Dortmund with the chorus onstage. We performed “Die Stumme von Portici” to a nearly empty auditorium, a so-called Geisterpremiere. We nevertheless, of course, gave it our all. There have been other premieres since then as the lockdowns have come and gone, but so far the chorus hasn’t been involved in those out of safety concerns.

In talking with friends, I’ve noticed that many of them point to this date as the day the coronavirus threat felt serious. And it was, unintentionally, the last time I wrote anything on this blog. So here’s an update about the last year.

Initial Lockdown

Following the Geisterpremiere, we stopped going to work for several months. It was unsettling.

At first, I tried focusing on my fitness routine. After forgoing the gym, I hoped to recreate my enthusiasm with at-home workouts. Unfortunately, I find working out at home to be less fun, so while I showed up (to my living room) to train, I also felt like I was going through the motions.

On the musical side, Fiona Apple’s album “Fetch the Bolt Cutters” dropped at the perfect moment, and this gave me creative fuel. I’d always been nervous about singing in my apartment. I can hear my neighbors a bit, and so I figured that they could hear me. But once the theater was off-limits, I realized I had to get over it and sing at home.

But what to sing? Naturally, we had some music to learn for the theater, but I wanted more. My search for satisfying music led to the two biggest changes in the past year:

  • I began singing lower rep. I experimented with some bass rep to gauge the limits of my voice, but as time has gone on, I feel very comfortable with what might be called “bass baritone” music. This actually tracks with the kinds of solo rep I tend to get, so I feel like I’ve been a de facto bass-baritone for a while. This is still an experiment though.
  • I began playing guitar and piano again. Since there was no telling when we could work with pianists again, I looked for ways to self-accompany. That initial desire sparked a revival in my private musical life.

My guitar playing especially has been a major focus of musical energy ever since. At first, I was learning how to play “finger style” like you would for country or bluegrass, but eventually, my focus turned towards classical music. My first attempt to self-accompany was to play through Schubert’s “Ständchen” on guitar while singing. That made me realize that I needed better technique and, eventually, to buy a classical guitar.

Initial Loosening

In May, the lockdowns were loosened a bit in Europe. The theaters were allowed to open in NRW, but the restrictions meant that it wasn’t viable to resume our season as originally planned. However, we did go back to work in a limited capacity: the chorus could only rehearse in smaller sub-groups, and we had to be seated far apart from one another while singing.

This relaxed period continued until the middle of October. During that summer, cases were pretty low here. We could and occasionally did go to restaurants. Many colleagues took summer vacations abroad, though Rebekah and I stayed home. I resumed going to the gym.

In the fall, our modified 2020/2021 season began playing out. Some productions were cancelled, and others filled their spots with reduced running times and casts. Different theaters found varied solutions to the problem of protecting their artists and audiences while also trying to remain economically viable for themselves and their employees. We continued rehearsing, though our eventual return to the stage kept getting pushed back.

The basic problem was this: grand opera is a crowded business, and singing makes managing aerosols expelled from the lungs difficult. You need lots of people onstage and in the orchestra pit, not to mention all the people working backstage who often work in close contact with one another. At the same time, you need repertoire to be ready to go should the situation rapidly improve.

In late October, it became clear again that the pandemic in Europe was surging. The cases exploded in Germany in a way they hadn’t in the initial wave. We continued rehearsing, but the season was modified again.

 

A chart showing the seven day average new cases in Dortmund
Average new cases in Dortmund

Winter Lockdowns

In December, even this limited activity became untenable. We went back into lockdown, and we ceased working for several weeks around Christmas. It’s unusual to have Christmas off, but because of the situation, Rebekah and I once again stayed in town.

I did get to do some live performing though. I sang a few masses in the week around Christmas with some colleagues. The church doors had to be kept open (we all wore coats, and I hugged a hot water bottle), and we wore masks when waiting, and we all had to sit far apart from one another, but standing up to sing a song, aria, or quartet felt the same as it always had. It was exciting.

I also published the, hopefully, first of many self-accompanied songs. I made a quick arrangement of the German Advent song “Maria durch ein Dornwald ging” for the Sunday mass, and I additionally recorded it at home to share on YouTube.

That recording features my steel string acoustic, but since then I have purchased a nylon string classical guitar. Researching this was a good project in late December and early January as a way to distract myself.

Likewise, some photography projects requested by friends were welcome and joyful bursts of creativity.

The Pool and the Monolith

This last year has been, in some ways, transformative for me. If I continue the practice habits I’ve developed, then over time I might be able to really make something out of them. At the very least, they give me a musical outlet separate from my day job. And the discoveries I’ve made about my singing could only happen in periods where my voice got long periods of rest.

However, the last year has been outright bad in other ways, and I’m not going to pretend that everything is just peachy. It’s not.

There are the general lockdown blues that are affecting everyone. It’s been exceedingly lonely at times, even as a married person. There have been long stretches where I lost the plot and fell into bouts of distraction. The state of the opera industry worldwide is a looming threat. And there’s a creeping anxiety coming from nothing specific beyond the water we’re all swimming in.

Several of my family members in the US have gotten Covid-19, and my grandmother died of it in early February. I hadn’t seen her since 2018, and we haven’t visited our families since 2019.

In nearly all other ways, we’re lucky. My parents, my stepmother, and my surviving grandmother are vaccinated. I’ve kept my job. My sister is healthy. Rebekah’s family has remained healthy. My friends who have gotten the disease have recovered. We don’t have children and have therefore been spared the stress of schools closing. We can pay our rent.

But it’s hard to have perspective right now due to the enormity of it all. There are stories of people in much worse situations, and beyond those there are the hidden masses of people whose stories aren’t told except in statistics. Their tragedies nevertheless spill into humanity’s pool of collective trauma, and from that pool rises a monolith built from the names and memories of the dead. It inches higher every day, and against its awful silhouette our personal successes, failures, and losses stand in pitiful relief, threatening to freeze around our hearts.

A Dream of Spring

We resumed rehearsing in late January and have continued ever since. We’ve even done some staging rehearsals, albeit with no singing from us and all while wearing medical masks. We’re still hoping that, following Easter, some kind of regular performance schedule can begin again in earnest.

I also hope to share more self-accompanied songs in the coming months. When I do, I’ll share them here too.

If you judge yourself lucky, consider donating to organizations helping those who weren’t. We’ve chosen Gast-Haus statt Bank e.V here in our part of Dortmund, and there’s likely an organization in your city helping out.

If that’s not a possibility, consider other ways you can help yourself and those you care about. Sometimes it doesn’t take much more than a bit of humanity. An ear. A message. You never know.

In any case, I hope for your continued health and the health of those you love.

P.S. In the background of all this of course were the US elections and the ongoing racial injustice there, but I’m leaving them out of this narrative, which focuses on the coronavirus.

The Stress Feedback Loop

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Do you experience emotions without some corresponding physical manifestation? I doubt it. Anger, fear, sadness, stress all tend to crop up physically as well as mentally: you get that hit of adrenaline, your muscles tighten up, and you’re on the emotional ride.

You might not even remember why you feel stressed! I’ve had to sometimes think through my day to remember why I feel stressed when I had such lingering stress artifacts. Once found, the logical question is whether carrying that stress forward is warranted. Usually it isn’t.

But what if this residual stress echo is brought with us over days, months, or years?

Anything can turn into a habit if we practice it enough, and that goes for those physical reactions as well. If we were to break down our physical habits and catalogue all unnecessary muscle use, we would find that some, if not most, of it is practiced stress carried into non-stressful situations.

If you’re singing with this residual stress, you will sound stressed because your muscles are acting stressed. You will behave stressed. You may feel stressed mentally because your body is acting stressed. And by feeling stressed mentally, we reinforce the physical stress.

It’s a stress feedback loop.

The first two places to look for this feedback loop are:

  • Your solar plexus (the point in your abdominals between the floating ribs). This will manifest through abdominal tightness and a torso collapsed in and around the solar plexus.
  • The atlanto-occipital joint (the point where your head meets your neck). This will be tight, and you’ll be trying to shorten your neck by pulling your head down and back.

Take a moment right now and divert some attention to one of these points and then the other. Breathe into them and soften them. By releasing them, they will expand on their own. Let them. It’s a subtle feeling, but I’ve found that it feels good.

Ideally, it needs to be practiced away from stressful situations because it’s hard to form new habits deliberately when we’re under stress. That’s where a practice like meditation comes in: it reintroduces us to ourselves in the most mundane circumstances (breathing, walking, sitting) and lets us re-habituate how we think and use our bodies.

It’s easier to see how stress changes us when our default is calm. But if we’re chronically stressed, the change isn’t as perceptible.

Nevertheless, next time you’re in a stressful situation, try and divert some awareness to these two points. Are you pulling your head down and back? Are you tightening your solar plexus and pulling yourself down and inward? If yes, then try and let go of that, and in so doing you may free yourself from much of the stress that the situation would otherwise provoke.

Try to break the loop.

PS. These are not exclusively my original ideas. The idea of physical stress leading to mental stress as a feedback loop was taught to me by my teacher Andrew Zimmerman who learned from his practice and study of Alexander Technique.

Reader Question: How Loud am I with Earplugs?

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Got a reader question a few days ago after reading my article “Singing with Earplugs”:

The main challenge I find with singing with ear plugs is knowing how to regulate the loudness of my own voice. Since I don’t have the normal feedback sound level, it’s difficult for me to know if I’m singing too loudly or too softly.

How do you overcome this problem?

I’ll respond with a couple tips, but a lot of the answer has to do with patience and changing your priorities.

Our Hearing is Imperfect

First, we aren’t great at determining how loud we are even without earplugs. Ever get asked why you’re being so loud or why you’re speaking so quietly and been surprised? I think we’ve all also experienced other people who were inappropriately loud or quiet and who seemed unaware of it. That can happen with or without earplugs because the mouth’s position relative to our ears prevents us from getting a totally clear idea of the relative volume of our voice to others’.

We’re hearing some combination of a voice coming from the throat and mouth and arriving at our ears from inside our own head and the sound from our mouths on the outside of our ears and the reflections of our own voice from acoustically reflective structures. We don’t hear our own voice the same way others hear it, and we never will, and we have to trust that we’ve picked up enough cues and good habits to be using our voice at an appropriate volume.

On top of that are personal vocal biases that encourage certain vocal behavior. Maybe there’s some intention to show off, so you tend to be louder to get attention. Maybe you’re shy and uncertain of yourself, so you tend to hide vocally. Maybe you vacillate between the two. Either one, however, is an extra-musical bias that needs to be internally combatted to find the ideal dynamic level.

So what’s different when we wear earplugs that adds to the above challenges?

  • Our own timbre and perceived loudness are different. Our perception of our own voice is tilted much more towards the voice coming from inside our own head rather than reflections of our voice from the outside world. It feels more cut off from the other voices and has a very different timbre than the other voices. We also feel relatively loud compared to the voices around us.
  • The experience is unusual. The normal cues we have to determine appropriate volume are distorted because we’re just not used to experiencing the world like this.
  • The overall volume of the outside world is reduced. Low volume cues can be totally missed while wearing earplugs. If you’re wearing earplugs that aren’t meant for musicians, then the timbral character can also be changed significantly.

All of these are disorienting if you’re not used to them. So what to do?

Practice More

The simplest solution is to use your earplugs more often. There’s no replacement for simply practicing more often with them. And I mean that seriously: don’t just use the earplugs in noisy group rehearsals, but use them when you’re practicing alone even if you’re not at risk of hurting your own ears.

You have to let yourself get used to them, and that may mean you might sing a bit too loudly or softly sometimes. But that’s what rehearsals are for. You’re practicing. Let yourself make mistakes and adjust from there. Eventually, your ears and brain will figure the new paradigm out.

Alternate With and Without

I like changing modes quickly to trick myself into learning new things. For example, the open mouth hum from Richard Miller is one of my favorite exercises. That’s where you cover your mouth with your hand, sing up to a high note, and then after you’ve begun singing the note you remove the hand.

Do the same with earplugs. Begin singing with them, then remove them in the middle of a phrase, then add them back, and then repeat. You’ll begin getting a good sense of what your voice sounds like both with and without. You can do this alone or in rehearsal. Just try to do it subtly, so you don’t disrupt anyone else’s work process.

You don’t necessarily have to use earplugs for this. Just cover your ears with your hands, and alternate on and off as you sing.

Pay Attention Better

Your pre-earplugs level of attention won’t cut it. You have to up your game or you’ll miss too much. Even through the earplugs, you’ll be able to get a lot of information, but only if you actively work at it.

Since you’re hearing less, you have to give more attention to what you’re hearing. Can you hear your neighbor’s voice? What does their timbre tell you about their vocal intensity? If the conductor speaks, can you hear what they’re saying? Can you hear the piano/orchestra?

Likewise, pay more attention to yourself. Do you feel like you’re really working hard to sing? Do you feel like you’re pushing? Do you feel like you’re singing without energy? Does your energy match the singers around you?

Which leads me to the next point…

Sing By Feeling

You have to learn to sing in a way where your primary reference is how it feels rather than how it sounds. Low-effort low volume singing feels a certain way, and you don’t need your ears to know it. Excessively loud pushed singing also feels a certain way, and you don’t need to hear it to feel it.

Even if you’re not singing with earplugs, if you sing long enough, you’ll be faced with weird acoustic situations. If you’re dependent on the sound of your own voice, you will constantly be frustrated and blame your troubles on the “bad acoustic” or “dead space” or the “weird costume” (hats and hoods are notorious for messing with how you hear yourself). But singing primarily by feeling applies to every acoustic situation.

Get Away From Extremes

At some point, you get an idea of how softly you can sing and how loudly, and your singing will be and should be far away from either extreme.

Find that middle ground and move to and away from that point in line with the musical demands. Think of giving around 60% of your max volume as the default mezzo forte dynamic. Then 55% for piano and 40% for pianissimo. 70% for forte and 80% for fortissimo.

You basically never want to approach 100% in terms of volume unless you’re going for an effect, and if you’re singing in an ensemble, you probably shouldn’t be going for that effect.

Focus on the Ensemble

There’s more to blending as an ensemble than just how loud you are relative to the others. Here are some questions to ask yourself:

  • Is our diction clear and unified?
  • Are our phrases moving together?
  • Do our vowels match?
  • Are we attacking the pitch cleanly without sliding or other undesirable vocal effects?
  • Are we responding to the conductor dynamically?
  • Tuning? Rhythm? I’d argue that getting the rhythm wrong is a much bigger danger of singing with earplugs than being too loud just because you can drop your attention for a few seconds and not realize you’ve gone off into your own rhythm-world.

There are a lot of ways to draw unwanted attention to yourself well before you sing too loudly or softly. If you’re really paying attention to the ensemble and getting all those other things right, it’s really unlikely that your personal loudness is by itself going to be a problem.

Be Patient with Yourself

If you combine everything above, you’ll be paying a lot of attention in rehearsal. You’ll be listening to your colleagues carefully through the reduced loudness of the earplugs. You’ll be following the conductor’s movements and her or his words very closely. You’ll be paying attention to how your singing feels. You’ll be paying attention to all the things that make an ensemble sound unified. You’ll have found a healthy standard loudness that’s neither too soft nor too loud, and you’ll reference your other dynamic levels to that point. You’ll never sing with 100% volume or near-0% energy.

The earplugs will make you feel a bit isolated, and it’s a scary place to be at first, but with patience, you’ll adapt to them and enjoy the benefits that I believe regular singing with earplugs can bestow.

Rules-Based Singing

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Since we can’t fully hear ourselves, and since we might decide we can take excessive vocal risk based on transitory feelings, we have to have a process that includes certain rules. We then rely on these rules to guide us through challenging situations where our present emotions might encourage us to behave differently:

  • “I breathe here. No matter what.”
  • “I round my lips here. No matter what.”
  • “I wear my ear plugs for this piece. No matter what.”
  • “I only give 85% of my max volume here even though it says ff. No matter what.”
  • “I maintain some squillo here, even though it says ppp. No matter what.”
  • “I modify the vowel here. No matter what.”
  • “I check in with the conductor here. No matter what.”

You’ll develop these rules on your own given your own strengths and weaknesses and the challenges of your given circumstances. When should you make such rules? Here are a few over arching times:

  • When you keep forgetting something that you know will help you.
  • When you have shifting circumstances such as room acoustics.
  • When you have very difficult music, especially music that presents a risk of early vocal fatigue.

Behind all this is the idea that your practice is mindful, so that you can develop rules in advance in order to fully integrate them. But late-developed rules are better than none at all.