Ian Sidden

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An Unavoidable Leap of Faith

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You will never have a fully accurate idea of how your singing sounds to other people. Whenever you sing, your ears hear something from your mouth as well as the sound transmitted through your skull, but it’s not the same thing that other people hear when they’re in the room with you. Even recordings can’t communicate it unless you are strictly a recording artist.

You might not even like your own voice if you heard it the way other people do. Or you might like it even more and wonder why you haven’t pushed yourself harder.

It’s hard to know who to trust when you get feedback on your singing. When someone tells you that you’re good, do you believe them? Why should you? When someone tells you that you aren’t good enough, do you believe them? Why should you?

In general, I prefer avoiding unnecessary leaps of faith. But with singing, you can never be 100% sure. So as long as singing is a priority for you, there’s an unavoidable leap of faith involved whenever you open your mouth.

“Al dente”

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“Al dente” is one of those terms that drives me crazy. It means “to the tooth”, and it’s used to describe the ideal amount of cooking for pasta.

However, there’s little in the term that tells you where that is. I’ve heard it used to describe pasta that I consider under cooked as well as pasta that I consider properly cooked. Perhaps there are greater subtleties that have eluded me, but that only adds to my dislike of the term.

Singing is full of these terms. These are terms that are code words for something that is hard to describe. “Head voice”, “chest voice”, “on the breath”, “legato”, “support” and so on all contain clues to what they describe, but once you move past those clues, they start breaking down in their specifics and precise meaning to individuals.

This is the part where I should provide an answer to this problem, but I don’t have one. Perhaps the answer is acknowledging that there is a problem, and these terms don’t have universal meaning between singers and singing teachers.

Open Jug Breath Holding

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Holding the breath comes naturally to us when underwater or when lifting something heavy. This is the closed-jug technique (my term). Picture a jug with a cork in the top. We fill our lungs with air, close the glottis (bring the vocal folds together to block further inflow and outflow of air), and leave it like that for as long as we need to do so. We can relax the breathing muscles themselves since the closed glottis is doing the work. Or we can even tighten our abs and push against the closed glottis.

In both of the cases I mention above, swimming and lifting, that’s a good strategy.

But for singing, this is not so helpful. We want to maintain a sense of inhalation and expansion. We want to reduce excessive abdominal pressure. We want flowing onsets that aren’t glottal attacks.

Think of your body as an open jug. Inhale and then leave the body in the position of inhalation. The ribs remain expanded, the remains belly gently down and out, and the glottis remains open. The air in the lungs remains as long as the lungs remain open. Any collapse in this position leads to the air leaving, and any expansion allows more air in.

We’re holding our breath, but we’re not trapping it. Instead, our breathing muscles are doing the work rather than the glottis.

From here, we can practice remaining in the position of inhalation, or we can sing a note. This is the open jug technique (again my term).

A Corner for Gratitude

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There was a moment in Die Blume von Hawaii, where I always tried to pay meta attention to what was happening and feel gratitude for it. Laya and Lilo Taro were singing in subdued light, while the rest of the cast and chorus were frozen, having just sung a big ensemble.

I was singing as Kanako Hilo and was situated center at the front corner of a high platform. One step forward, and I’d fall several meters to the stage, but while frozen, my sight could linger on the audience without it being weird. The music and the lights all came together in a swirling magic, and the drop in front of me provided the private illusion of flying.

In this moment, I felt intense appreciation for the audience’s presence, and I saw how lucky I was to be onstage singing. I reminded myself that I was there through a mixture of effort and sacrifice and luck, and that I had wanted this and was getting it at that moment. I knew I shouldn’t let it silently pass by without that recognition.

There was a similar moment in Don Giovanni, where everyone other than Don Giovanni himself was silent and sitting down in a semi-circle. I loved this production and this scene in particular, so it always came naturally that I felt gratitude for it. Masetto was in a rough place, but Ian was happy and was acutely aware of that happiness.

The gratitude was, however, tied to the knowledge that it wouldn’t last forever. Writing this now, these productions of Blume and Don Giovanni are gone, and the likelihood that I’ll get to do them again is almost nil. More broadly, I’m aware that I won’t get to sing professionally forever. There will come a day, whether by choice or not, where this path will come to an end.

And even more broadly, all of this that is now will pass. And by maintaining some corner of the mind for being grateful now, perhaps we can know that we’ve had our fill when the time comes to let go.

What if…

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Once at a coaching for the aria “Avant de quitter ces liuex”, which I regard as a technically tricky aria, I was advised to apply musical ideas from this piece to the aria:

What if you pretended a piece wasn’t hard to sing technically? What musical idea would you want to express? How do you get there?