Singing Archives - Ian Sidden

Perform Fearlessly Part V: Right Before a Performance

August 3, 2009 By Ian Sidden

Recently, I felt flustered through the beginning of a performance. My mind was wandering and grasping at myriad subjects even while the songs were completely unrelated. This left me feeling afraid and caused me to make a few strange mistakes that I had previously never made.

The experience really bothered me, and upon reflection, I realized that I didn’t do what I normally do before I sing.

I didn’t focus.

Pre-Performance Focusing

Ideally, your time spent on the day of a major performance will be all sunshine, hammocks, light breezes, and quiet meditation, but if it’s anything like most of my performance days, it’s full of travel, last minute preparations and –I admit it– caffeine. Therefore, a performer must take a few moments and gather up his/her brain into a usable mass.

[This is especially important before a recital because your exposure to the audience is so great, and the format offers you little time to rest and regain composure.]

Try these suggestions:

Focus on your breath. Just watch the rise and fall of your body. Try to relax that little spot right below your sternum. Beware of trying to “prove to yourself” that you’re breathing by gasping and working too hard. Just take it easy and breathe.
Focus on your posture. Are you holding any weird muscular tensions that are throwing off your balance? Let them go.
Find some alone time. It is important to commune a little with your fellow performers, but you probably need to vanish for a few minutes before you go onstage.
Do some light exercise. There are a few yoga poses that I especially like to do before I sing. They always help me sing, and they help me focus on my physical and mental condition at that moment.
REALLY WARM UP. Sorry for the caps, but you must sing full voiced and in all registers of your voice before you will feel good about performing. Let ‘er rip a little bit before you go onstage…
…But not too much. Don’t let your anxieties feed into your warm-up routine. Remember, you are warming up your mind as much as your voice, and you should be paying attention to what you are doing. I once listened to a good baritone completely exhaust his voice before a major performance out of fear that his voice was already too tired to perform. You can’t sing your high notes in advance, so chill out once your voice is good and warm.

If you are feeling genuine fear, along with the above suggestions, try these:

Remind yourself that if you fail, your life won’t be over.
Remind yourself that you won’t fail.
Remember, you cannot solve the future in your mind. The best way to be prepared for any mishaps is to stay present.

What strategies do you employ right before a performance?

Playing with Support

June 16, 2009 By Ian Sidden

Yes, that's a belly button. Sing through yours!

I am playing with a few new support ideas lately that I want to describe in brief. Since becoming a tenor, I have had to really “up” the amount of breath support I give myself. Realize though, that this does not entirely mean pushing the breath out with a strong abdominal action. Instead, it means a regulation of air.

Wide lower ribs. I have always believed in wide ribs, but lately I have been focusing more on the floating ribs at the bottom of the rib cage. In inhalation, I widen the lower ribs as much as I can. As I sing, I make sure that they never collapse no matter how strenuous the passage.
Back breathing. Along with the wide lower ribs, I have focused more on the area between the bottom of my ribs (in the back) and the top of my hip bone. In inhalation, I stretch this area out and feel as if I am filling that up with air.
Singing through my belly button. This is one I sometimes forget about but wish I hadn’t. While ascending, it is habitual for most of us to raise our larynx. If we think about keeping the larynx low, however, we may force it down by depressing our tongues. By thinking about singing through one’s belly button, one can “trick” the larynx into remaining low on its own.

If you are currently working on your breath support techniques, I would love to hear about them.

Master Class: Li Zhang

March 3, 2009 By Ian Sidden

I watched and performed in a masterclass at NMSU on Friday with Chinese voice teacher Li Zhang, or Lily as she is affectionately called here. Her teaching style is very simple and is very effective.

Her technique is based off of a hierarchy of three ideas:

The most important point is the foundation of the breath.
In the middle is the “vocal conduit”. I have also heard this called the “vocal column” or “column of air”.
Once prompted by another teacher, she described the “mask” as being a necessary third step but should not be focused upon without the other two in place.

I like this hierarchy, but it is admittedly metaphorical. When she was working with me, I could respond quickly because I had already learned the terms. If her descriptions were her only method, then the MC might not have gone as well. But instead, she used her other major talent (besides singing beautifully). She has a remarkable ability to imitate exactly what a singer is doing and then guide the singer with her hands and her voice toward the better production. Singers responded very well to this.

She was also remarkably honest with her momentary pupils. Lily told one student that she had thought that the student’s voice was inherently not very good until she realized that the student was just not using her breath well enough. She then was very complimentary. She told another young student that her piece, “Una voca poco fa”, was too advanced for the student at this point. In general she was positive about all the students, myself included, and was encouraging.

Another point of interest is this: she admitted that she had once had such serious vocal problems that she had to have surgery. After surgery her new teacher had her sing exercises on [i] vowel for three years. She made the claim that [i] had a way of focusing the vocal folds and counteract breathiness. So, today, I had my students sing on [i] vowel, and in several cases, the results were profound.

We never stop learning!

Brian Eno on Singing

February 14, 2009 By Ian Sidden

If you’ve ever listened to NPR for any extended period of time, you may have heard their series “This I Believe”. Listeners send in their essays on what they believe, and, if they are chose, they may read those essays aloud on the air. I have personally found many of these very moving and have thought about writing my own, but I always get about halfway done and wonder…do I really believe this?

Well, Brian Eno has written one about singing. Here it is. And he makes some big claims for singing! His essay is fun and maybe it will be an helpful inspiration to anyone who has thought about starting a singing group.

If you listen and have any thoughts, I would love to hear them.

I like singing…now what?

January 17, 2009 By Ian Sidden

Photo by Bridget Sidden

I am now a classically trained singer who has an eye on making my living from singing, and I have been wrestling with these questions (amongst many others) for several years now:

How do I go about getting head shots?

How do I prepare for an audition?

How do I prepare for a role?

What school should I attend?

Should I continue to go to school?

Whose advice can I believe?

How can I pay for this?

What is the nature of the professional singer?

Are competitions useful?

Should I move across the country? Or world?

How will this affect my family?

Why am I doing this?

etc…

Choosing to be a professional performer is a major decision and should be taken seriously. One the one hand, you ought to just “try things out” and “let things happen” to see whether you enjoy performing and are good at it. There is nothing wrong with performing for the sheer love of it and having no professional ambitions. On the other hand, decisions must be made if you do have those ambitions.

And this is a good thing.

Decisions and taking responsibility for them are part of maturity. Making choices as an artist is essential. And so, the more clear and deliberate choices that we make as human beings, the clearer we will be in our medium.

The medium that will be most discussed in this blog is singing, voice teaching and the other skills that may be necessary for success at those ventures.

I am currently a graduate student who has a wonderful voice teaching assistantship. At this school, I have had the chance to perform in some very cool shows where I created two roles for new musicals. I have also been the bass soloist for Bach’s St. John Passion. I have had excellent teachers at this school, and I feel that, yes, I could with enough effort and patience go and sing for a living. This Spring I will graduate, and from there my future looks as expansive and incomprehensible as the desert from a mountaintop.

This blog will be a running commentary on questions that I face as a teacher and as a performer. I hope to have interviews, reviews, pedagogy as well as advice on managing one’s career as I learn how to manage my own. I hope that this blog will eventually be a service to others who are facing these questions in their own lives. And though I will improve as a singer and human being with age, I will always try to approach my mediums through the eyes of a beginner who always has more to learn.

Ciao!