Vocalis Muscles

Posted on January 03, 2012 by Admin
Vocalis Muscles

Vocalis Muscles

In the last of a series of articles focusing on energized warmups, we focus on Energizing the Ear and the Voice as well as exercises for both. Employing these exercises continually with a dedicated chorus will result in a marked difference in rehearsal efficiency and progress.

Audiation

The warm up routine should focus on energizing the ear/mind. Stegman believes that listening exercises and aural skills in the warm up are essential to development of aural awareness. Audiation—mentally hearing a pitch and cognizing its function—is an important concept in a singer’s mental awareness and helps with sight-reading. The relationship of audiation and hearing is analogous to visualization and seeing. Write on the board a sixteen bar passage and conduct the singers as they sing the passage on a neutral vowel. Stop conducting and have the students continue to audiate the passage. After two measures, begin conducting again and direct the singers to pick up where the the passage resumed. Ask singers to sing a major scale using numbers one through eight and then have them leave out certain numbers in the sequence so they are forced to audiate the omitted notes. Play a triad at the keyboard and after giving them time to audiate the notes, ask the students to sing one of the three notes in the chord. For advanced choirs, have the students sing across the interval of a half step over four, eight, twelve and sixteen beats. These exercises are especially important in unaccompanied music since singers do not have a “crutch” in an accompanying instrument. “Teaching parts by note-pounding reduces a choir to rote memorization at the expense of improving aural skills—not to mention reading skills.” Energize singers’ minds to increase confidence levels and thus, allow singers to support the breath more fully and sing with more poise.

Energizing the Voice

Energizing the voice and producing a free-flowing tone only comes about after the singer’s posture, breath support and control, and the ear have been addressed. The energized voice should be free from force and tension and should be easily projected. This segment of the warm up period may be the most important, as it is the time when a director can cultivate the chorus’ tone and build on its strengths. In energizing the voice, the goal is not only to warm up the voice, but also to engrain a method of proper vocal production that students can understand and reproduce in subsequent rehearsals. This freedom of production is the precursor to maximizing resonance, which is accomplished when singers produce a “forward tone, using the hard palate as a resonator.” Students should not sing too loudly during the warm up period as this will produce (and may result from) tension. The singer, just as any other musician or athlete needs to “stretch” and warm up before strenuous activity begins.