More breathing

Having nursed wombats for a week or two, it would be about time to add a new exercise so that the choristers don't get caught in a rut.

This time, the aim is to reinforce the connections between deep breathing, good voice placement, and developing the higher registers.

Because I am a tenor, kids find it challenging to model their sound on mine.  Tenors have some of the technical qualities necessary for producing a good soprano sound -- especially making use of the head registers -- but on the whole, it's a vocal production which relies on a lot of counter-intuitive methods.  That's why good tenors are rare, and natural ones a matter of history in the making.

The upshot of this is that I find it challenging to teach young choristers how to access their head registers.  This is a problem which is reinforced by the wider aural environment; most of the women in pop music sing deep in their chest voice, and the result is that most people imitate that husky quality even when singing in places where it is difficult to maintain.  Another problem here is that pop songs tend to have fairly chopped up phrases -- even a long phrase in the score ends up being subdivided.  Part of this is an aesthetic conceit, but I suspect there is a lot of shallow breathing involved as well.

I find the following exercise useful for starting to connect the gesture of inhalation with supporting higher pitches.

Imagine you're blowing up a balloon: notice how the lower abdominal muscles relax to let the air deep into the chest.  To blow up a balloon really well, you need to blow from the bottom of your lungs.  (You could bring balloons in for the rehearsal to demonstrate this -- just be prepared for a bit of rioting and excitement.)

Having established how it feels to breath to the bottom of the chest, there are two things to do.  First, use a hiss, telling the choristers to imagine that they're blowing bubbles up into the air (while maintaining good posture, of course).

Then, sing either single pitches or a simple melody (e.g: Hot cross buns).  Make sure you start from the upper-middle register (for children, this would be around A-Bb; use these as the upper notes for HCB).  Using the deep breath, tell the choristers to keep imagining that they're blowing bubbles through the top of their nose, or bouncing oranges off their forehead.  It will take a couple of goes in the starting key to bring this all together.

Then you modulate -- do it for no more than four half-steps to begin with.  Watch for bored expressions, because this is a sure sign it was time to move on about three minutes ago.  Only carry on if you're going to up the challenge to keep the singers involved.

This is an exercise I keep in the mix for building tone.  It works equally well with adults as with children; if you use well-known nursery rhymes, you can add interval recognition and solfa signs into the exercise.