SOUND ADVICE FOR THE VOICE
AN ARTICLE
Sound Advice – Interview with
bass-baritone Iain Paterson (not my interview)
What about rehearsing a role? Do you
think it’s important to learn to mark big roles in rehearsal?
To my mind the practice of marking a role belongs to
another time when singers might have been travelling trans- Atlantic or from
one country to the next several times in a week singing big roles. Due to jet
lag and acclimatising then, yes, marking would be a survival method. However,
in my opinion, marking a role in rehearsal is time misspent. It’s important to
use the time to physicalise the role, to feel the stretch and expanse of it.
You need to know that you can deliver that role under all circumstances and you
need the time to sing it in to your body and voice. Let me put it another way.
How does a 100 metre sprinter mark? Jogging is hardly the same skill! You have
to build stamina. Once an athlete knows he can run the distance he then
distills and hones the movement to get the best peak performance he can.
What’s your feeling on auditions? Do you mind
that a singer doesn’t always have feedback from an audition panel even though
they might have sacrificed a great deal financially and otherwise to do it?
It is my understanding that there simply isn’t time to
respond to every singer who walks into an audition room when a casting panel
can be auditioning over 200 singers in any week. Each of those singers is
delivering on average three arias per audition so time really is of the
essence. Ultimately I feel that a lot rests with the responsibility of the
singer. Singers cannot be spoon fed. It is up to the individual to step up to
the plate and be ready for an audition and to be prepared to face the reality
themselves of why they might not have been successful. I feel that deep down, you
know the reason why a panel won’t choose to hear you again. Singers must learn
to be independent of such feedback. In all honesty, statistically you have a
better chance of winning the lottery than getting every role so rejection is as
much a part of the job description as success. There also seems to be an
epidemic of “guru-ism” around when students will run from teacher to teacher in
search of the perfect answers. It doesn’t work like that. One must collate and
filter. Take on board the advice which works for you and if there are any
recurring common points which require addressing then address them.
If you had a golden piece of advice to pass on to
singers, aspiring and established what would it be?
Don’t sing too much! I know singers who have spent
half an hour warming up singing scales and arpeggios for half an hour in the
dressing room only to find that they struggled to have the freshness and
stamina to deliver the actual role on stage. My teacher Jeff would warn, “Don’t
leave your voice in the dressing room!”. If you spend all that time perfecting
the scale of G major but can’t sing the aria what’s the point? Pavarotti didn’t
really warm up and was famed for saying that he just checked to see if the
voice was there. Vocal cords are quite resilient but they are also small and
fragile and do tire. The muscles and the support can tire as the roles get
bigger.
Part of the whole aim of learning to sing well is
learning to live with not singing at your best. One must work on their “not
quite my best voice”! We singers are our worst enemies in that we are
constantly analysing every sound we produce. What we hear and feel isn’t
necessarily what carries over to the audience in the theatre. You can spend all
your time on your 100% voice which one can only produce a fraction of the time,
and neglect working on the 80% voice which is the voice we have to deal with
most if the time. There’s always a reason why we can’t constantly be at 100%.
Either it’s too hot, or colds or allergies interfere or you just don’t feel at
your peak. So you need to be able to be great at 80%. I use the metaphor of an
athlete with a certain degree of trepidation, but we could consider ourselves
“athletes of the larynx”. Athletes, in the true sense, hone their game so that
they can accomplish the same level of skill with less effort. Roger Federer is
more shrewd in his game than he once was. He doesn’t expend as much extraneous
movement on the court as he once did. A performance is never set in stone. It’s
constantly changing. The other night, whilst singing Gunther at the Met I chose
to experiment with a particular phrase and really went for the high note. Later
on I was thinking, “What the hell did I do that for?”. You need to know your
voice well enough that you know when to save and give.
How do you stay empowered as a singer enough
to keep doing what you are doing at this level?
In chess terms the truth is you are a pawn as a singer
in the industry. You’re not a Knight or a Queen or a King unless you are Bryn
Terfel so in that way you have no power. To stay empowered you have to give
people as little room to criticise you and your product as possible. Protect
your reputation. Turn up on time, be a good colleague and know your music and
the language of it inside out.
