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Please email any comments on my journal to angela@voicegym.co.uk and let me know if you are happy for me to include them on this page. 13th February 2010The New VoiceGym CDA major contribution to the development of VoiceGym and Early VoiceGym has been provided by the people who have worked with it. Many of these can be seen in the photographs in the VoiceGym exercise books and heard on the accompanying CDs. These voices have developed and improved, so a new CD has been recorded to show the changes. Simone Laraway (www.simonelaraway.vpweb.co.uk) On leaving University in 1996 with a degree in Music and English Simone worked as the manager of the Voice and Body Centre so that she could also train to be a VoiceGym teacher. She then used her VoiceGym training to attend the Royal Academy of Music to study Music Theatre, where in 2000.she gained a Postgraduate diploma. But she then discovered that she needed treatment from a voice aware dentist and osteopath to help to stabilize the voice. The business she set up while correcting these problems can by found at www.flourishnewbiz.co.uk. So she missed the first CD and first appears on the Early VoiceGym CD recorded in 2006. Now in her early thirties the result of VoiceGym exercise supporting this realignment can be heard in three of the recorded songs. Her career as a singer is now increasingly invading business time, with regular performances in London and Milan. Andrew Gill Andrew is the youngest voice on the CD. He is 24 so the voice displays
the youthful Alexander Evans (www.alexanderevans.com) The early history of Alex's voice can be found in an article at http://www.voicegym.co.uk/doc_misalignment.htm entitled 'Structural Misalignment: its Effect on Performance (see case study 7). Alex came to work at the Voice and Body Centre to maintain the exercise programme throughout alignment correction and subsequently began to audition as a professional tenor. Now in his early thirties he has a West End Musical and an Olivier award nomination to his credit and is equally at home singing the material on the CD or singing opera. Angela Caine If you are young and sing well, like Andrew, you risk being pushed by schools, colleges, the media, music producers and the celebrity culture to short term success. It becomes almost impossible to achieve a long enjoyable, problem free and constantly developing professional career singing the music you sing best. Where I am at 72, singing is encouraged only as a 'sing for fun' activity and definitely all together, for confidence. But losing solo singing and with it a sizeable chunk of personal power does not begin in the 60s. It is a gradual deterioration, through poor maintenance that actually loses us confidence, in singing and everywhere else. Provided you learn how to go about it you can go on singing across a considerable range of music written for the solo voice all of your life. By solo singing to an accompaniment you are making much more meaningful decisions faster and more accurately than in a group with a conductor. So although you may not ever stand up in front of an audience, you will keep your personal power and probably your brain power too. That is why I am on he CD-to prove that point. There is VoiceGym and there are albums of songs with backing tracks to encourage you.
If you are working with the VoiceGym or Early VoiceGym programmes you can discover the improvement these four singers have made by sending a stamped addressed padded envelope to the Southampton address (until notice is posted of our move!) and the free new VoiceGym CD will be posted out to you. This offer applies only to those who have bought an Exercise programme 14th January 2010'Ay is for 'orsesWhen was it decided to change the pronunciation of the indefinite article in the English language? And who decided it? More and more people are using phrases like 'ay fundamental principle', 'ay definite plan'. Do they imagine that this gives emphasis to the point they are making? I suggest that the numerous politicians, TV presenters (my goodness even that master of informative dialogue, Jon Snow, is doing it!) it) and other makers of vocal emphasis to consider this. 'Ay' can be most easily articulated with a high larynx. The correct indefinite article, 'u' as in muck 'n brass sends the larynx down to its most efficient, resonant and rhythmic position for speech and singing. It is not necessary to know your functional anatomy, just say the two phrases yourself. 'Ay' definite plan' puts emphasis on 'ay'. 'U definite plan' puts the emphasis firmly on 'definite' which is, after all, the important bit you want to get across, or do you? If you are not sure of your information, the weaker the rhythm in the voice, the less we immediately grasp. By trial and error politicians may have realized that words difficult to digest need a strong 'ay' in front of them to soften the blow. If you adopt this as a technique your voice will eventually become higher than is natural and lack the verbal seduction the listener craves in a speaker. A good test for speaking from the heart and mind is to ask them to sing. A habitual 'ay' in your language removes this function from the voice. I must surely be wrong about this. After all, it is everywhere. Schoolteachers, lecturers, councillors, all do it. Children are being taught to read 'ay' for 'u' I have to correct them when I deal with their voice problems. Surely it must be an effective tool for communication that I have missed? So try reading this aloud… I wandered lonely as 'ay' cloud Got the point? 5th January 2010New Development for VoiceGymWhen VoiceGym began to evolve, through dissatisfaction with the established disconnection between speech and singing … it was a simple move really, I mean, where is the functional logic in taking one instrument and splitting it down the middle? … .it was clear that this was the beginning of a different thinking and a different working and like all beginnings, the worst thing you can do is decide where that thinking is going and plot a route. But I was lucky. I was surrounded by young dissidents who constantly prodded me and said "What I want to do with my voice is right in my head and my imagination, but the instrument that performs it doesn't do it. It doesn't come out as I intend it. Certainly not as good". The interdisciplinary work crossing related clinical disciplines that has become the fundamental working practice for VoiceGym was begun out of solving this problem for everyone who believed they could be vocally more proficient and it worked in a way that I could not have imagined. This stage of VoiceGym has been developing for twenty years and has had the following results. " Natural functional tongue resting position has made it into
public and particularly parental awareness. Three other people are now trained in supplying this information, this belief system, while hundreds of people world wide are now working with VoiceGym and benefitting. More and more professional voices are using VoiceGym as a development and maintenance system for a long working life. That all belongs to seventeen years in Southampton when I wrote the books and my husband Chris - already with a responsible role in human vibration research - took the photos, formatted the text and supported the various projects. The next stage is open-ended like the last. We move to Diss, in
South Norfolk for a large vegetable growing garden, more family
time, Chris's retirement and a large open and unstructured space
(presently a double garage - who needs a double garage?) that could
become yet another place for a further thinking and the opening
of yet another forward route. The address is The telephone number will be posted on the website when we move in January. The email will remain the same. Diss is on the main London Liverpool Street to Norwich line with a regular fast service (approx. one hour thirty minutes). We are a ten minute taxi ride from the station but far from the 'madding crowd'. I think this a perfect place to discover something new (or maybe something old but neglected and currently forgotten). Angela 11th August 2009I am horrified to discover that my last journal page was back in January, but this has been a difficult year for everyone. In the first half of the year people lost their jobs, their houses, their pensions due to sudden and unexpected changes outside their control. I too had a sudden and unexpected change. It began as a decision to take more care of myself, time for some serious maintenance. After all it was over fifteen years since my major orthodontic and alignment programme had alerted me to the connections between singing, balance and coordination. I was experiencing some niggling pain and stiffness. In a busy life this is the usual and often only trigger for stopping what you are doing and examining what is going on in you as opposed to around you. The pain was not specific, it was more a general prevention of doing what I wanted to do, which to me is pain. All movement had been a bit limited but it wasn't until 'limited' became not being able to easily squat to pick up things from the floor that I decided something had to be done. When I mentioned this in general conversation faces broke out in wry smiles. I have had a senior rail card for some time and regularly receive through the door advertising for stair lifts, walk in baths and funeral insurance. That I am not retired seems to be a worry in quite a number of contexts. When I make appointments it is often assumed that I can come anytime. The philosopher Carl Gustav Jung recommended that as death is inevitable one should live one's life as though it were for ever, which my practical father translated as 'when you know you are going to stop, you slow down". While taking this to its logical conclusion would leave a legal and financial mess to be cleared up I look around at the ageing population and I do see Jung's point ... … so I embarked upon an exercise programme to correct the stiffness. It did correct it - for about an hour, and then I tightened up again. Then feet hurt when I walked, so I didn't walk far. Obviously getting old and slow was inevitable. Time to retire, time to hand over to the young and fit. No more to offer in the body department. I reduced my work load. Not quite true. My work load reduced itself. How is it that a reduction in your easily flowing creative energy can broadcast itself so far - the world demand for VoiceGym suddenly went quiet? This provided what seemed to be the next stage of my life and I looked forward to advancing my piano playing, finding an accompanist to play while I sang, moving over, unwinding. Unfortunately my piano playing and my singing were as unsuccessful as my squatting. I had thought to return to Bach, Beethoven and Chopin and unlock the extensive song repertoire still in my head from so many years ago that I believed accessible 'if only I had the time'. But what was in my head would not translate into music. It lacked ease, rhythm, accurate articulation of fingers and voice. In fact, I could only move the music like I could move my body. So what now? The correction I embarked upon twenty years ago was not because
of physical pain but because of the emotional and spiritual pain
caused by losing my voice for which the received wisdom had no satisfactory
reason. The next stage was to make this information available because
I became aware of the numbers of people who
had similar problems that capped development of their person potential.
VoiceGym, Early VoiceGym, VoiceGym Book
were born of these aims. The last line of The Devil Within - and
the story of the struggle with it all is… It seemed to be another 'crunch time 'for me. Time to find another
life to get on with. I started with a thorough check out, but not
with the doctor. Firstly a functional dentist checked me and discovered
the body shifts over the last twenty years, not all of them good,
rendered my denture, providing two molars lower right and three
lower left and thus skeletal support, inadequate for the job. It
also had a metal bar, metal that might be toxic to my system. It
was now resting on a jaw where bone had been absorbed through lack
of stimulation from molar teeth - extracted in my twenties, hence
the denture. It was replaced with a denture of total plastic but
with much greater bulk at the back to crank up the vertical dimension,1
which may never have been sufficient.
Maybe you should use the pain as positive feedback and get moving more until the pain stops. A paediatric cranial osteopath supported and advanced the changes to my denture - more pain to hips, knees and other parts I would not have imagined were involved in kneeling down -like my right shoulder blade. The dentist has done with me but the osteopath continues to stabilize the changes that are still occurring and will do so until Christmas as my body is not keen to change. It eventually complies, but it argues more and takes longer. It has taken best part of a year to begin to feel different. I have sung and played the piano regularly throughout the last six months, and the improvement has been an effective measurement of progress. Two other experienced VoiceGym teachers, Simone Laraway, listen to her demo at www.simonelaraway.vpweb.co.uk and Alexander Evans www.alexanderevans.co.uk you can hear him on the VoiceGym 'results' page, took responsibility for teaching me the VoiceGym exercises from their perspective, demonstrating how important it is for a teacher to regularly return to fundamentals to check they still understand what they are doing and why. I now feel terrific, purposeful and motivated. The best thing is that I have lost the stiffness and the feeling that I must wind down, step back and find something less to do. I am now practicing the repertoire I sang so many years ago with a professional accompanist who declares me fit for purpose. The voice has always been there but the initial damage to the instrument was so severe that the first recovery twenty years ago seemed like excellence, but was only relatively so and a greater awareness, a more informed application was needed from the clinicians, from the teachers and from me to get me to the next level. Singing the repertoire I sang fifty years ago feels strange. One is supposed to be too old to do this, and yet I now have more understanding of the music and the words, well honed by experience. What did I know of death and loss when I was twenty? Maturity has always been welcomed in instrumentalists, so why not of singers of sixty and more? There are a few, but it should be the rule not the exception. And have you noticed they are all men?
Extract from Morituir Salutamus (1875) Written and delivered by Longfellow at the 50th anniversary of the class of 1825 in Bowdoin college. Angela 1. Vertical dimension is the height of the molar teeth and how they come together, which affects the function of the jaw at its joint with the skull (the TMJ ) Insufficient vertical can lead to dysfunction and pain in this joint (TMD) 27th January 2009I had intended to make these journal pages weekly but that was optimistic of time available. They will now appear when a burning 'voice' issue cannot be ignored - which is generally about once a month. Books have always been a popular Christmas present, but the press reported in December that sales were down. Is this the recession or do less people find reading a pleasure? By the beginning of January the 'Today' Programme on Radio 4 reported that at least one publisher was attempting to woo children back to reading, so as to develop a new adult generation that will buy more books. To this end they have produced books that enclose a CD and interact with a computer. This would appear to abandon the very nature of a book. No longer can you take it in your pocket down the field to lie and read in the grass on a summer afternoon; hide it with a torch under your pillow for when you should be asleep; curl up with the cat and transport yourself far away from the cold and windy weather. Are we still able to call this new 'thing' a book? We seem so often to be changing the rules of early growth, learning and development just to promote instant gratification. But this short-term and easy investment actually betrays learning and development. With the demise of the 'silent read' we lose the brain's own consideration of sentence construction, imagery and story-telling, unhindered by teaching methods and surrounding noise. Information gathered thus is later reflected upon and stored for the moment when we hunt for a way to express thoughts and ideas. It is fundamental to the development of communication skills which, like so many other personal skills, are on the wane. We do not need to have a government review to discover this. It can be heard and experienced all around us, in home and school, in the street and in the workplace. Is reading a 'Voice' issue? Absolutely yes it is. Fluent reading is a two-part process. A book is just text until it is translated into language. Once your brain has processed the words you have read you need an instrument to play them on, and to be able to translate the text in the book into language, which has pitch, tone and colour, you need a competent voice at whatever age you read. The voice supports the second part of 'reading', which is probably the most important. The passing on of information, whether it be the story of the three bears or the theory of evolution, is the part that fulfils the bigger educational picture. The voice and its sophisticated speech patterns have been developing for some 100,000 years. Writing, on the other hand, is only 5,000 years old. When we are motivated to think we feel the need to communicate our ideas. We then write them down so that others may read them. We must never lose sight of the long term purpose of teaching children to read. We are giving them the pleasure of learning new ideas and concepts - the delight of language - not of the text. A book is a voice that speaks to you in a myriad of sounds and colours, and to appreciate the extent of those sounds and colours you have to have your own voice for the book to stimulate, so that after reading it you want to tell someone about it. Maybe you have never thought of your voice as a musical instrument because you don't sing, but you do not speak like a Dalek. Every utterance has pitch and tone that depends on what you want to say and to whom. So you play your thoughts and ideas, most of which are stimulated by reading, on your own unique vocal instrument. So how is your voice? When you read to your children is it flexible and mechanically efficient enough to turn text into music and fire their imagination? Do you read poetry to them? Do you sing with them, or to them? All of these activities excite children to read, so that the next time they see you curled up in a chair reading with a 'do not disturb' bubble over your head, they may make a copy of you and do the same. Afterwards you can both complete the loop, by describing to each other the new ideas and thoughts that the quiet reading together has stimulated. Angela 1st December 2008I have just been to the opera - no less a production than live from the Metropolitan Opera New York. Live from, as opposed to live at... and this possibility may change the audience for opera for ever. Followed closely on the heels of the Met., which began directly relayed performances to cinemas in 2006, firstly Covent Garden and now Glyndebourne are busy employing the technical wizards that translate opera into a 'full frontal' medium. In the production of Le Damnation D'Faust there were underwater scenes and galloping horses bearing away Faust and the Devil. These were projected images. But there were also soldiers striding vertically up walls and devilish dancers suspended to support earth bound sprites as they hung precariously over balconies a long way from stage level. This was for real. The two romantic leads in this production obviously did not believe it necessary to do more than sing the role. No hanging off balconies for them and whoever costumed them did not expect them to, for although Margarete took off her dress early in the seduction scene, she obviously did not remove her corsets and so walked about as though preparing for her coronation. There was a droll moment when Faust seized her and she almost choked upon his perfectly white, folded and starched neckerchief, which came between them like a frothy meringue. There was no intimate love for each other, only for the sound of their own voices. This is unkind and non appreciative of the many wonderful opera singers who have given up 'acting the part', as did mainstream theatre some fifty years ago, and replaced it with 'being the part'. I have been transported by Fleming, Hvorotowsky, Vagos, et al. in the same season on the big screen. I could believe Fleming was seventeen in Onegin and that Vagos could fall to his death leaping precariously as he fenced Marcel with a stick across the roofs of Paris. So ROH and Glyndebourne, a word in your ear. It takes only one performance to lose an audience, especially the unforgiving audiences who have seen performances where the danger, the emotion and the nitty gritty was lived and seen to be lived, on stage and screen UK Singers have all the muscles and the spiritual and emotional equipment to deliver such performances but unfortunately this is not developed as part of singing training. There is too much music and not enough physical training. Before young singers work on opera repertoire they should be learning how to express themselves without music and use their bodies to hang, climb, balance, go up ladders and all those other things you have to do easily and naturally within a multidimensional production. The muscles of facial expression do not need to contort to say the words. Vowels are shaped by the pharynx. All pitch is made in the larynx. Neither affects what you do with your face. Your face is part of the total physical expression of emotion. With the development of cinema actors had to learn that less was more and that 'less' had to be at all times natural. Singers also have to be brought out of the virtual reality they call 'performance' and into an inner quality that can only come from knowing more about how movement, voice and expression naturally connect and work together Otherwise filmed opera will be no more then a classical 'X' factor - a lot of effects around a singing puppet. Angela |
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