Charity events, a way to feel useful with what I do best!

I am quite pleased to have been asked to sing to quite a few concerts in this period... Just before Christmas, at a private event and for the Italian Club here in North Finchley. Those evening worked out quite well and I have been blessed with a genuinely welcoming audience in both cases.

Soon, I will have the pleasure to sing in recitals all over North and Central London.

Forthcoming charity concerts, for those of you who are following me, are:
the 29th of February at Guy's Hospital,
the 29th of March at Heath Side, Golders Green
the 15th of April at Valerie's, Marsh Lane
the 25th of April for JACS

Masterclass at the Royal College of Music

Ahhh! Finally I witnessed a great masterclass, led by the oustanding Roderick Williams. The singers had all great voices and distinct intelligence (even though they all exhibited the absence of proper breathing management which hindered what could have been otherwise exceptional performances) and they made great use of the advice and the tips given about interpretation, audition technique, connecting with the audience and the necessity of not overdoing things when singing and letting the music and the character speak for themselves. The point here was not to get in the way and having the courage and the ability to be blank first, and then replacing mannerism with individuality. Interesting, educative, stimolating masterclass. He never went digging into singing technique, wisely, even though you could see that what stopped some of them from improving straight away was the impossibility to get rid of the feeling of straining and having to worry with the difficulties of the singing. Well done to everyone, anyway, and thanks for such a quality event!

Daily tips on voice matters

Facebook is proving for me to be much more easy to deal with, so if you want to follow me giving brief but valuable insights and advice on singing, you want to like Yuri Sabatini Singing Teacher on FB!.

See you there!

Busy times

It has been quite a while since I wrote for this blog. Partly it is because I find it easier to share quick thoughts regarding the singing on my Facebook page, Yuri Sabatini Singing Teacher; and partly because of the inherent lack of time in this period of my life... I am gradually but steadily seeing an increasing number of students, many beginners for some reason, which led me to a consideration I will share later in the post... I am also spending more time with the children, aware that this is the best time of my life in terms of the enjoyment that we can get from each other. They will grow soon, and life will take a different shape. There hae been also things to fix and change at home, and I had to learn new pieces for concerts I had..

So, as yesterday we went to sleep very early (trying to build the habit for them), this morning at 5 I was already awake and with no sign of the intention to getting back to sleep I decided to come down and reflect on things. Opening the blog and beginning to write has been the consequence.

I am keeping open to my own criticism, I always did, as a way to improve and never be satisfied with what I reach - in terms of my singing. I believe that's what brings about excellence in anything: your constant will to get better at what you do, to master what you can't yet. I had 2 concerts since the summer break, and they were good. The first one has been good. The second in fact was great. But I had to keep working on my voice as I am doing, because I need to arrive to the point of total control, or better, total freedom in using it. I need to, because I realised this is not there yet: last Monday I auditioned for Glyndebourne and tension kicked in, which spoiled my performance. I wanted to understand what happens, physically, that hamper my performance when I tense and worked on my voice to create the habit of singing effortlessly. I still am, but very happy with the results so far. There is a point, no surprise, just in the "area di passaggio" where I am more prone to grip, to "go of fibre" as we say in Italian. I mean to push more, and it happens when I am not fully rested and relaxed, or when the acoustics is bad. BY continuosly and conciously shifting into the head voice by releasing any thick quality, any grip to the modal voice, and compensating (balancing) by gently darkening the sound (copertura), the voice becomes free of any excess weight and moves higher and with extreme easyness.

Ah, yes! I promised I was going to share the consideration I made regarding my beginner students. Here it is: I find I am really the best of my job in bringing up students with good technique, it's my good share in a world in which many potential good voices are held back by defects that have been left undetected. Pointing them out when they are at postgraduate level is so painful, and often you meet resistance and denial.. Yet, it's a pity to watch a masterclass with Kiri Te Kanawa or Roger Vignoles, as I did last week, and to witness the breathing and vocal faults in the singers who performed at the RCM. Maybe, by the law of statistics and numbers, those who I teach won't reach performance status, but they will always enjoy singing and show what a free sung voice sounds like, with no defect in tone. And this for the enjoyment of those who listen too! ...what a delusion to hear at the RCM sopranos with breathy emission, or straight tone, difficult and noisely breathing, or tenors with distorted timbre... and see that they are completely oblivious to the defect.

Hmm, hungry. Morning is coming and is time for breakfast. Keep well everyone!

Back home!

Welcome back to everyone, I hope you all had a great summer!

After more than one month holiday, I'm finally back to normal routine - if there is such think as "normal" routine in my life!
This is the first time I am away for such a long time and I must admit it feels strange to find myself in London which is a quite different setting than my hometown Rome... But there you are! I am sure this feeling will soon go away: I am looking forward to meet my students and to make music myself.

Blessed week for a father like me!

As from today, all is back to normal routine... but at the same time from now on nothing will be the same for me anymore.

My wife went on holiday in Florida, with her sister, for 8 days. Saturday to Sunday. It has been the first time I was alone with the children, now aged 6 and 3, and the first time for them their mum was away. Relatives and friends were quite worried it would have been difficult for me to juggle between the house chores, keeping them well fed, bringing them at school in time, teaching my students... and with the aggravation of having to sing for a private audience in concert on Thursday, even myself started to doubt I could manage to make it through... But instead of being a stressful period of my life, it has been the most intense, fun, rewarding and bonding experience the three of us ever had so far!

Even though I always helped my wife, it is different when she is not at home: you are in charge all the time, you have to organise their time to keep them entertained, doing shopping, prepare their meals, and so on... I must say that I felt blessed to be able to spend most of my waking time with them (and all of my sleeping time as at night they slept with me in my bed!).

I lived the life of a lone parent, and honestly enojoyed any minute of it. The weather has been magnificent and we played many adventures in the park. We played music together at the piano. Jonathan helped me in the house and the little one, Oscar, who usually prefers his mother company, came much nearer to me, hugging me and kissing me of his own initiative... and there's nothing more sweet than being cuddled by these lovely, affectionate boys.

I thought I was helping before, but my perspective has completely changed: now I just want to spend more time with them and it's an honour I wouldn't renounce for nothing in the world! :)

Quality vs Quantity

Sometime ago, I promised my students and facebook friends that I would have written a post about the topic of breathing for singing... and there we are as I've finally found the time.
Techniques of breathing abound, right and wrong, and confusion too. ...At times, is not only the confusion the issue, but an incomplete, superficial knowledge, both theoretical and of one's own coordination.
The subject is actually so complex that it's complicated to start it.
You hear the advice to push in and the opposite one, to push out.
You hear the term support, invoked as one-for-all cure of any vocal ailments, but few can explain it. And few are those who get it right in doing so. You see, the fact that it seems to make sense in one's explanation doesn't mean that it's right. You come across another word, appoggio, Italian term devised to evoke and convoy a certain feeling that is experienced when the right coordination takes place, but which, again, often is misunderstood or not completely understood.
(Patience! As I said, the matter is complicated, but I will explain what that is: bear with me!)
We'll start by analysing some of the most common mistakes inexperienced singers make (actually, the majority of singers, in cases even those working professionally).
So, the singer start by taking an intake of air and... you hear the noise. Many things are wrong with it: incompletely open glottis and tension in the abdomen (there could be other unfavourable conditions to singing present when this happen, but this are always the case and enough by themselves to affect the tone and the performance.
Then the singer starts to sing and... you see the abdomen contract and the side of the ribcage being squeezed in (the chest collapse quite quickly, too). What does that imply? Too much pressure in the lungs for a start, which translates in too much sub-glottic pressure, which means the vocal folds can't meet properly to vibrate. How can you tell that? Look and listen: you'll notice either a breathy sound and a fast loss of air, or tension in the throat and rigid sound as the singer try to contract at laryngeal level to stop the air to escaping from his mouth. IN BOTH cases, vibrato is affected by being either less natural or too quick. Quality of sound? You can hear the effort, the forced nature of this voice, the impossibility to move fastly between notes in scale like phrases (agility) and the preclusion to diminish the sound to piano (dynamics, or messa di voce if you like).
Now the singer has to take a subsequent breath fairly early and snatches one, again audibly. You notice it seems strange that another one was needed so quickly. Time passing by, you see also the chest raising up and down with any cicle of breath, the shoulders slowly but steadily get involved in the process, the singer gets tired, the voice is badly affected. At the end of the performance, if it was a long one, he is knackered and hoarse.

Now: I know, probably you don't do any of this so blatantly.
Yet, something is not completely right or you wouldn't be here reading this article, is it?
So, let's delve into the matter and give you the insight you were looking for.

How do I take a breath for singing?

Rule number one.
Be still inside.
Be calm.
DO NOT tense your abdominal muscles, particularly the rectus.
(Why? Tensing the rectus tenses the intrinsic and extrinsic muscles of the larynx. Also, the resistance to the descent of your diaphragm - brought about by the contraction of the abdominal muscles which squash your organs inside of your belly - make so that the effort in inhaling is more than needed and chances are that the volume of air in not enough, but more importantly, that the recoil of the diaphragm is accelerated from the very onset. The breath will last less and there will be no possibility to control it with ease. At the opposite, loose viscera -the content of your abdomen - will weight on your diaphragm and counteract its ascent, thus saving you breath! This feeling is what we call appoggio, leaning upon something, passively... the concept of support ("support the sound", "support from below!") is, on the contrary, an active action foreign to the coordination and the feeling of appoggio: appoggio is relief in singing, support is one more thing to work on!)

Rule number two.
DO NOT inhale much. "Quality, not quantity". By the way mark this: the higher the notes you will be singing, the less breath you will need. Yes, you read it correctly. You don't need a big quantity of breath, even for the longest phrases. It's what you do with the breath, how you manage it - how quickly it is expelled by your lungs - that counts. This is the crucial point, the result of appoggio. THIS MAKES ALL THE DIFFERENCE.

Rule number three.
Don't tense in the larynx and throat at the onset. If you have inhaled in the conditions outlined above, there will be a sense of relax in the neck, throat and in the upper chest area. The intake of air will be silent. The larynx will feel out of the way, and recover with each new inhalation.

Rule number four.
On the onset, keep the sense of ease: don't contract the rectus abdominal muscle - the transversus and the oblique will do the work assisting the exhalatory activity, without you having much to think about it.. forgive me if I don't go SO MUCH in depth ;) . That will guarantee the right amount of airflow and will leave the larynx to work in an optimum condition. You will hear a focus in the voice and you will feel it in particular area of your skull (depending on vowel, pitch and volume you are singing in), with the impression of the sound floating on the breath, effortlessly (remember the old saying? sing ON the breath, not WITH the breath!).
Air will not escape quickly, the chest will remain comfortably high and apparently always in the inhalatory position reached upon adopting the so called noble posture. Vibrato will appear naturally at the correct rate, unaided. Quickly moving passages will be easy to accomplish, as it will playing with dynamics without affecting the quality of tone. Singing in high tessitura will not call for tension, in either holding or pushing anywhere in your body.
That's appoggio, or one way - pretty simple, yet subtly correct - to put it into words.

As usual, comments are welcomed!