This is one of a series of summary posts around a specific topic, bringing together five relevant posts from the past.
This summary is all about vocal range: how it’s relevant to being in a choir and how you might go about finding where you fit. I’ve already referred to five older posts in the first part of this series.
I am a member of the Natural Voice Network and all my work is based on their ethos.
But what exactly is ‘Natural Voice’ and how do Natural Voice choirs differ from other kinds of choir?
I believe that proper preparation for singing is vital.
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But sometimes I forget to explain why to singers who come to my one-off sessions. This is what I should remember to tell them.
I’ve always known that I’m more interested in traditional songs, but I’ve only just realised that it’s the vocal quality that I’m most drawn to.
There’s something thrilling and primal about the sound of traditional singers’ voices. How do they achieve that and how does it differ from, say, ‘classical’ singing?
This is a revised version of a post which first appeared as The Natural Voice approach in September 2007.
I often mention my membership of the Natural Voice Practitioners’ Network (NVPN) on this blog.
I thought I’d remind people of what this Natural Voice approach represents.
All Natural Voice practitioners share a common philosophy towards voice work. Simply stated, we believe that singing is everyone's birthright, and that:
Many members of the NVPN run community choirs based on this philosophy, although we are a very broad church with members from all areas of voice work, not just choirs or singing groups.
What exactly is the Natural Voice approach to singing and voice (note the capital letters!)?
It’s something we often struggle to pin down in the NVPN. It may seem to many outsiders to be some kind of wishy-washy organic wholefood let-it-all-hang-out way of singing, but it is in fact a very specific discipline or approach to voice work (not just singing by any means).
When practitioners join the network, they state on the membership form that their
“approach to teaching voice and song is in harmony with the Philosophy and Working Principles of the Natural Voice Practitioners’ Network”.
By adhering to a common philosophy and set of working principles, the assumption is that we will end up with a network of like-minded individuals who all approach voice work in a similar way.
However, as the network has grown over the years, we have become a very broad church which includes a range of practitioners covering sound healing, community choirs, spiritual chanting, working with pregnant mothers, using voice for therapy, singing contemporary compositions, etc.
Although many practitioners working in these areas do use a Natural Voice approach, there is a danger that the term itself is becoming a catch-all phrase of convenience which is beginning to lose its strict meaning.
A while back I helped to formulate a code of practice which I believe encapsulates more accurately what it means to use the Natural Voice approach. It turns out though that it’s impossible to find a code that suits such a broad collection of practitioners!
However, I thought I’d mention some of the key points here in order to to clarify what my own understanding of what the Natural Voice approach to voice is.
The code is divided into four main areas:
This is the foundation stone to the Natural Voice approach. It reminds us that the voice is connected to and rooted in the whole body. The whole body supports the voice and needs to find a subtle balance between relaxation and alertness. An understanding of the body, breath, emotion and sound connection is central to our approach and demands physical awareness and exercising. It also means that every voice session will begin with both a vocal and physical warm up.
Basically nobody should be excluded from music-making. Singing is our birthright and should be accessible to all. Hence we don’t assume any prior knowledge, try to steer clear of jargon, use a variety of teaching styles to maximise everyone’s involvement, and try to accommodate those with physical and other restrictions.
We need to respect the individuals we work with and all the cultures we draw from. We acknowledge and accept that each voice is unique to the individual. Wherever possible we find out and explain the historical and cultural context of a song and credit its composer or source. We also choose material for our work which is not exploitative and will be culturally accessible to everyone in the group.
We approach our work in ways that are unlocking, freeing, allowing, releasing, non-judgmental, and encouraging. We are playful, informal and forgiving, focusing on process and participants’ experience rather than any end-product.
You can find more information and a fuller description of the network’s aims, philosophy, working principles and training opportunities on the NVPN website: www.naturalvoice.net.
To get a good grounding in the Natural Voice approach, and a chance to learn how to set up and run a singing group, Frankie Armstrong (founder and inspiration to the NVPN), along with her partner Darien Pritchard (a Feldenkrais and massage practitioner) leads an annual week's training workshop at Kinnersley Castle in Herefordshire. Full details can be found on Frankie’s website.
Is there such a thing as an ‘unnatural’ voice? How does one find one’s ‘natural’ voice. I will be writing more about this later.
Back in January this year I shared with you my journey so far of Becoming a choir leader.
Yes, I am a choir leader, and I have one community choir, but the majority of my living comes from running one-day singing workshops. By accident, I now earn my living entirely by teaching songs to people! This is what I do ...
“So what do you do for a living?”
I teach songs.
“Ah, a singing teacher! I wish I could sing.”
No, I’m not a singing teacher, I teach songs. And I believe that everyone can sing.
“Well, not me! So you work in a school?”
No, I don’t work with kids. I teach songs to adults who like to sing.
“What, you mean like a choir? That’s posh!”
Well, I do have a choir, it’s a community choir. We do it for fun, it’s not really posh. But most of my work is leading singing workshops.
“Singing workshops? Like how to make a song?”
No, more like a one-off class where I teach songs.
“Do you do songs from the shows? Pop songs?”
No, that’s really not my kind of thing. I did do pop songs for a while as I thought they would be popular workshops, but I realised that pop songs are very hard to learn.
“What kind of thing then? Mozart? Handel’s messiah?”
No, traditional songs from all around the world. Folk songs from different countries.
“We used to do ‘Kookaburra sings in the old gum tree’ at school! I remember ‘Kumbayah’ too.”
They’re not really folk songs, they were written in the 1930s. Also, I teach songs in their original languages, we don’t do many songs in English.
“But what if you can’t speak foreign languages?”
You don’t need to. I give out the words phonetically and you just learn them by rote. I spend some time on getting the pronunciation right though.
“I think it’s really clever when people can just pick up a piece of music and sing.”
We don’t use written music. You don’t need to know anything about music or music theory to come to one of my workshops. I teach everything by ear. Most of the traditional songs I teach are passed down orally and not written down.
“Do you use a piano or have backing tracks?”
Neither. I teach songs without any musical accompaniment. We make a wonderful sound just using voices and creating amazing harmonies.
“I couldn’t come to one of your things, not only can’t I sing, but I wouldn’t know any of the songs.”
You don’t need to. Most people won’t have heard the songs before. Everyone will be in the same boat learning new songs from scratch. And lots of people are like you and don’t believe they can sing.
“What kind of songs do you do? I don’t think I know any foreign folk songs.”
I bet you do. They use loads of them on TV ads these days. There was one time they used a Ladysmith Black Mambazo song (they’re from South Africa and sang on Paul Simon’s Graceland album) to advertise baked beans, and the amazing Bulgarian women’s choir to advertise a make of car. You’d be surprised where this stuff pops up!
“So you think I could come along and learn something?”
Sure. I don’t assume any experience and my workshops are open to anybody over 16 who loves to sing, even if they think they can’t. I get people who only sing in the bath, people in their 50s who haven’t sung since school, and people in their 80s who’ve been in choirs for years.
“Won’t they all know more than me? It seems a bit daunting to walk into a room of people who think they can sing.”
You’d be surprised. Most people feel as nervous as you and assume everyone can sing better than them. Everyone’s a bit hesitant at first, but I always start with a warm up which involves lots of silly noises and actions so people are soon laughing and relax pretty quickly.
“How long are your workshops? I wouldn’t have thought I’d learn much in a couple of hours.”
My one-day workshops are usually six hours long with an hour’s lunch break, but I also do one-off workshops as short as two hours. You’d be amazed at how quickly a group of strangers can be singing in harmony and making beautiful music! I reckon to get through between four and six songs in one day. That means really getting to grips with them and singing them well at the end of the day.
“So where’s your next workshop?”
You can find details of all my workshops on my website. I go all over the place and work three Saturdays out of every four, so you can bet there will be one near you. I also do occasional residential workshops where you can go and stay for the whole weekend and learn loads of songs in a relaxed atmosphere.
“What if there are no workshops near me?”
I go where I’m asked! You can find out about the kinds of workshop I offer on my website, then you can book me to come to your area and run a workshop just for you and your friends or your choir.
“I’m based in Los Angeles. When will you next be there?”
Well I’m based in the UK, so probably not in the foreseeable future I’m afraid! The furthest I’ve been for a one-day workshop is Brussels, and I’ve also run a whole week’s workshop in France. But as I say, I go where I’m asked, so who knows!
“Are you the only person who does these kinds of singing workshops?”
Not at all! I’m a member of the Natural Voice Practitioners' Network (NVPN) which has over 200 members across the world. We all share the belief that everyone can sing, that everybody should have access to music-making and that no prior musical knowledge is necessary. You can find loads of singing workshops on the NVPN website.
“In LA?”
We only have a few members in the US, and none of them are in LA. But I have lots of contacts over there and I’m sure I can point you in the right direction. There’s an organisation based in Canada similar to the NVPN which covers North America: The Ubuntu Choirs Network.
“So this kind of work only goes on in the UK and US?”
Not at all. There is a lot of similar work in Australia, and to a lesser extent in other countries.
“I might check it out then, see if I can find a singing workshop to go to.”
You do that! You’ll find that you love it and who knows, maybe it’ll become a new lifelong passion.
This is a guest post by professional singer and qualified teacher Janet Shell. She writes here about how to maintain your own unique vocal quality whilst improving your tone. Contact me if you’d like to submit a guest post.
As a professional singer and teacher, I am very keen on developing a technique which allows the singer to be in control of their own sound and for it to sound like the person you know singing rather than some kind of manufactured robot!
Do you ever think that when somebody sings, the sound they make does not match what you are seeing? Here are some ideas to help you maintain your authentic voice whilst improving your tone.
The fundamental rule is never to force the voice into sounding louder than it is, or deeper or bigger. People associate largeness of voice with success. In fact that only serves to push the vocal mechanism into bringing in other muscles to support it. You see this by the muscular strain around the neck, you know those neck muscles sticking out like veins?
Strong tone comes from picking up your inbuilt microphones – your resonators. It is rather like bringing a camera image into focus. Nothing has been forced, but the result is cleaner and clearer. You can feel these working when you hum and then open up the sound, imagining it pouring out between your eyes.
A great way to feel the resonators is to sing the word LUNG and sit on the NG part of the sound. You can move through lots of pitches on this sound and as you do so, if you gently place your fingers against your nose, you will feel it vibrate.
The trick is to place all the sounds you make in this part of the face when you start singing properly. It will have the effect of feeling the sound going away from you.
When working with singers, whether in a group or individually, I spend some time eradicating breathiness and huskiness. Ironically, this is caused by not getting enough breath flowing through the vocal cords. They come together because air is sent out of the lungs. If you don’t expel air out of the lungs, you cannot close your cords! It is the opposite of what you may think.
How do we get a strong sound which is not breathy and which allows the voice to glide easily from pitch to pitch? It really is to do with the preparation before singing. The intake of air needs to open up everything inside in your thought process. So taking a breath in means your ribcage expands and therefore moves outwards. If your shoulders raise up, you have not opened up sufficiently.
Try expelling all your air so that you have to take in a breath – that way your body will be in crisis and take in a lot of air in its most efficient way, which does not involve squeezing and raising the shoulders! You will notice the expansion of your rib cage. Try bending forward and breathing: here you can feel the ribcage working naturally. Now try and create that when you are upright!
The development of tone for me is like layers. The first layer is the childlike, simple sound – with no hint of maturity. As you develop your voice, it is like adding layers: however, you should always be able to access the simplest layer – a healthy voice can make a complex sound or a very ‘straight’ sound at will. Sometimes I am asked what I mean by that. The ‘straight’ sound is the one where you make a childlike sound. To make that your cords come together cleanly giving a clear and uncluttered tone.
If you can manage all these things, and it is a process which you have to practise until the muscles respond automatically, then you will have a natural and unforced tone.
I sometimes hear people talking about creating vibrato but this is a ‘put on’ element if you approach it in this way. Vibrato happens naturally as the voice develops. Uncontrolled vibrato is almost always a sign of tension in the voice and a forcing of the muscles. It is the very thing which ages a voice and is not the sign of a mature technique but actually quite the opposite!
To sum up, natural developed tone quality comes from managing the breath and placing the sound so the muscles are free to work and therefore the tone can be true and strong without being interfered with!
Janet Shell offers active voice management and communication skills training through her website TalkingVoice.net.
I realise that apart from the About Me section on this blog, you probably don’t know much about me or my journey to become a choir and singing workshop leader. Well, now’s the time to reveal all!
Why am I telling you my story? Well, I thought it might be nice for you to know a little more about me, but also I want to show that you don’t need to have formal musical education in order to be able to follow your dream.
From an early age I’ve always loved music. My parents aren’t musical at all, but bought me a guitar when I was about 10 and sent me to lessons. Although it was a pain at the time, I’m really glad that I had that opportunity. It means that I can read music and pick out a tune on a guitar.
I had an amazing appetite for all kinds of music – from classical LPs (borrowed from the local library) to listening to Radio Caroline under the bedclothes late at night to hear the first airing of The Beatles’ White Album.
I was in the local church choir as a kid, but don’t remember much about the singing. Most of the time we would pass chewing gum and stories along the line during the boring sermons.
In primary school I managed to join the choir, but we just sang Christmas carols once a year and maybe led the singing at morning assembly.
I’ve never been the sort of person to sing to myself around the house (and still don’t), but I’ve always joined in with the radio or CD that’s playing, often adding the harmonies rather than singing the tune.
From the age of 11 I pretty much stopped singing except during school assemblies or at annual scout camp. I wasn’t in any choir or band (although I’ve always wanted to be in a rock band!) or orchestra.
When I was in my early teens I managed to get a holiday job working the lifts at the Fairfield Hall in my home town of Croydon. Once all the audience were in, I was able to watch the concerts for free: George Harrison and Eric Clapton were two of the acts I remember, but there were many more.
I was never in a harmony singing choir, nor did I ever attend any choral or classical concerts. The family did go to see Oliver! and Fiddler on the Roof in the West End though. But I hate musical theatre!
I was good at maths at school, so ended up going to university to study pure mathematics. During the first year I changed courses to do computer science. I then went on to do an MSc in Artificial Intelligence and began to study for a PhD.
I got bored with being an academic, so never got around to writing my thesis up, and went to Malaysia instead to lecture in computer science. Clearly all good training to be a choral director!!
I did nothing particularly arty, and certainly nothing musical, at university or beyond. When I came back from Malaysia I got an Artificial Intelligence research job at London University for three years. (If you Google my name, you will eventually find me credited on a join research paper from that time.)
For some insane and inexplicable reason, I joined an adult evening class in drama whilst in London. Although very shy at the time, I took to it like a duck to water! From the very beginning I was interested in creating my own work and made a few shows with fellow class members.
I even auditioned at the University and ended up performing in a Jacobean tragedy at the Edinburgh Fringe. That’s the closest I’ve ever come to ‘normal’, straight theatre!
Having discovered this new creative drug, I quit the computer world, started to claim unemployment benefit, and threw myself into making theatre. I soon had my own company in London, attended loads of workshops and master classes, and then began teaching at several drama schools.
After a few years of this (and making no money!) I was really lucky to get a job as a performer with the Centre for Performance Research (CPR) in Cardiff (which began as the Cardiff Laboratory Theatre).
In Cardiff I was introduced to unaccompanied harmony singing. We used to include songs (often from Eastern European singing traditions) in the performances we made. I attended many local singing workshops, including one by Frankie Armstrong, the driving force behind the foundation of the Natural Voice Practitioners’ Network (NVPN).
I did workshops with Polish theatre companies, members of the Roy Hart Theatre, Japanese Butoh performers, and a couple of Georgian ethnomusicologists who introduced me to the joys of Georgian song.
I travelled the world with the CPR and was lucky enough to watch and train with a huge variety of different performing arts genres. But gradually the opportunities faded and I became poor and unemployed once more.
I thought it was about time I got a ‘real’ job and started to apply for posts as university lecturer in theatre. Eventually I got a job at Coventry University in the Performing Arts department teaching theatre.
When I moved to Coventry I immediately looked for a singing group to join so I could continue to sing the amazing unaccompanied harmony songs that I had discovered in Cardiff. But there were no such groups. There are lots of choirs in Coventry, but none of them did the kind of music I loved, and most of them were far too formal for my taste.
So the local council suggested I start an evening class called ‘Songs from around the world’.
“But I’ve never taught songs to people before!” I exclaimed. “Oh, you’ll be fine”, they said.
And so began my life as a teacher of songs.
There were times when less than a handful of people turned up to a singing session, but slowly, slowly the numbers built until I had a reasonable core of singers. The local council were amazing and supported me throughout this growing period. But eventually I realised that I couldn’t survive on the council pay, and decided to go private.
Thus was born my first choir: WorldSong. We met once a week on a Wednesday evening during term time. We started with around 20 singers, but over the years the choir grew to over 60 with a waiting list to join. It is still growing.
I took my university responsibilities very seriously and believe that I did a very good job. But this began to take a toll on my health and finally I had to take a year off work. During that time, I managed to continue to run the weekly choir sessions which helped to maintain my sanity. There’s only so much daytime TV you can watch when you’re ill!
Eventually I quit the university job and started to make my way as a freelance choir and singing workshop leader. By that time I had joined the Natural Voice Practitioners’ Network (NVPN) and had met many other practitioners. I naturally assumed that they all made their living by their singing work, so I was determined to emulate them.
Little did I know that most NVPN members have day jobs unconnected with singing! If I had known that, I doubt if I would have had the courage to attempt to earn my living solely from my singing work.
In 2000 I learnt that a choir in Stamford, Lincolnshire was looking for a new musical director. I had no idea where Stamford was, but it didn’t seem too far to drive, and it meant a change of scenery so I went over to run a workshop for them.
I got the job, so was now leading two community choirs (and I’m still leading Woven Chords to this day). Through this new job, another choir approached me, and I took over Global Harmony in Melton Mowbray. That was three community choirs! Although I was doing lots of driving, I was just about making a living.
Over the years, the choirs that I’ve led have grown considerably. I’ve since handed over the reins to both WorldSong and Global Harmony. Along the way I’ve also run smaller, more advanced singing ensembles such as The Small Group, C-Section, Minor Chords and Vox Mondiale.
My singing workshops have taken off and pretty much every Saturday I’m running a one-day or weekend workshop somewhere. Plays havoc with your social life, but that’s the way it is.
I’ve also gone back to my theatrical roots and been working with the Foot and Mouth voice-theatre project for the last two years. This year we have two big premieres at local theatres.
I have developed enormously as a teacher and a choir leader, for which I thank the many singers that I’ve worked with from the early days onwards. I hope you had fun, and I apologise for the sticky moments when I didn’t fully know what I was doing – they call it on-the-job training!
You can’t plan your life’s journey. Things will go wrong, surprises will happen, you will get lost. And isn’t that great? Isn’t that what being human is about?
I’d love to hear about your own journey to becoming a choir leader, community musician, professional singer, etc., especially if you’ve had no formal musical education! Do drop by and leave a comment letting us all know what you do, where you’re from, and what your musical journey’s been like so far.
This is the second guest post from Deb Viney who works at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, UK. Her first post was From the back of the choir 1 — first steps which looked at her experience of joining the SOAS World Music Choir. In this post, Deb describes a typical weekly choir session.
Chris was kind enough to ask me to contribute some thoughts about what it’s like to be involved in a natural voice style world music choir from the choir member’s perspective. The promise that there would be no auditions and no requests for anyone to sing alone was very important to me. Like lots of people I’ve previously been given messages suggesting that I “can’t sing”, but I still enjoy trying. In this kind of choir, that’s not a problem, I fit right in. I’ve no desire whatsoever to be a soloist, or in any way to draw attention to myself, so I always prefer to stand at the back of the choir for performances.
Then onto some noise-making: sirens, humming, nonsense sounds, whatever the director suggests, really, sometimes we add the sound effects for a funny story. Then we might move on to some kind of vocal scales, perhaps in the form of a counting song, moving up and down the range of our voices — don’t strain, but reach as low or high as you can. It’s surprising, but the group manages to start sounding like a choir, even this early in the session.
Or perhaps a simple piece that can be easily turned into a multi-part round (that’s where the choir is formed into many sections and each sings the same, but they start at different times, so the sound has many layers).
The second piece might be some work on a more difficult song, in our case that’s usually something in a language other than English (more about that later). It’s usually best to do the toughest stuff before people get too tired.
Usually we work by first all learning the tune, that provides a basic structure into which we fit the parts. Then the director teaches each section their part. She breaks down the part into shorter phrases and first we repeat them to try and establish the words and rhythm, then we start to sing them. It takes only a handful of repetitions of simpler songs to allow the people singing the part to get enough confidence to allow the choir to run through all of the parts together.
In a typical session we might manage to fit in a refresher of one or two more songs we have learned before, maybe adding more verses or adding extra parts. So typically we cover three or four songs in an evening. This means that over the course of the Autumn and Spring terms (about 40 practice-hours) we learn a repertoire of about 10-12 pieces. Since the SOAS choir has about two-thirds new members each year (as many students move on) we tend to learn a new repertoire each year, though we might carry over one or two favourites.
So apart from repetition, how do we learn? Most people use one or more of the basic learning modes: visual, auditory, kinaesthetic and semantic. In other words we might remember by associating the sounds with an image; or by associating the sounds of the song with a rhythm or with sounds we recognise (perhaps a foreign phrase sounds like a name, or a phrase in English). Another possibility is to learn by the movements (kinaesthetic links), how that strange sound feels as you say it, distinctive mouth movements. The other possibility is to find, or to assign, a meaning (semantic content) to the unfamiliar sounds. This can be through understanding the translation, but it can also be just a matter of attaching an arbitrary meaning to the sounds to help you to remember them.
If this all sounds too much, don’t worry. I got through my whole first year as a choir member, including a performance, without properly learning any of the songs: my memory was blank until the director gave the first line as a cue. The second year was easier and this year I actually did learn in full several of the songs — which suggests that learning by ear does improve one’s auditory memory. So keep working on it!
An extra post for a shameless plug! BBC Radio 4 have been running a 5-part documentary series on choirs this week, and the choir WorldSong which I founded in 1997 was one of the featured choirs. Interestingly, out of more than 25,000 choirs in the
For those of you who missed the broadcast or who live outside the
The series is called Joan Armatrading’s favourite choirs and the WorldSong part went out on Tuesday 20th May.
Singer-songwriter Joan Armatrading visits outstanding choirs around