Last week I wrote about Why a warm up shouldn’t be just vocal exercises.
This week I’m going to revisit five old posts which look at warm ups in more detail. This is one of a series of summary posts around a specific topic, bringing together five relevant posts from the past.
In a recent blog post, Robert Sussuma urges singers to “stop warming up, doing exercises, and practising.”
He is being a little provocative, but it has prompted me to reflect on whether singers need to warm up or not before singing.
As a member of the Natural Voice Network (NVN), I share a belief that our voices are rooted in our bodies.
But it’s not just the NVN, most professional singers believe this too.
I believe that proper preparation for singing is vital.
.JPG)
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 have a low boredom threshold. There are 100s of gorgeous new songs I want to teach and it’s hard to cram them all in.
But more often than not, singers want to sing the old, familiar songs they already know well. How to strike the right balance?
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.
I reckon most of you will be too busy with Christmas to read my blog this week! Full to overflowing with turkey and all the trimmings, it’s hard to get off the sofa to switch on the computer. Besides which, computers might remind you too much of work!
Rather than a normal post, I thought I’d list the most popular reads from 2009 in case you missed them first time around.
So . . . a very merry Christmas and happy New Year to one and all and thanks for reading. I couldn’t do it without you!
