Air – Part 3

After we organize our breathing system to maximize our capacity to engulf air, we have to pursue the next goal: Conservation. It is a simple word and simple minds may think it to be a simple operation. The truth is quite complicated. It was Renata, my voice teacher, who put the truth about air conservation in my ear, and that truth is still an echo in my head. They are her words: “If you want to sing “Bel Canto”, you must learn to sing long phrases.” It was not more than a month later that I figured out one part of the equation and started using my dad’s bowling ball to do “Pull Overs”. When you don’t have the money for good equipment, you improvise and I knew I needed to make space for more air. My dad got tired of me playing with his bowling equipment and bought me my own bowling ball. I still have it.

If I could afford lessons, why couldn’t I afford a dumbbell set?

Renata comes to Iesi for Il Pirata

Lessons with Renata were affordable because she never charged me anything. It cost my dad a few $ for gas to drive me to lessons. Did you know that gasoline was affordable once upon a time? She even gave me the scores to use for study. I was poor, because my dad, like his dad, was a hard worker in an industry that payed peanuts for his time and effort. I ignored the many social justice weeds behind which we Blakes could have hidden. Some carriers of the Blake DNA from my generation found those weeds quite attractive, but I was happy to work toward searching out my gifts and turning them into economic success.

How to improvise.

I learned about “Pull Overs” from a magazine my dad allowed me to slip into an almost overflowing shopping cart. My aunt was filling it with groceries as she pushed it down the aisles of the old Grand Union on Margaret Street. Every Friday after work he would drive us to downtown Plattsburgh where he could cash his check and pay for the food that would feed us over the next week. Our house sheltered a small platoon of assorted generations. There was my Grandmother, Grandad, two maiden aunts, my dad and me. We were poor, two of us old enough to receive a Social Security check, and like many of the families of the friends I had in the neighborhood we liked to eat. That means that one shopping cart full of food was sometimes not enough to keep us going for a week. By the way, that’s why there wasn’t a lot of money hanging around for fun stuff like dumbbells.

So my dad was serious about conserving the few dollar bills he still had in his pocket when we got back from Plattsburgh on a Friday night. His effort to make his leftover cash meaningful in our lives was a great example to me for how we should conserve air.

Singers are faced with a gargantuan project. Let’s list a few expensive, in terms of air, items that a singer must pay for:

Consonants can cost you a bundle.

“T”s propel air like guns shoot bullets or blanks, depending.

“F”s can fritter tons of air.

“S”s are just as bad as the previous example.

“P”s can be just as penetrating and wasteful as the “T”.

Etc. etc. etc.

So we have a double edged sword to deal with. No one should hide behind the memory of modern victories over consonants and emulate some of my colleagues. Evading the consonants all together gets you off the hook of consonant costs but leaves your listener wondering what the words are all about.

Singing in falsetto at high volume throws a big bundle of air away.  It would be like shredding currency into confetti rather than buying the stuff to throw at your favorite Holiday parade with your AMEX card. I did a little dance on this problem in “What’s the buzz”.

There are other vocal technical deficiencies that dump air, but I really want to direct your attention to how I believe Garcia wants to help you establish the most efficient use of the air you inhale. He tells us to do his vocal exercises in every color, volume and key possible to our voices. He gives license to the beginner to add pauses for necessary breaths. He doesn’t explain how to reduce this necessity. Renata, you remember, my voice teacher, knew this to be important. I believe Garcia expected that telling anyone about this fundamental artistic ability would have inspired people of his day to laugh at him. These days I can’t decide whether to laugh or cry when I hear singers run out of breath before they finish a composer’s phrase.

So how do we learn to conserve? We must convert into sound, as we sing, the maximum percentage of the potential energy we create when we pressurize the air in our lungs. Whatever the volume, whatever the color, whatever the notes, whatever the words and whatever the key may be, if we can phonate the exercise or the melody at hand comfortably, we must get to the end of it. We then make it longer. We slow it down, or we add more notes to sing. The time you can sing without coming up for air must increase. As much as I would like to delineate the physics and physiological manipulations that must take place, I don’t have room to do it in a blog. Besides, I know that there is no amount of knowledge of the conservation particulars that will empower a singer to sing a longer phrase. Focusing on only one or two of the many particulars of this conservation game will do no more than ruin the sound being produced. So why risk it? No pain no gain. No risk no reward.

The only way to establish efficiency of air use while you are singing is by tedious practice. The two key factors are quality and duration. Measure the length of time you are singing while you are singing. As you sing the phrase or exercise stay aware of how much air you have left. Try to mark the half way point. Keep going until you run out of air. That is, sing the exercise/phrase and hold the last note to use up the last bit of air. Do it again and again until you find the tempo or number of notes that use up all your air. Sorry, keep a minimum with which to finish the phrase/exercise gracefully. All the while you are doing this timing thing you must pay attention to the sound you are making. Measure it well. It must never be less than really good. Start simply.

For an exercise:

One vowel, one volume and one color. Then do the other vowels and get the same time result. Then do clearer and darker and louder and softer always getting as close to the time result as before. Then start mixing these things together. ie: Clear to dark. Dark to clear. Clear to dark at the mid point and back to clear at the end. Loud to soft. Soft to loud. Well, you get the picture. Mixing everything together while managing to keep your good sound quality is the apex of air management.

For any melody:

Do the same as above with one addition. When you are at the apex of your air management abilities with the melody, you get to add the words. Follow your instincts about how the character you are impersonating would express the words at hand and when you are able to mix all those variables already mastered into making the words vibrate with meaning without speeding up or taking extra breaths, you have reached the apex of technically perfect artistic interpretation. If you find that singing the words make finishing the melody without extra gulps of air impossible, well, you have to know that if you are truly gifted, your gifts will overcome. So don’t give up and try the next trick. Use only the vowels of the words for your interpretation. Follow the consensus between the composer and librettist but only with the vowels. When you can finish your melody with all the various vowels in place, you then have to make war with the consonants. That war is not absolute. It is more like what gardeners do with fancy shrubs, or what gets done to vines belonging to an expensive Bordeaux label. What Michangelo did to that monster block of marble in which he saw David. Those consonants need to be there, but they need to add to your effect on your audience so you can take their breath away, not allow your “T”s and “S”s to take yours away.