The Technique and The Method
Recently Debbie and I watched a Public Broadcasting remembrance of a fascinating Frenchman who made the USA his home and adopted nationality. The AMERICAN MASTERS program “Jacques Pépin: The Art of Craft” structured the story of his yet to be completed life into a beautiful biography. The truth of the “Old School” manner by which this unquenchably curios and ever ambitious achiever assailed life shined through in a manner that inspired Debbie to insist I make a blog about it.
This man’s significance to the world of food is already well established and I hope he will keep feeding posterity from his larder of knowledge and cornucopia of inspiration. I’m interested in him because I believe his life to be a great rerun, in the food world, of Manuel Garcia’s life in the opera world. He hasn’t attained to Manuel’s longevity, but he has certainly matched Manuel in the realm of universal respect in his industry.
There is no doubt about his convictions concerning the technical foundation for his “Art”, and so refreshing to read his humble words of estimation of his “Art Form” in the interview, “Blue Collar, White Hat”, in The Columbia Journal of American Studies. One of the parallels I see to Garcia’s time line; Pépin might never have written his books “La Technique” or “La Methode” without a disaster forcing a hard turn for his ascending star as it traveled through time with us. Pépin almost died in an auto accident. It forced him from behind the stove at his restaurant onto a path of advocacy for his “Art Form”. I would say the world of food is richer for this turn of events, even if Pépin had to suffer. He serves society in a much larger way now than would have been possible to him as a chef in even the most celebrated restaurant on earth.
Disaster struck the Garcia family when Manuel Sr. was robbed by bandits in Mexico. They took the fortune he had amassed in the New World from him before he could get it back home. 
What little money the bandits missed in their search of the Garcia entourage was about enough to pay for their passage back to Europe. The great tenor had to start from scratch to build a new nest egg. When the old man got back to Paris, he had little time to wait before his son recounted his disastrous debut in Naples, and announce his desire to begin building a life outside of music. In the fullness of time the elder Manuel’s voice began showing signs of age and the singer, still short of the nest egg lost, had to turn to teaching to make a livelihood and about this time the younger Manuel set his sights on supporting himself while traveling the world. His mother talked him out of it, and I thank God she did. Papa Garcia had already founded a school of singing in Paris and Garcia Jr. signed on to help his dad. Disasters; dad’s forced contribution to Mexico’s benefits for bandits program, young Manuel’s failure to launch as an Opera Star and papa’s voice surrendering to the pressures of Father Time, set the stage for Garcia’s stellar teaching career and his two wonderful books. Garcia’s “Ecole de García” part one and part two could have been called exactly the same titles Pépin used for his two books. Maybe Pépin had a better editor.
Garcia lived 101 years. I pray that Pépin, if he so desires to endure, may exceed Garcia’s record. Given the content of the interview to which I link above, I’m inspired to pray that he keeps talking, teaching and writing. Old School is really hard to find.
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Torino: Once More with Feeling!
My ticket is purchased and the dates are set. I will be working with singers with whom I have already collaborated. It will be a singular pleasure to hear how each has progressed since last I heard them. I am eager to guide them toward their goals.
There is still room for more participants, and if anyone of you has been interested in working with me, this Master Class would be a good opportunity:
10 – 16 April, 2017 Sede dell’Accademia della Voce del Piemonte
Please come and give me have a chance to help you.
Rockwell Blake
Read MoreAir – Part 4
OK! We have air. We need to use it wisely. We have a system for converting the potential energy of pressure we apply to the air in our lungs. It is called the larynx.
I once upon a time had a video embedded here but it has disappeared from YouTube. The illustration of all the various parts of the vocal structure was really good. I am on the lookout for another example.
The conversion center is so complex that one could despair of ever understanding how it works. There are labs at prestigious Universities populated by hyper intelligent people seeking to nail down an explanation of how these structures really work to produce the human voice. Until they are able to formulate a real time theory of all the muscular activities as well as the air pressure being converted into sonic energy they will not be able to offer a recipe of muscular activity for any of the millions of different noises we humans are capable of making. So we might just give up thinking about this critical feature of our anatomy and get on with life. You know, go to lunch, catch up with your text messages, do your peer reviews, take in a few YouTube videos, organize the dust on your desk, memorize the music in the program you plan to do next week or struggle to keep your eyes open while your department head, voice teacher, stage director, agent or even your most dedicated fan talks at you.
There is really no value, beyond the fun of knowing things, in being aware of the structure of your larynx while you sing. The knowledge you need as a singer is quite different from putting names to every structure in the larynx. It is the sonic knowledge most everyone has, but very few acknowledge as having any value at all. What I’m talking about is best understood as an ability to hear content or meaning in the tone of voice. It is the “subtext” of our communications. Just remember the times your mother said to you something like: “Don’t you speak to me in that tone of voice!” We speak it and we hear it. All the bits and pieces of our larynx provide about half of that subtext, and the anatomy of our ears collects this toning of our words. Our brains processes what our ears collect, and it is sad to say that many of us are tone deaf. If you cannot hear the subtext, you are particularly disadvantaged at air conservation. Forget about interpretation. What you cannot hear, you cannot imitate.
The key to air conservation is your ability to recognize your tone of voice. The lock you must open with that key is maintenance of your tone of voice. If you can recognize the subtext of the sound you are making and you can maintain it as you change things like vowels or volume or registers for that matter, you will be employing everything described in the above video in a balancing act that no singer can execute as a matter of will or factual understanding.
So listen to the key. Listen to yourself. Hear the sound you make on an easy note in the middle of your voice at medium volume. I ask students, who need to be introduced to their voices, to display joy and satisfaction as they sing one note for me. Do the same for yourself. Sing one note as if you are one of the happiest people on Earth. See how long you can hold the note without losing that joyous tone of voice. That is to say, time it. Keep repeating this happy singing with your stop watch. Joy and note longevity are the goals.
For the guys, please sing in Chest Voice. You will have to explore Falsetto later, but for now it’s all Chest all the time on one note at one volume.
When you have the ability of hold your happy tone of voice in one volume on one note using every bit of air in your lungs, I believe Garcia would have moved on to making the student sing using up all available air while dividing the time in three equal parts. On third on the original note then one third on the upper neighbor then the final third back down on the original note. This subdivision would progress along the scale for as many notes as Garcia saw as necessary. In the case of our focus on air conservation, I think we can risk going straight for the jugular.
The great test for air conservation expertise is the “Messa di Voce”. Start with one of the pitches on which you have already sung and measured with your stop watch and found yourself able to hold it for a long time without producing a noise that sounds like you are getting bored or forgetful or disinterested. Start to sing on that pitch as if you were going to just do the long note again “with feeling” as you have already done successfully many times. The difference this time will be that you will make a diminuendo for half the time you know yourself able to hold that pitch in full voice, and then at the halfway point start a crescendo that will bring you back to the same pitch, sound quality and volume with which you started the exercise. The original rule to maintain your tone of voice: happy and satisfied, is to be maintained through the diminuendo and the crescendo. You will find the exercise really difficult as long as you are unable to do this tone of voice maintenance. You will find that your ability to stay with the program while doing the “Messa di Voce” will be equal to your ability to match the “Messa di Voce” length to your sustained tone singing of the same note. Guys! Guess what? When you do your diminuendo, you are going to find singing in Falsetto unavoidable and you will be forced to explore Falsetto as you sing softer and softer. Within this exploration the key is to carry your original tone of voice at the beginning of the note all the way through the exercise. Have fun.
An old friend sent Debbie, my wife, a You Tube video link for a singer who starts an aria in a concert with a long held note during which she slightly varies the volume. She presented the note as if she were doing something as difficult as a gymnast standing on his hands walking around with his feet in the air and then standing still on just one hand. After she finished her “show off” trick she acted embarrassed at having made such a display of vocal prowess which is, after all, not called for by the composer.
Yugo for you?
Ferrari for me!
I’m sorry to say that her display is more like a car salesman selling a Yugo to a guy who wants to buy a Ferrari. Now that would be a good trick. A hand standing gymnast (for the girls) would have deserved the applause that she got. The note that this soprano sang for her audience, almost anyone can do, and for far longer. I can understand how some misguided students of singing can convince themselves that if gathering applause is that easy, the road to fame must be really easy.
Do that “Messa di Voce” thing and don’t give yourself an easy time of it. Many of the secrets of singing are waiting for discovery inside this exercise. 
Every one of the muscles in your larynx has a part to play. I’ll be back to talk more specifically about them.
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.
Read MoreVigata vagrancy
Debbie, my wife, and I have streamed the last of a series of films that we found available on the internet that were produced for the RAI. We fell in love with being carried away to a real town with a fantasy name: Vigata.
What has this to do with singing? Actually nothing, but after we finished all the Montalbano magic carpets to Sicily available on MHz we decided to watch a “bonus” interview video added to the long list of episodes that carried us one more time back to Italy. We landed in a conversation with the author of the Montalbano books: Andrea Camilleri. This person is almost as interesting and engaging as the stories he wrote. The point of why I want to talk about this microscopically important facet of our lives in retirement is that Camilleri tells Teresa Mannino in that interview a few things that everyone in THE ARTS should know. Some old people really do know things that the young need to hear. Since I don’t ask you to pay for these blogs, I’m not going to ask you to pay the freight to stream the interview.
First: Art is not “Work”.
ROME, ITALY – FEBRUARY 20: Andrea Camilleri attends ‘La Scomparsa Di Pato’ photocall at Alfredo Restaurant on February 20, 2012 in Rome, Italy. (Photo by Ernesto Ruscio/Getty Images)
In an official You Tube clip:
Camilleri says he had fun writing his stories.
I’ll include the captions they inserted on MHz:
Teresa: The one (book or story) you enjoyed writing the most?
Camilleri: No, I always enjoy writing.
Camilleri: If my writing should degenerate into work, I won’t write anymore. I don’t understand those people who say, “Such exhausting work! God, how tiring it is to write!” Relax! It’s certainly less tiring than unloading crates at the central market. Even though I sometimes do get tired, but without exaggerating. I’ve always said that my ideal is the lady on the trapeze.
Teresa: The lady on the trapeze?
Camilleri: Yes, at the circus. She looks beautiful, always smiling, right? She does a triple somersault the whole time smiling, lightly… And she doesn’t show the immense fatigue of the training. Because if she did, she would ruin your enjoyment as a spectator. It’s the same for me. I want to be a trapeze artist. I don’t want to convey the hard work in my writing. And so, I enjoy myself here. Understand? It isn’t work.
About fifteen minutes into the interview Camilleri discusses his manner of instruction for young actors. He has a lovely way of linguistically complicating a very simple principle. Great joy bubbled up in my heart as I listened to this grand “maestro” of the imaginative arts delineate what I believe to be true.
This is a link to a pirate YouTube that is good only for the fact that it is free: You Tube The RAI must have pulled the full interview off its servers. The links in the first You Tube clip do not connect to anything. Money may make the world go round, but I try to make my ideas free.
Camilleri: Attention. An actor has a complex personality, and you must play, not with imposition, because with imposition at the most, you’ll end up a bad copy of yourself. You must be astute. You say “A” with someone so that “B” follows. I don’t think I ever was a teacher. Maybe an advisor. I came from a very severe school…. Horace’s. It’s a totally different way of considering didactics. But I was very severe, very attentive in the selection. But once they became students, I tried to understand, at most, what road they were taking. And on that road, I tried to clarify the doubts that could arise, and pave the way in reaching a result that would mirror their personality while it was being created.
Camilleri was well loved by his acting students, and for good reason. He says that he was very selective in choosing students, but more importantly he says he was concerned to guide the artists under his instructions to use the individual gifts they had to develop their interpretations reflecting that which was already part of their own personalities. It is easy for me to understand that Camilleri was seeking to find the core of the talent with which each actor was gifted. Garcia counted this as the first job of a singing teacher.
Garcia wrote:
“Often one needs an experienced judgement (sic) to recognize in the voice of the student the germ of the true qualities which it possesses. Generally, these qualities are only in the rudimentary state, or well veiled by numerous faults from which it is necessary to free them. The essential point is to first establish the existence of them; one then manages to complete the development of them by patient and orderly studies.”
The phrases “what road they were taking” + “reaching a result that would mirror their personality” and “recognize in the voice of the student the germ of the qualities” + “first establish the existence of them; one then manages to complete the development of them” may seem to you to be completely different ideas. To me they are really the same idea. Garcia’s text directs the teacher to look for and discover the true nature of the vocal gift in each student before doing any technical development of the voice. Camilleri guided each of his students to develop characters for the stage that reflected the various facets of their own personality. I would say that Camilleri wanted each individual actor to use the natural personality gifts they possessed to enlighten the impersonation of any character they were working on. Garcia directs our attention toward vocal gifts, Camilleri points at complicated personality gifts. So what’s the difference? Different parts of the human organism. Camilleri certainly didn’t exclude the vocal gift from his attention, but it is only one small complication.
In that first link, Camilleri tells us all about one of my 10 commandments for an artist. He called his ideal a trapezista. An artist must present a sense of satisfaction and enjoyment while doing the work. An agent once told me that he wished I could make my singing seem difficult when I did auditions, but I refused to take that advice. I expect he knew what he was talking about, but my focus was not on pleasing him or the “Gate Keepers” to whom he wanted to sell me. I wanted to impersonate the tapezista that Camilleri was talking about. I wanted to sing the most difficult music and keep on smiling as if it were nothing. So should you. It is sad that “Gate Keepers” would seem to have a hard time recognizing difficult music without the interpreter ruining the composers intended message by communicating the stress under which the music places the artist. That would not be an artist in my book. More like a used car salesman.
Air – Part 2
So, I’m back.
A proud papa of a tenor just getting his feet wet in the business requested some workout advice for his son. They say that a picture is worth a thousand words so:
The photo belongs to Johns Hopkins University and once came with a very good description of the movement I believe every singer should do if they engage in any physical exercise at all. If a picture is worth a thousand words, what about a video? I found a You Tube that does a great job of speaking to my intent for suggesting this exercise:
There are only two ways to become a master of long phrasing. One is to become a meticulous manager of the air we can get into our lungs, and number two is to make room for as much air as our breathing apparatus can contain. Back in the day before anyone had the chance to tell me I couldn’t do it, I set my sights on both goals.
The Dumbbell Pullover was one of my favorite moves, and it put my rib cage in the best shape I could possibly hope for. I might have liked to have a chassis like Seth Feroce’s, but I knew I had better things to do with my time, if I wanted to sing well.
By the way, girls can profit from this exercise too:
Seth speaks a “real guy” kind of language that I find refreshing and is all about expanding the chest for competitive reasons. I may not use many of his locutions, but I want everyone to know that we are both talking about competing for the attention of an audience. Seth has a competition judging panel in mind:
My idea has nothing to do with attracting the attention of a similar panel one normally has to face in a Music program
No. As important as these gatherings are to the educational institutions that marshal them, they are much less important than crowds like this:
It is in front of these ticket paying populations that your worth is determined, and it can be risky business, but I’m getting a bit off track here.
Let’s get back to basics. Being able to sing a lot of notes before having to take a breath, hopefully between words, is a good thing. The more notes you can sing without needing more air, the longer you inspire your sympathetic listeners to hold their breaths. That’s only one benefit. If you get a few of your audience members to gasp for air while you keep putting notes together in a long phrase, you might get noticed by more people than you think possible. In a sold out La Scala performance the numbers can be outstanding. Let’s face it. You can never be sure that even one bored member on a board of judges will even notice that you started singing.
Making lots of room for air is what I have in mind. You cannot make your rib cage larger, but you can force it to present the largest space for your lungs that the bones will allow by working on the muscles and connecting tissues.
No matter how much effort you put into this or other exercises, it will all be for nothing if you slouch and flounce about while singing. Stand up, hold yourself on your feet as straight and perpendicular to the ground as you can comfortably do so.
Take as deep a breath as you are capable, and proceed to exhale as slowly as possible without letting your rib cage collapse. Keep it up there where you started. When you can no longer cause air to flow out of your system otherwise, only then start bringing down the rib cage, until you run out of capacity. Make this procedure your standard way to sing your phrases, and you will discover that the rib cage collapse will become your standby maneuver. Like a reserve tank for saving you from having to gulp air in the middle of a word. When you come toward the end of a phrase, and you notice that the rib cage is starting to go down, just think of it as your air tank gauge beginning to flash “EMPTY”. So what do you do? Quickly find a convenient point in the phrase, between two words, preferably at a comma. That is where you should breathe.
The old school would have you do this deep breathing exercise with a lit candle just in front of you. The trick was to exhale in a manner that bent the flame over away from you. Oh!! The bigger trick is to keep the flame bent over without a tremble in the flame. The next big trick is to vary the bend in the flame in such a controlled way that it moves, but does not tremble.
The pull over is for increasing your air capacity, and the candle trick is for increasing your control over that air.
I’ll be back. You can call me an Air Head if you want, but most of what our audience hears has to do with our manipulation of air. So it’s always on my mind. How much air we can contain has a personal limit, but we can stretch it.
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