Greetings! I feel so lucky to be a part of such an incredible institute and I wanted to share with my friends and singers what's going on..because it's pretty cool.
The CCM Institute takes place each summer at Shenandoah University in Winchester VA and is run by Jeanie LoVetri and her faculty..singers and professors from universities and high schools nation wide. The institute is intensive training (and as I'm at the end of my 2nd 12 hour day I can honestly say they're not lying when they say intensive) in Jeanie's method of singing: Somatic Voicework. The root of her work is in creating a UNIQUE voice that the student ENJOYS singing in. In coming down to the student's level and working there as if you were them. In letting them take responsibility for their body awareness not in telling them what they're feeling. In asking lots of questions because saying "Make this lighter" might not mean the same thing to me as it means to my student. In not using flowery imagery "Imagine there is a rubber band across your hips and it is contracting and lengthening" but in giving a very clear physical command "Contract and release your belly muscles."
Soma means body, so Somatic Voicework is body oriented voice work. It is also science based. Jeanie has studied and worked with leading ENT's and SLP's worldwide and brings her knowledge and experience with them into her work. As a BFA Musical Theatre major who has self taught vocal anatomy and function it has been so helpful to have anatomy lectures and explanations to exactly what is going on with the voice and the chain reactions that occur. By far one of the coolest things we've been doing is watching video of the vocal folds..both Jeanie's and others'..in each register. I knew going into this that the cricothyroid lengthens and thins the vocal folds when head voice is produced but when I first actually saw it happening it was pretty mind blowing. #vocalnerd
Having studied with both classical and Speech Level Singing teachers I was very excited and interested to see what Somatic Voicework brings to the table. After listening to lectures this morning I turned on my brightest smile and plopped myself down at the "faculty table" at lunch to ask all my questions. It's pretty cool having lunch with master teachers, one of whom played Christine in Phantom at the age of 42, yes she's gorgeous, petite, and at 50 looks 30. The other is actually related to another Doyle family that lives in my home town...small world..but I digress. The answer to my question about the differences between Somatic Voicework and Speech Level Singing had to do with the head voice. In SLS it is taught that all voice is created and connected to speech without a separate head register. In SMV there is certainly a head register (duh) and one of the first functions of SMV is to find and isolate pure head and pure chest register. SMV also uses a very wide mouth to create a bright sound, which you'll know if you're a student of mine, I have encouraged a much taller mouth to keep the larynx low.
What I'm learning is that the larynx is a joint, just like our elbow, and that that joint will and must move. It's going to hike when you're in belt or belt/mix and that's ok. A tall skinny mouth is actually adding more woofer to your sound and giving you a darker vowel..thus the smiling bright vowel and the smiling mouth. Makes sense.
In our small group work today we had to find pure head and chest registers. My group was comprised of mostly older, extremely experienced, classical DMA's who hadn't sung in pure chest voice, well mostly ever. The fact that they were willing, and eventually able, to make such a "non classical" sound was heartening as lots of these teachers work with Musical Theatre majors at their institutions. As a side note I've had lunch with professors from major universities with well known MT BFA programs who told me that their studio is half classical students and half MT and that they have little to no idea what to do with the MT voices beyond legit, classical musical theatre repertoire. I could stand on my soap box here and talk for awhile about the disconnect between what is happening in liberal arts BFA programs and what it takes to be a working MT actor but I'll save that for another post. My point is, change is happening, and the classical world is finally getting hip to it.
My task in small group work was to lighten my chest voice, something I've really struggled with. We all struggle with the evil first passaggio and I haven't found a great way to go from pure chest into mix without completely changing my sound. Now I have. My sound has never felt so light and easy. I've never experienced mix in the way it is described and worked with here. As a side note...the first EVER seminar on the mix register was given at the Voice Foundation Symposium in Philadelphia this year! Change..it's coming. I am so excited to expand on the foundation that we're building in Level 1 and bring all this new information back to my students. Get ready!
Other highlights for me have been Jeanie's work with a classical singer whose heart is in contemporary musical theatre. She worked this dramatic soprano into a Sutton Foster-esque belt in about 20 minutes..very cool..I taped it. :) Where my work in LA was about getting results quickly SMV is about "waiting for the bus". Each exercise elicits a function and the student gives the response. If the response isn't what you're looking for you don't just move on and forget about it, you keep at it, you "wait for the bus" and give the body a chance to catch up to what the brain is asking it to do.
Another great moment was Jeanie's work with a post-menopausal lyrical soprano who had lost about a fifth off her range and added bass notes she never had before after going through menopause and also a vocal fatigue she had never experienced before. This is a common problem. She had worked with Jeanie last summer and was told to focus solely on her pure head voice to combat the fatigue and while it worked she hadn't gotten any of her range back. Jeanie lightened everything up. She was squeaking like a mouse, very staccatto, then lots of slides, and at the end of 20ish minutes the woman had a D6 and the a smile to light up the room.
As many of my students are kids and teens, a thing I have in common with many of the teachers here, I was excited to touch on working with them. SMV works the same for adults and kids. Jeanie says and there were many heads nodding in agreement, that kids need to sound like kids. When we get parents (and yes it's mostly parents) pushing kids into sounding like rock belters or huge opera singers we're getting into trouble. Even the super star kids go through puberty where things will and do change. We're getting more in depth into working with kids tomorrow...stay tuned.
I could keep going about the things that I'm learning and the incredible teachers I'm getting exposed to but it's late and there's another 12 hour day tomorrow. I am so excited to be learning new things, reestablishing my relationship and love of singing and the voice, and making so many connections with professionals worldwide. I can't wait to get in the practice room and try all these new techniques out..and I still have 8 days to go! Get ready DVS students!
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