Back to the touring

Well it's been a fascinating three days on tour with Hatstand Opera. We were expecting to perform the same programme each night, but when you make a living singing live, you have to deal with the joys and the pitfalls. Both the soprano and the mezzo started with colds last week, and the soprano's has travelled onto her chest and voice. Fortunately the hall we were in had a kind acoustic. So on Thursday we rearranged the normal programme and replaced the songs most affected with items from the mezzo and from me (I am happy to sing Flanders and Swann at the drop of any headgear you may care to mention). Colds affect singers in different ways – with some it’s the lower register and with others it’s the high notes. Fortunately, the soprano's high notes are both easy and indestructible. Since the show is scripted, she gave most of her lines speaking a full octave higher than normal (around the C/D an octave above middle C, and made it work. It amazes me how flexible the human vocal instrument is.

The sound of his soul - Dhafer Youssef

Saw Dhafer Youssef last night at the Barbican. Gillyanne and I had only heard one short recording of his voice, played by one of our participants on the Vocal Process Core Training course. Our friend Simone got us press seats for the concert last night, and we really didn't know what to expect. He came out with his band (four players), sat at the microphone, and just held a note a capella, keeping rhythm by beating his chest. It was like a greeting to the audience, and was absolutely spellbinding. As I said to Simone, this is the first time I have witnessed someone opening their mouth to sing and sharing the sound of his soul with nothing in the way.

It's also an extraordinary voice. The sound is clear and strong, he belts up to tenor high C and then goes on up another couple of octaves. He had a slightly sore throat last night, so only (!) managed three and a half octaves.

The musicians are highly accomplished, all with a powerful sense of pulse. It is gratifying to hear music played with a springy inner rhythm - it doesn't always happen! The five of them work very well together, creating different tapestries of sound, and great visuals: three live camcorders projecting images of the band onto mirroring screens at the back. Hats off to the trumpeter Arve Henriksen, who made sounds on the trumpet I didn't know could happen, and then sang solo and duet with Dhafer. His trumpet playing is so evocative, sounding more like a flute or shakuhachi.

Dhafer invited us backstage after his set - he's such a nice guy, full of energy, and very open. We'll definitely be using his recordings on our Core Training course next week.

For a quick example (and reviews) of Dhafer's arabian/nordic fusion music, click on this BBC Jazz link http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/jazz/reviews/youssef_digital.shtml

Coaching "The Girl in 14g" with different singers

It’s been fascinating working with different voices on this piece. Mostly they’ve been Musical Theatre-trained (usually by Gillyanne Kayes or me), but I also have a working operatic soprano singing it. Since she actually does sing Queen of the Night professionally, the staccato coloratura sections up to high D hold no terrors for her. Although she does complain that the patterns aren't quite the same and she had to relearn them after 15 years of performing!

I’ve been working with her on the jazz sound and the sounds for the main character – mousy narrator and broadway belter. The jazz setup has a low larynx, lowered tongue (with lots of mouth space) and altered vowels, with a breathier voice quality.

The narrator uses what my RSAMD students refer to as baby twang – small, bright, piercing and definitely not pushed. With this particular singing we are not using full-on Broadway belt for the finale, but a very good replacement, reinforced twang. It's very effective.

Performing this song contains the added task of moving quickly and safely from one voice quality to another. In my operatic soprano’s case she has to "rack down" on the opera sound to match the others.

The Girl in 14g

The way that Musical Theatre vocal music is written reflects the differences vocal technique and sound (see previous blog). As a singing coach I've been working with a number of singers on taking more breaths, using less line and using an easier, slightly straighter tone. There is one particular song I've coached several singers on that represents the "crossover" culture well. It's "The Girl in 14g", a wonderful piece recorded by Kristin Chenoweth in which the singer plays three different characters, a wannabe opera singer with high Ds, a wannabe jazz singer whose scat singing goes down to low G, and a mousy main character who turns into a Broadway Belter at the end. It's a vocal tour de force.

From Opera to Musical Theatre

I tend to specialise in coaching singers who want to sing in more than one musical genre. There are often some major adjustments to be made, and the first thing to change is line. This is the sense of always connecting each note to the previous one at a similar dynamic and tone quality. Opera singing has a few fundamentals - line, gradient, matching tone quality, and projection above a large orchestra. The background to operatic writing as far as I am concerned is music and "instrumental" phrasing. This is particularly obvious when it is sung in whatever the original language is, as many opera audiences do not necessarily understand every word of what is going on. Musical theatre differs in that its background is text and story. There is usually a great deal of spoken text (Les Miserables is an exception), and most musicals use microphones, so the delivery is more colloquial and projection is not as vital.

Village Halls and Fairy Lights

Well this is one thing Music College doesn't teach you. How to pin up pink fluffy fairy lights in the shape of a large heart.

I'm with Hatstand Opera on a touring scheme that takes professional companies into rural venues in Cheshire. Part of Hatstand's ethos is to bring opera to those who do not normally watch it, and we certainly succeed in that! Wives who might know the British airways ad (the flower duet from Delibes' Lakme) will drag their husbands kicking and muttering. Ironically, at the end of the night it's often the husbands who come up and say how much they have enjoyed the experience.

Back to the fairy lights. One of the perils of village halls is the stage. We are happy to work on the floor or on stages of most descriptions, but most village hall stages are vertiginiously high, small boxes with ancient or incomplete lighting. For this particular show, Love, Lust and a Damn Good Chardonnay, Hatstand always request a black box set-up (black curtains on stage all the way around to hide the sides) and a lighting rig. What we found at the hall was an off-white painted box, no curtains and four spotlights at the front of the stage, all resolutely pointing in the wrong direction. So we had to come up with something pretty amazing - in under an hour.

In the Pink
For this show, Hatstand always carry two long pink dining room curtains, so they went up at the back across the doors. Two magenta feather boas normally worn during the last number were commandeered and wrapped around the curtain rods, then draped down for effect. Did I tell you the visual theme of the show is pink? The two lengths of fairy lights (pink hearts with feathers attached) normally bedeck my digital piano. Instead, the soprano and I wrestled with white electrical tape, attaching the fairy lights to the back wall in the shape of a large heart, to be switched on at the top of Act 2. There was a wonderful moment in the show where the mezzo, having forgotten to switch them on, managed to hit the button on the line "So you say you like the apartment? / I’ll have you know that I've furnished it all myself", which got a big laugh. She was playing the part of the Jewish mother-in-law from hell, in the trio "So Much In Common", a musical about a transvestite serial killer in New York. Nice…