Moving from opera to musical theatre style

Working in the West End coaching studio again today.

I love working with versatile singers, and the opera singer who came today is doing really well with more contemporary styles. In today's 90 minute session we had a caribbean national anthem, Jerusalem, We'll Meet Again, The Girl in 14G and a new lyrical musical theatre piece (not heard in this country yet). Normally we'd be doing Donizetti or Mozart, so this is quite a repertoire swing!

This session was about tweaking and guiding. I'm working with her on vocal style, performing tips and watchpoints, and which musical style points belong to which musical genre.

It's fascinating for me to hear someone who is so used to singing and working in one genre change to another. She is doing really well and has a natural instinct for communication. Although sometimes we have to fight the previous training!

To the lyrical musical theatre piece we added volume changes within words, breathy excitement to one section, specific diction tips to another and played around with keys until we found one that really worked for her voice. The original was apparently for a female bass (down to low E and the highest note an octave above middle C). She's an operatic soprano singing with a lyrical vocal sound, so we had to find a key that worked with direct communication and didn't "overblow" on the top notes. Apologies to the opera singers reading this blog, but I know what I mean! Just ask me if you want to find out more...

We ended up in Eb, a really warm key for the song (subtext - "please don't ask me to leave you, I love you but I'll never see you again"). Unfortunately in the middle key change we ended up in Gb major - a great key for warm climaxes, but a little devil to transpose into.

Although I prefer people to sing in the original keys most of the time, there are certain styles of music where key is less important than performance, and this style was one of them. It was far more important to get the feel of the music and the emotion across than stick rigidly to the written score, and the transposed key worked far better for her.

Having said that, she'll be working with the composers in a couple of weeks' time, so I'll keep you posted on their thoughts!

More about working on style in the next blog.

The Vocal Process "opening your throat" techniques appear on the new sell-out Constriction and Release Training DVD
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The Vocal Process website has 300+ pages, including a series of free articles on vocal technique and style, memorising and different musical genres.

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