Forgiveness

One of the reasons the jaw can be tense is because we have set it against the people who have wronged us. Or we are clenching our teeth, trying not to say the thing we feel bitterly to be true, but we know shouldn't be said out loud.

When we go to loosen the jaw, for the first or the hundredth time, we run into the feelings that helped create the tension. They can be bigger than you might think. The jaw can be more resistant to loosening than seems rational.

Letting go of jaw tension often means letting go our ideas about who other people should be, what they should say, how they should act. It's true, we use our jaw muscles all day long, talking and eating, talking and eating. They will probably be tense even on the day we are enlightened masters. The more spiritual work we can do, though, the lighter the burden on our jaws will become.

The more we can trust that our singing is a good gift, to ourselves and the people around us, the easier it will be to open our mouths and let the sound out.

Singing well usually requires forgiving other people. It always requires we soften our relationship with ourselves.

How to loosen your jaw

Singing requires a looser, more flexible jaw than most of us naturally have, and just like your hamstrings, it's good to spend some time everyday helping those muscles find freer ways to be. Two or three minutes can be enough. Here are some things that I have tried that work for me. They are in no particular order. If something doesn't feel good, don't do it. 

1.  Hum a simple song on an “ng” sound, and move your jaw up and down, in a chewing motion. “Ng” is made entirely with the back of the tongue, so the jaw is completely free to move. This may feel strange at first, because our speaking habits tell us that the jaw and the tongue must always move together, but this isn’t actually the case. Notice how tall you can open your mouth while singing on “ng.” To find the sound I mean, say the word “sing” and hold the last sound – that’s the nasal vowel “ng.” If you plug your nose, the sound should stop completely. Feel free to make any collection of pitches that entertain you. Notice what it's like when the jaw moves and the tongue doesn't.

2.  Place your fingers gently on either side of your face, near the jaw hinge, and open and close your mouth. Watch yourself in a mirror: is the motion smooth? does the jaw move straight up and down, or does it go to the side a little? can you freely move your lower jaw in a side-to-side circle, as a camel chews? in both directions? Go slowly. Notice how smoothly your jaw can move. The muscles might feel tired sooner than you think. Try to stop before that happens. Lightly massaging the jaw hinge might help it to loosen up. 

3.  Place one tennis ball in a tube sock and take it to bed with you. Lying on your side, without a pillow, find a comfortable place for the tennis ball to nestle near your jaw hinge, on the outside of your body. You’re lying on your side with a tennis ball inside a sock under your head, in a place where the gentle pressure of it encourages the jaw to loosen. Please don’t try this on the floor – the floor is too hard. First spend 30 seconds here, and notice what you notice. Switch to the other side. Is one side tighter than the other? can you relax around the tennis ball? 

The friend who told me about this starts every day this way. Before she even gets out of bed, she lies on a tennis ball. It’s made a huge difference in her quality of life.

4.  Put another tennis ball in that same sock and lie on your back, positioning the two balls on either side of your spine, at the base of your occiput (the bony part of your skull that starts where your spine ends). I like doing this on the floor, because it gives me a deeper release in the back of my neck. I find that loosening the back of my neck also brings more spaciousness to my jaw. Try it in bed and on the floor and see what works for you. It might help to tie a knot in the tube sock to keep the balls from slipping out. 

5.  Last, but not least, sing the opening line of "Deck the Hall" only on the syllable "vo." Freely open and close your mouth each time to make the consonant "v." You might need to sing the song slower than usual (the fa-la-la's are pretty challenging when they're sung as vo-vo-vo's). Expect your jaw to be more willing to move the more times you try this. Sing in a range that's comfortable for you. Let the jaw feel active, but not clenched. Aim for puppet-y floppy. What's it like?

Sing now, listen later

One of the reasons I think it can be easier to sing at our lessons than at home is because we’ve outsourced the need to judge how we sound. We’re coming to the lesson with the expectation that the teacher is going to tell us how we’re doing, and we can let our own critical mind rest for a bit. I emphasize a bit, because my own voice lessons are a combination of me singing/being and then asking questions about what just happened. I go back and forth between a little thinking and a lot of thinking. It seems to work for me.

When I first started taking voice lessons in my twenties, I would faithfully tape record them and never listen to the recordings. I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Now, that tape recorder no longer works, and I think all those tapes are warped anyway. Since the invention of the iPod, listening to myself singing has gotten easier, but not much. That has nothing to do with the iPod, but with me getting more comfortable in my own skin. Apple and I seem to be evolving together. 

I feel a bit like a phony for sharing an idea that I myself have never tried, but I do think this may be useful for someone out there... 

Since it’s hard to sing and listen to ourselves at the same time, let a recording device do the listening for you. Sing – freely, expressively, noticing what you feel in your head, while your phone or computer, mp3 device (or tape deck, if you still have one!) takes it all down. You’re not recording this for youtube, you’re recording this for you. Later, but not too much later, sit down with a comforting beverage and listen to what you sang, through headphones, if possible. Notice what you notice. Does it sound as free as it felt? Is there at least one moment where you can say, “wow! that was nice” ? If you’re like me, you may feel so repulsed/embarrassed/mortified that you cannot hear anything worth praising. It’s okay to push delete. Let me encourage you, though, to keep the recording if you can, at least until you have another one to compare it to. The more you listen to yourself, the less embarrassing it gets. I am living proof of that. 

And now that I think of it, recording yourself when you practice could be something like writing morning pages: writing three pages every day regardless of how you feel, in one sitting, on whatever comes out. Morning pages for me happen irregularly, and I am a happier person when I write them. When I re-read my them, I’m not so much interested in judging them as I am in finding out what’s been on my mind. I read with the eye of an explorer. “So that’s what I was thinking about? That’s a great sentence! Boy, I was really upset about that and it seems like nothing now. I wonder what that was supposed to mean? That could be a country western song” etc. It’s a great practice. I learn a lot about what moves me. I learn a lot about where I might be headed next. 

Maybe I could listen to recordings of myself practicing with the same explorer’s eye. Ear. “Attention K-mart shoppers, it’s now Thinking-Free Singing Time. Go have fun! Turn on that recorder and pretend it isn’t there. We’re just going to make some noises and process them later. Ready, set....”

Maybe I could. 

But I sound worse!

A student recently shared,

“I’ve been trying to do what you’ve asked. You know, listening to myself hum and noticing what it feels like. I’m listening to more songs on the radio and singing along to them, and I think my singing has actually gotten worse!”

Oy. This happens. And it may actually be true that the singing now is not so good. 

Three things to consider:

1.  When we’re listening closely to the sounds in our head and thinking about our singing, the singing might very well sound, and actually be worse, especially if we’re doing more than humming. This is because thinking and letting the breath sail through and out of us don’t go together. If you’re singing vowels or actual words, it really is better to let the opposite wall tell you what it sounds like. Notice what you feel, but listen to the wall. You need to let the breath go in order for the voice to find it’s “sweet spot." 

When you’re listening to yourself, make sure you’re listening for the lightest possible hum (m, n, ng) you can make, and letting it float or spin freely in your head. If you do that, chances are it will sound pretty good.

2.  Another consequence of studying singing is that our ears get more critical. Ultimately, that’s what we want: critical ears and a bushel of technique so that our voices can be as free, open, beautifully powerful as they can be. And, at the beginning, when the ears are more critical than the bushel is full, we can get discouraged. 

Return to a hum. Throw a ball and whoop. Sing the silliest song you know: Ay lay tay ate ate ate, aypples aynd baynaynays, ay lay tay ate ate ate apples aynd baynaynays... Retreat into play and trust everything will be all right. It will be. Keep studying and your bushel will fill before you know it. 

3.  “Even I don’t wake up looking like Cindy Crawford.” – Cindy Crawford 

The singers we hear on the radio have had their singing recorded, mixed, remixed, sometimes auto-tuned, compressed and who knows what else in order to turn it into a salable product. They would not sound that way in our living room, singing a cappella, without a microphone or sound engineer in tow. We cannot expect ourselves to sound like them. It’s not physically possible. 

And... Breathy voices are sexy and seductive and sweet and often stunningly beautiful. If you have a microphone, that can be an effective way to sing a sexy, seductive, sweet, stunningly beautiful song. If you try to sing along to a recording of such a song don’t be surprised if you’re disappointed in yourself. Breathy voices are hard to tune to. You will have trouble blending your voice with the recorded one, because there’s not much “there” there in the recording. 

Think of it this way: I’m encouraging you to find the smallest, most beautiful golden thread of a tone you can make. That’s what all this lip trilling and humming is about – to find that golden thread, to find your simplest, most fundamental beauty.

When you open that tone to a vowel, the thread becomes something more like worsted-weight wool, something you could knit a sweater with, not just a beautiful lace shawl. The breathy voice on the radio is the knitting equivalent of roving, at best, and dryer lint at worst. Plying worsted-weight and roving together will give you a pretty funky-looking yarn. You might knit with it, but it will be full of contrast. 

Singing along to a breathy voice on the radio will always be full of contrast. Do not expect your voice to blend. It might be physically possible, but to accomplish it requires giving up so much of yourself, so much of what’s authentically you, that I would say it’s not worth it. 

That’s not the you I want the world to hear. We need you to be you. And you do, too. 

The good news is that when my student sang in her lesson, and I asked, "So, how does that sound to you?" She answered, "That sounds good!" I whole-heartedly agreed. More on why singing at your lesson can be so different than singing at home is coming soon, in another post.

The Lip Trill Doodle

When I was in college and learning Russian, I spent hours in the language lab. Later, with a cup of coffee, I wrote words and sentences down, again and again, in great lists that took up pages of paper. I needed to physicalize words in order to learn them. Hearing them wasn’t enough. Pronouncing them wasn’t enough. Just seeing them on flashcards wasn’t enough. I needed to feel the words move through my arm and hand, out of me, into graphite, for them to become real, for my mind to hold onto them. 

When I tell people that I studied Russian, and actually worked as a translator/bi-lingual human for a while in my 20’s, they often say, “Russian is so hard, you must be so smart!” 

Maybe. I may be really smart. But I learned Russian because I worked hard at it, because I loved it. I found a way for it to move through my body. I got it out of my head.

This might have been my first step toward discovering that drawing and singing at the same time can be really helpful. This is sort of like the ball-playing exercise, only with a pencil line in place of the ball. Draw a swoop on a piece of paper. Whoop the swoop: make the sound “whooooooop,” following the direction of the line you drew. Try drawing another swoop, maybe a little differently. Whoop the swoop. If you’re feeling self-conscious, a hum works just as well: “mmm” or “nnn” or a lip trill. Let the sound be flowing and continuous, maybe a little schmaltzy. 

This is not about singing the right pitch at the right time. Rather, sing to the end of the line. Take a breath as you draw another one. 

And then, try drawing and humming at the same time. Imagine your voice is powering the pen. Let yourself be surprised by what you hear and what you draw. If the line on the paper goes up and your voice goes down, that’s just fine. The point is to make a picture of your voice and to make a song of your picture.

The point is to let the breath flow through you and away from you without regard for right or wrong. 

In fancy, music-teacher language, this is called graphical notation – representing a musical idea on paper without using traditional music notation. I like to think of it as vocal finger-painting. When I assign it as homework, I call it a Lip Trill Doodle. 

It can be a useful way to get your voice out of your head. If you try it, tell me what you found. 

Just sing, dear

So it’s Day Seven of the blogathon and for the first time I feel like I’m not going to get a post in, I can’t put two sentences together, I can’t think straight. 

This would be a perfect frame of mind to practice singing in, except that I have to get this post done. 

I mean to say that good singing and thinking really don’t go together. Someone (? needs attribution!) has done functional MRIs or scans or something of people while they’re singing and has discovered that the cognitive area of the brain is, for the most part, not engaged. 

But even without that non-attributed, perhaps completely made up, “scientific fact,” I can tell you from experience that I think a lot when I talk, and I sing well when I don't. 

I’ve come to feel that singing is much more like weight-lifting than it is reciting a poem with notes. Songs turn out better when I stay in my body, when I notice how the song physically feels as it’s happening. Turning on the thinking brain seems to turn off the instrument. 

Put another way, the audience doesn't need my Deep Thinking, they need me to give them something to listen to. They need me to breathe in, deep and low, and then make an efficient, beautiful tone. Breath in, tone out, stay out of the way. As attached as I am to my thoughts and reflections, at the moment of singing, they're the last thing that's needed. 

It has taken me years to learn this.