“Words, words, words, I’m so sick of words.”

                    From “My Fair Lady”—song “Show Me”—Lerner and Loewe

One of the most misunderstood elements in singing is the subject of diction. “I can’t understand his/her words!” Then the singer tries even harder to pronounce the words, and in the process of doing so loses his unique sound. Trying to spit out the consonants is even more damaging to proper diction. The reality is that singing is speaking on air. Our speech as a child was an outpouring of our thoughts and emotions delivered with a body free of tension. This was soon nipped in the bud because as our bodies grew, our voices grew, and it was too much for our elders to put up with. Therefore, we learned little by little to stifle our voices, stifle our emotions, monitor our thoughts, and start holding our breath by stiffening our bodies.

With all these restrictions, the body is taught to close down. With it everything else closes down. When our body becomes accustomed to being tense, it takes a long time to return to a free state. It then becomes part of our intellectual, emotional, and physical nature to be in this constricted position to speak. However, someone who has to use the phone all day, or deliver speeches to an audience without the aid of amplification, finds that the voice tires easily, and if misused too much can experience vocal fatigue and hoarseness. If this persists, the condition can actually damage the speaking mechanism. Singers who have been urged to pronounce words instead of speaking the words, not using them as them as the language is actually spoken, are in for a long period of rehabilitation. Pronouncing words is a function of the conscious mind. Learning to speak a language changes this to a function of the unconscious or intuitive mind. As long as the words remain chained to the conscious mind, the voice remains chained to the tongue and the throat remains closed. Our organic sound remains closed. Our uniqueness is stifled.

When this happens, the words may indeed be more pronounced, but with the throat closed we now have no organic sound, no emotional vibrations, and no touching musicality. These are all impossible if the emphasis has been on the words. The voice does not project because it is being held in place. Only after the voice is in place, and your organic sound has been established, should one endeavor to “clean up” your diction. Proper diction requires the proper sound to resonate with, but the words never come before the sound of your voice. Pronouncing does not place the voice, the proper coordination of the cords and air allows the voice to place itself—detached from the words. When this occurs, the diction clears up like magic—because the voice is truly an awesome instrument—and suddenly we have a real singer, words and all. Despite us, the voice will work its magic if we get out of the way. Now our unconscious mind takes over, and all the things we wanted from our voice begins to happen. The sound is ours, the musicality is ours, the diction becomes ours—all because the conscious mind stopped manipulating, and the brain was allowed to take over.

This process takes time because we were taught so many erroneous facts. Most of the facts we learned and put into the computer were correct in themselves, we just perceived them in a wrong way and the voice stopped functioning organically. The trouble is, this stoppage can be misinterpreted as a secure technique. We become addicted to working too hard. The most misunderstood is language. This misunderstanding of itself is enough to keep the voice forever locked away. If a microphone and speaker system is used, pronouncing words works because the system amplifies the sound. However, if the voice is to project in an auditorium, the true sound of the voice is blocked by this pronunciation and the sound of the voice is stifled. The sound of the voice stops at about the sixth row. There is no thrill in the voice either, because the tongue is not allowing the sound to emerge, but instead is very busy pronouncing words. This is very vulnerable to the singer from a confidence standpoint, because there will always be someone criticizing the inability to hear the singer’s words. Joan Sutherland was always a prime candidate for this insanity, but she did pretty well despite it. How often have I heard Italians criticize Pavarotti because his words were unintelligible to them. One has to deduce that there is quite a bit of envy involved there. I have heard so many voices losing the placement of the voice to accommodate the language. Once the placement is allowed to happen, any language becomes understandable because the singing mechanism is not being disturbed by the words, and the pronouncing mechanism is free to do its job. This is where clarity of vowels makes the words understandable and also allows the voice to project. A student of mine brought the following article to me last year, and it explains a great deal of what I am trying to say in this Newsletter.

     “When the Creator first formed man from the dust of the earth, the Torah tells us that “He blew the breath of the Lord into his nostrils.” This brought man to life, and represents his very essence, the breath that flows through his body. The unadorned breath of life, free of the artificial manipulations of speech, is the most expressive form of communication. A gasp, a sigh, a scream are more telling than pages of prose, because they don’t describe what is inside us, they actually are what is inside us!

         Therefore, the voice itself, the exhalation of the breath, is more expressive than the spoken words it transports. When Hashem wanted Abraham to heed the advice of his wife Sarah, He told him to “listen to her voice.” The voice is the key, not the words.”

                                                                         ALSO

       The Polish government once issued a harsh decree against the Jewish populace. With the greatest difficulty, the Jewish communities arranged for one of the leading sages of the time to meet with a high-ranking Polish minister and plead for the abolition of the decree.

       The sage and his delegation were shown into the presence of the minister, and the sage immediately began to speak. There was just one problem. The sage spoke only Yiddish, and the minister understood not a word of it.

       Another member of the delegation immediately interposed himself as the interpreter, but the minister waved him aside. Instead, he sat and listened intently as the sage spoke for many minutes.

       Afterwards, the would-be interpreter tried once again to translate and summarize the sage’s remarks. Again, the minister waved him aside.

      “I did not know the meaning of a single word he uttered,” said the minister, “but I understood him completely. The decree is abolished!”

      from “THE PARSHA ODYSSEY” Project of the Legacy Foundation, Inc.  “Jewish Learning

      for Jewish Living.” “Rosh Hashanah:A Breath of Air” Rabbi Naftali Reich

This is the type of hearing we must develop to listen to a voice correctly. It is not what is seems to be, and is even against our learned, logical way of thinking. On the way to perfect diction one must go away from it for a period of time.  Instead, so often the singer is urged to try harder and harder to pronounce the words. He/she is certainly not encouraged to change his way of perceiving diction, but rather is encouraged to keep digging his own grave deeper and deeper until the words so bury the voice that there is little hope of unearthing the real sound. This lack of understanding also buries the idea in our muscles and in our intellect. As a result, we have no emotional connection to these words at all because we are locked in too many places. No communication can take place because we are shackled by our hard work.

     “Communication is so much more than the words we say. These form only a small part of our expressiveness as human beings. Research shows that in a presentation before a group of people, 55 per cent of the impact is determined by your body language—posture, gestures, and eye contact—38 per cent by your tone of voice, and only 7 per cent by the content of your presentation. {M. Argyle et al., in British Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology Vol. 9, 1970, pp 222-31}.

     From “Introducing Neuro-Linguistic Programming” The New Psychology of Personal

     Excellence” Joseph O’Connor and John Seymour

It is interesting that they used the phrase “expressiveness as human beings.” We are always having to combat the problem of  “human doing” as opposed to “human being.” It is much more effective to speak to your audience than pronounce to them.

A personal trainer I worked with gave me the above book. I tried to read it, was absolutely baffled by it, and put it aside for a while. One day it almost jumped off the shelf wanting to be read again. I don’t think I put it down until I had finished the whole thing. Sometimes things come to us and we aren’t ready for them. Simply put them away, and somehow they will reappear when we are open to them. Sometimes information comes to us in this way also. We really didn’t hear what the other person was saying because our mind was thinking too much for it to register. Later on, we may hear the same information again as if for the first time. Sometimes we recall hearing it, but it didn’t go into our information bank. There was a block there for some reason. As we grow, more and more things start to appear where we saw or heard nothing before. We start waking up. We start being open to new ideas. Communication requires that the listener is also in the right state for receiving information. If our body language is tight and stiff, then the mind is stiff and doesn’t take anything in—or allows only what is not opposed to our set way of looking at things.

Much of singing is a contradiction because singing is really counter-intuitive. We must learn to think a different way. The puzzle we have put together doesn’t really give us the true picture of how things actually are. We live mostly in our conscious mind, and when we begin to break those barriers down there is a feeling of feeling lost and confused. We do not like to throw information away that helped us in the past but is no longer useful. When we can’t see what is going to replace it, we hold on to what we know. When reading this information on how language works, until we experience it, it seems like so much hot air. However, if we stick with the information long enough it will start to sink in, and the end result will surprise even you. Most people feel a 180-degree turn in their thinking process, which creates the same turn in their physical and emotional bodies. As this process becomes more organic, we allow the correct coordination to take place in the body. We finally understand how any language can be spoken with great clarity. As long as we stay locked into our old way of thinking, we get the same results that we always got.

     “Beautiful and elegant diction is a necessity for the singer. Great singers with marvellous voice production always enunciate so well that one can understand every word they sing. The best help a singing student can give himself is to take care of his speech at all times. One should always speak with a “parked” tongue and enunciate with the tip of the tongue and the lips only. Half an hour of good speech while practicing will do nothing for you if for the rest of the day you talk and chatter without any thought of your voice production and your diction.”

   From “A New Guide to Good Singing” Gerda Nielsen

The excerpt above is from this wonderful book on singing published in Canada by Avondale Press. I have not been able to find out if it is still available, but if you happen to find this book somewhere, be sure to buy it. Ms. Nielsen certainly has her finger on the pulse of singing, and should be a classic for all singers to read. Simply written, to the point, and totally readable from cover to cover.

As I have mentioned before, when you want information to come to you, just relax, put out the energy, and the thing will appear. Just before I was going to print this Newsletter, one of my students sent me a paper called “Introductory Lesson” by Beniamino Gigli. I had just listened and watched a video tape of Gigli last week that another student brought to me. We listened to it together that evening, and out of the many singers on the tape, Gigli had it all. Some of the other singers had more voice, some had more personality, some were better actors, but none of them were the singer that Gigli was. Here’s what he writes:

     “I also share the view that good singing must be based on the five vowels, a, e, I, o, u—my computer keeps making a capital I out of the letter I—in their purist form, and modifications thereof.

     Now as regards the formation of these vowels in relation to singing I must bring into sharp focus a highly important factor, viz,; the absolute necessity for mentally conceiving beforehand the vowel sound and its colour or timbre, whether in pure or modified form, that one wishes, or is about, to produce. In other words, every vowel sound must be mentally shaped and mentally given the requisite colour, according to circumstances, before being physically produced on a natural and spontaneous basis, fluid and untrammeled. Certain methods aim at a heavily emphasized vowel production solely on a physical basis and without any mental shaping and colouring beforehand. Which can only lead to grossly exaggerated forms with consequent stiffening, in degree, of the parts engaged in such production; the tonal product suffers accordingly. Any exaggeratedly emphasized vowel sound constricts the throat; and assuredly no tone issuing from a clamped adjustment and setting, however slight the constriction, can ever be spontaneous, harmonious, and expressive, let alone beautiful.”

Again and again, it must be emphasized that it is the brain that pronounces words, not the muscles of the face, the lips, and especially not the tongue. When that fact is accepted and experienced, diction can begin. At first there is so little movement of the face—like a ventriloquist—that the singer is frustrated by being told not to pronounce the words! However, this is the only way to experience the hidden mechanism that even our speaking voice has forgotten how to do since we were children. It is now time to unlock that part of our bodies which so expresses what we really are. It is our very essence we are trying to get back in touch with. Insisting on physical diction keeps us locked away intellectually, emotionally and physically. Most of our recording “artists” these days are pronouncing words, and the microphone loves it because the voices do not produce enough vibrations to throw the instruments off. How many times have you heard an operatic voice on record, then heard it in the auditorium and were terribly disappointed because it had little or no projection? Great voices were difficult to record because they had so much carrying power. Microphones do not take kindly to that kind of sound. Most depend on the machines for power. So much for technology and the its contribution to singing. Someone stated that one need not listen to any recording done after 1972, unless it was an unaltered live performance. No one can tell what is actually happening when you listen to these records. The engineer wins the day. Words that are not in the correct placement are clear in a room, are clear sung into a microphone, but are not organically connected to our emotions. As Gigli stated, one must mentally conceive beforehand what you are singing. Then we get a grounded, emotionally satisfying sound with impeccable diction. Otherwise we get words, words, words. Without your unique sound, pronouncing words is a poor substitute. We have also lost the authentic color and thrill of that most wonderful of instruments, the human voice.