Breathing and Breath Control

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Enough of these musings – it’s high time I got on to some rather more serious vocal issues and of course one of the most discussed and argued issues is that of breathing and breath control. We have all been told how important it is and yet how confusing it all seems. I personally have tried every breathing system I have ever come across (just like many of you out there too, I expect) – I have pushed out, pulled in, “zipped up” the front, tensed my buttocks, tried bearing down as if giving birth etc etc. There are almost as many breathing methods as there are singers – pick up Jerome Hines’ fascinating book “Great Singers on Great Singing” and you will have hours of endless entertainment reading different accounts of how singers think they sing. But beware ….take note of Cornell MacNeil’s warning at the front – “This book may be injurious to vocal health”. I bought this book in 1984 and still dip into it from time to time – I now finally feel confident at rooting out the sensible parts. Anyway, I digress – back to breath control. I am now absolutely convinced that the truth is much simpler.

So what is my stance on the matter? It’s simply this: don’t bother too much about breathing! It should not be complicated. 20^th century teaching has led us astray in this matter and all due to the famous schism in vocal teaching that arose from Garcia’s coup de glotte. The poor chap was completely misunderstood on the matter and the result was that a new way was sought which took singers away from the action of the vocal cords and into the realms of placement and highly complex breathing systems which overload the cords. More recently there have been further complications with the influx of ideas from the East and other cultures about meditation, yoga, martial arts and so forth and these have also produced the cult of belly breathing. (I’ve tried all that too!) Such breathing is fine for relaxation techniques but is no good for singing at all. First you must adopt what in bel canto is termed “the noble position” with regards to posture (how my younger students giggle at this term and yet I can find no other way of describing so accurately the alert, upright yet not stiff stance we need as singers, with our loins girded underneath). Then you simply inhale with a feeling of the breath going gently back and down and you start the tone on “the gesture of inhalation”. Another way to think of that inhalation is to breathe and then pretend you have forgotten what you are about to say, or another idea is that of the joyful surprise (a surprise not a shock, mind you!). Breathing in through the nose (enough breath to smell a rose – you’ve heard that old chestnut too, I’m sure) is also good, although in performance I find it too slow most of the time and a bit “sniffy” and so I mouth-breathe.

So, you have inhaled and emitted your tone what then? Once breath and tone are fused together the idea is to stay in the ‘breathing-in position’ as long as possible, right up to the moment you take the next breath. This way your singing becomes your controlled exhalation as you feed a small stream of air through the vocal cords to keep them vibrating. When you renew the breath it should happen almost as a reflex action. Having emptied the lungs to some extent, a vacuum has been created so when you momentarily relax for renewal, the breath goes in by itself without you trying to do it!

I realised the simplicity of breathing for singing when my first Alexander teacher asked me to emit a vocal sound without taking any breath at all. We do not in fact need to take a breath to sing if we have been simply standing and breathing normally – our lungs already have plenty of air in them in order to sing. Often the mere action of taking a breath can distract us if we are not careful from making the clean emission of tone and we may emit the sound carelessly: without having to think about an intake of breath your focus is totally on emission of tone. Remember that the clean start of the note is what you want. When you do add in the breath remind yourself that you would not dream of taking a sledge hammer to hit a tin tack so don’t fill yourself up with so much air that all you want to do is get rid of it and then you blast it against your vocal cords. Anna Moffo describes all this very accurately in Jerome Hines’ book mentioned above if you are interested to read her account (see page 185).

And that is that – simple yet quite hard to co-ordinate it all to begin with and really you need a good teacher who understands this way of breathing to guide you. Do beware of all those fancy breathing methods out there! Speech Level Singing, which of course has taken off in the world of popular music as a method, has in fact got a lot of bel canto ideas embedded into it although there are dangers with this method. David Jones “The Voice Teacher” has written a good article on this subject. I have taught students who have had Speech Level Training and found quite often it has been misinterpreted by their voice teachers who have not come from a classical background. I’m sure the originator of this system knows what he is doing as he did study with bel canto teachers but his ‘reinvention’ for the pop market is a little too shallow for the classical world. At least it gives pop singers a safer approach.

So in conclusion – very little air is needed to produce a good tone. So don’t get too bogged down with all this breathing business but get back to those onset exercises and get your vocal cords working efficiently – if they are efficient you do not leak air and therefore you can last on a thimbleful of air. This post should keep you all going for a few days at least! I’m off to do some singing practice! Oh and get a rose from my garden to add to my post just to add a bit of colour! Happy breathing!

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