If you’ve had any degree of vocal training in the Western classical tradition, you’ve encountered the 24 Italian Songs book.
Folks love to hate on em. You can search the YouTubes and find a lot of nascent singers doing their best.
You can also find some of the world’s greatest like Cecilia Bartoli bring them to stunning life.
Theatre singers often give these the hard eye roll because they can’t see how a 250-year-old art song is gonna help them nail that Hairspray callback.
And they’re right. It’s not a direct line. Add to that most singers don’t take the trouble to find out what they’re singing about, and yeah, absolutely — you’re in irrelevant-to-me snooze town right away.
But when you’re a theatre singer, you get to embody countless stories and folks, and that means countless sounds. And these songs have a lot to teach us about how to access those in beautiful, soul sharing ways.
I’m remembering reading the program notes from Betty Buckley’s concert at the Donmar Warehouse in 2000; she talked about how her core training was in bel canto technique, and you can hear the value for legato singing, communication of soul, and vibrant presence in everything she did/does.
Go listen to some “Memory” circa 1983 as well as the stuff she sang in “Tender Mercies” and you’re gonna hear legato flow in all of it. If there’s a theatre singer you wanna take a note or seven from, there you go.
These can give you the keys to flow in your breath and sound, vowel secrets and acoustic leverage, make your articulation clear and effortless, make you a flexible embody-er of character, give you terrific sound comparison tools, and show you how to mine the beauty in material folks call overdone.
There’s an ongoing complaint that musical theatre rep keeps getting higher and higher. And that’s because musical theatre rep has gotten higher and higher.
If you survey what folks were singing generally in the 1950s and ’60s and compare that to what was shaking down just 20 years ago, you’ll see — things have changed, Raoul.
It’s like when a runner breaks a world record, humans want to see how much faster they can run. Same with singing — it’s a muscular event, and our mirror neurons want to witness the risk and excitement of high notes sung with skill and beauty.
And yeah, you’re right, there’s not been a race to the low frequencies in this regard, so a lot of folks with deliciously low voices are feeling very left out of the current commercial musical theatre market. I have thoughts on this that I’ll share with you later.
The shape of musical theater singing changed in the 1960s, really with the advent of HAIR and when rock music entered the scene and then all kinds of styles found their way to the stage. Microphones and electronically amplified music as a standard meant that singers could do a lot of different things with their voices, and that changed the game.
Understanding the framework of your own instrument
This is where understanding your own vocal sweet zone is so important. If you focus on Western classical singing, your voice type will be categorized — lyric soprano, dramatic mezzo, leggiero tenor, basso profundo, etc.
This is mostly because you’re singing acoustically with no amplification when this is your field.
When you’re a theatre singer, it’s important to know where your voice feels most efficient, easy, and powerful, AND you also have a lot more leeway than our classical classification system has handed down to us. You’re a human with a voice, and there are tons of possibilities. Especially with a microphone.
Questioning Your Limits
If a song or role calls your name that you’re not capable of executing range-wise right now, I invite you to question whether you might be able to accomplish it one day with the right tools.
I’m not advocating delusion here. I’ll never sing “Glitter and Be Gay,” and no one’s ever going to say, “Dan really gives me Barry White vibes.” But I have tons of other possibilities available.
I want you to understand that your voice is full of potential and possibility, and just like regular yoga practice will get you bending in ways you never thought possible, regular systems of vocal practice will change your identity as a singing storyteller. You’ll sing into new ways of making sound that your ego doesn’t even have a name for right now.
And of course, this skill will open up all kinds of possibility for you as a theatre singer.
What to understand and how you can leverage it
Real quick, some basic understanding of anatomy and physiology will help you out here —
Lower pitches mean thicker shorter vocal folds.
Higher pitches mean stretchier folds.
Think of a guitar string. If you loosen the string, lower frequency. If you tighten the string, higher frequency.
Your vocal folds are vibrating bodies like the guitar string.
Looser or shorter = lower pitch.
Tighter or longer = higher pitch.
There’re also different ways of singing different frequencies,
different modes and registers where the same pitch happens with different coordinations.
There are also different vocal tract configurations in which pitches can happen.
Vocal tract just means the space from your folds to the opening of your mouth, and there are thousands of possibilities for shaping that and the sounds you can make.
Pitch happens inside your larynx —
Your larynx can figure it out. If your physiology is capable, the things inhibiting you from singing certain pitches often happen before or after the vibration event in the larynx. I’ll lay those out for you later.
All these ideas will loosen up your idea of what it is to make different frequencies with your mechanism.
Before I tell you how you can sing higher notes with confidence,
you need to pay some attention to the lower frequencies first.
This will give your mechanism balance. If you ignore the low frequencies, your folds will get used to singing the stretchy rubber band sounds and won’t have any quality time letting the loose and juicy folds vibrate at the other end of that spectrum.
And the stretchier frequencies give important info to the low meaty vibes, and the thicker fold events have things to teach the higher sounds. You want to make sounds in all frequency capabilities of your voice.
I’ll link a simple series of exercises to coordinate and bolster your low sounds at the end of this.
Now, when you look to extend your capability and confidence singing higher frequencies,
it’s important to sing these pitches in thick and thin fold coordinations and the continuum in between.
You’ll want to sing pitches in Mode 2/head voice and Mode1/chest voice.
After you’re finding some ease with both of these coordinations, you’re going to want to discover that they’re connected. I’ll link a messa di voce exercise at the end of this as well that show you how to do that.
In all of these ways of making sounds, the important truth to incorporate into your body is that the voice works like a stretchy rubbery situation. It’s not a series of compartments.
This cubby hole idea is a big reason why singer brains want to physically reach for high frequencies or shoehorn pitches into imagined compartments.
Singing pitches is much more akin to intonation with a stringed instrument where there are millimeters of variation as opposed to a piano keystroke.
And here’s a list of things that could be making singing and pitch flexibility very hard for you:
Pushing too much air
We think more is more when it comes to singing, and we’re wrong. You need enough air, no more. Especially when it comes to higher frequencies, we think we have to pound the support.
This has the unhelpful outcome of pummeling the underside of our closed folds with a ton of air pressure, and all the laryngeal muscles have to adjust. This creates all kinds of mayhem and the opposite of the balanced energized flow we need for your brilliant folds to sing different frequencies.
Ask yourself: how much dynamic support do I need for this phrase or note? Listen to your body, give it a number value from 0 to 10, and experiment. I’ll link a video at the end of this article that talks more about this.
Thinking the voice comes from not through
We perceive the source of the voice at the throat level. Not helpful.
The energy that comes THROUGH the folds originates in your breath-moving muscles, the abs and ribs, depending on what style you’re singing. And those muscles live inside the entire body’s energetic framework.
This is why bodywork modalities are so important for singers to promote muscular and skeletal awareness, alignment, strength, and flexibility.
The cubby hole concept
Like I said before, singing is a stretchy and malleable event. The moment we start to perceive the voice in terms of piano keys or compartments, we get rigid, and we lose the sense of flexibility we need to let the voice show us what it can do.
Slamming way too much vocal fold together
We get really local in the folds sometimes when we’re trying to make a pitch happen.
We apply pushups or pick-something-heavy-up logic to singing, and it’s a very different muscular event.
It’s something that happens with delicacy and robustness together, and you’re learning to engage certain muscle groups while others relax, and that’s because singing is weird. And you guessed it. There’s a video for that.
Not allowing the larynx to do its thing
This goes together with the last one. But your larynx is a very brilliant structure. It literally hangs from the hyoid bone, the only structure in your body that does this. And it has an intelligence all its own.
The quick and dirty advice on this is to talk kindly to your larynx and tell it, “I trust you.” Then you give it absolute permission to go wherever it wants to go. You’ll make some sounds you don’t like, and you’ll discover a lot of things you wouldn’t have when you were trying to hold it in place because a teacher somewhere talked a lot about a stable larynx.
If you’re singing, you’re moving, and your larynx should be like a buoy on the water, able to respond expertly to the breath energy you’re providing.
As a general rule, I tell mine he can elevate if he wants to when I’m singing higher pitches. Experiment with this. See how high it can go! You can always let it chill down.
The actual length of the vocal tract (folds to mouth) affects how easily a note will come through, and it will vary song to song and style to style.
Tune in to your own body and get someone with good ears and incorporated skill themselves to walk the road with you.
And most importantly, listen to your own body.
Your singular voice is capable of so many things, and it has colors and expression that are singular to you.
You have to tune in and feel what feels good, be courageous and try new things so that your vocal identity can include lots of different sounds.
It’s also important to recognize and embrace the frame of your vocal limitations. Great creativity always flourishes inside constraints. Like a sonnet.
For example, I can sing low notes, but if I just hear a bass baritone talk, I know my voice is a different instrument than that. I’ll never have the power and resonance in lower frequencies that they have. Therefore, I lean into what my voice enjoys doing. We all have different sounds to contribute to the choir.
But now back to that question from the beginning of this —
since the current commercial musical theatre celebrates and features higher pitches in many instances, what do you do when your sweet spot is in the low zone and doesn’t coincide with what the market is currently doing?
First, if you want to work in the commercial musical theatre, ask yourself how much can you bring your skills into the middle of the Venn diagram. How much range can you stretch into while feeling like it’s comfortable and true to how you want to express as an artist?
(I often say if you’re a baritone with range extension, that’s vocal gold because you have the leverage in your lows and access to the top. Boom.)
Second, if you truly feel like your skill set doesn’t have a lot of overlap with market demand, where can you use it where you’ll feel artistically fulfilled? What styles do you love to sing? And what musical rep is actually out there that you can specialize in? Thing is, having a truly sparkly low voice is rare, and if you do it well, you will stand out in the market and be known for your ability.
And this is simple, and no one wants to hear it, but it’s the absolute truth: how can you choose yourself? You want to sing and share the sweet zone of your voice, get a musical director you trust, make a show, and invite folks.
Make ways to share your voice that you’re in control of, and you won’t be as tempted to be angry at market trends that skew to screlt.
If you haven’t heard the news already, there’s a little bit of advice for theatre singers that’s been going around for a long time.
It has to do with the sinuses in your face, and folks who taught bel canto singers back in the day often used these mysterious skull caves as guide posts for singers to know they were making the right kinds of acoustically amplified sounds.
Versions of this legend have been passed down through oral tradition and may take on the form of phrases, such as “get it forward” or “use your mask,” or you may even have a visual of a very well-meaning voice teacher pointing on either side of their nose, and telling you to aim your voice there like a laser beam.
In my experience, all of this has been the opposite of helpful.
And I can tell you why real real quick.
First of all, nobody can hear what’s going on in your mask except for you. The only thing folks hear is what vibrates through your mouth and through your nose.
You might not even have the self perception to feel the resonance there, and that’s okay.
The second reason I never think this way or encourage singers I work with to think this way is because the vast majority of your resonance happens in a little place that I’d love to talk about.
That place is your pharynx.
If you snort, let your uvula flop back like your sawing logs at 3 AM (my wife reports I am expert at this these days, sorry sweetie) you’ll feel the spot.
? In the above pic, you’ll see the blue, yellow and green portions — those are where your prime resonant money’s at.
Makes sense, right? They’re directly north of your vocal folds.
Your folds vibrate, and then all that vibration gets bounced around and amplified right there in the recital hall of your vocal tract.
Feeling resonance in your mask is an EFFECT, and what you’re feeling is nanoseconds past tense. The vibrations you’re feeling there are the result of what just came through your folds and pharynx.
In my experience, when I’ve tried to aim for the front, sing into my mask, or hit any kind of back row through a lot of forward resonance, my body recruits all kinds of muscles to direct this feeling to this spot.
And this makes the pharynx muscles do the only things they can — constrict.
Lookit: (image courtesy of Teach Me Anatomy)
The green, orange, and blue muscle groups — they swallow for you hundreds of times a day. And the only thing they can do is get smaller.
To sing well, this mischief has to be managed. The softer and meltier these muscles are, the more room the recital hall (your pharynx) has to bounce sound waves around and amplify them.
If they’re squeezing just a little trying to laser beam your sound forward, well, you’re going to get a real samey, monochrome, bright metallic sound that honestly musical theatre gets made fun of for.
And for good reason — it’s dopey, and folks are missing out on all the individual color that the rest of their singular vocal tract can paint those sound waves with as they travel through.
So, what DO I do?
I encourage a dual perception — a centered awareness of the resonance vibrating through your vocal tract while your communication attention goes to your scene partner.
Musical theatre performers have to manage multiple awareness all the time.
I’m Christine Daae, I’m me, there’s the conductor, the audience is full tonight, that bobby pin is in too tight, maybe I’ll offer Raoul a breath mint later, I should have warmed up better before this show, I could use a nap, watch the conductor.
I’m astounded when folks believe we can’t think about vocal technique and storytelling at the same time. We have to. Humans have to think about more than one thing on the regular.
Yes, I know all the recent studies on how you can’t really multitask, and yes, hand raised.
But are you trying to tell me that when you’re scrubbing your tub you can’t sing “Alone” by Heart at the same time?
See?
I mean, anybody who’s sung and danced simultaneously can tell you that technique and singing can happen at the same time. Or else you fall over.
So here’s what I want you to understand:
Your primary resonance happens in your pharynx.
Folks can only hear what vibrates through your mouth and your nose.
Therefore, let’s do things that help these two factors happen as freely and efficiently as they can.
You might feel like your forehead’s gonna buzz right off your head, but someone could make a very similar sound and feel none of that.
Here are the questions you can ask yourself in order to find the sweet spot for efficient resonance and honest communication.
What are you singing?
What’s the world of the show or the song? Ado Annie’s gonna sing differently from A Little Night Music’s Ann, and she’s gonna sing differently from Ana in Frozen.
You’re a theatre singer. You make thousands of different sounds.
Once you know that,
What kind of breath support are you using?
“If I Loved You” support is gonna be very different from “Take Me or Leave Me.”
(”If I Loved You” is gonna have floatier ribs and be generated from the lower transverse abs and obliques [appoggio], and Rent is gonna have more rib closure and engagement which produces compressed phonation —
think toddler wailing over their banana being peeled the wrong way, broken, or slightly bruised. Those ribs know how to engage with the focal folds.
Then get a sense of the emotional impulse you’re working with.
Ado Annie: “It ain’t so much a question of not knowing what to do….”
Ann: “Soon, I promise. Soon I won’t shy away.”
Ana: “For the first time in FOREVER!….”
Three very different needs to communicate. These emotional images will light up in different parts of the body, and they’ll move the voice in a different way. Pay attention to your body on this.
Then, notice how that affects the phonatory pattern of the voice —
What happens when you notice the emotional energy of surmising, “It ain’t so much a question of not knowing what to do.”?
And how’s that different from Ann singing, “Soon, I promise….”?
And Ana’s got a completely different set of circumstances going on.
Your folds are going to sing these three different characters in different ways.
Now, it’s time to notice what the voice is doing just north of you larynx — in your pharynx.
Meditate your attention right back to that spot where your uvula vibrates against the back pharyngeal wall when you snort.
That’s the spot where I want you to notice your vibratory energy flowing past like a stream.
How does Ado Annie’s stream move?
How about Ann?
And Ana?
Notice the differences in air speed and how you feel the vibrations. Does that feel different from what you normally do?
Do you still feel sensations up in the front of your face? For me, I never think about them anymore. I may just be used to them, but I just don’t focus there.
Then after that, how can you shape your articulators and the rest of the tract to help you the most?
The one tip I have for you on this is to let your tongue float into your mouth. You want your tongue to float high and close to your hard palate.
This does at least 3 things:
1, it gets your tongue out of your most resonant place, your pharynx.
2, it floats the root of the tongue off of the larynx, so this whole mechanism has freedom to move.
and 3. When the tongue floats high toward the hard palate, it creates a very helpful acoustic bottleneck that causes sound waves to bounce back into the pharynx and amplify even more.
Then, the dialect of these characters, their self concept, and the world of the show are going to affect your articulation choices. Your entire body energy based on who you believe you are is going to shape how your tongue, teeth, and soft palate, and pharynx all interact.
And that’s the flow of energy that you have actual immediate control over. You can witness that as the actor/storyteller while looking to see if your communication is landing with your scene partner.
You can, in fact, do more than one thing at a time within a given task.
I hope this takes the pressure off of you to think you have to target and aim vibrations in a certain spot on your face. Sometimes you may feel sympathetic resonance galore in all kinds of places in your skull. Other times, you won’t.
That doesn’t matter. What does matter is that you are making free, efficient sounds that come from a deep belief and empathy for who you are being, and the story you are courageous enough to live.
Again, what I want you to walk away with from this is —
Your primary resonance happens in your pharynx. Nobody can hear your mask.
You can indeed think about vocal technique and storytelling at the same time. In fact, I believe they serve each other.
Trying to aim your voice in a forward direction can sometimes recruit muscles that decrease efficiency and cause unwanted constriction.
Then, when you’re working on any kind of material, ask yourself:
What world am I in? What am I singing?
What kind of breath support does this call for? What’s my body’s identity here?
How does this affect my phonatory pattern? What kinds of sounds am I making?
And then what do the resonances happening in my pharynx feel like as they flow through?
and then,
How do your articulators, affected by your body’s ego identity as this character or in this style, sculpt this vibration when it flows through your mouth?
And sub note on this, and this is a whole other topic — let your tongue float high and fill a lot of the mouth. It gets out of your pharynx, frees your larynx, and creates a terrific acoustic environment.
All of these things you have direct agency over. You can stand in your energy column, share generously, and observe how your scene partners respond with openness, curiosity, and play.
Practice these things, and reach out if you have questions at dan@dancallaway.com. Or click on “work with me” to find out how you can, well, work with me.
I’m all about getting you simple tools that make sense and work fast so that you can tell the stories you want to with joy, freedom and love, feel confident and excited at auditions, and contribute beautiful and satisfying work in whatever room you collaborate.
Because remember there is objectively, empirically, and scientifically only one you, and folks need to hear the story only you can sing. Now go sing. Bye. ?
The tough thing about the studio I use at school: it sits directly beneath a practice room.
Sometimes it sounds like incidental orchestra warm up.
Sometimes I hear prolonged reed instrument embouchure masochism.
And sometimes singers get in there, and I remember that nobody knows how to practice.
(Sounds like a useful video series. I’d just have to make the title “How to Get Good and Slay Your Foes,” or something like that.)
The other day, though, a diligent person above me at 8 The Fenway decided they was gonna do themselves some high belting.
And they’d decided belting meant making a strong sound with their vocal folds REALLY together all the time.
I understand. That’s a logical thing to think. It’s just that so much of singing is weird and counterintuitive.
I tried to focus on my work, but I just kept hearing this somewhat familiar melody being emphatically forced through this person’s larynx.
My mirror neurons wouldn’t let me notice anything else besides the auditory empathy constricting my throat.
Then there were the vowels.
Oh no, friend, you’re not going to sing that note with that vowel the way you want.
I almost changed into my nobody-asked-me-but-I-must-help Vocal Pathology Avoidance Man superhero costume and bounded upstairs, but I had no time. And that woulda been weird.
Then I realized that somewhat familiar melody was “The Joke” by Brandi Carlile.
I love “The Joke.”
But there was nothing funny about what was happening here. Stop doing this to yourself. And this song.
So, there’s a slew of stuff I could say about the nuanced interworkings of how to make effective Mode 1 (basically chest voice) sounds around and above your passaggio.
But here are three takeaways we can learn while we pray for our friend’s vocal future.
The Voice Comes Through, Not From
The power source for your voice starts in your torso (well, your whole body, really, but, again, another article) — your abs and ribs, depending on what kinda sound you’re making, who you’re being, and what’s happening in the story.
This moves the air THROUGH (yes, yelling at you) your vocal folds and causes them to vibrate.
When folks make belty sounds, the brain somehow decides that the source of the screlt is at the throat level, so the body recruits all kinds of effort around your larynx. No bueno.
The air movement ITSELF helps with vocal fold closure, so when I don’t collaborate with this physical reality, I fight my own body and make things real real hard.
The breath, vibration, and communication energy come THROUGH, not from the folds.
This is also why singing’s so scary and tricky — it’s a flow that you can’t stop and edit before it leaves your mouth.
Belty Sounds Aren’t Just Dependent on Your Folds
Lots of folks think, “Belt? Ok, engage vocal fold slam!”
There are lots of ways to make called-out, excited, risky, wailing, engaged, scream-adjacent sounds. And so much of this depends on your phonatory pattern and the shape of your vocal tract.
And when you discover these ways, you’re gonna be a little angry at how easy they feel.
What we call belting is often one of the most efficient ways to make noise, and it requires a teeny bit of air. Yeah, it’s robust, but the actual feeling of efficient sound making is some crazy return on your breath investment.
Belty sounds also collaborate only with certain vowels.
If you want to look this up, check out Complete Vocal Technique’s work on this, and look up Overdrive and Edge modes. I think their breakdown of this is one of the most straightforward ways of understanding belty sounds. You can also watch a video I did on vowels here.
Your Body Knows How to Belt
The family of sounds we’ve come to call “belting” are all very natural human sounds. That’s why we love it. They’re real, engaging, risky, and the let the emotions through. They’re healing.
So learn to listen to your bod.
And listening to Brandi Carlile is a good lesson in this. She sings straight from her hear guts spirit errythang.
In “The Joke,” the melody of the chorus climbs and climbs — that’s story structure telling you these folks who are laughing one day won’t be.
Just that line, “Let ‘em laugh while they can.”
That “laugh” for 2 beats — what does your body feel when you picture folks pushing somebody down chuckling because they have the upper hand? Do your justice hackles get up? Might that affect how your voice calls our the word “laugh” for 1.5 seconds? Of course it will.
I’ve made the equivalent noises as our friend SHOWING UP and working in the practice room. Good job up there!
I’ve worked really hard and been mystified by how to accomplish a vocal task. I’ve thrown all the spaghetti at all the walls and made the wounded animal noises to prove it. Often in front of folks.
Your voice is resilient. Yes, there’s fragility there, and we have to take care of it.
AND, it’s so strong and capable. Think of all it can do. So trust it. If you feel tired, or anything feels uncomfortable, stop, and don’t do it that way again.
Get help! From someone who knows what they’re talking about. Someone who can demonstrate knowledge about how your physiology, psychology, and soul make sounds.
And be kind to you. You’re going to suck at stuff that’s new. Let’s let ourselves be a beginner for heaven’s sake. Talking to myself, too. Oof.
And if you want to learn to make these noises in straightforward, easy ways that make sense, work, and are fun, just reach out and work with me.
I’ve made all the mistakes, and I hear this stuff every day, and it’s my absolute delight to help you sing free, joyful, and heal stuff in the process.
Singing is sneaky like that.
There’s only one you, and folks need to hear the story only you can sing. Now go sing.
Did you ever have the acting teacher who kept poking until you cried?
Somewhere at the Bogfart’s School of Acting Teacher Witchcraft and Gizzardry, there’s a class:
“How to Make Your Pupils Weep So You Can Validate Your Ego and Tell Yourself You Facilitated a Breakthrough.”
Listed as FORCEDSOB 2937-AB in the catalog.
There’s a lie behind this manipulative pursuit, and that porky is this:
If you really feel it, the audience will, too/love you/think you’re great, and you’ll be a real actor.
I mean, maybe.
But storytelling via pretending to be someone else has more nuance than that.
And please review your own history as an audience member. Survey the times you witnessed an actor really feeling things. What was that like for you?
The most generous thought I may have in such a situation is to say, “Wow, they’re really feeling things.”
Yeah, nobody cares.
On the flip of this, have you ever performed a thing of any kind, felt a little struggle bus about it, experienced frustration, and got mad that things didn’t go according to your plan — only to hear feedback later that what you did really moved them?
That’s happened to me several times, and the fact that my own experience of the event was such a poor barometer really frustrated me.
I was frustrated because my MO was jacked; I was trying to engineer maximum audience adoration rather than do satisfying work and tell an honest, excellent story.
And people can smell that shipoopie.
If you’re singing “Still Hurting” from The Last Five Years, and you’re all “Better act brokenhearted now,” you’re about to be a caricature of Sadness from Inside Out, only not endearing.
And here’s a big reason for that.
Emotion is a result of a whole cascade of thoughts, hormonal interactions, and decisions. It’s not the present tense EVENT.
When you focus on portraying a feeling, you’re way behind the actual narrative.
It’s the same as singers being told to “get it forward.” Resonance, like emotions is a result, and if you try to make it the target, you’re a nanosecond behind what’s really happening. I’ll have to write about that.
This is what I mean.
I’m writing this to you. It’s 5:57am, and I’m in the FLOW.
I hear, “DADDDDYYYY! I NEEEEED YOOOOOUUUU!” above me where the boys’ bedroom is, Jude’s daily rooster call.
I feel
jarred from my focused state.
sweet in my heart because he’s cute as all get out.
annoyed that I have to stop work because every morning I think I can complete something before they wake up, and every morning I’m wrong.
I walk upstairs to their bedroom and feel
Grateful for their sweet selves.
Deeply entertained by whatever Jude’s hide-under-the-covers surprise morning greeting will be. (Today it was his signature ba-da-bing ba-da-boom. It’s hilarious.)
anxious that I won’t be able to get my checks checked on my checklist this morning.
guilty that I care so much about my checklist.
anxious again that I’m not investing enough quality time with them and forebodingly sad imagining the day when they’re older and won’t be so eager to play knights with plastic swords with Daddy.
And that’s just the top layer.
This is why when Melissa asks me, “What are you thinking about?” I’m like, you mean now or 3 seconds ago?
The point is — I don’t even KNOW what feelings are going to pulse through me. I do things. I have thoughts about them. I tell stories to myself about what’s happening, and boom, emotions.
If I train myself to open my heart and do this while being watched by a room full of folks, somehow that becomes an artful and healing thing. How terrific.
But if I’m like, “Okay, time to act nurturing and agitated at once,” I’m already outside myself trying to shellack an emotional quality on my body, and there’s no way I can be inside the story or behind my own eyeballs.
So remember — emotions will always come. That’s what they do.
Just get clear on who’s who and what’s what. Play pretend, have fun, and be surprised by what happens.
It works, I promise. No demonstrative crying required.
When Noah was 1, we took a trip to see his Uncle Rob in Albany.
Here’s little collage from that trip.
We were playing on the living room floor one day, and we opened the front door for some sunshine. I noticed the glass storm door wasn’t fastened all the way, and a gentle gut impulse said, “might be a good idea to close that.”
My brain countered, “I’m sure it’s fine. Besides, that would require you lift your ENTIRE person off of this soft carpet.”
Two minutes later, Noah decided to get some vitamin D near the door and leaned against the glass. Poor bug didn’t expect the door to MOVE, and before I could catch him, he was nose-down on the front step.
I felt terrible for not acting on that simple prompt just to click the door latch.
I can’t tell you how many times my guts have sent up a warning flare that I ignored. And every time, I could track back to the moment when the gentle nudge bubbled up followed by the immediate rationalization not to act on it.
Scientists have been learning all kinds of mind-blowing things about our gut-brain, the enteric nervous system.
And you’ve got your own list of gut-negation palm-to-forehead moments. While you don’t have to understand all the science, you and I both know all kinds of information comes from the most surprising corners of our bodies.
This is terrific news for theatre singers.
Here’s why.
When you know your gut has truth to tell, you can turn up your receiver volume when you craft a song.
You understand that your body can teach you to make any sound.
And it’s silly easy. Here’s how you do it.
Take a phrase from your song. Let’s use “My Funny Valentine” by Rodgers and Hart.
We’ll use the lyric, “Yet, you’re my favorite work of art.”
Step 1: Just say the lyric.
Like you’re a robot. Let the meaning and the image occur to you.
I saw a marble statue and remembered my voice teacher Cathy sang this at a wedding many years ago.
And then I remembered a joke that says, “How many cabaret singers does it take to sing ‘My Funny Valentine’? Apparently, all of them.”
See? all kinds of stuff can generate from one phrase. “Oh the tricks your mind can play.”
Step 2: Say it again.
“Yet, you’re my favorite work of art.” And let more images come. Open your heart to your personal connection to the images.
Now I think about the times I look over at Melissa in the kitchen when we’re in the trenches, and she just looks beautiful. It’s usually when she declares she’s in the depths of frumptastic, but there’ll be a smile line on her face or a little sarcastic aside she’ll say, and I’m grateful we get to share our life.
On another day, something else might come up. Biscuits. Or the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Notice these images may or may not be logically related to the lyric.
Step 3: Notice where your body lights up when you say the lyric and see the things.
You’ll feel emotional energy well up somewhere. It’s often subtle, so tune in. Dial your attention to where your body experiences “you’re my favorite work of art.”
Right now, I’m cozy in my solar plexus, and my throat gets an excited twinge.
Step 4: Now just witness that place with the energy, and sing the phrase while you look at it.
You’ll get key information about your personal relationship to the lyric, and you’ll notice how your body has a clear opinion on how to sound that phrase.
Your head brain will be a little frustrated, too, because the knowledge lives deeper down, and it can’t put it in a spreadsheet.
As you do this work, the phrases become part of you, so when you sing them, they’re arising from images emanating from your own psyche.
And here’s the secret sauce to this whole thing.
You have to open yourself to all the crazy dream-scapey things your subconscious mind tosses up. Just like in life.
You may say, “Yet, you’re my favorite work of art,” and you remember your dad telling you to stop using the front counter railings at the Mt. Airy Burger King as parallel bars when you were in 3rd grade. Brains are like that.
Sometimes you feel blindsided, and you can handle it. You’re a courageous storyteller, and you chose to stand on stages and tell the truth.
And guess what — when you open yourself up to that kind of input rather than trying to traffic-direct every image you meticulously crafted in your homework, you let yourself be a human.
Your brain recognizes that you’re humaning, and you can relax and let the story flow the way it wants to that time. It’ll be different the next.
And who knows — maybe you’ll clear up your gut-brain highway so much, you’ll readily respond when your wise body tells you to close the storm door all the way.
But your consciousness well is going to offer up buckets overflowing with images singular to you, because after all — there is only one you, and folks need to hear the story only you can sing.
Freshman year of college. I couldn’t sing a passage that was beyond my vocal ability, and I sounded like a mule dragging an overfilled tobacco sled to the tune of something that might’ve sounded like “Donna non vidi mai” from Manon Lescaut.
I’d sing a wrong note. I’d crack. It’d sound terrible in my head.
And like a reflex, I’d smack my right thigh like a Dickensian cop truncheoning truant orphans.
Richard Cook would sit balletically straight on the piano bench and look at me with wide, concerned eyes.The cogs in his brain must have turned the little bingo decision ball in the “above my pay grade” answer box.
Voice lessons were times when I wanted
✅ the right answers (consistent impressive hight notes, duh)
? the exact prescription for creating the right answers
? better ability than my competition
? approval from my teacher and peers
? stunning vocal ability so that I could then accept myself
? to tear down and eradicate every vocal fault I had and only sound like a perfect star of a singer
?️ to keep my voice contained in a safe manageable place where I could control all the correct, impressive, exact, superior, applause-inciting, approved, and fault-free sounds I would consistently make.
It was a mess in here.(I’m pointing everywhere.) And that shit hurt.
This is why I tell the pedagogy students at the BoCo: singing just happens to be the modality we get to work in to help folks heal.
The way I tried to use singing when I was 18 was music abuse.
Here’s why.
?♂️ Exercise is good for you. When you use exercise to comparing yourself to your treadmill neighbor, it disconnects you from its healthful purpose.If you’re in yoga class thinking, “Damn, I can Trikonasana so much better than that inflexible shaky pants over there,” you may have missed the point.
? Nutritious food is good for you. If you’re eating your kale and pumpkin seed salad with a splash of lemon juice while a seething judgment of the folks going into Dunkin Donuts across the street boils in your liver, you may be injecting more free radicals into your system than the antioxidants in that kale can mitigate.
? Spiritual practice is good for you. But if you’re like, “I’m pretty sure I meditated and prayed longer than all these jokers in this planning meeting this morning,” you may be missing out on some of the soul benefits a gratitude list can offer.
We do the same thing with singing.
We ab- (the Latin root means away) -use it.
We take it away from its natural and healthy purpose and turn it into a means to tell ourselves the story of better-than.
Because of loving teachers, caring friends, artist peers, plus the privilege to be a teacher, I saw examples of how singing can transform you and those who listen.
I learned
? Singing’s an always-moving thing, and the moment you try to pin it down and box it, you’re dealing with past tense.
? So many things can be true about the free ways you can sing. And once you think you have a tool figured out, you’ll find it doesn’t apply to everything you want to use it for.
? A singer can sound flawless, and you can notice that you just don’t care. If singing’s not connected to an open heart and a commitment to be generous, it’s lifeless. And we can tell.
?? Approval and applause feels good, and their effects evaporate like morning fog. You have to find a deeper purpose for making music, one that brings satisfaction to your individual soul and one that makes you proud of the trail of interactions you’ve left behind.
You have to embrace yourself before you can embrace your voice.
Even if you’re making technically stunning sounds, if you don’t have space and compassion for yourself, no amount of virtuosity is going to earn the grace you need for you.
There’s gold in what you call your vocal faults. And when you get curious about them instead of angry at them, they have a lot to teach you.
and
Your voice is all of you.
It creates itself from the very essence of you being alive — your breath. And it has the power to reconnect the broken pieces like golden vocal Kintsugi. (Thanks Kevin Wilson for this illustration.)
If we could see the energy and vibrations surrounding and coming from us, our minds would be blown on a James Webb Telescope discovery level.
While you may not open-palm slap yourself like 18-year-old me did, I invite you to be curious about the ways you might inflict punishment instead of offer understanding.
Singing is a healing path, and when you’re committed to being whole-hearted and walking it, folks who hear you will wake up to the hope that healing is possible for them, too.
Here’s your invite — get in there and heal. (It’s scary, unfamiliar, it hurts, and some of it really sucks, so don’t be alarmed.)
But it’s a life and death situation. There’s only one you, and we need to hear the story only you can sing.
Theatre singers get off track real quick when it comes to musical style. We shoot straight for a sound result when some very simple questions will do a lot of the work for us.
In this video, I’ll walk you through a simple framework that’ll help you find your way into musical style with skill, authenticity, and respect.
Before college I read, “A Challenge for the Actor” by Uta Hagen.
I didn’t know how to pronounce her name, but I took notes on all the strange exercises she taught:
☕️ spending inordinate amounts of time with cups of coffee experiencing smells and feels,
? pretending you were the character before and after you were on stage,
? and writing down all kinds of biographical information that you never even talk about in the show.
Sounded like a lot of work. And I was THERE for it.
She said I should swim and play tennis for exercise. Great! I already did both.
Then she came for my regional dialect.
She didn’t single me out by twang, but I knew my Surry County drawl wouldn’t fly at HB Studios.
I broke the news to my dad (whom I’d continue to call “Deddy.” They couldn’t take THAT away from me.)
“Deddy,” I said, hoisting a spool of rope onto a high shelf in his warehouse. “I don’t want you to think I’m putting on airs, but I’m going to have to work on my accent.”
He understood, and so I set out to create a composite dialect profile that was part Tom Hanks part Leo DiCaprio (it was the Titanic and Romeo and Juliet year.)
No matter how many flourish syllables I eliminated from words like “there” and my first name, my rolling hills DNA still vibrated.
The vicar at the church I attended in London always greeted me with a hearty, “Well howdy Danny Callaway!”
While it no longer feels natural to say “win” and “when” as multisyllabic homonyms, the southern spice still seasons my vowels and vocal melody.
Since I’ve lived in lots of different spots, I’ve studied humans with different ways of talking.
And it made me realize there’s a direct connection there with musical style.
A human usually speaks and moves the way they do because of the sounds and movements they were surrounded by growing up. These become ways to connect and communicate.
When I lived in London, my American dialect stayed in tact. But I changed inflections without noticing it. (So that folks knew I was actually asking a question.)
(It took me three months to understand that a question was being asked in the first place with the Brit pitch down-swoop before a slight rise. In North Carolina, a question was communicated through an upward slide of at least a perfect 5th through diphthong extravaganzas.)
The more folks I encountered, the more I learned that musical style is dialect.
Musical style grows from the soil and soul of a place.
Reggae, hip hop, British music hall, bluegrass, metal, 80s pop, 1920s crooning, bel canto, bossa nova, Vaudeville.
Each of these style names evokes place and culture.
The big mistake theatre singers make when they seek to embody different styles is that they focus first on how a style sounds.
What needs to happen is to back up and ask: Who am I?
My ego identity is going to be very different if I grew up in Black Mountain, North Carolina, as opposed to Caracas, Venezuela.
Where did this style grow up, and who am I as a communicator of this style?
That’s where to begin.
This question will change everything because you’ll start to embody the style rather than parrot sounds.
On a road trip from North Carolina back up to Massachusetts, I studied of a group of men talking around a Sheetz gas pump. Their bodies spoke in Surry County; the way they laughed and moved was like they had time to eat a slice of pecan pie while they guffawed at rude jokes.
I imagined a similar scenario in Massachusetts, and the bodies and voices were very different. Tighter torsos, tenser shoulders, quicker arms and hands. MAYBE time for half a Dunkies chocloate sprinkle donut.
Reminds me of a dance callback I had for Jersey Boys. I couldn’t get the style down because it was sharp and compact. Not only did it feel alien, it felt wrong in my body. You can take the boy out of Surry County….
So, when you approach musical style AND dialect in any material you work on, ask those questions: Who am I? Where did I grow up, and what are my assumptions about how I relate? Let that affect your body and then see how the voice follows.
You yourself show up with your voice and body based on a whole life’s collection of influences and choices about how you want to connect to the world.
The characters you play and the songs you sing are no different.
And inside of there, there’s the one and only you singing whatever style you’re singing, and folks need to hear the story only you can sing (in whatever dialect that may be).
We mean well, but voice teachers are often sending students off on a quixotic quest to find “their authentic voice.”
Theater singers of all kinds have spent a lot of time on this search for what their “sound” is.
When you’re a theater singer, your job is to embody multiple different ego identities. You don’t want to be a singular brand because that limits the myriad expressions you’re capable of.
Biologically, empirically, and scientifically, you already showed up on the planet with a singular voice that has never been and will never be repeated. Your particular combination of lungs, larynx, and vocal tract is your own.
