Which Is Your Default Printer
WHICH IS YOUR DEFAULT PRINTER?
Singers use their voices all day long, but how do they use it most often? Speaking. The greatest fight I have with my choir singers is that they try to sing like they speak. [see: You Don’t Sing Like You Talk; You Don’t Dance Like You Walk] This leads to a thinner, wider, closed sound that is riddled with rushed diphthongs and clipped consonants. Not to argue with Harold Hill, but singing is more than “just sustained talking.”
By its nature, speaking has a default position of CLOSED. In a conversation, we listen with a closed mouth (hopefully) and then open it to talk. We open our mouths just enough to make the appropriate sound and then our mouth returns to a closed position. We push away from closed, and our mouth returns to that position as if we have a spring attached to our jaw.
Now consider great singing. The default position is OPEN. We ask singers to breathe through an open vowel (the one they are about to sing), and then the goal is to stay open. [see: Don’t Be A Dumbbell] We strive to only close the mechanism as much as is needed to make the consonants that interrupt our vowel stream. Then our mechanism falls back down to OPEN. My voice teacher (Virginia Starr, BGSU) would often say to sing as if my mouth was numbed with Novocain in order to let my jaw relax downward into an open position.
Choir Bites Interactive Slides can enhance online/hybrid lesson plans or be used as supplemental assignments. Your singers’ awareness will rise as they engage with these simple, “sticky” concepts! Click here to learn more!
Nowadays, our computers often have access to more than one printer - through the network at school, the office, etc. And so it is that the computer asks you to choose a DEFAULT PRINTER. This means if you hit PRINT without making any changes, paper is coming out of THAT PRINTER. This is how I see singing - you must make OPEN POSITION your DEFAULT PRINTER. There is no other option. Everything comes back to open, all the time, and you must CHOOSE every time you close the mechanism. WHICH IS YOUR DEFAULT PRINTER?
