I once met a Black American gospel singer on the London leg of a world tour. I imagine she was nearly eighty years old. During her concert I heard the most wonderful and exciting voice:
liberated, clear and adventurous. She had the kind of voice any of us would love to possess. Sounds flowed freely from her.
How did she do it? After her concert we met and talked.
'How long have you been singing?' I asked.
'Since I was seven,' she replied.
'How many times a week do you sing?' ' O h , three or four times a day.'
'You mean one day once a week?'
' O h , no, three or four times a day, seven days a week!' 'Every week?'
'Yes.'
At this point I began to sweat and stammer.
'Haven't you ever lost your voice or suffered acute strain and fatigue?'
•No.'
'That's amazing,' I said very weakly under my breath.
'Are you saying,' I went on, 'that in all your years of singing you've never had trouble with your voice, never had to see a doctor or throat specialist, never had special voice lessons?'
'Yes.'
'I am so astonished,' I continued, 'because most performers and public speakers, given such a punishing vocal chore, would be in serious trouble by now.'
At this reaction she threw back her head, laughed out loud
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and through the hilarity said, ' O h , my dear, but you see God doesn't mind a bum note!'
Any actor, singer or professional speaker - people who use their voices daily - will immediately see the relevance of this story. Performers particularly have a peculiar - if not down-right obsessive - need to sound down-right all the time, every time.
'Sounding right' haunts most speakers, not just professionals, and consequently freezes our ability and freedom both vocally and imaginatively. We resist taking our God-given right to speak and vocalise fully because all of us are afraid of sounding 'a bum note'. But like the lady says, if God doesn't mind why should we?
Self-Judgement
My encounter with that Black gospel singer (and my incredu-lous questions to her) stays with me even today because it relates, I have always felt, to any and all speakers: we all harbour a fundamental fear about our voices, we are all racked by severe self-judgements.
That fear is bound up with the way we t h i n k we sound to others. This self-judgement can and does prevent us from communicating fully to the world. This obstruction is so strong it will often create permanent vocal habits that physically and spiritually constrict our voices. It can actually turn some of us into vocal cripples.
Once coaxed into life these habits, or what I earlier called self-imposed gags, become afflictions that most of us are barely even aware of. They hide and nag us or even become comfortable and benign parts of us. They tend to be more subtle and even subliminal than overt and clinging. They become part of every speech transaction we make. The further we move away from our innate vocal freedom and hide behind habitual obstacles, the wider the gap becomes between us and our right to speak.
Each day I confront people who are handicapped with
self-judgements of all kinds. My task is to help them break what is usually a lifetime of habits or simply one bothersome tendency. Again and again I find myself saying: 'You have the right to speak. You have the right to breathe. Take your time.
You have the right to be yourself.' And I always remember the simple straightforward message of that gospel singer: ' O h , my dear . . . God doesn't mind a bum note!'
I usually deal with the end results of a chain of events and vocal recriminations that cut most of us off from these three rights: speaking, breathing and taking the time to do both. I deal with matters like posture, breath, speech, articulation, use of language, approaches to texts and more. Most of all I deal with voice. A n d to that end I usually have to confront what the habits of a lifetime have done to any individual's sense of self-esteem. Here is where habits do their most devious damage.
A Craving for Instant Results
Most of us live in such a fast, product-oriented world. We need and demand immediate results, instant gratification, sudden release from all pain. But a fully rounded and confident vocal capacity needs maturing.
Anybody in education or healthcare knows that quick fixes are simply not possible. Lasting work on the self and the body takes time. Vocal work often needs to be done at different stages of life for altogether different reasons. What a young voice student can do at eighteen is nowhere near what a great performer of fifty can achieve. But then few mature actors will ever realise the voice power that a vocally gifted actor had in his or her youthful prime. What politician today has the quirky and sly vocal resonances of a Winston Churchill?
Vocal flexibility and daring take time to mature. Yet the craving to achieve instant results will often exert appalling pressure on our ability to communicate.
Just think for a moment about how many of us as children
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were disciplined to 'stand up straight', told to 'stop mumbling' and commanded to 'speak up'. Sound familiar? I am sure it does. A n d to what lasting effect I wonder? Has it made us better speakers or just speakers filled with habits? A n d how long will it take us to chip away at a lifetime of built-up defences? It could take a while.
Some immediate vocal improvements are possible in a short space of time. With the right exercises improvements are possible within ten days. Lasting ones, however, do take longer. Maintaining them means starting a whole new lifetime of good habits.
From the start I must be clear about one thing: nothing in voice work happens instantaneously or through force. We should experiment, play and enjoy the work but never push, predict or judge it. You secure the right to speak by earning it. So consistent work is part of the process.
Yet before we start on the process of working with the voice, we first have to take a look at all those nasty habits I have been referring to obliquely without yet identifying.
We'll start right off by exploding a few key myths having to do with voice work which in their own way have locked us into a habitual mind set and may have even convinced us that our own voices are not worth improving. For so many of us, I do believe, hate the sound of our own voices.
The Myth of the 'Bad Voice*
I have never heard a 'bad voice'.
Does that sound strange or unconvincing to you? If it does it is probably because you think you hear them daily. 'His voice is so overbearing.' 'Her voice is so shrill.' It might even be your own voice you are talking about.
Some voices have obviously suffered serious damage and are medically flawed. Others are susceptible to allergies and upper respiratory infection. There are croaky voices and squeaky voices. But if a voice is healthy and not the victim
of chronic illness then it cannot be termed 'bad'. It may, of course, be grossly underdeveloped or overdeveloped, nervous or overconfident, untrained or very badly trained. Think of the muscles of the body as an analogy. Without some form of exercise and physical restraint we go either flabby or become muscle-bound. Sounding overbearing or shrill are simply vocal habits that have gone too far in either of two directions. Neither is 'bad' in itself. Both are easy to control.
So it is not the voice that is bad but just the bad habits that suppress its freedom.
What I think worth remembering is that every human voice has thrilling potential waiting to be discovered and unleashed.
A n d I do mean every human voice. As soon as any of us surrenders to a defeating habit and says, 'I have a bad voice', what happens? Our whole capacity to speak unashamedly and communicate expressively suffers a crisis of confidence. The whole vocal apparatus that physically allows us to speak in the first place shuts down. We begin to second-guess every statement we utter and each sound we make. A negative myth about a bad voice compromises our right to speak.
What I do meet most often in my work are constricted or 'held' voices that are often quite easily released and freed.
Perhaps nine out of every ten speaker falls into this league of bad habit. Now that most of you know your so-called 'bad voice' is nothing other than a myth, wait a bit and we'll explore this phenomenon among others in greater detail below.
The Myth of the 'Beautiful Voice'
In Britain, especially, we have been dogged by the notion of the 'beautiful voice'.
The stage and screen actors we have grown used to see-ing and hearsee-ing, the authoritative BBC-announcer voice that once filled the radio airwaves (now thankfully disappearing in favour of a more colloquial variety), the so-called 'posh accents' of the upper class and royalty have all conspired to
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create the myth of correct elegance in speaking. This is the sort of voice you listen to instead of hearing whatever statement or text it speaks. It lulls and enchants you like a gorgeous piece of swelling romantic music. You are overwhelmed by it, sometimes even envious of it. You are won over by it. You want to sound exacdy like it. To you it is the civilised way of speaking. We describe such voices as 'sonorous'; that is, imposing and grand.
My image of the beautiful voice not only encompasses that of skilled legendary actors, but it also extends to wonderful bits of meaningful - and sometimes meaningless - rhetoric spoken in places like the House of Lords or the pulpits of the Church of England. When we listen to these beautiful voices are we more engaged with the issues and meanings of a play, commentary or sermon or are we merely swept away by the rhetorical dynamics of the speaker? I would say the latter is true.
Don't be fooled however. The beauty in some of these voices is only skin-deep and perhaps a mask for insincerity.
Using another metaphor, these voices show the agility of a tumbler flipping across a stage. We are startled by one physical characteristic honed and practised to perform very well. But do we, as audiences, leave a theatre or public space talking about the message we have just heard or have we been captivated and lulled by the speaker? Aren't we seduced by beautiful voices just as we are repelled by bad ones? I think we should be able to hear any text first and forget about the speaker.
But beauty bewitches us. A n d beautiful voices are like the mythical Sirens who lure us off course and onto the rocks.
In its own attractive way the 'beautiful voice', just as much as the 'bad voice', is a creature of habit. It can prove to be just as huge a barrier to the speaker as a shyly inaudible or aggressively pushed sound. In both instances, the voice fails the speaker in the essential goal to communicate a word and its sense; each is in some way disconnected from the voice's right to serve a message.
Please understand that this is not an attack on voices that are capable of speaking beautifully. I find a beautiful speaker as enchanting to listen to as you do. I am only arguing that each of us has the right to our own voice, and that the sound we make appropriately befits the ideas and emotions we express.
Our voice, whenever we use it, should set out to match, organically and emotionally, whatever material we say and not be disconnected from it. The two must come into perfect alignment. The real beauty of speaking lies in attaining that perfection.
Proper voice work is neither a form of cosmetic surgery nor a version of old-fashioned elocution lessons but a path to speaking in your own way with your own God-given voice, bum notes and all.
We have all experienced listening to speakers who sound insincere, overbearing or just unsure of what they are saying.
In effect, I think our voice becomes a sort of he detector that instantly traps a speaker whenever he or she is being unauthen-tic. What we strive for, therefore, is not a 'beautiful' voice but a voice rid of doubt and insecurity, a voice perfectly in pitch with the honesty of any text or feeling, a voice that in essence is sincere. Sincerity gives any voice compelling beauty.
This sincerity can only emerge when a voice is completely free of any trace of lie or habit. In the quest for a beautiful voice most people would rather exchange sincerity for tricks.
Usually they cut themselves off from their own individual sounds and impose on themselves some notion of a 'right way' to speak. In doing so, ironically, they cut themselves off further from the genuine right to speak by compounding old habits with new ones.
The Myth of the Voice Guru
There is no doubt that many areas of voice work are enor-mously potent. Working on the breath, for instance, can always expose and touch someone on the deepest level. It
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is penetrating work, both intimate and revealing. I will talk further about this later on when I explore the breath and then further on again I will demonstrate what I mean in the exercise section on deep breathing. Breath takes us to the core of voice work.
Exercises developed to open and free the voice can make anyone - female or male - suddenly vulnerable, tender and unguarded, rather like a snail without a shell. Work on this level can be intensely frank and personal. Human potential of any sort, once massaged and tapped, can be powerfully revealing.
Unfortunately there are some voice teachers, particularly in Britain and North America, who believe they, not the work itself, are the real sources of power. They provoke students to reveal secrets about themselves unwillingly. They dictate when and how to speak. They dangerously probe psyches, in some cases violating privacy and dignity. Like the 'beautiful voices' they sound good. I am sure that some of these teachers mean well but they approach voice work psychologically and not just physiologically which is where, I think, emphasis must always be anchored; they work without either anatomical training or licensing as therapists and healers.
I talked, for instance, to an actor in Canada a while ago whose voice teacher had told him 'to scream and scream until it hurt' as a prescribed method of releasing his voice. This, it turns out, is quite a common phenomenon and as unsound a bit of advice as you could possibly give someone. D i d he follow that advice? Should he have followed it? N o , of course not.
Every year at the Guildhall School's auditions in London I hear candidates who exhibit all the signs of vocal damage at the hands of unskilled voice teachers. This is no less true of people I have encountered auditioning for drama departments in America where the training and teaching of voice are not always carefully regulated. Abuse of this sort seems, in fact, to be most flagrant there. Even when actual damage of the vocal cords has not been the case, I have heard so many talented
students made almost speechless and voiceless by the severe judgements and recommendations of voice teachers who have assumed the roles of gurus.
The role of the responsible voice teacher (and I say this for the benefit of teachers and students alike) is: a) to explain clearly the workings of a voice; b) to identify specific problems;
c) to prescribe exercises to free the problem; and d) to offer choices that open up further options to vocal freedom. We are not out to make converts or acolytes. If we can pass on enough working knowledge to a student - show him or her the technical hows and whys of proper voice work - the voice teacher should become redundant in anyone's life. We should just be putting people on pathways towards personal goals.
But leave the enlightenment up to them.
Anyone should be free to play and experiment with their voice without someone like me looking on in either judgement or approval. The right to speak involves you discovering your very own freedom to speak in ways that suit you best.
There is no such thing as one 'method', no definitive vocal exercise has ever been devised to suit everyone's needs, there is no single way of attaining vocal release, no mumbo-jumbo to imbue strength and power, no 'mantras' and, because voice work is so very personal, no one teacher. There is simply no aura involved. Nobody working on their voice can learn to do so through fear, intimidation or charismatic pronouncements. I hope that everyone who follows me though this book remembers that. And if you begin encountering this attitude, the voice of the 'guru', then take heed. Especially if you should hear it from me!