The S-word (“Support”) pt. 2
with pictures this time
In Part 1, we talked about “support”— how it’s an ill-defined word, that means many things:
In Part 2, we talk about the mechanics of diaphragmatic support, and what how extraneous tensions remains in the system when we target “support” as something to do.
Marisa & Yatharth:
I want to talk about the S-word, “support.”
Some of you know I roll my eyes and sigh a bit when I hear the term. I’ve seen too many singers destroy their voices with “support.”
So I want to talk about what “support” means (versus support), why singing teachers talk about it so often, and what’s wrong with the term.
Many people, when they try singing, will naturally tense up their throat.
The airflow that comes out of our respiratory tract needs to be neither too much, nor too little, so the vocal folds in our larynx can vibrate just right.
It’s a lot like blowing air over a paper strip to make it float. (You can try it! Your very own demonstration of support!) Too much, and it sputters out. Too little, and it’s never lifted enough.
So, what people naturally, some would say unnaturally, do is tense up their throat, to regulate the airflow coming out somehow. This leads to a misplaced larynx, a tsunami of tension in the rest of the face and body, and generally a kind of constrained quality of singing we don’t associate with beautiful or natural.
It’s understandable. From elementary school, we start training children to interact with things via control. If you control the outcome of this test, you might get into the next class. If you can control the sound of your violin, you might advance in the orchestra. (If you control the forest, you might…)
There’s very little relationship with a way of being that’s not control, to the point it can just feel like the invisible default. “It’s just what you do.” It’s impossible to gesture out of it.
So people come at singing with the same expectation and preparedness to control. They expect to wilfully control their singing, and tense up their throat muscles with a rigidity that mimics a classroom timetable, or form, or sitting in a chair: hold it still, ignore desire for movement, and get something done.
So the throat is rigid, the larynx is distorted, and the throat can’t really do that good of a job at regulating airflow anyway; for high notes, or particularly low notes, or particularly loud notes or soft notes, or any dynamics, it just can’t do the job the massive diaphragmatic muscles we have can.
Singing is difficult, sounds bad, and hurts the throat.
The world of singing largely recognises this, and support has been the secret passed down. People know enough to know that when the diaphragm (which is really shorthand for an entire set of muscles), the voice can be louder, more confident, softer, with more agility, lower, and higher.
The issue is in people think they can do that willfully, and they take the same preparedness to control and move it down from the throat to the diaphragm.
This “support” does work. Students can learn to “do a thing” that gives them access to pitches and dynamics they didn’t have before, and this is why singing teachers teach it. And yet the truth is when the diaphragm is tense, so is the rest of the body, and also the soul. The rigidity moved downstairs. Students can do more, but as my Libero Canto teacher would say, the voice is destroyed.
Listen to this recording of Alma Gluck, a beloved opera singer from the 1900s. When she sings, her voice is simply sitting on breath. Her voice isn’t wilful; it is channeled. She becomes almost transparent, in how she channels something that may be called spirit.
These are vivid ways to describe the fact that Alma Gluck has not destroyed her voice with a fixation on diaphragmatic control. Instead, her body has learned to strengthen the diaphragm and use it naturally. Her movement is moving as one, arising from itself. She let go, and funnily enough, it gave her a great degree of lowercase-c control over her voice.
Diaphragmatic support is necessary, but the “support” that is often taught and related to is just a mechanism of control and rigidity applied to the lower torso instead of the throat. In Libero Canto and Vocal De-armoring, the teaching that helped my voice, and the way I teach, is to allow the voice to let go more, so the body’s mechanisms for learning can kick in.
Along the way is a sometimes delightful, sometimes harrowing journey in simply yawning, and letting the body do what it does. But to someone used to control, it really can feel scary and empty, I sympathise with that. There’s an absence of doing the thing we used to do.
When we’re already aching, stillness feels like pain.
The support Libero Canto teaches does not need to maintain conscious control of the diaphragm, but simply stays conscious to how the body feels as it explores the voice, and allows it to make little experiments that inform it and strengthen it. The purpose of a good teacher is to enhance that process of body’s experiment. That’s support. And that’s why I sigh at “support.”
End notes:
Tension in singing is not a bad thing; it is necessary. Extraneous tension is not. Like a violin bow, some tension actually produces the beautiful sounds of our voice, but to have an excess and concentration of tension that impedes ~movement~ rather than moves with it is stiff singing, not free singing.
Likewise, wilfulness in singing is not a bad thing, but only being able to be wilful, in my opinion, is not free singing.