The S-Word (“Support”)
a less helpful term than it seems
Yatharth:
While watching the Libero Canto documentary, I noticed one of the teachers, Deborah, disliked the word “support.” She seems to even suggest “support killed many singers’ voices.”
Support seems to be a thing lots of singing teachers talk about. What’s so wrong with it?
Marisa:
Where to start!
First thing — often there isn't agreement about what we mean. By “support”, some people mean “sing from your belly” - which often translates to people as tightening the abdominal muscles. Other people seem to mean, “sing with a supported sound” - which sometimes means a non-breathy sound or a “focused” and pingy sound. Sometimes people mean don't sing from your throat (meaning don't push or squeeze from your throat). Some people mean sing from the diaphragm, but then the question becomes, okay, how? And often, again, the how is some sort of tensing to feel like you have control.
Nothing is wrong with support! I'd say that, from my perspective, there isn’t actually a lot of specific agreement about what that word means. By “support”, some people mean “sing from your belly” - which often translates to people as tightening the abdominal muscles. Other people seem to mean, “sing with a supported sound” - which sometimes means a non-breathy sound or a “focused” and pingy sound. Sometimes people mean don’t sing from your throat (by which they usually mean, don’t push or squeeze from your throat).
Some people mean sing from the diaphragm, but then the question becomes, okay, how? Often, the “how” is some sort of tensing to feel like you have control. The idea of singing from the diaphragm becomes a matter of trying to contort and control the body by controlling where the body initiates sound from.
Yatharth:
That'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 we have with a way of being that’s not control, to the point control can just feel like the invisible default. “It’s just what you do.” It’s impossible to gesture out of it.
So what I'm gathering is that 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 a form, or sitting in a chair: hold it still, ignore desire for movement, and get something done.
The throat is rigid.
Marisa:
Yes, and when the throat is rigid and someone is primarily squeezing for the throat, talking about supporting from the diaphragm can initially be super helpful - because it moves some of the energy out of the throat, out into lower in the body. That's like a band-aid kind of fix.
Yatharth:
Aha. So when students try to “do support,” they distribute the tension into the rest of the body, but don't actually remove extraneous tension.
And so this "support" does give students access to some more pitches and dynamics they didn’t have before, and I guess this is why singing teachers teach it?
Students think they can do support willfully, and they take the same inclination to control and just move it down from the throat to the diaphragm. When the diaphragm is rigid, so is the rest of the body, and also the soul.
Marisa:
So a deeper, inside-out kind of paradigm shift would be working with that rigidity itself - rigidity in the mind, the heart, the body… What's so special about this way of learning singing, is that it's an Undoing Way. The body knows when we get out of the way.
If you let the body be free, under careful and expert guidance, it can naturally develop the “support” to sing with agility and freedom. Wilfulness isn’t necessary. The word “support” often makes singers think they have to do a thing, and in doing that thing, they ensure they’ll never truly sing freely. The body will learn to support on its own when we get out of the way. The body will reveal to us how to sing - it already knows. And that includes how to support. Which means, to me for our purposes right now, that the singing is on the breath. On the breath means the singer is breathing out, and the muscle of the diaphragm is acting as a leader of the pack of muscles involved in the breathing out.
Yatharth:
Yeah, there’s an difference between “support” as something a singer is trying to do, and support as referring to a natural diaphragmatic strength and agility.
Maybe in trying to gesture at that support directly, singing teachers unintentionally lead students to do the former thing. As if singing was a wilful coordination of parts, rather than a movement that arises naturally as the body knows how to learn to sing.
Marisa:
We are looking to cultivate spontaneity - not control. A spontaneous, dynamic, responsive diaphragm. Responsive to the musical imagination, to the heart, to the mind and the spirit. Breathing is, after all, life itself, and the diaphragm is more than “just” a muscle, it is life-giving.
Yatharth:
I loved this recording of Alma Gluck you played in the channel membership class: 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.
Marisa:
It moves me so much that this is what you heard. When I first heard Alma Gluck, I was blown away. Compared to the modern opera and musical theatre singers I listened to regularly, she seemed other worldly to me. It was a confusing listening experience, because I couldn't hear emotion in the same way I was used to. But I did hear emotion - in a different way. Like you say, spirit.
Now, of course I don't know what Alma Gluck was actually thinking about when she was singing, but what I hear is voice on the breath, super toned and flexible diaphragm, and a lack of hardness in the muscle. I also hear letting go. It's hard to write about these things which is why I've been avoiding it. Hearing can be so subjective. I write in my book about the process of listening I went through over many years, to hone the specificity of my hearing. Gotta get that damn book finished.
This was Part 1. 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.