Free your neck and go bubbles

The music world is quite demanding!

Somehow musicians decided that there must be no room for mistakes. If they make a mistake they feel something terrible is going to happen and they will never recover from it again, so somehow their necks are always at stake. So singers and musicians go on in life doing their best in order not to make a mistake. 

And so they will safely stay where they are, maybe improving a little in disguising their mistakes, mainly just 'hiding' it better, yet they will stay where they are.

Funny thing is that in order to learn something new we all know we must allow ourselves to make mistakes. Jazz music is the proof of that, a good musician will just 'extend' that mistake and make something else out of it, that's when it becomes improvisation.

Yet when making a mistake, singers and musicians in general tend to freeze and that little mistake is bound to take over the mood for the rest of the song, and it will take them at least another song to recover from it. If only they use their heads they would know the audience wants to hear good music played from their hearts, not from their fear. An audience can forgive any mistake if the musician/singer is honest and open.

No, no mistakes allowed or... let's play and sing ugly

After a long journey of searching for my own voice 'outside of myself', learning tricks and practising the best way I could, doing the best I could not to make mistakes, I finally found it. And I found my own voice not by practising the same again and again but by learning how my instrument really works. And most of all, by allowing myself to go wrong, to feel wrong and most important, to have fun with it. By exploring and playing, really playing!

I decided to bring playful ideas into my way of teaching and to have people 'singing ugly' sometimes, so they can give themselves permission to sing differently. You would be surprised what beautiful voices come out when I ask my pupils to sing ugly!

So we all went bubbles
As I mentioned in the last post, the last 'uSing your voice and body well' workshops were in Zagreb, at Kubus Arts Organisation we had a big range in levels, styles, and professions: singers, musicians, actors, dancers, teachers... Everyone learning from each other, which makes the work so much alive and so much fun.

And at the Academy of Music University, time for something 'really serious': opera singers!
A group of pupils from the 1st till the 5th year and their teachers were present, wonderful voices, wonderful dedicated people. And we all had a great time seriously playing with the work.

From the Alexander Technique we know the importance of not disturbing the relationship between head, neck and torso. Most people will unconsciously pull their head back in relationship to the neck and torso for breathing, a.o. That is such a deeply rooted habit in most of us that we won't feel we are doing it (more about sensors and feeling wrong in one of the next posts, keep tuned).

How to deal with it? Well... I like to go bubbles. No need to force nor to be serious about blowing bubbles!

As usual I was giving a feed back with my hands to each one of the participants so they could feel what they were actually doing when blowing out those bubbles, and they all found out a lot. Some even found that if they didn't pull their head back they'd have to re-direct the air flow in order to blow out the bubbles. Some started to get too serious with the new discovery, but I make sure to remind them it's only bubbles!

Free your neck and go bubbles

I remember when I had to learn how to re-direct my voice because my neck was finally freer. It was scary for a moment, it is quite scary to change so much, but what the heck, we get used to ourselves again and again.

I am now 48 years old, and I feel very privileged to be able to keep on playing and go bubbles with such a great bunch of inspiring people.