Question from a Teen: Open your throat. How?
Wednesday, July 30th, 2008When singing, how can you open your throat?
Answer: Hi Crystal,
My guess is that “open your throat” is the dictum of someone who is coaching you in voice. I know when I was a teenager a vocal coach said something off-the-wall to me that made no sense to me – until years later when more data “explained” everything.
“Opening the throat” is what enriches, warms and amplifies the sound produced by the vocal cords, and it doesn’t need to be a mystery to you. Let me see if I can help.
You can find what it FEELS like to open your throat by doing the following three things.
1) Pretend that you’ve just opened the door into your home and you’re SURPRISED by an old friend you haven’t seen in two years. You automatically “gasp” in surprise. Go ahead and do the “surprised gasp”. Now, do it again and see if you can hold that feeling. Then, keeping that feeling, say “Hi! how are you!?”
2) Again, using your imagination, pretend that you’re holding your favorite flower (perhaps a rose) in your hand and you’re taking in the wonderful perfumed scent with a deep breath. Go ahead and pretend that you’re smelling that rose. Notice what happened to your jaw and throat when you did that!
3) This time, still using your imagination, think of yourself in a meeting being lectured by your principal – and you suddenly feel the need to yawn. Of course you don’t want to make it obvious, you submerge it instead. Now, go ahead and “BEGIN A YAWN”. See if you can stop there without going all the way into the yawn. If you can learn what it feels like to only BEGIN A YAWN – memorize what that feels like.
I should tell you that there are teachers that will go into a great amount of detail differentiating between the three examples praising one and warning against the others.
Nevertheless, it will be evident that in each case you’ll notice that your jaw drops downward (and your voice box does too slightly), your throat expands slightly and if you inhale with your mouth open the air feels cool in the back of the throat and the air goes in you easily and quietly. THAT FEELING – of the jaw dropped down and the throat slightly expanded is what is known as the “open throat.”
It may take some practice and getting used to before you can reproduce it without always ending up yawning. The full yawn is TOO OPEN and TOO STRENUOUS – and that’s not what you need to get to. Memorize the feeling of “the beginning of a yawn” or “smelling a rose” and start making sound without being critical of what you hear. You may think of the sound as being “bigger” “more mature” “dramatic”, etc.
Learning to do this may not come instantly, but, with practice you can become very comfortable with it and allow ALL YOUR SINGING to come through this “open throat” feeling. Listen to and watch Stephen Costello, tenor, and Jessye Norman, mezzo-soprano (among a host of wonderful singers).
To help your jaw get used to dropping open freely, you may want to add an exercise like “Yah-oo, Wah-oo” purposely allowing your jaw to “fall open” freely.
Now, having said all this that sounds positive toward the idea of the “open throat” I must issue a warning. There is a very real danger of artificially opening and/or over opening the pharyngeal space creating unwanted tension, a darkened tone and even a compromised resonance that lacks brilliance of the singer’s formant. The concept of the open throat does not extend to expanded tension, but rather easy “relaxed” openness that maintains freedom of movement. It is at this point that sound is enriched, amplified into a timbre listeners greatly appreciate.
I hope this helps. Best wishes.