Vocal Music Advice

One obvious cause for the high-larynx scenario is that singing has increasingly tended to abandon the principles that for centuries were cultivated and until the mid-twentieth century characterized most popular vocal music.  The popular tonal models are what teenagers come to admire.  James McKinney said categorically:

After working with hundreds of young adults for over 40 years, I am convinced that very few have any conception at all how their voices should sound or, for that matter, how any well-trained singer or speaker should sound.  If they have any model in mind, it usually is drawn from the pop or rock singers heard 24 hours a day on radio and television, many of whom are prime examples of what vocal abuse can do to the human voice. (1)

McKinney went on to declare that:

The typical young adult coming out of the teenage years has no basis for knowing how loud a well-produced voice seems to the person who is making that sound nor of the strength of the vibratory sensations that accompany what voice teachers refer to as ‘‘richness’’ of timbre and ‘‘depth’’ of tone.  Many young adults avoid developing good vocal technique because of the misconception that they will sound too loud or too artificial when making the kind of sound the teacher is advocating.  Such students must be exposed to good vocal models, either in performance or on recordings, until they have replaced their tonal misconceptions with a positive mental image of good vocal tone.(2)

Poor tonal models and their aesthetic influence comprise a primary influence on the plethora of young singers with the idiosyncrasy of the high larynx.

A second observable cause for the prevalence of the elevated larynx among incoming college singers is habitually poor posture, induced and reinforced in the use of electronic amplification.  This point is not unrelated to the one previously mentioned.  The typical posture by popular singing models is a horizontally hand-held microphone … or slightly at an angle as though draining a stein of beer, with chin and head raised.  Regrettably, many young adults in American churches who use a standing microphone to amplify their soft sultry sound still do not take advantage of the opportunity to stand with good posture, but are seen to crane the head forward, instead of standing closer to the microphone.  The resulting development of poor singing and postural habits is understandable in this scenario.

The development of the adolescent voice renders many teens insecure vocally and unable for a time to phonate efficiently.

There is a period when the interarytenoid muscles can not or do not close the back one-third of the glottis; this results in a gap between the vocal processes of the arytenoids cartilages—the cartilaginous portion of the glottis.  This opening is so prevalent in adolescent voices that it has become known as the mutational chink.  Despite this chink, progress can be made toward reducing the amount of breathiness present. (3)

William Vennard adds a warning to this observation in his text saying, “Young singers should not be driven to eliminate this breathiness impatiently.“(4) [italics Vennard’s]

Kendra Friar quotes the research of Lynn Gackle’s doctoral dissertation concerning girls.  She states:

. . . that girls pass through three identifiable stages of voice change divided according to speaking pitch, tessitura, quality of voice at different registers, and overall voice quality.  A first-stage girl has a light, childlike, flexible voice.  A second-stage girl is in the prepubescence/premenarcheal period, characterized by first signs of breathiness, or she is in the puberty/post-menarcheal period, or the peak of mutation, which is characterized by unpredictable changes in range and ease of singing.  A girl in the third and final stage, though not an adult, demonstrates a larger vocal range, consistency in changing registers, and a more adult vocal quality.  Gackle instructed directors to classify adolescent girls as either “light” sopranos or “rich” sopranos, since they do not yet possess the adult characteristics of sopranos or altos. (5)

One recent study at California State University identified boys has having five stages of vocal—mutational—development during the adolescent years.(6)   The material point is that the relative instability that many youth feel vocally renders them more apt to rely on electronic help so as to be heard.  Besides this, use of electronic amplification is also driven by popularity and pressure to conform to the peer structure.  It is “cool” for a young musician to possess his own amplification system.(7)

Another contribution for laryngeal instability among young singers is produced by their desire to emulate their popular vocal models and in a range that strains the voice.   Most popular male singers sing at a frequency in the range that is often the identical notes of their low-voiced female counterparts.  What females belt, males often strenuously strain and contort their features to reach.  Other popular singers, being fully mature, have very wide ranges.  These extensive spans are frequently exploited in the songs they perform.  In both cases, young voices are not developmentally able to sing the material.  Therefore, it is attempted under great tension.

One other cause shall be named: ignorance.  Within the existing lifespan of our college students, a large percentage of high schools across the country that used to cultivate the arts and music have stopped doing so.  High school bands, orchestras and choirs have dwindled in number.  The wide-ranging music instruction within many high schools that formerly had it has diminished.  Students who find teachers to instruct them on the foundations of music and singing do so more frequently on an individual basis now.  For this reason the Music Educators National Conference and the Music Teachers National Association exist to fulfill a vital role in the American culture.  What used to be taught in the schools as main subjects prior to the Great Depression is now being advocated for reintroduction to the schools by these organizations.(8)

What is it that must be taught to respond to the counter-productive stresses of the high larnynx?  What is it that produces the beneficial relaxation of the jaw, the expansion of the pharynx and stability to the larynx?  The answer is found in the “open throat.”(9)
_______________________
(1)  James McKinney, “The Three Ages of Voice: The Singing/Acting Young Adult from a Singing Instruction Perspective” Journal of Voice (11:2 June 1997), 153.
(2)  Ibid., 154.
(3)  McKinney, Diagnosis, 87.
(4)  William Vennard, Singing, the Mechanism and the Technic (New York: Carl Fischer, 1967), 63.
(5)  Kendra Kay Friar, “Changing Voices, Changing Times” Music Educators Journal (86:3, November 1999), 26-29.  Friar synthesizes Gackle’s article from the Choral Journal in this paragraph.
(6)  Ibid.
(7)  The popular thinking is, ‘the more decibels…the better.’  Such is the distortion [pun intended] in the thinking of many youth.
(8)  Michael L. Mark, “A History of Music Education Advocacy” Music Educators Journal (89:1, September 2002), 44.  Michael explains that “Advocacy is the way that we as music educators can explain to policy makers, as well as to the general public, the reasons why our profession is important and why we need their support to continue serving the needs of society. As advocates, we need to tell the nation that music education is vital and dynamic.”

(9)  To be sure, there is much more to be taught in conjunction with the concept of the open throat such as posture, respiration, breath support and control, phonation, articulation, expression and musicianship that applies to learning to sing.

Tags: cultural peer pressure, Ignorance, insecure vocally, poor models, poor posture, reliance on amplification

This entry was posted on Monday, May 24th, 2010 at 2:26 pm and is filed under 5. Causes of High-Larynx singing, Adolescent vocal issues. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.