THE SINGING BREATH

How would I describe the singing breath if someone were to ask me? I was wondering the other day. How did I experience it? Well, I would explain that to sing you have to take abnormally deep breaths, so your whole muscular apparatus has to learn what to do to both accommodate and utilize this super-breath (I remember Marilyn Horne saying you even have to use your buttocks muscles). When I breathed correctly, I had a wonderful sense of capaciousness—no, more than that—of boundlessness. I felt like I could go on inhaling, my ribcage expanding indefinitely, as though there were no limits whatever to how much breath I could draw. When I took a less successful breath, however, I would hit an obstruction—a physical dead end—in one place or another in my body, an area that became “locked” in a manner that didn’t allow me to open any further; the sensation was even a little painful.

When Giora, one of the directors of the Alexander Technique school in Berkeley, first guided me from a stool to a standing position—one of his hands on my neck, the other on my sternum—I had the sensation of floating upward, it was so effortless. Later he explained that by moving quickly, he could bypass his students’ usual way of using their bodies, their habits of bracing and tension. By not giving these time to kick in, he was able to trick the body into moving in a more integrated way.

My hunch is that Mrs. Unruh used to do something similar with me, that by forcing me to keep up with her brisk musical accompaniment during vocalises, instead of constantly stopping and starting me the way most teachers would have, she created a momentum that swept my body past all of my habits of holding and tension.

Unfortunately, at the time I quit my lessons with her, my breathing was still hit and miss; I hadn’t completely mastered this new way of using my body. What complicated things further is that I had a lordosis—a curvature of the spine—so that a sitting position allowed my ribcage to expand more easily than a standing one. Unlike the majority of teachers who insist their students stand, Mrs. Unruh was confidant that as my technique became more assured, I’d be able to translate what I was learning from a sitting position to a standing one.

I also remember another distinct sensation I had when I took a singing breath. I felt as though there was the midpoint of a cross in the middle of my back and my intake of air caused the lateral arms of the cross to expand outward while, more surprisingly, the vertical arms moved upwards and downwards. When I tried to do my vocalises on my own, however, I was unable to replicate this sensation that had allowed my voice to soar.