kainscalia

As a professional opera singer and someone who has acquired a certain level of knowledge of technique -acquired the hard way after some years under the hands of bad teachers- I see something horrible being done here. The young girl's voice is truly exceptional, it has an unusual beauty --- and in some years' time it will be completely, utterly ruined.

The lip tremble and chin wobble that is evident in several of her videos, as well as the unsteady and fluttery nature of her vibrato denote a *large* amount of sub-glottic pressure. These are things that aren't simply aesthetic problems, they are indicators of things that destroy voices and ruin careers.

The presence of the jaw shake this early is extremely worrysome. Technician David Jones explains the consequences of this in this fashion:


When I search my memory for singers who suffer this vocal problem, one large-voiced soprano comes to mind whose career was supported early on by Luciano Pavarotti. She has a beautiful instrument with fullness of color and beauty of timbre. However, this singer suffers chronically with a shaking jaw and tongue. The focus of the voice is sacrificed and over time, a large wide vibrato (wobble) developed in her voice. Tragically, this singer who once had a mainstream career hardly sings.


The chronically shaking jaw is merely the external symptom of a serious internal problem that is a combination of one or more of these elements:

*Breath pressure: When breath and support are not low enough, it causes a lot of problems for the onset of sound or what some singers call the "attack".
When the breath is not 'low' enough (diaphragmatic) , it is essentially a clavicular breath (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPITHzdUUDk you can see it in the closeup here at 2:27 where the camera changes angle and you can see her shoulders moving up with her breath-- this is the indication of a clavicular or shallow breath) and you ennd up having too much breath pressure blasting upwards through the larynx. The result of this is that tension ends up accumulating in the shoulders, neck, jaw and tongue. The reason for diaphragmatic breathing is that it allows the singer to control the pressure using the lower body muscles-- with shallow breaths, you don't have these muscles working towards a regulated air pressure and the result is that, as vibrato occurs, the back of the tongue begins to shake uncontrollably. The result of this amount of tension is the shake in the jaw. Instead of creating a steady vibrato, this causes vibrato to become fast (the warbly 'Snow White' vibrato, which this poor child has started to develop) and often irregular.

*Incorrect Attack: When the singer hasn't been taught how to properly initiate the sound (what Joan Sutherland called the 'feathered touch', which is essentially a tone that is initiated in a gentle fashion from which vibrato occurs occassionally, versus the 'hooked' approach), the vocal cords do not come together properly after inhalation and the jaw and tongue try to control the sound. Because too much breath pressure has come through the cords at the attack (the 'onset of sound'), the tongue then tries to regulate the excessive breath pressure. At this point the vocal cords are not vibrating healthily and the singer essentially resorts to 'fabricating' the vibrato by shaking the jaw and the tongue. Although this often fools many listeners, this isn't true vibrato and it causes severe damage in the long run. The use of the tongue and jaw cause the eventual rising of the larynx-- which sets the singer up for potential vocal damage, as the larynx must remain in a naturally lowered and relaxed position.

*The High Larynx: Phonating with a high larynx can cause many bad things to happen. The vocal cords don't vibrate correctly (because they don't approximate the way they should), the soft palate (the 'vellum') collapses and the jaw tenses--- this is extremely dangerous and it robs the throat of the protection that technique grants the singer. This approach only causes problems as the singer's voice matures.

Unfortunately her high breaths create too much breath pressure under the larynx, therefore setting the stage for the "shaking jaw and tongue". When the breath is clavicular, the body often attempts to compensate by applying a downward pressure to fuel the breath (often attempting to depress the tongue). The result of this is that it 'overblows' the vocal cords, the jaw and tongue respond to too much breath pressure and shake uncontrollably. The long-term result of overblowing the cords can result in bowed vocal cords, nodules and polyps on the vocal cords- and the long long-term effects are, in sequence, loss of roundness of the voice, a 'lightening' and 'thinning out' of the singer's sound, loss of brilliance, the development of an exceedingly slow vibrato or 'wobble', and eventually the loss of most of the singer's register and a 'white' voice stripped of most of its attractive qualities (such is the state of another once famous 'girl singer,' Charlotte Church, whose voice has essentially been reduced to a colorless pinched sound
, she is now incapable of singing the classical repertoire with which she started)
The truth of the matter is that the girl's parents either have no brains whatsoever or they are too blinded with the promise of celebrity to think of her long-term interest--- but even worse, the girl's voice teacher -who SHOULD know better- is an absolute criminal for 1) Allowing her to do this AND 2) for having given her such an atrocious and damaging technique. I can assure you that I know that your objections to this will be "But she sounds great!"--- and indeed, she does, BECAUSE she has a naturally gorgeous voice. Voices that have a naturally ready beauty (as opposed to voices that eventually come into a beautiful quality after years of working them) are very deceptive- their lovely quality often overcomes technical problems at the very beginning. Young bodies can, for a time, compensate for bad techniques- but only for a time.
My own voice was one of those cases: I have an unusual instrument which most who heard me found naturally beautiful--- I had many technical deficiencies, but the pleasant nature of the instrument camouflaged most of those issues and I was essentially coasting on my youth. I was fortunate in time to find an amazing voice teacher who warned me of the incoming crisis (and, indeed, I had started to experience some of the early symptoms of problems during my then recent performance as Nemorino in Donizetti's "The Elixir of Love") and with whom I have been working towards attaining a solid technique and an intimate knowledge of the principles of singing and its physiology. Having said this, I am very much afraid for this young girl precisely because she has such a beautiful voice. The wobbling chin is a HUGE warning sign to anyone who knows anything of vocal technique -most female classical vocalists have to re-tool their approach to breath support after menopause due to physiological changes in the body. When they fail to do so, the chin wobble immediately appears and it indicates that the proper adjustment for breath support (or appoggio as the italian school calls it) has not taken place and that the singer is running the danger of ruining their voices. When a ten year-old girl is displaying this so early in her career, it is even a worse sign.


What disturbs me the most is that people don't see the truth for what it is: A potentially gorgeous instrument is in the hands of butchers, the people who should be watching out so that she should come to no harm are the blindest, but the only thing people seem to notice is how pretty she is and how lovely she sounds like. Sorry, Rationalbiker, this is something for the horror files. Whomever her voice teacher is, they should be punched squarely across the face for this. Repeatedly.

The tone of that argument sounds very Bill Clinton circa Lewinskygate. You are attempting to be obtusely naive, or otherwise you are trying to pretend that the suggestion and the act have nothing in common, which is honestly quite disingenuous. You are trying to say that the subject and the object are divorced and unlinked--- while at the same time agreeing to a certain contextual connection. There is either a context or there isn't, you can't have it both ways. Lady Gaga is vulgar and sensationalist, and she embodies and uses a view of sexuality and sex that is unhealthy and sensationalist, this is the fact you cannot escape.

People who admire and respect the beauty of the human body don't toss off their clothes to shock an audience into silence anymore than the Regietrash directors who use nudity in the middle of an opera in a vulgar and superfluous fashion to cause a rise out of the audience for purely shock's sake. Rather, they turn both the human body and sexuality into a mockery by thrusting it into a context in which it clashes and becomes discordant, distorted and objectified, bereft of all deep romantic meaning. I have heard a lot in this argument about context, well here's the gist of it- what they do is contextually incoherent and therefore seeks to reduce the object to an object of mockery, and therein lies the depravity of these so-called artists.

I'm glad this topic came up, there is a lot to think about.

When I try to analyse the question for myself "Is bullfighting art?" I am conflicted.
I know I'm harboring some contradiction and have yet to figure out how to correct it.

* Having watched some televised bullfights I see where CGA is coming from. There is a beauty and grace to the performance that is hard to deny. I also see the part about being a representation of man against primal nature.

* However, I do find it barbaric. While bullfighting should rightly be permissable (animals having no rights to violate) it does not change the distastefulness of causing drawn out suffering to a living creature.

CGA, you point out that we (as a society) kill animals all the time for food, to clear space, leather, so on. True.

Those animals are generally humanely killed.

Permissable. Yes.
Oddly beautiful. Yes
And yet, I still find something less than noble in a mind that needs to torment a living thing for entertainment purposes.