Singing Teacher Uses Another, Even Better Analogy
John Man, local singing teacher and last living link to the bel canto tradition, used another analogy in his singing lesson yesterday.
“Touch the sky with your castle and fly down on the carpet,” he said to Little Jimmy, eager student. “And remember, don’t let Aladdin into your lamp!”
Little Jimmy smiled, nodded, and wrote something down on his iPad. “I like the analogies because they surge unbidden from the great collective unconscious of Man,” he explained. “If I hear enough of them, eventually I will understand.”
“Listen only to the next note and throw the current note into a basket,” said Man. “If you collect too many eggs you might not be hatching just chickens!”
Sally McNally, another one of Man’s students, said that the analogies were at times a little strange but generally much more helpful than getting other types of knowledge like facts. “Sometimes a teacher might say something about vocal folds or tongue position or what air is, but I tend to prefer being taught knowledge I can use, not knowledge that’s just there.”
Man nodded sagely. “Exactly,” he said. “The sound doesn’t come out of your mouth, you send it there. As you climb the beanstalk you must be planting more seeds, otherwise you won’t escape. Pull on the thread and let the knitwear reveal itself.”
We asked a passing violinist if any of these analogies could help in their practice sessions. “Well, I’m not sure those analogies quite work on violin,” he explained. “My teacher tends to use a different sort of analogy, like, ‘your playing is as bad as the gulag I escaped from,’ or ‘your intonation is like the spiritual desolation of a six-month winter’ or ‘your phrasing is as aimless and disappointing as my own children.’ You know, helpful stuff that bolsters the soul and makes you want to work harder.”
“Let the breathing take care of itself by letting it in and out at the same time,” said Man to another student, Bob Guy. “Remember, pumps don’t break when you stand on them, unless they have a faulty design! Is the sound where your feelings are? Make your lips the gateway to your teeth.”
Guy told us that he found the analogies quite frustrating. “I actually have aphantasia which means I can not see visual imagery in my minds eye,” he explained, “so all of these images and analogies are quite pointless for me. It would be like having a teacher who said things that did not help me at all.”
“When swans swim along the river, they don’t listen to the river,” said Man. “The river doesn’t even have a mouth!”
One area of singing technique to which Man devotes a great deal of energy is the thorny question of consonants and how to use them with nonsonants, otherwise known as vowels. “Diction is the most important thing about singing,” explained Little Jimmy, “except for all the other things, like singing.”
“Consonants are the inter-crown spacing of the forestry of supported vowel growth,” explained Man. “Let your consonants be like the vegetables that collect in your sink: you just need to turn the garbage machine on. Let your consonants be like a forgotten memory: it happened, but not to you. Don’t do consonants like they are important; they are too important for that! Let your consonants open like an envelope and close like a paper plane. If you sit under the sun, you’ll get warm; that’s how your vowels should feel next to your consonants. Let your consonants taste like filtered water: refreshing, and won’t make you sick. Let your consonants be a door with a hinge you’ve recently doused in vowels, and by vowels I mean wd-40. If your consonants are breaking the line, hang them out to dry, with a peg! Let your consonants hear only themselves, not their friends. Let your consonants be like the grapes that make wine; yes they have a lot of juice, but you’ve got to stamp on them to get it. And then don’t drink too much, because you’ll get drunk!”
Dorothy Borothy, another singing teacher at the same institution as Man, says that at first she did not quite appreciate the power of a good analogy, but after hearing Man use so many of them, she has started using them herself. “You can’t build a house around a window,” she said.
“Exactly,” said Man. “We have to keep spinning, like a truck driving through outer space: that’s the only way to reach the moon. What matters is not how you are doing it but what you are doing. Your back should be your lungs. In some ways, they are!”