Free The Inner Voice: The Making of a Singer by Renee Fleming

scream” for three hours without causing herself pain and harm. When a singer uses her body and breath properly to support the voice, it takes the strain completely off the throat. My ear, nose, and throat doctor, David Slavit, marvels at the fact that we can sing for hours—a feat that ought to leave blood on the floor—yet come in the next day with baby-fresh vocal cords, showing no signs of redness, swelling, or strain. The same is rarely true of sports fans, who after shouting throughout a stadium match are generally hoarse or unable to speak. Stage actors have to learn support just as we do, or they could never withstand a regimen of eight shows a week, although the increasing presence of amplification even for plays is reducing the necessity for this kind of technique. Singers nevertheless rest between performances, for our Herculean “weight lifting for voices” needs a day off, just as power lifters would never train the same way runners do. Interestingly enough, the heavier the voice, the more such rest is necessary. A lyric voice such as mine, which less often engages in “extreme singing,” actually benefits from regular daily training, with flexibility being the key goal.
    How I support my breath is relatively simple to explain, but in practice a difficult process to really coordinate. Once I have taken in that optimal breath, and my abdominal wall is open, out, and expanded, along with as much of the rest of my torso as possible, I resist allowing these muscles to collapse again. “Resist” is the key word: if I continue to push out, I’ll lose the connection of the breath and create tension in my throat; if I allow it all to collapse quickly, I’ll have a breathy tone and not enough air to sing even a short phrase. Another crucial part of this formula is to keep the intercostal muscles out as well, and to prevent the chest from collapsing. I learned this particular technique from observing other singers, and there is a valid reason that caricatures of opera singers so often portray them as pigeon-chested. When I’m singing comfortably, I can actually imagine that my torso and my breath are doing all the work, while my throat is completely relaxed. Years of practice and experimentation led me to this optimal combination, which enables me to sing high-tessitura pieces, which are not by nature comfortable for me.
    While I was trying to understand how my own body worked, there was also music to learn and the entire concept of developing an artistic interpretation to wrestle with. For me, as for most singers, the process required a huge amount of time, energy, and practice. Of course, every now and then there’s someone who just happens to come by all of it naturally—the twenty-five-year-old who just opens his or her mouth, and by some miracle it’s all there. But even the greatest natural talent in the world needs to learn how to support and care for her instrument. In that respect the voice is like an inheritance: no matter how great it is, you still have to figure out a way to make it last. Everything breaks down at some point, and if the singer doesn’t know how to fix it, she will quickly fall by the wayside.
    I’ve finally accepted the fact that singing takes ten minutes to explain and ten years to accomplish. This was all work I had begun as a high-school student. Each teacher brought me further along with different explanations of the same concepts; often my understanding of those concepts was a result of my own experience or discovery, and sometimes it was just plain luck. Learning how to sing is rarely a process that follows a straight line, and it’s rarely clearer than fog until one grasps it in its totality.
    Most singers are like me, building up every little note, every notch, as if the voice were a mosaic put together one tiny colored tile at a time. It’s the puzzle again. Because I wasn’t a natural, I had to develop a very intricate understanding of how my instrument worked, with