Readers of this column know that I believe the athletic training paradigm can inform vocal studies in a number of useful ways. As we embark upon a new academic year, I encourage those of you who are enrolled in performance degree programs to investigate ways in which your school’s broader resources can help you incorporate a sport-specific athletic training regimen into your curriculum and start a dialogue with your teachers and peers about the relationship between fitness and singing.
I find it useful to distinguish between aspects of vocal technique that are specific to the coordination we seek to develop in the studio and the broader physiological attributes that must be addressed with fitness and somatic practices—alignment, stamina, and overall stability. I believe that the time has come for voice departments to create the means to provide singers with education and robust support for fitness as an integral component of performance curricula.
When voice teachers regard incoming freshmen as being in possession of an instrument suitable for the development of technique and musicianship, we do them (as well as ourselves) a significant disservice. With rare exceptions, young singers’ alignment and overall fitness are not yet adequately developed for the task. If schools do not provide them with the means to optimize their instruments, far too much is left to chance. They may later find themselves encountering deep frustration and confusion when technical and musical training alone fail to yield the results they desire.
With the exception of some hardcore child athletes, everyone develops postural distortions and muscular imbalances. As F. M. Alexander put it, “Use determines function.” Our bodies evolve in response to the way we use them day in and day out. Distortions and imbalances can be created by sitting for long hours in classrooms or in front of a television or computer; engaging in repetitive asymmetrical activities like shooting pool, playing guitar, or skateboarding; or recovering from an injury that leads you to favor one leg over the other for an extended period of time.
No one develops a perfectly balanced musculature by accident. Your body is the sum total of your habits and experiences. The minor distortions and imbalances that you develop may create no problem whatsoever for the average human, but any serious athlete must strive to resolve them in order to achieve peak performance. When a singer fails to address them, they are playing a dysfunctional instrument. The dysfunction may manifest as only a slightly exaggerated spinal curvature or asymmetry, but it will likely limit their singing in one or more ways.
Athletes and their trainers know that good alignment is essential for optimal performance, and it is just as important for excellence in singing. Most athletic activities have a direct impact on alignment, however, while singing does not. Singers are also not regularly assessed for imbalances or provided the means to address them the way that athletes are. This also applies to cardiorespiratory stamina, which is crucial for singers and fairly simple to assess and improve upon—yet most of us have little awareness of the vital role it contributes to performance or any tools to address it.
The best teacher in the world can only teach a singer how to play the instrument they bring to the studio. Examples of athletic limitations impacting performance capabilities include the following:
-If a postural distortion of their cervical spine is limiting movement of the structures governing phonation and resonance, it will likely also limit the singer’s ability to apply techniques designed to improve range, registration, and tone.
-If muscular imbalances in their torso are impeding their ability to fully expand their rib cage, they are also impeding the singer’s ability to learn breath management. If the muscles governing scapular retraction are weak, they will fail to maintain an elevated sternum no matter how many times you point out that their chest is collapsing. Weakness in these muscles is also usually behind a tendency to elevate their shoulders on inspiration.
-If miscellaneous chronic tensions and movement habits go unresolved, unintended movements (such as unconscious arm and neck movement and side-to-side weight shifting) will punctuate their singing and interfere with their ability to embody their characters.
-If they have not developed adequate oxygen consumption, they will not be able to sustain long phrases on a single breath despite excellent breath coordination.
If the source of a singer’s problem rests in their alignment, it can be resolved only through improving their alignment, no matter how skillful their teacher or how diligently they practice. Voice teachers are unlikely to be able to detect the reasons for such problems—and even if they can, it is usually outside the scope of their practice to be able to resolve them. The best that most will be able to do is offer strategies that may enable singers to compensate for them, but that will never yield the kind of freedom necessary for mastering singing.
Singers need training and resources to optimize their physical instruments, and voice teachers need assurance that their students are getting the support they need to get and keep their voices in shape. I would like to see voice departments provide each singer with a thorough individual assessment of those aspects of their fitness that impact performance and design a regimen to resolve any imbalances or deficits.
Clarinetists understand that fingering activates keys that, by means of springs, cover up holes with padded discs. The springs sometimes break; the pads age and need to be replaced from time to time. They need to know how their instrument works so they can keep it in good working order. They also need to know whether a problem they’ve encountered is the result of faulty technique or a faulty instrument. Singers must cultivate similar relationships with their instruments.
I have here stressed the importance for singers to develop good alignment, stamina, balanced strength and flexibility, and overall health and well-being. But I do not include any reference to body composition in my list of essential physical attributes. While there does seem to be a correlation between body composition and vocal excellence, it is likely a correlation that is specific to each individual singer. Were we to do a study, it may be that we would find that there is a range of body fat percentage that the majority of fine singers fall in, but I suspect that that range would be too wide to make it broadly useful.
What can be said is that a significant change in body composition will have an impact on how the instrument functions. Anything you do to promote a significant change in your physiology will have an impact on how your instrument functions. Therefore, changes you pursue in your physiology should ideally be for the express purpose of optimizing your instrument. Any changes you pursue for any other reason must be undertaken with respect for what it might do to your instrument and monitored carefully for any adverse effects.
This is why it greatly concerns me when I observe an ever-increasing emphasis on singers’ appearances among impresarios and casting directors. I am all for singers becoming as fit as possible, but in service to their singing. The pervasive idea that the voice is one thing and the body is another is utterly ridiculous. They are one and the same.
It is so counterproductive when singers go to extremes to slim down or pump up without serious consideration for how it might impact their instrument. Were they instead to engage in a fitness regimen designed to optimize their instrument, they would likely realize their aesthetic goals as well. And should this regimen fail to realize those aesthetic goals, that would indicate that these goals were unrealistic and impractical.
I’m recommending incorporating the means to optimize singers’ instruments into performance curricula because I want to improve singers’ chances for success. An additional benefit, however, would hopefully be that doing so would begin to educate the greater opera community that there is such a thing as an optimal instrument, and aesthetic concerns must take a back seat to its cultivation.
If, in addition to voice teachers and vocal coaches, singers have fitness and bodywork specialists on hand to ensure their peak performance, it will not only benefit the singers but also raise broader awareness of what it means to simultaneously be and play an instrument. It will become clear that form follows function and that it is no more useful to compare an opera singer to a movie actor than it is to compare a gymnast to a basketball star.
