The Wonderful & Confusing World of Breath Management!

Breath. I refer to this most important subject as Breath Management. It encompasses everything to do with inhalation and exhalation. Personally I found this to be the most frustrating and bewildering part of mastering the skills needed to sing well. This is a subject that I need to talk about in numerous posts so I will just talk about one issue at a time. I am a down and outer. What does that mean? It means that when you inhale you literally feel your breath go down low in your body and out. This corresponds to how I experience support. If a singer inhales correctly they will see their abdomens expand outward. I like to expand as low as possible. When we sing we must maintain the same feeling of full inhalation. That outward expanded feeling is what we keep when we support. I never want to allow a feeling of in or up. The Italian word “appoggio” means “to lean” The great basso Jerry Hines talked to me a lot about the energy created when we “lean” down on the breath “appoggio” and hold our lowest abdominal muscles firm and strong. I must admit when I began developing this technique with Jerry and my main voice teacher Dodi Protero I was a mess! Pushing, shoving, trying, failing. It took me a long time to build not only the strength I needed but more importantly the correct coordination so I could sustain his breathing technique for long periods of time. One of the things that helped me the most is every lesson that I took with Dodi she made me sing with a seamless legato line. This means many things….steady vibrato on every pitch, constant vocal sound and no stopping of the sound. This is the essence of “bel canto” singing. I believe the absolute mastery of this legato singing is what is missing in today’s singing. I like to give my students some bel canto songs to make them work hard and develop this skill.