Week 3: Seeing Improvement

Happy Monday Everyone!

This week wasn’t a perfect streak, but it was a VAST improvement over the week before. I completed my three hours of work four days last week. The fifth day wasn’t a total loss - I did about an hour of work, but had to grab some groceries for a friend who is shut in right now. At the end of the day, I felt like being a good human was more important than completing my three hours of music work. I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that no one will give me a hard time about this.

Nearly all of my work time last week was spent practicing. I’m working on picking rep for a competition, and so I’ve been trying out new things, digging out old things, and generally seeing what works. I took my two new arias from a couple of weeks ago to a coaching on Friday, and they’re coming along really nicely. I’m letting those two settle in before I try to record them in a few weeks!

Something great happened this week though. For a mezzo, I have a pretty solid upper extension (I got the “Do you think you might be a soprano?” question for YEARS, but that is a topic for another day). However, I’ve always struggled to keep the tone completely even all the way to the top. It wants to thin out and either get squeaky or airy. It lacks the power of my middle and upper middle voice. Granted, I’m talking about notes almost two octaves above middle C that mezzos don’t have to use all that often, but they still have to be there when I need them. And they need to sound GOOD.

Why am I rambling about high notes, you ask? BECAUSE I BROKE THE CODE!!!

I could give a long lecture on what it feels like and the technical aspects of this, but I realize that it’s probably not all that interesting to most of you reading this. The short version is that it feels like the sound is traveling the path of a shepherd’s hook through my head if said shepherd’s hook were ending between my eyebrows (the sound has to go back before it goes forward, if that makes sense?). Suffice it to say, that my coach heard the difference immediately, and we celebrated.

Have you had a breakthrough in your work lately? I want to hear about it!