Professor Evgenia Sheveliova is the second of the two teachers I’ve studied with whose ideas about voice have made the biggest impact on the way I sing and teach. 

We met in Moscow, during the summer of 2008, and our association came about rather unexpectedly. I was not looking for a singing teacher at the time, but rather a language coach to help me with some Shostakovich songs I wanted to learn. I asked a pianist friend in Moscow if he knew of anyone who might be able to help me. He only knew a proper singing teacher, he said, but thought I should meet her. During the course of that first meeting, it became clear there was much I could learn from her, and for the next three years, I travelled to Moscow three or four times a year for a tranche of lessons. 

Evgenia was 70 when we met, and a Professor at the Gnessin Academy of Music in Moscow. She was also a People’s Artist of the USSR – an honorary title awarded to artists of the Soviet Union for exceptional achievements in their particular field. We met at her flat in a tall Soviet-era block, set in a pleasant leafy district to the south of Moscow, close to the Orekhovo Metro station. My first impressions were of a rather formidable lady, small and slight in build and stern in aspect, but with a brightness in her eyes which burned with curiosity and interest. Her voice was firm, resonant, and clear in quality. 

I had been working on Schubet’s Winterreise that summer and took two songs from the cycle to sing to her. Evgenia had trained as a pianist before becoming a singer and played well, accompanying me herself on an upright Blüthner piano. After I’d sung, she walked across to a table by the window, picked up a large anatomy text book from a pile, and opened it at a page which showed some photographs of a cadaver in various stages of dissection. She said she hoped I wouldn’t mind looking at such photographs, but it was necessary if we were going to be able to work together. She then showed me a photograph of the abdominal muscles, explaining how engaging more with these muscles when I sang would give me the extra support and power she felt my voice needed.

What particularly interested me about Evgenia’s teaching was the fact that she also approached singing from an anatomical viewpoint, which was an approach I had begun to take with Esther Salaman. I understood from my pianist friend, who had worked with Evgenia at the Gnessin Academy, that this approach was unusual in Russia. She saw the voice as being a musical instrument, which teacher and student both have to build whilst the student learns to ‘play’ it at the same time. And being constructed of muscle and tissue, it is also a ‘human’ one – alive with the sound being produced by a coordination of breath and muscle. This makes possible the expression of every kind of human emotion.

For this first meeting, a Russian friend accompanied me in order to translate, but a few days later, I made my own way to Orekhovo by Metro, and rather nervously pressed the intercom button at the entrance to Evgenia’s building. I was always struck by the brightness of her voice when she answered, telling me to come up. During one of our conversations, she told me she ‘spoke as she sang and sang as she spoke’ and we agreed that fundamentally, there is very little difference between singing and speaking. The sound is produced in exactly the same way, but in singing, a wider pitch range is needed and the voice is sustained for longer periods than in speech. The singer also has to work within a tighter frame of pitch and rhythm. Resonance, however, is used in the same way and the brightness and projection that results from a well resonated singing voice, is also pleasing and desirable in speech. It is not such a difficult idea to grasp, but in reality, not quite as easy to achieve; and this thought occupied me more and more as I began to teach spoken voice as well as singing and draw parallels between the two disciplines. 

My pianist friend had accompanied Evgenia in concerts at the Gnessin Academy and played me a recording of a recital of Prokofiev songs they had given together a few years earlier. Evgenia would have been around 68, but her singing was firm and strong, and still very beautiful with no hint of shrillness at the top, nor tremor in the sound, both of which can appear as a singer gets older. Evgenia felt I had more stretch available in my vocal folds, which would offer me some more notes at the top of my voice, and I was glad to work on this along with the deepening of support she suggested. 

During the rest of that summer, I worked with Evgenia on the whole of the Winterreise cycle using the music to work on technical points, as we went along. My Russian friend came to help with translating on occasions when he was available, but for the most of the time we managed to communicate with the smattering we each had of the other’s language. I had been talking with my pianist friend about the possibilities of performing Winterreise in Russia, but understood it was not a work that would particularly draw a Russian audience unless it was sung in Russian. I was interested to see Evgenia produce a score in which the original German had been translated into a singing Russian text, and found similar editions of Schubert and other composers in the music department of the huge Dom Knigi bookshop on New Arbat Street. I decided, though, not to venture into re-learning the work in Russian.

Nevertheless, Evgenia recommended a recording in Russian by a Ukrainian bass called Boris Gmyra (1903-1969) whose interpretation cast quite a different light on the work with faster tempi than those I had chosen, along with the fusion of Russian words with Schubert’s music. She challenged the melancholic approach I had taken towards building the character of the wanderer-poet, and thought my singing was often ‘too grave’. He is a sensitive man, yes, she said, but he is also brave. This came up when we worked on the last four songs of the cycle towards the end of the summer in Moscow. In Das Wirtshaus, the fourth song from the end, he approaches a graveyard which he likens in his mind to an inn where he might rest for the night. The funeral wreaths appear to him as signs inviting him inside. But there is no room for him there and he must continue. He has already resisted lying down in the snow beneath the linden tree at the beginning of his journey, and now, too, he realises that all he can do is continue. ‘Onward then, still further, my loyal walking staff!’ he says. There is no giving up of life and, as Evgenia said, he has survived and will continue to survive. It is not a cycle of despair, but rather a work of resolution and determination. There is a life force at work within him which is much stronger than his sorrow.

Evgenia’s approach to voice was perhaps more philosophical and spiritual than Esther’s, which was more pragmatic and organised. Whilst I learned much about vocal anatomy and physiology with Evgenia, especially the structure and work of the vocal folds, and the blending of chest and head voice resonances, we had many conversations about the function of music and art and whether a work added something to the world or diminished it in some way. Music, she believed, is living architecture and in the same way there are many beautiful buildings in Moscow such as the Kremlin, for example, and ugly ones like the Soviet era apartment blocks in the district where she lived, we have music that either constructs, or deconstructs. Schubert’s music is of a kind that constructs. It will endure for as long as mankind exists and contribute something to the universe. Winterreise builds us up, bleak as it is, because it reflects so strongly the depths of human emotion and the precariousness and vulnerability of life. What is more, the emotions expressed in Winterreise are still relevant, perhaps even more so in our twenty-first century, and they continue to resonate deeply within the human soul. We have all, to some extent, experienced the feelings expressed in Winterreise and this is what keeps the piece alive. The protagonist survives and we will survive too.

I returned to Russia a few months later, in December, to work with Evgenia on the programme for a recital I had coming up at a festival in Tarusa – a town on the banks of the river Oka a few hours drive from Moscow. The programme included a group of songs by the American composer Ned Rorem (b.1923) which were mostly composed during the 1950’s when he lived in Paris. Evgenia was very taken with his music which whilst remaining tonal, shows a musical language and style, and a way of setting words that is totally unique and individual. I was interested to discover Evgenia was a dedicated exponent and champion of modern music and had, until fairly recently, been participating in recitals dedicated to works by Russian avant garde composers. Ned Rorem’s music cannot be considered at all avant garde, but her enthusiasm for the Rorem songs I had chosen for my programme prompted me to leave her my music when I returned to London. On my next trip, a few months later, she asked me to stay after my lesson to listen to a young bass from the Gnessin Academy who was coming for a lesson. She had given him Rorem’s song Early in the Morning and asked me to help him with his American-English pronunciation.

During my first lesson with Evgenia, she told she had not been well and was still unwell. I discovered later she was being treated for cancer and over the course of the next three years became increasingly frail but, it seemed to me, stronger in spirit. She told me there was still much she wanted to say. My last lesson with her was in September 2011. When I left, I kissed her goodbye and she stepped out onto the landing, and made the sign of the cross over me, which was something she was often won’t to do. I knew this was probably the last time I would see her, and I think she knew that too. A few months later, my Russian friend, unable to get a response from her mobile, called her landline, which was answered by her son, who told him she had died. She was teaching at the Gnessin Academy until the end, her son said, and had been very happy to have a singer travelling from England to work with her. For my next concert, I chose songs I had worked on with Evgenia and dedicated the concert to her memory, speaking about her to the audience in Oxford. I am very happy and grateful to have had the chance to work with her. 

My blog posts until now, have focussed on different aspects of voice technique. At the beginning of the national lockdown this year, before discovering the wonders of Zoom and Skype teaching, I realised, as I cancelled my lessons and began to sink into gloom, how teaching and working with the voice becomes a way of life. Because the voice is a ‘human’ instrument – constructed with muscle and tissue – it is constantly changing as we develop and grow as human beings. For a performer, it is very important to find a teacher who can not only help you develop the vocal skills you need to sustain a professional career, but also to provide guidance and advice as you advance in your career as well as grow older.

I have been very lucky in life to meet and work with two teachers – one British, one Russian – whose pedagogical input has had a profound influence both on the way I use my voice, and the way I teach. At the beginning of my career, after some years of troubled early training, I met Esther Salaman who laid the foundations of the approach to voice I use and teach today. My Russian teacher, professor Yevegenia Sheveliova, I met when I was in my mid-forties and had been teaching and performing for some twenty years or so. With both teachers I worked on Schubert’s song cycle Winterreise – a work that has accompanied me for most of most of my adult singing life and which remains indispensable to me. 

My old Peters edition of Winterreise is tattered and falling apart now, and I have replaced it with the new scholarly Bärenreiter edition. My old score, however, contains markings, directions and notes made by both my teachers and revisiting the work during the lockdown, with plans to perform it next year, I thought about my teachers and what I learned from them. This is the first of two posts about my teachers focussing first on Esther Salaman and how, through my lessons with her on Winterreise, she taught me the importance of words for a performer and how we can connect emotionally to them. 

A cycle of 24 songs, Winterreise forms a dramatic narrative charting a winter journey undertaken by the poet-singer who, trapped within the pain of an unhappy love affair and a lover who has betrayed him, steps out into the night and sets off on a journey which takes him metaphorically through a frozen winter landscape, as well as on an inner journey into the  depths of his soul. Unrequited love in all its forms, along with a restless dissatisfaction with life, a sense of being outcast and alone and a stranger without a home, were all themes that predominated German literature and art at this time. The protagonist of Winterreise represents this restlessness and as he journeys through the winter landscape, his mind starts to unravel bringing him to the edge of madness. During the course of the journey, the elements of nature appear as symbols of his inner turmoil with nature acting as a mirror to what is going on inside him.

Winterreise was composed in 1827, one year before Schubert’s death at the age of 31. In 1822 Schubert contracted syphilis, an incurable disease at that time, and his health gradually deteriorated over the next six years resulting in his death in 1828. It was against this background of declining health as well as depression that Winterreise was written. In an interesting parallel to this, the author of the poems, Wilhelm Müller, died the year before Schubert at the equally early age of 32. The two men never met but the combination of Muller’s verses and Schubert’s music resulted in a work which formed a turning point in the development of song as an art form. 

Wilhelm Müller was perhaps not a poet in the league of Heine, Goethe or Schiller, but he was a recognised and respected literary figure and his work was popular. He also wrote with the idea that his poetry would be set to music. In 1815 he noted in his journal:

“I can neither play nor sing, yet when I write verses, I sing and play after all. If I could produce the melodies, my songs would be more pleasing than they are now. But courage! Perhaps there is a kindred spirit somewhere who will hear the tunes behind the words and give them back to me”

Beneath the folksong-like simplicity of Müller’s writing, lay a depth of feeling and sensitivity which offered Schubert the possibility of taking the expression of human emotion to a depth not reached in a classical song before. With his settings of Müller’s poems, Schubert expanded the potential within a song for a much greater depth of expression as well as a dramatic narrative.

It takes just over one hour to perform the twenty-four songs that make up the cycle, and for that time you are completely alone on the stage with only your pianist for company. There are no props, no scenery no costumes. The drama has to be carried by your voice alone and the drama is of the deepest, most human kind. It is an existential journey that takes the singer and audience right to the heart of the psyche and is a piece that requires an intimate connection to the words and the emotions behind them as well as a considerable understanding of the workings of the human mind. 

I first heard Winterreise as a singing student at one of London’s music colleges. My early training was as a countertenor, and my repertoire at that time centred around the composers of the 17th and 18th centuries. I also played the harpsichord quite seriously and was taking this instrument as my second study. The sound world I was thus familiar with, whilst beautiful, striking, and expressive in its own right, was quite different from what I was hearing in the German Song Class which all singing students were obliged to attend. 

Whilst some of the more well known Schubert songs were already familiar to me, I had not experienced the emotional intensity of the songs found in Winterreise. Nor had I experienced the way emotion was so directly and almost piercingly expressed through both the vocal writing and the piano accompaniment. The songs of Robert Schumann and Hugo Wolf brought further revelations but with Winterreise, I was also struck by the way the story unfolded dramatically through a sequence of songs the telling of which was undertaken by one singer and a pianist. Being a solitary person who enjoys working and doing things alone, I immediately wanted to find a pianist who might feel similarly about this work and learn and perform it myself. But this was to take some years.

I did not complete my training as a counter-tenor. I left the college early and sang for a few years with some ensembles specialising in Baroque music and also gave piano lessons before deciding to retrain my voice as a bass-baritone. I had already begun singing in the area of my speaking voice, and some of my countertenor repertoire – certain songs by Henry Purcell especially – worked quite well within the bass-baritone range I had so far developed, but I realised I needed the help of a teacher if I was going to take my bass-baritone voice further, and found my way to Esther Salaman in Highgate.

I had been reading books about singing and found Esther Salaman’s book, Unlocking your Voice – Freedom to Sing in Westminster’s Central Music Library. Esther’s book offered answers, it seemed, to some of the vocal difficulties I had been experiencing with my practice – accessing the upper part of the voice especially – and I arranged to have a lesson with her. She taught from a rather ramshackle studio at the end of her garden which with its pink walls and rush matting, books and music piled on almost every available surface, portraits and paintings, an old Blüthner grand piano and faded curtains at the windows, reminded me of interiors I had seen belonging to members of the Bloomsbury Group. Esther was encouraging about my voice, unstinting in her criticism of the way I was using it, but offered alternatives which made sense to me and agreed to take me on as a pupil. An association thus began which was to last until her death some fifteen years later. I did not realise at the time of my first lesson that Esther was almost eighty years old.

A few weeks after beginning lessons, Esther mentioned a tenor she was teaching whom she felt had an important talent and who was beginning to make an impression on the professional musical scene. His name was Ian Bostridge and a year or two later, I went with Esther to hear him sing Winterreise at the Purcell Room on London’s South Bank. I had started working on Winterreise myself, by this time, and a question which frequently came up in my lessons, was that of expression and the emotional implications of the words. I remember, from that performance almost thirty years ago, the intensity of Ian Bostridge’s singing and a vivid physical and emotional connection to the words and text. Esther challenged me to move away from what she described as an instrumental approach to singing and we began to consider an approach that took a deeper involvement with words and text as its starting point.

This was indeed quite a challenge. The focus of classical singing training is traditionally placed on developing a beautiful sound and the term bel canto, which describes the style of singing developed in Italy during the 17th and 18th centuries – upon which most classical singing training is still based – literally translates as beautiful song. The voice teacher Cicely Berry, interestingly suggests in her book Voice and the Actor that for a singer, the meaning of a song is conveyed through the particular disciplines of sound – its energy being found in the resonance of the voice. For the actor, on the other hand, the energy lies in the word. Singing training must of course focus on developing a voice which is not only beautiful, but which will also withstand the demands of a professional career. But it also important to build a voice that is fully responsive to the emotional and technical demands of the text as well as the performer’s imagination. Here, the singer faces a unique challenge because one has to effectively ‘build’ an instrument whilst at the same time learn to ‘play’ it. The human voice is produced by a coordination of breath and muscle, and singers have to learn the fine coordination of the muscle movements involved in forming the voice. At the same time, one has to learn the skills needed to meet the demands of the music – skills such as range, agility, dynamic contrast and the articulation of the vowels and consonants of speech and language. Artistic expression and technical development, however, can go hand in hand. Esther believed that if a person possessed the true desire to communicate the text or message of the song, as she called it, the voice would respond. Even at a formative stage of training, a balance of technical knowledge and skill and an emotional response to the words and music, could lead the singer to a point where the voice was able to respond truthfully and spontaneously to both music and text. 

Esther’s teaching was based on the bel canto approach -an approach she discovered late in her career. She was open about the vocal difficulties she had experienced as a professional singer and the fact that when she found an approach which worked for her, it was too late for her to really use it as a performer and so began what she described as a ‘continuous adventure in teaching’. Her teaching was very specific and she offered me a structured approach to practising which identified the basic vocal skills, and taught me exercises which worked on each skill in isolation but lead to what she called a ‘totality’ – each skill triggering off the rest. I had already been singing professionally as a counter-tenor for a few years before I met Esther, but my training and practice until then had been rather disorganised and more metaphorical than anatomical and I was never quite sure of what was going to happen when I took the first breath at the beginning of a concert. Sometimes it worked beautifully, sometimes it didn’t. Esther taught me to know where the first note was going to come from and how it was going to come, and I began to understand how knowing the muscular and physical process that took place when I spoke or sang, brought confidence, providing what I still think of as a ‘platform’ upon which to stand when speaking or singing in public.

Esther also taught me the importance of vowel sounds and how they carry the voice and form the emotional centre of a word expressing its feeling (consonant sounds provide meaning). She offered me a set of exercises for vowel centring  which I still practice and teach thirty years after those first lessons with her. Centring, deepening, or focusing the vowel, helps us to find an emotional connection to the sound and therefore the word. We can change the emotional implications of a word by the way we speak or sing the vowel sound. The word love, for example, can be spoken or sung with a feeling of love, hate, anger, fear or doubt (amongst other emotional states). Our emotional response to a word colours the vowel sound and gives it a particular emotional quality and deepening or centring the vowel, can awaken this emotional response.  

When I began my lessons with Esther, my approach to vocal music was indeed instrumental – coloured considerably by the fact that I had studied piano and harpsichord for a long time before beginning serious singing training. It was also influenced by the fact that most of the works I performed as a countertenor had been settings of religious texts which did not suggest an overly emotional approach. The German songs I now wanted to sing, however, demanded the deeper emotional connection and commitment to the words that Esther was talking about.

I am rather ashamed to admit now that when I began singing in German, whilst I had a grasp of the overall mood and meaning of a song, I did not know the literal meaning of every single word and often couldn’t answer when Esther asked in my lessons what certain words meant – which was something she was wont to do. Language classes at college concentrated more on teaching the correct pronunciation rather than facilitating any degree of fluency. But as I began to build my repertoire of songs by German and Austrian composers, I also began to gain a grasp of the language and build up some vocabulary. And by the time I started to learn Winterreise, I had sung several whole recitals of German songs. 

A dramatic work such as Winterreise, however, requires the performer to become a singer-actor and I decided to approach the piece in the way an actor might approach a role such as Hamlet or Macbeth. An actor has to look at the world through another’s pair of eyes, slip their feet into another’s pair of shoes and make the characters thoughts their own taking ownership of the words. The first stage, of course, was to learn the words and there was the added job of translating them as I am not fluent in German. There is a wonderful book, however, called Lieder Line by Line by Lois Phillips who translated hundreds of German songs literally, as well as poetically, including the twenty four songs of Winterreise. Esther suggested writing out the German texts by hand in a little notebook with the English translation on the line above in a different coloured ink, and carrying the words around with me. Doing this enabled me to ‘live’ with the words, as she said, and to think about their meaning and underlying mood as I waited for a bus or sat on the tube. 

I spent a lot of time walking with the text around London parks and across Hampstead Heath in all weathers and at different times of day. Wind, rain, frost and snow appear throughout the journey and I wanted to experience these whilst I sang the songs in my head. I also thought about the time frame of the work as a whole – but as time in this piece is ambiguous and the journey a metaphorical one, it is very difficult to set a real time scale. Nevertheless I formed the idea of a night and a day spent walking, then a night resting in a coal burner’s hut before continuing on through the morning until mid-afternoon when the low-lying winter sun begins to set. It is at this point the poet-wanderer has a vision of three suns in the hazy, winter sky and meets an organ grinder standing barefoot on the ice in ghostly twilight.  

Walking with the songs in this way also helped me identify the way each song contributed to the unfolding drama – the songs which, for example, carry the drama forward and  express what is happening in the present moment, and those in which the wanderer pauses to ruminate or reflect on his dilemma. I coined the terms ‘songs of movement’ and ‘songs of reflection’ and walking helped me find a tempo for each song which followed Schubert’s directions but which also took my own walking pace as a starting point. And the songs of reflection offered the opportunity to sit on a bench for a few moments or to stand and gaze across the view of the city from Parliament Hill.

I also started a collection of postcards depicting scenes suggestive of a winter journey. Caspar David Friedrich was a contemporary of Schubert and his Winter Landscape which hangs in London’s National Gallery, shows a haunting scene evocative of the desolation and isolation experienced by the wanderer (he does not encounter another human being until the organ-grinder in the very last song of the cycle). Another powerful image – also by Friedrich – was that depicted in Wanderer Overlooking a Sea of Fog which can be found in the Kunsthalle in Hamburg. A man stands alone on a rocky precipice with his back to the viewer. Fog swirls in front him through which the shape of mountains and rocks can dimly be seen. 

It is not the snowscape one would expect to accompany Winterreise but it is one which  portrays all the Romantic ideas of solitude and man, who as hero or anti-hero, is pitched against the elements of nature, searching for a place where he might find respite from his restlessness, longing for past joy or love that has been lost. 

My last lesson with Esther followed my first public performance of Winterreise which took place in February 2004 in the music room of Burgh House, in Hampstead, North London, with pianist Angus Cunningham. My final lesson with her was a few weeks after the performance. She was in the audience and we talked about understanding the text deeply and responding to it. What was missing, she felt, was what she called ‘the sparkle of the imagination’ and a ‘spontaneity of thought.’  ‘Let the audience see the formation of the thoughts behind your eyes’ she said, ‘make them long to hear the next thought. Write the song for yourself, it’s not only Schubert’s music but your poem as well. Hear the whisper of thoughts in your head, think the words through as you bring the song to life.’ 

Esther died the next year at the age of 91. We had spoken on the telephone a few months before and I had planned to go and sing to her so she could ‘hear where I was at’ as she said. The sudden death of my mother, however, a few weeks after our conversation, and the family responsibilities I had to attend to following that, meant I didn’t get to Highgate and Esther died shortly after my mother. 

From the work I did with Esther I learned that one has to earn the right to perform in front of an audience whether as a singer, instrumentalist or actor. There is a duty to the composer, the poet or writer, whose words or music you are bringing to life with your breath and the vibrations of your voice.  There is also a duty to one’s own integrity and talent as a performer. This right comes from work, done on one’s own privately, in solitude, investigating every layer of a song or text word-by-word and every note of a composition, finding somewhere inside yourself a response to the meaning of the words or the music. Then the expression of the text becomes organic and authentic.

In a documentary film about her work (Where Words Prevail, 2005), the great voice teacher Cicely Berry said: “we are drawn to a voice which vibrates and which has resonance”. Resonance is the process through which the initial vibrations of our voice, created by our vocal folds, are literally ‘re-sounded’ and amplified. In the same way a piano sound board or the belly of a violin or guitar reinforces and reverberates the initial sound produced by the strings of the instrument, the resonating spaces within our body take our initial vocal sound and amplify it. 

Resonance adds substance and energy to our voice and helps carry it forward in space, enabling us to be heard. It can also reflect our individual character and personality, and draw people in to listen to what we have to say. We are heard as a person rather than a voice. For an actor, a fully resonating voice that is able to communicate the meaning and emotional sense of a text clearly and distinctly, is a skill that needs to be developed to the highest possible level. For the non-actor or non-professional speaker, developing a warm, resonant voice can often be life-changing. A young student of mine, good-looking, warm, and personable, told me he was fed up sitting round the table in the pub trying to join in the conversation whilst his friends talked over him. And an interesting and friendly lady, whose rather breathy and high pitched voice gathered weight and tone when she spoke about her passion for travel and opera, felt the men in her office (where she held a senior position) neither listened to what she had to say nor took her seriously.

Resonance takes place within the air-containing cavities of our throat, mouth, nasal and sinus cavities. The resonance created in these cavities is known as primary resonance and is air-conducted. The effects of these vibrations, however, can also be felt sympathetically across our chest, and in the bones of our face and skull where it is said to be bone-conducted. These secondary, sympathetic vibrations provide us with useful sensory feedback. If we can feel vibrations across the roof of our mouth, our cheekbones or in the bones of our rib cage as we speak, for example, we can trust our resonators are open and vibrating and that our voice is reflecting this.

Our throat, mouth, nasal and sinus cavities are interconnected and known in the medical literature as the vocal tract. The sound wave released from our vocal folds when we start to speak or sing, is able to flow into all three, disturbing the air molecules already contained within them and setting them off into vibration. These vibrations add volume and texture to our initial sound before it is shaped by our tongue and articulators into the vowel and consonant sounds of speech and language. The vocal tract is malleable and continuously moulds and shapes itself as we speak or sing helping to produce a sound that is totally unique to the individual. 

Each resonating space offers a number of very specific qualities to the voice. From the lower throat we can draw warmth, depth and richness, for example, whilst the mouth space brings clarity, definition and brightness and helps our voice to project. The nasal and sinus cavities are smaller spaces which are fixed and therefore less malleable, but the higher frequency resonances produced in these smaller spaces add extra brightness and carrying power to the sound, as well as providing us with useful sensory feedback.

The throat and mouth spaces are our largest resonance cavities and the most flexible. We can change the shape of these spaces in a number of ways producing many different qualities of sound and colour. Lowering or raising our larynx, for example, will make the throat space longer or shorter changing the quality of the sound immediately. Spreading the lips in a ‘smiling’ position and closing the jaw will immediately lessen and diminish the warmer deeper qualities that come from the lower throat, resulting in a sound that is shallow and thin in texture. Releasing the jaw, on the other hand, will open up the lower throat allowing these warmer, darker tones to infiltrate and blend with the clearer, brighter qualities produced in the mouth space.

It is important to learn how to blend and balance the resonators. Too much lower throat resonance will produce a voice that sounds dull and muffled and will also be harder to project. Too little, will result in a shallower, thinner sound. The key is the release of the jaw. When the jaw is released, the throat and mouth spaces open into each other in a way that space is maximised and breath and sound are able to flow through unimpeded. Resonance will then balance itself naturally.

This is especially important for an actor because an effective balance and blend of resonance not only enables the voice to project more easily in a theatre space, but also makes available a wider range of colour and vocal qualities upon which to draw when building a character. For the non-actor, voice and speech become more interesting, varied and expressive to the listener, and more satisfying and pleasurable to the speaker. Our pleasure lies in the sensual physical aspects of speaking or singing whilst the sound of our voice is for our listeners to enjoy.

At this point we can encounter the phenomenon of chiaroscuro. This is a technique used in painting where light (chiaro) is blended with shade (scuro) producing a quality that is three dimensional in effect. Both Leonardo da Vinci and Caravaggio were known for their use of chiaroscuro and the term has long been applied to classical singing. But it is quite possible to apply it to the spoken voice as well. A balanced blend of all the different resonance qualities, creates a spoken sound that is three-dimensional and, crucially, whole – a sound which vibrates and has resonance and, as Cicely Berry said, one which will draw people to listen to what we have to say. 

As an instrument, the human voice is unique in that it is alive and intimately bound to our whole physical and psychological being. When I start teaching a new group of acting students, I often ask them what brings their voice into play. I point out that as they sit listening to me, there is no voice, no sound. The answers they give are nearly always intelligent and informed: breath, vocal folds, the diaphragm, vibrations. It sometimes takes a bit of prodding until eventually someone offers up ‘the brain’ or ‘thought’ and this is correct. Our voice is the result of a desire to communicate something. We have a thought we wish to express, that thought inspires the body to draw a breath, and that breath initiates the vibration of the vocal folds which becomes the sound wave upon which we speak.

Our voice is a coordination of thought, breath, and muscle, responding directly to our desires and emotions, and forming a bridge between our inner, imaginative, and spiritual life, and the outside world. It is the means by which we make known our desires, joys and sorrows, and thoughts and opinions. For the actor, their voice carries the potential for the dramatic expression of every possible human emotion. An actor also carries the responsibility of bringing a writer’s words to life. The words of a play remain print on a page until the actor literally breathes life into them and lifts them off the page. For all this to happen, a healthy vocal practice, together with an understanding of how the voice works, is essential for the performer or professional speaker, and can be of enormous value to the non-professional.

Professional voice differs from the non-professional in that it needs to be able to sustain the expression and communication of dramatic text and emotion in a way that does not strain or damage the muscles and organs involved in producing sound. It needs to have stamina, strength, and flexibility, to be interesting and varied, capable of being heard and understood in all kinds of performing space, and to be responsive to the actor’s thoughts, imagination, and the emotional implications of the text. 

These qualities are inherent in every voice, however, and the desire to improve vocal stamina, quality and range, is something that brings many people to training. To know our voice and understand how it works, as well as what happens when it doesn’t work, is also to know and understand more of ourselves and of what drives us forwards in life or holds us back. As the voice becomes freer and stronger so we too become freer and stronger as people, performers and communicators.