Vocal Pedagogy: May I Be "Franck?" or Shut Up and Let the Student Sing
We voice teachers love to talk. We love to explain. We love to sing and illustrate and lead and pontificate with the wisdom of our accrued years or share what we are learning in our continuing education.
But, sometimes, knowing when NOT to speak is more important than anything we can say.
Back in the days when I worked with high school singers, a lovely soprano brought the “Pie Jesu,” from the choral setting of Gabriel Faure’s Requiem, to work on in her private voice lesson. Her church choir director had asked her to sing it during an Easter service but she was very concerned about “breath support.”
I usually work joyfully as a vocal technician in many styles and genres of music. But in this lesson I decided to veer in another direction and suggested that the student listen to some of the great organ compositions of the Belgian-French Romantic composer and cathedral organist, Cesar Franck.
Franck lived at about the time as the French composer and organist, Gabriel Faure.
Why did I do that? Where did that idea come from? What did I hope to accomplish?
First, some background: I grew up as the daughter of a full time music minister/ organist/choir master and singer/voice teacher. Evidently my crib was located next to a wall which shared the chambers of the organ pipes, in an apartment above the first church Dad served. Here’s a video that shows an organ pipe chamber accompanied by a pipe organ and shots of organ stops—the knobs and buttons an organist uses to combine string, reed and woodwind sounds.
Plus they play with all four limbs. And read three lines of music for 2-3 hand keyboards and a foot keyboard. And improvise. And plan registration and click knobs and press other kinds of pedals like some sort of mad scientist. And they make music.
The point being that I grew up hearing daily the King of Instruments and feeling the vibrations of the pipes as Dad practiced. I studied organ in college (even though I was a Voice Major in the BM program) and spent several summers as a substitute church organist in Pittsburgh, PA. One of my brothers earned both the BM and MM degrees in Organ Performance.
As a result of this background, I knew that if my singing student could just hear the French reed organ pipe sounds that were developed during the Romantic era in Western Europe, played on a good pipe organ, she might be able to follow her own inner compass to execute the long vocal lines of the Faure piece. During the Romantic period, French organ builders introduced a type of wind chest that could accommodate high wind pressures, enabling the organ to imitate woodwind instruments like the bassoon, oboe and flute. So between the new mechanical action of the organ and the new woodwind sounds, the organ could produce lovely legato “singing.”
I took a chance on trusting that if she could hear the legato organ singing, she could take what she already knew technically and start to apply it without my “interference.”
The student, who is very talented anyway, instantly “got” the connection between Cesar Franck’s “Prelude, Fugue and Variation” for organ and the vocal line of the Faure solo, “Pie Jesu.” She and I were both amazed at what an instant difference it made in her singing. She automatically and effectively used what she knew to spin the long lines with more freedom and skill.
And I was humbled at how my shutting up enabled the student to learn more…
(Addendum-M.C. went to college for vocal performance and music education, earned a masters’ in music history, and makes her living as a voice teacher and arts’ administrator. And yes, she still sings both classical and folk music.)