What is the "Free Open Throat" for Singing and Speaking? Benefits for All Singers
This post may not be for you if you want exercises or scientific illustrations for singing. Yet if you read through with some focus, you’ll find the very stuff that allows for an open throat and enables your training to take root.
Background
I first discovered Cornelius Reid’s book trilogy (‘The Free Voice,’ ‘Bel Canto in Principle’ and ‘Practice and Voice: Psyche and Soma’) in graduate school. In 1980. I resonated deeply with these books then, and still do.
All teachers of singing need to viscerally understand that the histories of western vocal pedagogy AND of oral musical traditions aren’t just added to with time. They both have an eternal quality of circling back to embrace roots and then burst forward again in new growth. One feeds the other and around they go, like a wagon wheel moving along the singing trail. They weed out, add to and hold fast – sometimes by specific exercises – but also by underlying principles, overarching concepts and use of language.
Reid wrote:
“The willingness with which a singer RESPONDS to the ENERGY CHARGE (What???? What is the ENERGY CHARGE??) when the throat opens will determine his ultimate potential for mastering a vocal technique that is functionally free. This means facing up to the fear and anxiety that are ever present throughout the formative stages of training. No other phase of the learning process is quite as important as this. How the singer meets this challenge will determine whether or not his artistic ambitions will be realized…Since anxiety is so intimately bound up with physical contraction and fear of movement, one of the major problems during training is to break down the student’s innate dread of inner expression…
The willingness with which the singer responds to the energy charge when the throat opens….
What????
Wtf does Reid mean by “willingness to respond to the energy charge when the throat opens?”
First of all, the throat opens as a response to the energy charge. The energy charge comes first!
Singing doesn’t start with the breath or “inhalation.” The throat doesn’t initially open by “creating space,” “placement” or even by getting into character or poetic understanding. It isn’t shaped by “lifting the soft palate,” or “lowering,” “raising,” “tilting” (or whatever-ing) the larynx, or by supporting with the intercostals or transverse abdominals or skilled use of the articulators.
Reid suggests that the initiation of things ‘happening’ is dependent upon…. how much a person is willing to respond to “The Charge.”
So what is “The Charge?”
One of my primary voice teachers, Elizabeth Daniels, spoke about “the thing” (her words) that happens before you even breathe to sing, and how, if anyone identifies “the thing” they’ll win a Nobel Prize. Daniels’ teacher was Todd Duncan, George Gershwin’s hand-picked Porgy for the premier of Porgy and Bess. Duncan evidently used to say that the way the throat is responding before the breath is taken will determine the freedom of the singing afterwards.
And my father, a brilliant and loving full-time church musician, used to say “Cultivate a belly of fire, an open heart and a cool mind.”
Maybe one of the most important things a teacher can do in our current day and age is be part of the support system to help clear and tune a singer’s charge. Then functional training can take root.
Personally, I think this “charge” may be something that has to be cleared frequently and throughout one’s life.
The “energy charge,” to which Reid refers hasn’t yet been measured by science. But this “state” is the result of the urge to sound as part of our natural makeup up as bioelectric beings. There are many kinds of energy, or electrical phenomena produced within living organisms and within the earth itself.
The late Dr. Meribeth Dayme wrote in the third edition of her book Dynamics of the Singing Voice:
J. Diamond (1983) has defined “life energy” as being a vital force that is physical, mental and spiritual in nature: the physical being reflected in the muscular activity and the functioning of the skeletal system: the mental including thoughts and the ability to be centered; and the spiritual that begins as spirit which is signified by the love and humanity within each person. He has also noted that everything in the environment, both physical and psychic–thoughts, feelings, desires affects life energy. *
I believe that this is all part of the unencumbered charge to which Reid refers.
What is the charge free of?
Reid gives us an answer: it is free of anxiety.
Voice and acting teachers, actors, singers, dancers, performers, and healers have been weaving together somatic re-education, movement, mindfulness, nutrition and wellness, bodywork, rehabilitative tools, and intention for over forty-five years now. These ways of uniting the mind-body split in our culture help to heal our willingness and ability to respond to The Charge. It’s that initial thing that has to exist before we release and engage our body’s pressure systems to breathe.
Yes, the “charge” is all our habitual responses to life, influenced by sometimes hidden personal motivations and deep beliefs.
When the voice is free of these anxieties and beliefs about Self, the throat can then allow all the ‘things’ that we observe in voice science, including whatever latest research has been reported.
The emotions we feel aren’t the same thing as the energy charge that Reid mentions.
Many singers are vocally reflecting the angst of the times, rather than establishing how to deliver expression of angst without having the throat shaped by anxiety. Teachers, mentors, coaches, producers, conductors and directors should help to create an environment that supports The Charge. But since that is not always the case, part of a singer’s training must develop a willingness to respond with their own charge, within themselves.
Each singer carries the responsibility of protecting their own charge throughout their lives.
Reid also writes:
This means facing up to the fear and anxiety that are ever present throughout the formative stages of training. No other phase of the learning process is quite as important as this. How the singer meets this challenge will determine whether or not his artistic ambitions will be realized.
This is where we do get into a bit of historical pedagogy root-rot, because it’s not only in the formative stages of training that this may happen, but can occur at regular intervals throughout our artistic adult lives. We can become disconnected from our spirits and, most of us have never learned to listen to our bodies as the Ultimate Wisdom. Our culture teaches us to fear and hate our bodies. And sometimes what our bodies are telling us seems to be in direct conflict with what we’ve built in our careers and private lives, and in direct conflict with our motivations.
This conflict, by itself, will warp “the charge.”
His final words of the paragraph are:
Since anxiety is so intimately bound up with physical contraction and fear of movement, one of the major problems during training is to break down the student’s innate dread of inner expression…
We’re brought back to the rise of somatic tools, dance, cognitive therapies, etc., and all kinds of advances in healing as various tools to release physical contraction and fear of movement. We cannot solve the student’s anxiety—that is their journey.
We can only journey through our own limitations, freeing ourselves in huge & tiny ways as we go. And that is how we light the charge within ourselves and in the singers and groups with which we work.
I sing the body electric,
The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them,
They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,
And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul….-Walt Whitman, American poet, essayist and journalist
*Diamond’s trilogy examines this life energy in The Life Energy in Music, vol. I, II, and III. New York: Archaeus Press
This post is a recently updated version of a post I wrote for Justin Peterson’s blog in 2019. He writes: “Cate’s interest in the impetus to sing is an area that is not always discussed in pedagogical circles with a predilection for more quantifiable scientific data. I hope readers will enjoy her ideas!” Justin
2023, Cate Frazier-Neely. All rights reserved. Design by Awakened Creator.