A Little Book of Voice E-Book

Ralf Peters

• Herausgeber: Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Ratgeber
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Seitenzahl: 52

Beschreibung

This little book is a collection of thoughts and ideas about the practice of voice development beyond art and therapy. How could people be given access to the field of human voice who don´t wish to use their voice artistically? At the same time this book is a brief introduction to the voice work of Alfred Wolfsohn and Roy Hart

Leseprobe

I have to struggle with the people I want to teach. Their main argument against me is: “You just have to take me as I am!” (…) But what I have to tell them is that they will not dissuade me from seeing them richer than they think themselves to be.

Alfred Wolfsohn

for Maja Dentan

Contents

Introduction

Free play of the voice versus technique and tricks

Voice as partner

Triangle of contact

An anecdote about Husserl: The lively discussion

Vocal Window

Vocal Window of Communication

There is no such thing as ‘objective’ hearing

Voice Development with Body, Mind and Soul

Freeing the Voice to be itself

Voice and Breath

My Voice

The Three Elements of the Voice

How to work with People who have no specific interest in the voice?

Individual Work – the Core

There is no such thing as wrong notes

Why do we limit our vocal field at all?

A voice tells stories

Two Pillars of the Development of the Voice

Why discover the whole Vocal Field?

Voice and Life

Vocal flexibility instead of vocal efficiency

Voice and Hearing

Hearing: Levels of perception

Perception of the voice – controlling versus observing

Four Aspects of the Development of the Voice: Using the voice, listening, feeling, thinking

Voice and Space

Vocal Tone and inner / outer Situation

Living Inner Space – Living Voice

Introduction

Since about the turn of the millennium the subject of the human voice has moved beyond the purely artistic and therapeutic fields into business training studies and colleges of further education. Business groups and associations focus increasingly on vocal communication as one of the major aspects of everyday business life. As a result, vocal training regularly features in Companies’ in-house performance enhancement programmes. The vocal training offered needs to rise to meet this challenge. Until now voice teachers have mainly focussed on training singers or on working with diction, either for professional speakers or as speech therapy. Now they are suddenly faced with a brand new clientele with no genuine interest in voice itself, wishing only to make better use of their voices in business contexts, and in more effectively controlling their voice in negotiations or conferences. At the same time, training requirements may sometimes be quite unspecific like “doing something for the voice”. This may seem a reasonable request. But will it be adequately achieved through exercises and training that have been designed mainly for singers, radio announcers or speech therapists?

In 2005 I was faced with this question for the first time when I was asked to create vocal training modules for use in a business context. At that time I was not sure if I could come up with something that would give participants anything of value to use in their jobs. Although my own training as a Roy-Hart-voice teacher has been quite extensive – one of our main directions being the exploration of the full range of the voice beyond conventional singing and speech – up to that point my activities had been more or less focussed on the artistic field. After giving the first vocal training course in a business context I had doubts. After many more courses I am still asking myself how to design a vocal training programme that does not have artistic or therapeutic objectives as its aim. The following thoughts and comments in this booklet on voice investigate this question. Writing this I am not interested in stereotypical answers but wish to provide my readers with food for thought. That is why I am presenting my musings in the form of a sketchbook of written fragments which may well overlap and repeat themselves. If my writing inspires any of my colleagues to further clarify their own concepts on vocal work, this would indeed be a very welcome result. The non-expert but interested reader, on the other hand, might intuit by reading the following pages how much there is to discover by learning about the voice, even though they may not wish to use it artistically in any way.

This text is not intended as a booklet of instructions on how to give voice training. No exercises – with one exception – are presented. My reason for this is that professionals already have lots of exercises up their sleeves and newcomers will, in my opinion, be much better off receiving their first vocal exercise in person with a teacher, rather than reading it up in a book. In writing this booklet, my intention is to provide a possible framework for developing vocal programmes with non-artists. My ideas on this subject are related to the thoughts and practices of Alfred Wolfsohn and Roy Hart. I have expounded their views and working concepts elsewhere. If reading this booklet sparks off interest in the Wolfsohn / Roy Hart approach to voice, it would be a very welcome outcome.

Free play of the voice versus technique and tricks

The first thing I do when introducing my course: “Voice in professions” is to ask the participants about their expectations: what do they wish to achieve by means of the voice work? What usually comes up first is that somebody says they would like to know tips and tricks to improve their voice or to work it more effectively. There are of course efficient ways to, for instance, make a voice hold out better in a difficult situation, and I am very happy to pass them on. But I don’t in actual fact believe in tricks, and for some people this might initially come as a disappointment. The reason why I don’t believe in tricks is that even if you are vocally very proficient, tricks in a moment of vocal crisis are only successful if you are able to allow your voice sufficient freedom to apply them. But if a voice already possesses this kind of freedom or free play it doesn’t need tricks to sustain itself. It is this very freedom that enables a voice to respond in a flexible and open way to all kinds of challenges, choosing its own route and whatever support it needs by itself.