Healthy Singing

Good singing is an athletic pursuit. Just as with sports, aerobics, or jogging, the muscles that support the activity need to be methodically conditioned; once good condition is reached, it needs to be maintained. Then as now, the fit or well-conditioned singer can control pitch, manage the breath on long phrases, support a diminuendo as well as a crescendo, control vibrato, deliver rapid passagework articulately — in short, can handle the purely technical skills that Baroque music demands.

Bacilly, Playford, and Galliard all agree on the fundamentals: good posture, good breathing, and plenty of hours of practice, beginning with simple exercises and progressing to more challenging ones. You, as the director of a choir or vocal ensemble, need to know enough about vocal fitness to spot unhealthy singing and suggest ways to correct it, as well as to teach the fundamentals of good singing right along with the notes and the pronunciation. The best way to learn about good singing is to study with a good teacher. The collegium director who comes to his or her position from an instrumental background should take very seriously the obligation to handle young singers’ voices intelligently. Often you only need one or two lessons yourself from a sympathetic colleague to get you started on a visceral — as opposed to a merely aural — understanding of good singing. Or you might have a “guest coach” for one or two rehearsals with your singers, concentrating on basic technique, with you singing right along with your students.


Bacilly says that while no teacher can make a beautiful voice out of thin air, nevertheless,

What can be accomplished is in the realm of vocal corrections: The voice can be brought out more, where it previously was muffled. Continuous practice can make a rough voice delicate, correct bad intonation, and make a coarse voice sweet . . . A good voice . . . is effective because of its vigor, strength, and its capacity to sing with expression, which is the soul of vocal art.

Vocalizing in the falsetto voice is a useful practice for all singers, and you will not harm the voices of men in your ensemble by having them do easy vocal exercises in falsetto in the octave above middle C (c'). Descending scales that bring the falsetto down into the mid-tenor range are useful not only for exercising the falsetto, but also for developing more ease and more resonance in the high end of the chest voice. In the process, you might discover a particularly beautiful falsetto tone in one or another of the men, a potential countertenor for English repertory.