Breathing

I've been chewing over writing a post about breathing for a week or two. It seems like the beginning, and the most important, so maybe it's also the last. It's one of the most fundamental things that enables us to sing properly, let alone live. I once watched a film starring Tom Hanks, I can't even remember the title, but at the end of the film he talks about how, even when things were at their worst, he knew that all he had to do was keep breathing, in and out, and in and out. There wasn't a choice. He couldn't stop living. He simply had to breathe.

I was profoundly moved by this scene, and when I think of it in regards to singing it seems to make so much sense. We need to remember to breathe. When we're hit by nerves, or we care a lot about a performance or audition, our pulse quickens, there's a rush of adrenaline; we forget the simplest thing required of us to sing. Breathing is paramount as without a steady flow of pressure on the vocal folds from the bellows below, the sound we make doesn't ring true. If we're not breathing correctly we don't create the sound we're used to and the quality of the performance deteriorates. Learning to breathe when nervous is a skill. Breathing is so important to us that for the majority of the time it is involuntary, it isn't something we think about, and yet when we wish to we can exert some control over it. I think the control can be unconscious at times and I have noticed that when I am excruciatingly nervous I all but stop my breathing as a defence mechanism. It is a way of controlling the situation that is no longer in our hands.

When we begin to learn to sing it is almost a given that the teacher will start with breathing. Closely linked to posture and ensuring that the body can support the flow of air, breathing becomes something singers are overly conscious of. Perhaps for the first time in their lives they learn to stand taller and to take a deep breath and without letting it escape immediately, use the air as the tool to make their instrument sound. Over time the intercostal and abdominal muscles grow stronger; we can exert more control. And yet, we can lose some, or even all, of the control we attempt to gain over it when hit by nerves. There was a programme recently on BBC2 which was presented by the wonderful soprano Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, and she said something that really hit me. Every time, before she goes on stage, she makes sure that she has time to breathe in, very slowly and calmly, twenty times. She takes her singing back to its simplest level and regains consciousness of her body's air flowing in and out.

As a young singer trying to understand what can improve my performance I have to assess what it is that is constricting me or what changes in my technique from when I'm practicing to when I'm in front of an audience. First and foremost I have to notice that it is my breathing that I need to be conscious of. And in the future, I will take Kiri's advice and go back to the beginning. Breathing in, and breathing out, in and out, in and out.