Who Run the World? Depersonalizing your voice and getting fierce...Sasha Fierce. Part 2

Welcome to Part 2 of "Who Run The World?"  This post is the second part of a 3 part series! If you have not already, please see Part 1!  

My friend Veronica, Mr. Kristoff and me after a concert

When I was in High School I had a really awesome chorus teacher who loved Musical Theater.  His name was Mr.Kristoff.

He spent his free periods singing with whoever wanted to come and sing with him, and if you brought a vocal selections book to him you could just plop it down on the piano and he would play through the entire thing with you.  I would cut class to go sing with him (as many of us did) and   he introduced me to so many of what are still my favorite songs like everything from The Last Five Years and a song called Miss Byrd.  (I know what you're thinking and, yes, he recommended a song with lyrics such as “My nipples start to throb inside my bra” to a 15 year old.  If you knew him you wouldn't be surprised. He also used to shove me into my locker, call me Bonehead, stick his fingers up my nose when I wasn't paying attention and give me wet willies.  He was THE most inappropriate person but he loved his job and his students.)  Mr. Kristoff passed away at the end of my junior year.

We had some substitute teachers step in and during that time we were also starting rehearsals for a school show.  There I am… I was Maria Von Trapp…

The Sound of Music .... could I have straightened my lederhosen for the cast photo?

I remember rehearsing one of the songs at the piano with a substitute teacher for the first time and he said I wasn’t singing the way Maria would sound and that it was too "bright." Now, if you know me, you know that my singing voice does happen to be very bright because I basically taught myself by obsessively listening to The Little Mermaid and Sherie Rene Scott recordings.  At that time, I didn’t know how to make darker sounds at all even if I wanted to.  I only knew how to sing in the voice Tom now calls “The Jen-DeRosa-In-The-Shower Voice”:  Bright, squeaky, highest larynx in the world.  But Mr. Kristoff always made me feel so good about my voice even despite its squeakyness!  We would sing for hours and he never said anything about making it sound darker.

I hadn’t had a formal voice lesson in my entire life and any and all criticism was a direct hit to my little nerdy soul.  In a weird way, I probably would rather have heard, "Jen is fat," in high school than, "Jen can't sing," because I knew I could always cut back on the ice cream, but my voice was my voice!  I couldn't change that!  Well, I couldn't change it at the time, anyway.  When I started to listen to the Parade cast recording and imitating Carolee Carmello is when I figured shit out and started developing what you might think of as a vocal alter ego.  Then I started just playing around with singing roles that were totally wrong for me... Mother in Ragtime, Lily in Kiss Me Kate....  And that's when I realized, "Maybe it's not just a joke that I can make myself sound like this! Maybe this is what the substitute teacher was asking for!"

Carolee Carmello-- You Don't Know This Man, Parade



When I consciously brought just a little of that older voice into my Maria rehearsals is when it started feeling easier to sing for a new teacher.  When I got feedback, I wasn't taking it as personally because he wasn't commenting on MY voice.  Now he would be commenting on a voice I was putting on for that play.  And I wasn't so territorial about the thought of changing what Mr. Kristoff and I had worked on together.  I started to understand that I could have more than one voice and that I could save the brighter one for my other songs. 

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Here's a piece of a coaching I had just this March!  I decided to just go sing for an hour with a coach I made friends with. Listen to what happened!

Years later and people are still asking me to make the same adjustment.  After that run-through, the coach told me I should make the darker voice my default because "it's a more lovely sound."  Did I cry?  Did I take it personally? No! I laughed about it and took it as a fun challenge!  He asked for another voice and so I translated that in my head to, "Ok. You're asking for the mom character who is 15 yrs older than me and has 48DDD's," and I sang that way instead.  Easy on my brain and easy on my soul because, truthfully, I don't consider any of my voices "MY REAL VOICE" anymore....not even the squeaky, bright one.  They're all my voices and some people prefer to hear one over the other, that's all.

If you can learn to weave in and out of a couple of vocal alter egos, it can make whatever feedback you get a lot easier to swallow.  You can stand back after your performance, hear the feedback objectively because it's as if it were about someone else, and then take the adjustment rather than want to quit.  We have to train ourselves to separate our identities from our voices, voices which are inherently personal because they belong to us!

Here's what you can do to start developing your vocal alter ego(s):

• Occasionally sing some songs that are just totally wrong for you. I personally like singing Home from The Wiz. I'm clearly never going to play Dorothy... but I've learned a lot from fooling around with that song and trying to imitate Stephanie Mills, and I can apply what I learned to the songs that are actually right for me.  
• Think of your voice as clothes. How many times has your mom said she hates your outfit? I know my mom has told me that plenty of times.  Do I give a shit or get offended? Most of the time, it's just annoying because I thought I looked nice when I left my apartment and maybe she doesn't get it because she doesn't live in NYC... but I know I can always change my clothes when I'm with her and wear what I want to wear later.  
• As you start learning how to imitate other singers take notice of whether your personal aesthetic has changed.  Are you starting to prefer the 48DDD character? Are the voices of your alter egos starting to creep into your home base? If so, that's not a bad thing. It just means you're more versatile and have more choices!
• This is the biggest thing I can say about depersonalizing.  Are you ready?  When you are imitating someone else, instead of thinking "That's not how I sing," think of it like "That's not how I USUALLY sing."  That IS how you sing... because that voice is coming from YOUR throat!  It's just not where you first think to go when someone asks you to produce a sound.  Even if the Carolee Carmello voice doesn't feel organic to me, it's still an extension of MY voice.     And when someone gives me an adjustment on that voice it's a little easier to take because it's not MY voice that they want to change... it's basically Carolee's ;)  
• Read the third and final section of this post coming soon!

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I'm remembering how when Mr. Kristoff wanted us to sound a certain way he would demonstrate it in a woman's voice and ask us to imitate him.... as if a girl imitating a man imitating a woman would sound at all normal... but he didn't care what he sounded like... he just knew that was how he needed to perform to get the job done....  And even though that's not how he usually sang... his woman voice was still one of his voices!  It'll be 9 years this June since Mr. Kristoff passed away and I can still hear that funny lady opera voice.  I don't know if that voice was his Sasha Fierce or if he even knew who Beyonce was, but he was a goddamn good male soprano if I ever heard one!