So you Want to "Sing" in the Choir: Playing in a Vocal Manner

by Margaret Thornhill

September 2010

Wind playing is compared so often to the human voice that it's almost a cliché. "Singing" a phrase, playing "cantabile," "voicing" intonation, "supporting" with the breath: we talk as if the mechanism of the voice and the clarinet are much the same. It's no accident that we call a group of clarinets a "choir."

Fine choral singers try to match articulation, tone and phrasing impetus with their section colleagues. One professional singer joked to me recently "we try to grok another singer" (a term coined by Sci-Fi writer Robert Heinlein in his 1961 novel, Stranger in a Strange Land). When I didn't recognize this word,  she said "or perhaps it's like the movie, Avatar." 

"Grok" will do--Heinlein defines it thus: 

"Grok means to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes a part of the observed—to merge, blend, intermarry, lose identity in group experience."

What a metaphor for ensemble performance! Not many conductors are going to say "grok your stand partner" but I'm sure you see what I mean. For any attempt at total identification to be successful, singers and clarinetists need both the luck to work with sensitive, like-minded musicians and the tonal flexibility to yield to this experience.

These days, when I'm looking to fill an empty chair in my audition-based clarinet ensemble, I'm seeking someone with  a "singing" tone: lively and flexible, cushioned and centered, unified and varied. While good technique, strong reading, excellent intonation, and personality—musical and otherwise—count tremendously,  a tone that is beautiful and that blends with other ensemble members is the most important factor. 

Anyone can play with a more singing tone, whether an intermediate high school student (who will need help), a college non-major taking lessons (with a keen ear), an adult amateur interested in moving up to better chamber groups, or a post-college clarinet returnee who wants to get back into the game. What follows here are some ideas from vocal pedagogy that can serve as starting points for clarinetists interested in playing in a more vocal manner:

1. Singers create a beautiful legato by staying "on the breath" 

For trained singers, the goal is consistent breath support in all registers, so that there are no "holes" in the voice. The eminent New York singing teacher Ruth Falcon once invited me to put my hands on her lower abdomen to feel how she continually re-engaged the pelvic muscles to support her tone.  This is harder work than most clarinet players ever do, but if you choose to do it, it will change your projection, your pianissimo, and build more core in your sound. 

In wind playing, breath is both stabile—providing a constant pressure to keep the air column vibrating—and motile, moving at varying speeds through the instrument to create the dynamic shape of the music.  

2. Singers and clarinetists phonate vowels

We call it "voicing"—making a vowel shape with the inside of the mouth to control fullness of tone or elevation of pitch or both. Most common is the use of the "E" vowel shape to raise pitch or an "Ah" to flatten. Singers use mouth resonance: why shouldn't we? I find that consciously bringing the breath forward in the mouth is essential to creating a vibrant and more rounded tone. Imagine the whole front of the oral cavity as a rounded, high-roofed, resonating space—a little cathedral of air, just waiting to be directed through the mouthpiece. 

Singing teachers encourage students to change their resonant cavity in ways that are not familiar in ordinary speech. For example, some speak of "opening in back." Many clarinet teachers talk about "yawning." Try experimenting to see what produces your best sound.

3. Singers match vowels to create a pure line

...and clarinetists match tones. Listening and adjusting makes all the difference. 

If you are new to the concept of matching, try matching your own "best note." Play a single note, sustain it, make it beautiful. Then, when you are satisfied, slur to an adjacent note without changing the quality of your support, or the beauty of your tone. If it is a dull note on the instrument, work against the tendency of the clarinet. Try this up and down the length of the instrument for a beautifully matched, basic scale. Work until your ear is satisfied.

4. Singers use the whole body as their instrument

The human body is a vibrating sound box! Singers see themselves as three dimensional; they often talk about using their backs to help create the tone.  

Try thinking about your back vibrating while playing and see if it doesn't really change your concept of what tone is. It's not just the clarinet itself that is resonating.

3. Singers "audiate" or imagine the phrase in their inner ear before or while playing it.

A great artist performs the music she hears in her head.  The stronger that aural image, the more assured the performance, and the longer and more expressive the line.  The kind of memorization that  is so much more valuable to playing musically than simple reliance on finger memory. Think of your printed music as a prompt for your inner ear.

"Audiation”—a  term popular among vocal coaches and choral conductors credited in Wikipedia to the music educator Edwin E. Gordon—can refer to the hearing in advance of every expressive detail  of the music while performing.

Try this out: listen to your music in your head without the clarinet, while reading. Then play it on the clarinet, listening ahead of where you are supposed to be playing. You will find that using your ear in a conscious way while reading makes your playing much more fluent.

4. Singers's tongues don't interrupt the phrasing

In singing, consonants are spoken clearly but released quickly in favor of vowels.  The tone is sung on the vowel, not the consonant.There's no such thing as that bugbear of intermediate clarinet playing—a short note that is all tongue, and starved of tone—in good vocal practice. Tongue strokes needed for consonants are never an end in themselves. 

6. Singers work against tension through physical models such as Alexander Technique which allow the entire body to open up and participate in the breathing process.

I've collaborated for many years with a pianist who is also a vocal coach. Two years ago I finally gave in to her suggestion about taking lessons in Alexander Technique, which is so widely respected as a tool for musicians that is offered as a required class for singers in many music schools. I can honestly say that these lessons have done more to transform my tone and relieve physical discomfort of neck and shoulders than anything else I've done since ending formal clarinet study.

The Alexander Technique helps you balance your body to release tension in your neck, torso, and joints. Most of us scrunch and torque our necks and shoulders as we sit to play, compressing our sound and breath in the process, and ultimately developing a stooped posture. (Check out the posture of the bass clarinetists in your local orchestra, and you'll see what I mean.)

Try thinking of your shoulders as having strings or wings that stretch to the side, you neck and head released toward the ceiling, your torso (especially your midriff) longer and wider. Then play the clarinet and hear the difference a tiny bit of Alexander Technique makes in a full sound

7. Fine singers, especially choral singers, need and use flexibility to make many different shadings of tone.

Why can't clarinetists cultivate this ability as well? 

Playing in a vocal manner involves unity and variety: unity of scale and consistency of intonation, flexibility when it comes to matching another individual or interpreting the character of the music.  A unified tone is one in which the notes are carefully matched in color and intensity to each other up and down the scale. Variety in tone is the ability to modify the tone and color of  an individual note at will: something essential to good choral singing and to chamber music.  

What do these vocal concepts mean to the ensemble player?

Both kinds of choirs—instrumental and vocal—are musical groups in which the sound of the individual is subjugated to the communal "voice" of the section. In both these situations, the reward, and the basic challenge is the joy of matching the "other": really becoming that other instrument or voice, not only matching and anticipating articulation, but also taking on the characteristics of the other players' tone. While section leaders may be prized for their skills as role models, true solo singers with unusually distinctive voices are not always welcome in professional choirs. Clarinetists whose tonal concepts draw attention away from the group by their differences can become problems in a selective group, too. If you are a player who can't blend, then your first task in becoming a great ensemble musician is to learn to observe the characteristics of others who are more refined and flexible players than you are, and to want to make them your own.

Blending always involves giving something up. If you have a carefully cultivated edge to your tone, if you have a very colorful scale, if you're using vibrato as a reed player and others use none, then you will have to consider modifying your tone production as a priority to be a good ensemble member. Always consider what tonal properties seem to be reinforced or cast up as role models in the group. When obliged to match articulation, try to anticipate what the others are doing; if unsure, be an imitator, not a trailblazer.

The "choral" model is not the only one for a clarinet ensemble, of course. Larger clarinet ensembles, starting with the historical ones of Bellison and Hermann previously profiled in this column, rely on transcriptions of orchestral music as mainstays of their repertoire. For the sake of variety, the conductor of a large ensemble might wish to evoke the diverse palette of the orchestra through exaggerating  contrasts between the different sections by range, instead of trying to pretend they don't exist. Blend takes place within—rather than across—sections. This can also be the case with composers writing for full clarinet choir in what I'd call a "band" idiom: lots of back and forth between sections, showing the variety of color of the different sizes of clarinets.  However, in my listening and observing of clarinet ensembles over the past few years that I've been writing this column, I find that smaller clarinet choirs are playing more and more original repertoire written in a vocal manner, and that the resulting "sound" of such groups is more likely to be one in which the tone colors are ideally matched from top to bottom. Listening to such a group, it's a little harder to tell who is playing what: the top range of accomplished bass players might well be mistaken for a soprano clarinet; the tone of a specialty contra player might simply sound like a downward extension of the bass. In this case, unity of tone would be prized over diversity, both for the group and for the individual. Good ensemble performance is this: to play with another person, you essentially have to be that person—to match articulation, to meld tone, to phrase in a similar way.  If your goal is to be part of an exquisitely matched musical team, risking flexibility for the sake of musicianship is infinitely worth it.

Copyright 2010, Margaret Thornhill. All Rights Reserved. This article originally appeared in March 2010 in The Clarinet.