Recap: Westminster Wednesdays delves into the vocal technique of belting

ANTHONY KOSAR: Hello all of you who are joining us this evening for our Wednesday webinar. I'm Dr. Anthony Kosar and I'm interim director of graduate studies at Westminster Choir College of Rider University.

I'd like to just briefly tell you that we have a number of online graduate programs and a number of in-person graduate programs for those of you who are considering a master's degree in music. I'd like to particularly call your attention to our newest programs, we offer a master of voice pedagogy with both classical and music theater tracks and our newest programs are online degrees in sacred music and choral pedagogy.

I'm going to put my contact information in the chat and I would encourage you to check out our website and our degree programs, and our faculty and staff, and if you have any questions please feel free to reach out to me and I'd be happy to interact with you.

It looks like we also have one of our trustees joining us tonight, and I'd like to send out a special welcome and thank you for joining us, and now I'd like to introduce our MC Dr. Jay carter who is professor of voice here at Westminster Choir College of Rider University.

JAY CARTER: Thank you Dr. Kozar, greetings from Jacksonville Florida where I'm currently preparing for performances of Messiah with the Jacksonville Symphony this weekend, if any of you tuning in happen to be local to northeastern Florida and are interested in attending these concerts please drop me a note I'd be eager to connect with you while I'm on the road.

But now to the matter at hand, it is a pleasure to introduce my colleague Jonathan Price for this installment of Westminster Wednesdays. He currently serves as the assistant director of the voice pedagogy institute at Westminster Choir College and teaches voice for both the school of fine and performing arts and for Westminster Choir College. His students are actively performing on Broadway and in tours across the United States of Germany and Jonathan is actively engaged as the director for voice for the performance career center in Manhattan and is the president of New Jersey NAS.

As a professional performer, he has worked extensively in operatic repertoires as a concert soloist and as a recitalist. His breadth of knowledge and fluency across the spectrum of vocal music has been essential in helping performers, teachers and practitioners of voice pedagogy musical theater and classical voice find common ground and to be able to communicate effectively as we all strive to awaken healthful techniques and broad artistry in our charges.

Mr. Price holds degrees from Boston Conservatory and from the University of Cincinnati College Conservatory of Music. He's been a faculty member of Westminster College of the Arts since 2013 and Westminster Choir College since 2018. So join with me in welcoming Jonathan Price.

JONATHAN PRICE: Thank you so much Jay and thank you to all of you for attending, and I'm excited to talk with you about what has become one of my favorite topics, sort of dispelling any of the concerns or hesitancy anyone might have about belting.

So before we start sort of the more formal part of the presentation I encourage you to put any of your questions or things that you're thinking about into the chat and my colleague Dr. Carter will keep track of those and make sure that I don't avoid any of your questions we'll get to them as we have time and I'm going to try to get to as many of those as humanly possible, while also making sure that we lay out what is hopefully going to be a really clear understanding of what belt is and what are some practical tools uh for building belt in your students.

So if you'll join me let's go ahead and I'll share my screen and we'll kind of get into it so we don't waste any time here at the front we can get to your questions.

Alright, belting for beginners, so let's start right off the bat, but what does belt mean and what we'll start off with are just a couple of descriptions that people might have and you can add your own as you think of them. Chesty a chesty sound, something with speech quality maybe it's loud or powerful, and maybe it has a particular timbre that you're expecting, whether that be twangy bright sometimes, also hefty is a term that's that comes to mind usually. I think Ginny Lavettery who coined the term contemporary commercial music that describes the sort of umbrella of a lot of these different ways of singing defines it as loud high chest singing and that it typically happens at a critical dramatic moment, in a song or in the arc of a character in musical theater.

So as we go on let's just keep a couple things in mind to sort of frame the conversation. First, off we're going to talk a lot about registration, so registration I'm just going to say these sort of as 

umbrella things I'm sure many of you are familiar with these but I often attend these things and find that i'm the one person in the corner who doesn't know what something means and it gets in the way of everything else that i'm trying to do so i want to make sure that we clear all that up.

So registration referring to sort of how do we balance different parts of the voice. We have what we call laryngeal registers those you might know them as chest voice and head voice or chest voice in falsetto. Scott McCoy defines them as mode one and mode two. A good way to think of that is thick folds, thicker vocal folds are associated with mode one and thinner vocal folds are associated with mode two.

Another thing that has been especially prevalent in research over the course of the last 10 years or so, is also the ability at the vocal fold level, to achieve the ratio anything along the spectrum of breathy, suppressed, and everything in between.

So all of those things are happening down at the vocal fold level. A couple other things to kind of frame your conversation; resonance. We're going to talk a lot about resonance and its role in the belt. Resonance essentially is describing shapes of our vocal tract being everything from the vocal folds on all the way on up to the edge of your lips.

The way that we describe a lot of that are we use the words sound quality or timbre, that's how we describe resonance qualities, and one of the main tools we have to talk about resonance is source filter theory. Source being the vocal folds themselves, the filter being everything else in the vocal tract, and the idea is there is an interaction between our vocal folds and the vocal tract and that interaction is where the magic happens.

We talk about that interaction in terms of resonance usually, and you might have also heard of a non-linear source-filter theory, or maybe not, maybe there aren't as many nerds among us but very similar source filter theory is sort of the basis for a lot of our understanding of resonance.

It's helpful sometimes to think about not just those two registers I mentioned before, mode one and mode two that are happening at the vocal fold level, but to also think of there being lots and lots of acoustic registers. Ken Bozeman who many of you may know recently wrote Practical Vocal Acoustics, edition number two, and I think he was the one that defined the term acoustic registers, but it's if you think about any of those little transitions that don't involve that primary movement from all of those little transitions that happened we can think of those as acoustic transitions or acoustic registers, and I apologize if there's any noise in the background I'm in my apartment in New York so you're hearing the city behind me.

Remember that terms are tricky and evolve over time. So you notice I introduced the words mode one mode two as opposed to chest voice and head voice. Chest and head voice are perfectly great terms, they just tend to be loaded with a lot of other things, like we tend to have sound quality associations with chest voice and head voice, we might have particular genre associations with how we use those things so using words like mode one mode two just allow us to get away from some of the long-held associations that might be baggage, but even a lot of the terms that you're going to hear like belt have meant very different things to different people over the years.

Singing is mysterious. Even in this wonderful world where we have all sorts of things from voice science, singing is still a beautiful mystery. You know we go into our heads, and somewhere between excited air and bouncing sound waves emerges this thing that has the power to move all of us, and has moved all of us here into a career in sort of search of ways to do it better.

So we'll talk about things, but at the end of the day we don't know exactly how all of these things happen, and having just a healthy respect for the fact that singing is mysterious will help serve us well. Perception isn't reality, it's more important, this is especially important when we start to talk about what belt is.

Right we started with a list of descriptions of what belt sounds like or what the quality of belt might be, but it's important to remember that what we hear and what is actually happening may not be the same thing, but especially in something that is as industry specific to contemporary commercial music as belt is. It's important that whatever we come across or what we help our students develop that we might call belt, would also be heard as belt by someone else so that's sometimes a tricky thing that takes some nuancing.

Alright, so I thought we might start somewhere that many of you would be a little more familiar or comfortable, which is the idea of Bel Canto technique. These are gross generalizations but I wanted to kind of define some terms. So we talked about registration earlier and I just kind of briefly go through here what are some of the building blocks of a more Bel Canto technique or a more classical technique.

So first, in treble voices they tend to make a modal transition, meaning from generally somewhere between C4 and F4. Though I kind of narrowed it down to that window, Scott McCoy actually has it much more broadly in his textbook, and they navigate secondo passaggio C5 to F5. Basically to maximize bloom and acoustic fidelity so meaning when treble voices get up toward the tippy top of their voice, into that top transition, there is some sort of modification of their internal shape, with the goal of having the sound blooming and beautiful on top. So they transition from some version of chest voice to some version of head voice from C4 to F4 and then transition into a more neutralized shape on top to be able to have more bloom.

Registration for tenors, baritones and basses, they make an acoustic transition away from speech and primo passaggio G3 to C4 and maintain vocal tract length at secondo passaggio C4 to F4 to maximize bloom and acoustic fidelity. So as we go up, [sings] instead of [sings] there's a transition that's made to allow for that.

Ok, so that brings us to resonance, you need to have in Bel Canto technique sufficient amplitude to carry over whatever ensemble you're singing with. Because unlike me here today and all of us who are involved in the contemporary commercial music space, you don't have a microphone, so amplitude is really important in Bel Canto singing.

Chiaroscuro is the sound ideal a combination of brightness and darkness clarity and obscurity and you need to feel like, it's one vocal quality more or less from top to bottom. Articulation is going to be idiomatic for the language of the work you're going to do some modifications of the articulators to serve your other goals, whether they be fidelity of line or legato, and there's a need for clarity less with supertitles and translations. So oftentimes we're not singing in the same language as our audiences, and we also have the aid of translations to allow us to not have to be quite so crystal clear with every word.

Then we have belt, and this is just always the stock picture for every belting thing, Idina Menzel, I'm very sorry, ot's a great picture though. Registration for treble voices in belt and again this is just kind of giving an overview, we're going to get into kind of the nitty-gritty playing around with this stuff later but this is just so you have a framework you maintain that speech mode through primo passaggio. so typically you're staying in some version of chest voice as you go higher.

There is no perceptible transition at secondo passaggio if you make it that high, that's awfully high for some kind of belt. There is a slight acoustic transition around B4 slash C5, so in a belter there you'll hear some sort of a transition that does happen around there, going from what we might think of as sort of a lower belt to a higher belt.

For tenors, baritones and basses, yes, as you just heard me do earlier, men can belt, it's an acoustic choice, it primarily refers to activity at second passaggio and above so that transitional area toward the top of men's voices or tenors, baritones and bass’s voices, and you maintain mode one above sequential. Resonance wise the emphasis is on vocal color, not making it loud. Though it will tend to be loud just because of what we're doing.

You'll have a shorter vocal tract length relative to Bel Canto and more legit singing, I hate that term but it is industry standard for anything that sounds quasi-classical. In musical theater, nasality is often used to increase brightness and to give it more of a speech quality so nasality which might be a total no-no and a lot of classical singing, you know, although some tenors would beg to differ, is a definite asset when we are trying to build a belt.

Open vowels are also favored, so open vowels tend to make it easier to find a belting resonance. Articulation, wise modifications are used to maintain a more open mouth position and length, so tongue-based consonants are preferable over bilabials when possible. So if you can make a sound by flicking your tongue versus having to close your mouth that's better.

Many strategies from Bel Canto technique can be used to maintain some of the same goals. What I love about that connection between classical singing and belting is that these are both athletic full-bodied endeavors. When we're talking about these sort of heroic larger-than-life characters that we see both in more classical singing and then also in belting.

So, how to build a belt, this gets us into a little bit more of the practical side of our conversation here. Mix first, so what is a mix? Mix is something that maybe is a term that you've heard before, I have heard it to mean everything from basically belts but with a little less volume, to basically sing soprano but with speechier bells. So anywhere in that continuum, I've heard that defined as mix. I just say it's having a speech-like quality on any pitch.

Mike Ruckles who was our musical theater master teacher at this summer's voice pedagogy institute, I think he had a similar definition, so having a speech-like quality on any given pitch. So this is one of my favorite little quotes, from Mary Saunders-Barton, who I'll reference a little later as well, she wrote the ‘Bel Canto Can Belto’ series and also co-authored ‘Cross Training in the Vocal Studio’ with Norman Spivey. These are both wonderful things for you to have in your collection.

Lay the track, then run the train, so the track would be mix, the train would be the belt. Only add weight when your form is correct. So how do we build a mixy sound? So I love that picture, twang, if you're interested in learning more about twang I can highly recommend any of Carrie Obert's writing, she's published lots and lots of articles on twang but it's a unifying timbral strategy. So as you talked about resonance earlier, twang is a thing that lets you get from one part of your voice to the other so it kind of has a common quality across registers and in fact when I use it I don't really feel much of a registered transition at all.

So you want to try to help using twang which involves a narrowing in the pharynx and also generally a higher tongue position. Finding that first this quality of sound you can use an /y/ buzz with the retroflex tongue, this is also for any of you who have experienced overtone singing. This is one of the strategies in that, so you kind of find that buzziness with the tip of your tongue up against the back of your bottom teeth and then that creates a similar resonance phenomenon as you want to have when you're mixing.

Using this is one of my favorite strategies and if any of my students happen to be here they'll be intimately familiar, using different voices that have a twangy quality. So if you think of the wicked witch of the west in this kind of quality, or maybe it's just an old lady or an old man, this kind of quality will allow you to find a little bit more brilliance in this, you know in the speech pattern.

You can also, this is another one that I've learned from Mike Ruckles this summer, which is an old reporter or movie star voice, and if you just keep your lips very close together you release your jaw and then you kind of have this kind of a quality which you can hear across this voice, this voice around this voice you have, you have twang.

So you can play with whatever quality seems to connect the most with you or with your student. My experience has been that usually one of these will hit with a student. It's very rare that you come across someone that can't find one of these constructions but you can play around with them until they do and it also puts you in a spirit of play which I think is so important when you're trying to experiment with new sounds.

Some more tools for this, so using a pitched monologue this is one of my favorite tools for building mix, so the idea of just taking your speech voice and finding it of course you know finding it into a song. So we just lost Stephen Sondheim, recently so I've been working on lots and lots of Sondheim with students, but take ‘Giants in the Sky’. so your student might come in and sing, you know, ‘there are giants in the sky’, particularly if they're classical student, then this is their crossover piece. Ok, that's beautiful but not entirely appropriate for the style we're in so what I might have them do is [sings], following the pitch of that then just trace that through with breath a little bit [sings], and you kind of go back and forth between singing and speaking and trying to get the speech that it follows that contour.

So that's what I just demonstrated and then you can add a little bit of a twangy voice to that, [sings] and you get a little bit more of that twangy mixy quality.

Another strategy is to start with noise so we just demonstrated that retroflex E sound and just getting a noise or something like that on the melody, [hums] and then see if you can add words to that without disturbing the buzz [sings]. I sang that role forever ago, one day I'll learn the words, and then we transition that into belty noises which I think is a more useful way of thinking of it. I think I encountered that in the new forum for professional voice teachers on Facebook the first time but I loved it. Belting noises rather than locking yourself into this idea of belt which has a lot of connotations to it.

Ok, now let's move from mixing noises which is just speech quality, into some belty noises, things that have a little bit more sense of importance to them. So animal noises are a great primer for this. One of my favorites as my students will know are meows so you can make a very cat-like meow, and make it a little bit more into something that would translate into singing, and then you can easily turn that into something that's a little bit more like a singing exercise so [sings] kind of taking that over. Similarly quacks work well [sings] and you hear that both of those have a very ad-dominated sound as I said earlier open vowels tend to work best for belt.

You can also use intense phrases and exclamations, so imagine you're standing on the street in New York and it is 10 minutes before the last train home, and there's no way you're going to be able to walk there in time, so your only hope is to grab a taxi and just say ‘taxi, hey taxi’, and that kind of energy can help you find a similar sort of belty quality.

This is one of my personal favorites, this is again a Mary Saunders-Barton, as many of these phrases are [sings damn cat] and it's just one of my favorite stories to tell along with this, it's good to have a story because it kind of brings the student along with you a little bit and puts them into a world, particularly if you have a student that is coming from a theater background.

So what I'll often say is imagine that you're like staying with some friends or some family, friend someone a little older, and you've gone out to meet some friends and it went way longer than you were planning on, and so you're having to come back and the lights are all off, you're trying not to wake anybody, you're, you're sneaking through the house and it's going very well. You're gonna make it no problem, and then all of a sudden you step on the cat's tail, and it makes the worst noise ever that you know is gonna wake everybody up and all you can summon from the bottom of your soul is ‘damn cat’ and you'll feel that you can make a pretty loud and pretty belty quality sound without feeling like there's a lot of effort. So I highly recommend stories around these.

Also exclamations, ‘oh yeah’, try not to fall in a kool-aid man, “oh Yeah” or something else that's a little boomier like that, try to keep it as twangy as possible, and you can easily turn that into again [sings] or [sings]. You know any variation on that is great.

Ok, and then some words of wisdom as we're sort of thinking about, what it is that you want to do with, your sort of teaching belt in your studio, some things just to keep in mind in the back of your head. The true belt should be used sparingly, so the true belt might be that fullest most open chesty sound [sings], you know some versions of that should be used really sparingly. You can accomplish what you need to accomplish usually without something that has quite so much weight to it, so recommend that what you might call a true belt be used sparingly.

Experiment with extremes, this is such a wonderful attitude regardless of style, but experiment with going from okay well, why don't you do that on your most heady sound [sings], okay now give it to me on your near fullest most chesty sound [sings], okay now let's experiment somewhere in the middle [sings]. Not being afraid to play around and try different things.

Belt works most naturally in open vowels, we've talked about that but also a high back of tongue is really useful for most belting practices. So make sure the tip of the tongue is always hanging out somewhere by the back of the bottom teeth, and that the back of the tongue is up closer to an E position. So these are not sort of those chiaroscuro classical versions of these vowels, generally, you want a slightly higher larynx position than in more classical singing so that high back of the tongue is super welcome. It also can help with a little bit of resistance, so you don't have quite as much air pressure coming to the front so there's lots of benefits there.

The belt should be voice type appropriate, so what do I mean by that so you know, just like we would never expect if we had a you know a five-foot tall, you know 10 lb soprano come in and then we have a five-foot eight 150 lb contralto come in, we wouldn't expect those two people to have identical timbres. It's the same thing with belt, you know you do not want to try to take belt as though there's one universal idea of what it should sound like. So help someone find the function in their own voice so you're building it through a mix. You're adding a little bit more chest as the student is able to handle that, and then you experiment with different levels, different intensities put them in different emotional situations. What would happen if we move from an ah to more of an aah, those will all have timbral consequences. So you can play within that but try to divorce yourself from having one sound ideal for what belt is, let it be flexible to the person that's in front of you.

Ask lots of questions. So one of my favorite questions is, you know once when someone does something you know that was new and they say oh my god I feel like I'm shouting, particularly if you're dealing with belt you get that a lot. One of my questions that I always ask is did it feel like you were shouting or do you feel like it sounded like you were shouting, and that's an important distinction right because especially if you're coming from a place that, I am not supposed to make ugly noises I'm not supposed to make any noises that might be outside of a particular ideal then sometimes even though something feels totally fine internally you might be afraid that maybe you're doing something wrong.

So asking questions to help give permission to a student to feel like they can make all sorts of different noises even the ones that don't have the most sort of classically beautiful quality, and then also giving a space where they can say ok, that was uncomfortable and then you can try to source that and figure what might be something that you could do to try to relieve that discomfort.

Finally, if you want to learn more about belting and really all of the different sort of contours, within contemporary commercial music and my particular expertise is in musical theater, I can highly recommend the ‘Vocal Athlete’ by Wendy Laborn and Marcy Daniels, Rosenberg, ‘Cross-Training For the Voice Studio’ which I referenced earlier. So you want to sing musical theater, there's a wonderful, ‘So You Want to Sing’ series that has been put together. I can highly recommend everything in that series, and then I also referenced earlier ‘Kinesthetic Voice Pedagogy 2: Motivating Acoustic Efficiency,' that whole work is a little bit of a heftier lift you know it assumes a lot of prior knowledge, but there's some really phenomenal information and there is a section devoted to belting in that, so I highly recommend, there's some great exercises in that as well.

JAY CARTER: John, again, thank you so much for your expertise and for your ability to translate between a couple of different versions of the language all at the same time and to help us look at belting and thinking about belting in this way. I know I'm better off for having listened to it.

For those of you that have tuned in, again thank you so much for joining us. I would call your attention to our offerings that are going to be happening next month. Unfortunately, I did not put it up in front of me but it is available on the Rider University website and I believe next month is Dr. Kathy Price, who Dr. Jonathan Price knows fairly well, who will be leading us through some thoughts about the voice, during time periods of change. So I will look forward to seeing the rest of you at that point.

Thank you for joining us, and I wish you well through the holiday season and through the new year. Thanks so much, take care.