Concerns, Care and Consistency For the Mature Voice

This past Tuesday I got an unexpected email from Christian Lane at Emmanuel Episcopal Church in Baltimore asking me if I would step in to do a workshop on Tips and Tricks for the Mature Singer. The person they had scheduled to do had a family emergency and was unavailable.

My first thought was “Wow, this is cool! I think I can do this! I wonder if all this writing about singers of a certain age is what prompted this:”

And then I thought it was more likely:

“Dang, we have to find someone to do this workshop! Who do we know who’s old?”

Then I got to work to figure out how to take the presentation I had done last year at Towson High School and add things specific to the mature voice.

I tweaked the one handout that I had used with THS (and earlier at an online Vocal Bootcamp) which focused on my handy-dandy acronym for vocal technique – BRAAP.

And I added another handout about Concerns, Care and Consistency for the Mature Voice.

The first area is Concerns.

or, as Mick Jagger puts it in the opening lyrics of this song…

I broke down concerns for the mature voice in two parts:

• Physical 
  • Atrophy – muscles, neural tissues, ligaments 
  • Cartilage ossification – not just in your knees! Your larynx is made up of cartilage
  • Stiffening and thinning of vocal folds
  • LPR (laryngopharyngeal reflux – not heartburn (GERD))
  • Osteoporosis
• Vocal
  • Hoarseness
  • Loss of range
  • Breathiness
  • Difficult register transitions
  • Vibrato issues
    • Wobbles (too slow)
    • Tremolo (too fast – also known as bleat)
  • Loss of stamina

And then we spoke about

Care and Consistency

or

And I broke down ways to counteract those concerns as follows:

• • Physical 
    • Keep moving – your body is your instrument!
    • Avoid:
      • Throat clearing, yelling, vocal overuse, loud talking, grunting
      • Late night eating, especially spicy foods!
      • Smoking (anything)
    • Hydrate, hydrate, hydrate!
      • Water or steam, but fruits and veggies also have a lot of water content!
    • Hormone replacement therapy – if that is an option (however, while estrogen and progesterone are valuable for treble voices, androgen will lower your voice irrevocably!)
  • Vocal
    • Keep singing! And not just singing songs over and over!
      This is something that I try to impress on my young singers – and sometimes it’s like pulling teeth!
      
    • But pace yourself!
      • Vocal rest when you need to (take “vocal naps”)
      • Learn to mark efficiently – if you’re singing down the octave beyond your range, you’re really not “saving” your voice at all.
      • Whispering (or even mouthing the words) is not helpful! (Put your fingers on your throat and mouth or whisper A-B-C-D-E-F-G: You can feel that your larynx is still working even though you’re not actually singing anything!)
    • Make accommodations if you have to (even if it’s short term)
      • Maybe you’re not a first soprano or tenor anymore – Linda Ronstadt said that, after turning 40, she had to “[look] for a new way to tell a story with the voice I had.” Bing Crosby apparently lowered his songs by a half step every 5 years after he turned 60. By the time he died at 74, he had taken his signature songs down a minor third.
    • Sing smarter, not harder! 
      • Vocal exercises – traditional exercises (which we worked on next)
      • Stemple exercises – created by Dr. Joseph Stemple, focuses on four elements
        • Warm up: Hold /i/ for as long as you can on F4 (treble) or F3 (TB)
        • Stretch: Slide from low to high on the word “knoll” through nearly closed lips
        • Contract: Reverse the slide from high to low
        • Power: Hold the word “oll” beginning on C4 (treble) or C3 (TB) for as long as you can. Repeat up to G.
          Each of these exercises should be done twice.
          I did these exercises every morning in the fall/winter of 2022 after I recovered from Covid to get my voice back. They are SO BORING. But they work. This was the source material I used for the handout and it’s a terrific resource: Vocal Function Exercises
      • Pick repertoire that fits your voice! (This doesn’t just apply to the older singer – suit things that are right for you where you are right now)
      • Work with a teacher in either group settings or individually to have an outside ear – you can’t hear yourself the way another person can!

After that presentation, we moved into vocalizing and my singers were terrific!

And I have to say how rewarding it was not to have to explain my cultural references (for example: “We can’t take that exercise too high or we’ll sound like Dino Flintstone,” and not be met with puzzled stares).

I managed to finish the class and cover all my material on time (which is better than I did at Towson High School). I even got a free lunch out of it! (Plus my fee, because exposure doesn’t pay the bills.)

Thanks to Christian Lane and Emmanuel Episcopal for having me – and I would love to do this again. Perhaps this might take me into another direction – group voice classes for mature singers? Perhaps at some community centers or retirement communities in the Baltimore metropolitan area?

Here’s the song I played to accompany our alignment portion of the class (it’s also a song I intend to use to close the cabaret show that I’ll be writing as a companion to my forthcoming book, Growing Older: From Ingenue to Grande Dame. Not sure I fully embrace the sentiment just yet, but the tune is catchy.

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If you’re looking for a teacher or a clinician to come in and talk to your group (or work up a multi-session class) about vocal health and the mature voice, send me a message and we’ll see what we can work out!