Amateur singers normally don’t sing without breaks in the sound that cut up the flow of the line. In music terms, they don’t know how to sing legato.
One cause of non-legato singing is the singer simply doesn’t know how to hold his breath while singing. You don’t push the air out to make sound, you have to hold your breath. The tension created in the torso is not something your average person is used to. The singer releases the tension whenever possible and that breaks up the line.
The other issue is that singers tend to close to voiced consonants to early. A voice consonant has a pitch: “ng” as in “King”, the letter n, the letter m are all example. Instead of giving the vowel the full duration, the sing will close to the “ng” and hold that on a pitch. That works for Sinata but no Palestrina. Even Haugen sounds crappy (crappier?) when not sung legato.
I can normally get good results if I just bring up these two points. It’s tough to create choral habits, but legato singing should be one of them.
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i have a dumb question…
how do you pronounce “Haugen?”
Is it hAW-gen? And for some odd reason, I’ve been pronouncing it hAY-gen.
I thought it was “HOW-gen,” as in, ‘can you tell me HOW-agin this guy’s so-called music came to be performed here?’.
ok thanks…
I’ve always said “HAWgen” or “The Artist Formerly Known As Martee HAWgen”
I hear that most amateur choirs sound much better after their choir directory has suggested a few bottles of premium scotch.
Jayson — is the scotch for the singers, or for the directors?
Care to share more tips on singing legato/ holding one’s breath? especially for long phrases? Thanks in advance.
Boy that would be a long post… I’ll see if I work on it next week.
J