In the article about Jussi Bjorling and the neutral stance I mentioned his use of rotation to support his singing. So far we’ve mostly looked at appoggio, which is just Italian for leaning (you’ll hear it described – nonsensically – as a kind of way to blow air). When you lean in the right way, you extend the vocal tract and you create a brief drop in air pressure that gives you an opportunity to use a “push” to make a powerful sound, or to finesse it without losing the “core” of the voice (a strong parallel octave overtone).
Even if you don’t use rotation when you perform, it’s good to understand what’s going on, because it teaches us about appoggio. When we watch someone lean into the sound it’s easy to see that they are stretching out their body from head to toe, or at least from head to hip. Lots of other authors have discussed why we need to extend and retract the vocal tract to sing using the high, middle, and low parts of the voice. I’ll spare you the physics: it’s serving a similar function to the slide in a trombone, which is really the closest instrument to the human voice.
What’s less obvious for most people is that for your body to get longer it has to get narrower, and. To get shorter it has to get wider. In “How to nail tricky onsets” you can see me improving the phrase by narrow my stance, because this high onset needs a narrow support. Because my feet are offset in the neutral stance, I can accomplish this to some extent using only a shift in body weight, but to get the full range I need to move my feet.
So what about rotation?
First let’s look at the obvious in the Jussi Bjorling video. Whereas Corelli moves downstage to sing high and upstage to sing low, Bjorling seems to move in the opposite direction. He rotates away from the direction he is looking when he wants to go high. If he had a rock in each hand, he could throw one into the band when he goes high.
With rotation it’s easy to see that this lowers breath pressure. The front leg holds his weight and the posture isn’t allowed to break. This anchored hip pulls on his trunk and pulls all the way across to the other shoulder, which combined with the tension in the legs result in a longer trunk and vocal tract.
To get back down he twists towards Ho dominant leg, and he keeps his stance from breaking. This widens him out as he untwists to neutral, and keeps his air pressure from dropping as he lowers the pitch. If he wants even more he can keep going past neutral.
Rotation is not as powerful as linear movement. But it is more precise and smoother because there’s not much momentum to manage. It’s one of the options you have when seated, where your appoggio is limited by your anchored butt. A big benefit of knowing how to rotate is that it gives you options for your acting. You can rotate into or out of a change of direction on stage, or use it when you have limited foot mobility.
Rotation and appoggio can be combined to make a “hybrid” move. Thats part of your own personal style
The one option we haven’t covered is simple and direct extension and retraction. That’s because I mostly see this type of motion already and don’t have any interest in teaching it. If you can do the other two you don’t need anyone to show you that.
https://newschoolsinger.com/2018/12/29/the-almost-lost-art-of-rotation-in-singing/
Submitted December 29, 2018 at 02:46PM by pcastagner http://bit.ly/2RfAMR5
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