Observing Ashley Hecht's Voice Lesson.

For my final observation from one of Dr.Lofgren's students, I observed Ashley Hecht. She is a Spanish Education major and this is her first semester of voice lessons ever. Ashley is a petite, soft spoken soprano, and she wanted to take voice lessons for her own personal enrichment. As it was with Brett, the door remained open for the entire lesson, and she didn't seem phased by it at all. She was sick the past couple weeks so this was the first lesson her and Dr.Lofgren had in quite a while. They began with going up five on an I vowel and then back down 5 on an ah. She was having difficulties staying on pitch as they ascended, but felt pretty comfortable in her lower range. Since she was having trouble finding pitch he had her slide up on on the I and then open up on the ah. She really wasn't opening up at all, and she was barely producing any sound. Dr.Lofgren took that as an opportunity to talk about posture. He pointed out all the spots in your foot that form a "tripod" and told her to align her body into an ears over shoulders over hips position and she should be standing so that all the weight is on her skeleton and she shouldn't be having to do hardly any work. Then they began to discuss breathing and he kept telling her to feel like the breath is sinking down low in her body. She seemed kind of confused, but after a bit of trial and error she began to get a low breath. He had her do yung yung yo up on an arpeggio, and she was barely opening her mouth, but he didn't seem to concerned with that and had her look in the mirror to watch her breath. They continued with the yung yung yo and he wanted her to concentrate on setting up her breath with the ng sound. After doing that for a while she started going up five on a ho sound and on the fifth one she did ho five times and went back down. He told her that she was breathy before and doing stacatto can  help get rid of some of the breathiness. He told her that she was starting to sound better, but I didn't really think it had improved any. If it were me, I would've had her do sliding I's or even just I's on a five pattern so she can feel something of a buzz and little more forward of a sound. She started doing ya up and down five, and she wasn't getting a very low breath and the energy of the sound was pretty much dead. Dr.Lofgren had her do a z sound up and down five and told her to do the ya with the same amount of energy that she had for the z and she did a lot better after that. They kept going up the piano and he would tell her to get narrow and thin at the top and to make sure she's in her head voice and it's nice and light. The higher she got, the tighter and squeakier it was and when they stopped he told her that and he said that she just needs to keep the energy behind it. I think there was a few more things wrong than just the energy though. I know that she needed to open her mouth up more, she needed to open up her throat, and she needed to bring the sound forward because she didn't have any buzz. They started on her first song which was an Italian piece. The tessitura was really pretty low for a soprano, and the highest note was an f5. She sang through it once and it was very breathy and I couldn't hardly hear her because her mouth was so closed. Dr.Lofgren asked her about diction in a couple places and he told her that she needed to get some energy under the sound because it sounded pinched off. Then he whipped out some sheet that had to be from the "Overtones of Bel Canto" book because it was the same type of warm ups he did with Brett. They did some oo-ah-oo and uh-eh-uh sounds and he told her to leave everything open and relaxed and let her tongue move to form the sounds. They went up to about an f and he asked how it felt and she replied that it felt tight. I was kind of questioning if she was really in her head voice, but Dr.Lofgren didn't mention it. He would play a note on the piano and tell her to start on that note and do a siren down. She was doing a pretty good job of opening up for that, but she was still running out of air. They started on the song again and she started to open her throat up more and her sound was fuller, but it only lasted for a little bit and she closed up again. Dr.Lofgren told her to trust herself and it will be there and she needs to use more breath. I didn't exactly know what he meant by that, and I'm not exactly sure that she did either. What I think he was trying to get at was that she was just scared to let the sound come out, and even though I thought he was kind of overdoing the whole breath thing, she really did need to get her breaths under control because they were pretty weak and high. The part of the song where it gets the highest, they took it down and octave and after singing through that they took it back up the octave and he told her to sing with the same openess that she did in the lower register. She was still pretty closed up, but they were out of time so they were going to come back to it next week. One of the big things I noticed in this lesson was that after she'd do something incorrectly, even after he explained how to fix it, Dr.Lofgren would kind of get lost, and he wouldn't really know what to say or do next. I think his style of teaching for her lesson might have worked for some people, but I'm not sure she was really comprehending much of anything he was saying.