Voice Classes
RICHARD HILTY IS A VOICE TEACHER FROM WHOM I TOOK 14 LESSONS
DIARY 13599
11/5/78
RICHARD HILTY TRIAL SESSION
Row of coats on hooks in the hall makes it look like an old schoolroom, and some sexy teenager's moving around the kitchen. Dennis opens the inner door for me and Richard's bulky and frowzily red-headed and cheery of voice, and Dennis asks if he should go and do A or go and do B, and I say "just go," and he does. See Linn's Stamp News and he says he collects only the first 6 US airmails, and I mention that I have some with pinholes in them, and he says I should look to see what initials they may be (and I check now and find FRB LA, with some holes missing, in my C5), and that we can talk about them later. I say I collect everything and he says he stashes things away that aren't C1-6. Then he mentioned Dennis said (which he said he didn't) that this would parallel my opening up in other areas, and I agreed, and he said let's see. He told me to stand with bent knees, tucking up my ass, pulling in my stomach "80%", crushing the tip of my tongue, and breathing through my nose. "Don't let your shoulders go up and down, pull them down," and when I do he says "Now you can feel the air entering your back, which is good." I told him about the trauma of being told "You're flat" in camp, and how I never sang except in Central Park in my broken voice. He said that it was just a matter of holding, and that someone who was tone-deaf was just COMPLETELY held. He told me to crush my tongue, "pitch" the voice by exhaling in a "huh" from the belly, then inhaling ONCE only and going "na-na-NA-na-na" up and down a pentad. I tried straining on the top NA and he said I was thinking about it too much: look at a point on a picture and don't think of the sounds I'm making. I'd squeeze a tone and he'd say, "You were listening." He'd repeat, "Hold in your stomach" until I was quite sweating, said it felt like hard work, and he said it WAS. Went to five tones up and four down, he said I had no trouble with pitch, would probably find that I could lower my voice a lot, "threatened" me with work with head-tones later, then said that I should practice every day singing, then thought, then said, "NOT singing, you'd think about it too much," and left me go at 7:30, fatigued, limp in the legs, sore of stomach, dripping with sweat, not sure WHAT I'd started! He said 3 pm Wednesday until possibly something opened up later in that day.
DIARY 13620
11/16/78
RICHARD HILTY LESSON 1
Show him the drawing I made of the FrB/LA holes punched in my C5, and he says he'll check on its value, but that it's probably less than a good copy he'd trade me for because he's a specialist, saying the catalog can't really be trusted since condition determines everything. Then he asks me to stand and sing, saying my neck is sore because I've been trying too hard, shouldn't HOLD my shoulders down because they'll just stay down if I don't lift them, and tells me that that snort of "pitching the voice" was to get me to feel my stomach, and it shouldn't be held in any more than THAT! Then he gets out a card and tells me to write directions: 1) Bend knees. 2) Pelvis under. 3) Crush tongue, more and more under molars at the sides as it relaxes, the rest of the tongue to the roof of the mouth, though I start strangling and he says I can leave a little hole, and I draw him a picture and he says that's fine, but I should get the snorting sound as I'm hawking up mucus from the sinuses, and that'll clear just fine in time. 4) Pitch breath, to firm belly. 5) Flare nostrils (I'd forgotten THAT completely the previous week!) and breathe slowly (I keep tending to speed up), staying firm in the belly, which is about the hardest part of it all. 6) Lean into sternum (this he adds this time), saying that when I sing I should feel that it's pushing outward toward him on each note. 7) Always focus on the VOWELS, which is what Dennis was doing this time, since I tend to go too much on the consonants and swallow the vowels, but it should be ALL vowels. 8) "In and out are the same" is what I put down when he says it a dozen times, and I figure THIS is a good clue for me because he keeps telling me to listen to my breathing (and not to the sound of the voice) and NOT concentrate on my throat. 9) Point nose at 2nd balcony, because I'm riding too far back on my neck, and this should stop me tensing it so much and open the throat more. He has me sing the first 5-6 words of "Younger than Springtime," to which I add "am I" rather than "are you," after I say I know the words to it. Then he quickly returns me to the "Ma-ma-MA-ma-ma" and says that for the following week I should vocalize, which I do NOTHING of until the following Wednesday, when I call to cancel with a cold at 10:30 to find that he only requires 3 hours' notice for NO cancelled lesson payment! GREAT, and THIS may be one of the reasons I've come up with a cold TOO!
SOMEHOW THERE IS NO RICHARD HILTY LESSON 2
DIARY 13697
12/7/78
RICHARD HILTY LESSON 3
TOLD him that I didn't have a chance to practice during the previous week, and he said that he knew that Dennis used to come in bleary-eyed, too, when he was working on me. Then he tried me singing, said I sounded fine, and he wanted to save my voice so he tried something that was usually more advanced: crushing tongue, breathing in one beat, opening mouth and breathing in for a second beat, then breathing out with trumpet-lips for two b eats. I tried it and it went very well until he said to SING on the outward two beats, and then I panicked (interesting to see)---looks like the 0 shows up when a letter doesn't "quite" make it---and kept inhaling MORE air than I needed, gradually filling up like a balloon, and we laughed about that, and then he had me trying falsetto, and I did very well with that, and then he found that I was hyperventilating more than I needed because I wasn't crushing my tongue against the roof of my mouth (ONE thing that's wrong with the backspace is that if you find you've transposed two letters WAY back there, you can't just go back and untranspose them, you have to erase ALL the way back OR, another glitch, if you see something wrong on the last line ABOVE, you have to go back and retype the WRONG letter so that the backspace can get rid of it). He kept praising me, saying how quickly I caught on with new things to do, how good it was for me to come in today even though I didn't feel like it, and how much progress I was making. He kept asking me if I felt tired, and since I know the lesson would be over if I said I was tired, I didn't, so we kept on going. (I have to learn I don't have to hit carriage return if I come to the end of the line and then stop, IT will remember!) Dennis told me what a nice open guy Richard thought I WAS, and I sure do like constant underscoring, even though it DOESN'T WORK if you hit carriage RETURN IN THE MIDDLE, and this SHEET certainly looks funny, and THIS should have been UNDERLINES. He told me to keep on practicing while I'm indexing, not worrying about the neighbors about the noise, saying that the kids ribbed him when he was practicing his falsetto, and I should just learn not to be affected b y it. And I guess there isn't anything I can do about extending the typing easily over one page if the paper messes up in backspacing, as it did there!
DIARY 13725
12/24/78
RICHARD HILTY LESSON 4
He doesn't even ask me how it went from the previous week's practice, or lack of it, and I fear his asking me to repeat what I'd ostensibly been repeating for the past week: one closed beat in, one open beat in, and a Na-a-A-a-a sung out on two beats. Instead, he started with my listening to my breathing, and then he said to breathe in for a beat of three and out for a beat of three, then sing a bit to that, and I fell into the same kind of confusion as before when I sometimes started singing before he started playing, or he started playing when I'd inhaled only once and tried to sing without any air, but it didn't seem to matter to him: he kept repeating the formulae: You can't sing with your brain, don't listen to yourself, that was great that time because you just let it come out. Then he went to four beats in and four beats out, just breathing, and then to five beats in and five b eats out, and I felt fine, since I'd always had great breath capacity anyway, and then to six beats in and six beats out, which I felt was middling long, and went so far as to breathe in on SEVEN beats, when he stopped me and told me to listen to him and not think ahead, and I wasn't to go on without direction from him. But AGAIN he seemed to be saying that I had a marvelous capacity for growing and listening to start with, and again I could progress much faster than others who had more hang-ups than I had, or more vocal and respiratory limitations. Then he started me singing, but not on one long vowel with a consonant at the front, but with repeated consonants, like ma-a, ma-a, MA-a, ma-a, maaaa, and then he would shout out "Na" and I'd go na-a-na-a MA-a-na-a-naaaaa, and he'd tell me to hold the last note, that I was forcing the tone here or there, that I should ENJOY it, let it OUT, and a few times I REALLY shouted out the sounds, and he shouted above me "GREAT" on the piano, and I blushed and smiled and teared in the eyes and FELT great. We kept on, he kept asking if I was tired and this time I could TRULY say no, and we kept on going with other syllables and he didn't give me a cassette and I began wondering if I should bring in one for him, but we chatted about how EASY it was with me compared with some others he'd had, and we left both smiling and he blatted out notes as I waited for the elevator and then walked down the stairs to get out quickly.
DIARY 13749
12/26/78
RICHARD HILTY LESSON 5
He buzzes me in even BEFORE I ring the bell, having heard the elevator door slam, and I'm in AGAIN to something different, so it doesn't seem to matter that I didn't practice during the week. This time he tells me to breath, then in shorter breaths, then to double the rate, then double the rate, and I mention at first that I DO feel the stomach-tightening/sternum-pushing alternating, and then when I finish doubling for the last time, the whole area FREEZES, and he says THAT'S where I'm supposed to sing from. GREAT teacher. Another time he starts me off when I don't have much breath, and I tell him that, and he astonished me by saying that it's not the QUANTITY of air that makes the sound, only the squeezing of the vocal cords, as in the air from a balloon-neck, and the QUANTITY OF PASSING AIR doesn't make much difference. Then he starts me singing way down at the BOTTOM, and this time I DO let the sound out, and it feels great, and he says it SOUNDED great, and I said that for the FIRST time I knew what he'd meant when he'd say it should FEEL good---because it DID. Relayed to him that someone asked if I was a tenor, baritone, or bass, and had to laugh that we hadn't gotten that far yet, and he said it didn't matter, either, since we were still looking around and still opening up. I kept feeling guilty about not practicing enough, and then said I was thinking of giving myself a vacation next week so that I wouldn't feel SO guilty, and he said he knew THAT feeling, so for that reason I shouldn't have a vacation, and should try whatever little I get. Again got great feelings from him, saying that I would open up, and he talked about how he felt he was BETTER as a teacher than as a singer because otherwise he'd PUSH his voice too hard, and that wasn't good for it. He talked about Gigli and Del Monaco as singers who didn't push, just let the sound flow, and we chatted until a bit past 3:30, he one of these times telling me how rice and beans made the perfect combination of amino acids, and how the natives were to complimented for knowing this WITHOUT science to tell them what an amino acid even WAS. He talked about other things, too, and I felt close to him as a PERSON.
DIARY 13771
12/29/78
RICHARD HILTY LESSON 6
I hear the woman ahead of me doing the floppy-lips speech, and am glad I don't have to do that, and then here I DO! He tells me to make blubbery sounds with my lips, and perversely I can't find the way to do it the first few times, then discover I have to give SOME pressure to lips or they won't have the framework to blubber around. Then I do it magnificently. He keeps saying that I'm trying too hard, and then I say I want him to hear some of the great sounds that I came out with during the week, and he pounces on that, saying "I KNEW it," and saying that I'll just have to get used to feeling good when I sing, producing good sounds, and not being able to tell whether I'm singing well or ill. He said the woman before me was the worst case of tone-deafness he'd ever heard, but some of her runs were pretty awful, today, and she's practicing for an audition! If this kind of woman has the nerve to audition, at least I can feel more comfortable humming a tune to a friend! He says I can increase my practice time from 5-10 to 10-15 minutes per day, and I say that I'll be lucky to settle for an average of 10, and sometimes he makes the remark that I'm progressing remarkably fast. He gives me some falsetto to do, then lowers it until my voice cracks, and he says the cracks are just fine, but it's just possible he's finding out what my ranges ARE. I get out some good sounds and he praises some sounds as being good, not necessarily the same ones. He says I can change to 4:30 from here on out, but that someone usually comes at 5, so the perfect slot isn't available to me yet. He says nothing about his idea of getting the cassette tape, saying last time that some friend of his hadn't bought the supply of tapes, or the copier, or something needed, yet, so It's not really his fault. He's glad "that I have more time to practice now," and says that I've made a lot of progress since the time I started. Insists that I should follow my breathing before I start practicing, shouldn't eat two hours before (as I did today, realizing LATER that the 1/3 delay was GREAT for my stomach, which STILL felt overfull), should practice in the MORNING when I feel better, not in the evening, and he harshly questions me when I say I usually EXERCISE in the evening, too, when I'm tired of working and want a break, and he says to try it the other way around.
DIARY 13893
1/4/79
RICHARD HILTY LESSON 7
He has breathing for a bit, tries some more falsetto, gets me to breathe in one beat with tongue crushed, breathe in a second beat with mouth open in an "ah" windy in the throat, and then breathe out a windy one-two. Then he had me sing some of these phrases, prefacing with the word "sing" each time, and he made MUCH less fuss about holding in the stomach (using the term "pitch the voice" only once, and later relying on "sing" whispered with as much aspiration and exhale as possible) and NEVER said anything about bending the knees. He guesses I've progressed, I guess. With the first few phrases he shouted that I must have had a good time in practice, but I said that now that I HAD the time, self-consciousness came up very strongly, so he scooted off to get me a cassette tape (playing "The Raven" for a time when someone hadn't erased the tape) recorded on both sides, eventually saying that I should 1) breathe for 5 minutes, 2) listen to side 1 and follow instructions (which he played for me to make sure that I could follow), and 3) listen to side 2 (marked #4, which he said to pay no attention to, but I got the idea I was moving pretty fast) for the first three exercises. He wished there was a way to vary the recording so that the mind wouldn't know what was coming next, but he couldn't think of it. He kept changing pace with me, saying that the 6-count gave me too much time to think and that I operated MUCH better on the 2-beat rhythm which I found it hard to do at the START. I didn't remember, but I guess it's in the notes. Then he had me going in and out of falsetto, taking me around the breaking point, getting some good sounds that he liked, happy the way I caught on to the windy-falsetto (and he used "blow out the cheeks" for me to use the floppiness I practiced ONLY on the way to his place, talking about the "trumpet lips" tightly pursed that he said wasn't what he wanted, but as floppy and jowly as possible), and said I was making good progress but that finally I sounded tired. "Up late last night?" "No, but the night before..." "THAT'S just when you'll feel it, the second night is worse, so we'd better stop and let you rest, but you're doing just fine, keep up the good work." Dennis threatened to tell tales on me, and I threatened to beat him. Good.
DIARY 13934
1/13/79
RICHARD HILTY LESSON 8
He's alone so he calls me in at 4:25, playing the tape back to verify that INDEED he recorded side 4 over side 1, so he went back to get side 1, saying that I should always go BACK to it if I get confused in what I'm doing during daily practice, and then go through the first three sets on side 4, keeping it VERY WINDY. Then he tries falsetto and some chest tones, and it goes so well that he starts giving me two-beat pitches, about 3 fast panting pitches through the two beats, then a VERY slow sipping 5-beat inhale, followed first by a single sound, then a three-note scale, then a five-note scale. Then he modifies it to start a slow breathy, rock for two beats, and THEN sound, and when the sound builds in complexity to N N E E A A A A A, really flinging out the sound, he shouts that I'm doing VERY well and goes to get a copy of tape 3, which he says I should go through once a day. He said that tape 4 was pretty advanced, and there were 6 tapes in all, but he kept on going, even past 5 when the guy didn't show up, and I said I wasn't tired and he was pleased, and he seemed to have forgotten to tell me to keep the pelvis under and knees bent, so maybe that's second nature by now, he just keeps telling me to push on the sternum BEFORE making the sounds and making SURE to keep the nostrils flared, which seems to be things that I keep forgetting. Then he tells me to push my left finger into my jaw to make SURE my jaw hinges open, and when I open it farther, my teeth feel strange THAT far below my lower lip, which is better pressed forward (and he asked me for the blowing of lips once, which I managed to do, and introduced the "snore," which has me groggling in before singing, a way to "increase that feeling of suffocation" and get the head out of it so the BODY can sing), and he laughs and says "Found yourself chewing on your cheek, didn't you?" Then getting into what he calls "coloratura, like the soprano" he has me going HE HE HE HE HE, rather fast up and down, and I get so winded and so caught up in the lesson that I just DO what he says, and he's completely delighted and runs out to record SIDE 6 and gives it to me for once a day, and I keep on until 5:15, when I have to leave for Dorothy's, and feel SO good when I leave that he SURELY sees it, and I almost weep up the street.
DIARY 14010
Also 1/27/79
RICHARD HILTY LESSON 9
He's waiting for me at 4:25 and I go in and he records side 6 and plays it back to make sure it's there, saying I should only go as far with it as I feel comfortable, since it might be set a bit low for me. He compliments my voice, saying that I did well not to practice when I had a slight cold, and that I might be feeling rusty. He pushed me ahead, and then let me go back to listening to my breathing for awhile, and then had me back into the coloratura, alternating the ahs and ees, making sure not to get into the AW sound, but keeping with the pure AH sound. He kept telling me to flare my nostrils, which I kept forgetting, and said he said it helped when he said it a lot on the tapes. He said I should do number 3 first, with concentration on slow breathing, and then #1, and then said that the crux of the lesson would be slow breathing, then a pant, then doubled, and then into a nn-nn--a-a-A-a-a-a-a, which he would call a five-scale. Then he kept noticing that my voice sounded DEEPER, and once he even used the term "legit" for the voice that seemed to be coming out, but then he said that occasionally it would artificially deepen when I had a cold, so I said I should have a cold more often. I came out with a few passes that he looked at me expectantly and said "How did THAT feel?" and I had to admit that they FELT good in the body, when I could just LET go the mind, LET go the idea of just what it was I had to do, probably HAD my pelvis under and my nostrils flared and my lips well forward and my jaw well dropped without having the discomfort of poking my finger into my cheek, and just SANG out. He made some jokes about how poorly I must think I'm doing, saying that I'm doing well, and I start to REALLY let out my voice but crack a few times, and he again repeats that I can't go wrong by SINGING, but I CAN be wrong by TRYING too hard for a particular effect. "Just keep at it, it'll get to the point where you BODY knows what it wants." He said lots of other things that I couldn't quite remember, but DO recall that I left it really feeling quite HIGH, good about him, and someone else rang the bell and came in just as my stomach was feeling quivery and he made sure I wouldn't practice more that day.
DIARY 14057
2/13/79
RICHARD HILTY LESSON 10
I greet him with the news that some of his 7-counts were actually 8-counts, but I JUST counted the entire tape and find much to my chagrin that ALL his counts WERE 7, which seems reasonable since he said none of his OTHER students complained about it! Oh, well! He keeps trying me with the falsetto, saying that an entire VOICE can be trained ONLY in the falsetto, and there isn't any temptation to sing very LOUDLY, which is what helped make HIS voice not so good. Told tales of other people who came in and it took them MONTHS to get back to the SAME GOOD QUALITY of sound that they had when they came in the first DAY. I finally "get" that the "sing" being said is to put the tongue against the roof of the mouth, which he says should go even HIGHER for me, and AGAIN I keep hawking down phlegm, which he says is because of the cold weather outside. He keeps insisting that I shouldn't sing with my full voice, and he takes out tape 3 from my week's practice and says that I should continue putting my finger in my cheeks, but the point isn't to open my mouth AS FAR as it can go, but only AS FAR as to allow my fingertip to go in, but NO FARTHER. Oh! So I come out with some VERY stupid sounds that he praises a lot, but it ends up that I have no really clear idea what's GOOD and what's NOT, except that my jaw doesn't drop a WHOLE lot, I usually have to stuff my tongue onto the roof of my mouth more than I think warranted, the pelvis-under, knees-bent seems almost automatic now, but I have STILL to concentrate on tightening the stomach and driving forward the sternum. My lips go forward fairly well it seems, but my nose is never flared enough: the point seems to be to have so many OTHER things to concentrate on that the SOUND becomes very secondary: the body is supposed to FEEL right, but the ears aren't to be trusted in listening to the SOUND. He doesn't seem quite so extravagantly praising as before, though we seem to have fun together, and this morning Dennis says that I might be controlled in LOTS of things, but I'm more willing to make mistakes in singing class---until I think I know what's going on, and THEN make me want to control it. HJ says to practice only on my OWN with the full voice, so since I hardly practice with the TAPES, that doesn't happen very often.
DIARY 14077
2/18/79
RICHARD HILTY LESSON 11
Told him his counts of 7 WERE right, and he said "You can catch me up on something else sometime," and said he'd WONDERED why no one else had said anything about it. He says to stay off 3, goes farther up and farther down the scales, liking my voice, "taking the chance" of saying I probably put in a lot of good work this week (which I agreed with, not daring to say I'd just practiced once), and he keeps telling me to put my tongue alongside the molars aside my mouth to keep the tongue dumb-feeling, and he introduces me to the HN-EEE breath, with the tongue ALONG molars and the lips STILL pushed forward. I told him that my arms felt HEAVY, as if they were PULLING down, and he said that's REALLY getting into my body, and it was GOOD, but that I should NOT pull BACK the shoulders, just collapse around the stomach as my body seemed to be telling me to do. He said that if I GROWLED on an inhale, it was before I was giving it my all with my belly, so I should give it more of the NG feeling from "sing" and more hardened belly. I could feel the belly pushing out in the right way, though I said that I was STILL poking a hole into my sternum, and he said I should be glad I'm not like the male singers who always clutch their thighs when they sing, everyone always wants to hand onto something. He encouraged me to use the HEHE-HAHA-HEHE-HAHA sound instead of just the HO-HO-HO or HA-HA-HA, as used on the tapes, and then he got me into "Younger than Springtime," saying that it all had to be in the VOWELS, and I practically said it Younnnngggger that SPR NGNGNGNTm in my effort to go it wrong. He said the Younger turned into the diphthong EE-UH, and the Than should be more THEI, as in THEIR, writing it with a double loop, reminding me now of "are" together, saying the song would be EE-UH--GUH--THEI--I---and then he just sort of tapped his teeth and almost did a "gatime" to illustrate the shortness of the dwelling on the consonants. I tried it a few times and he seemed to say I was getting better, but I kept wanting to look at my watch, thinking he's had a cancellation and keeping me until 5:30, but when he dismissed me with a sore stomach it was only 5:03, and he said I had just been working hard, but was doing very well and he liked it.
DIARY 14132
3/2/79
RICHARD HILTY LESSON 12
No one was there so I went right in, saying I'd done nothing the past two weeks, and he hinted that I might have gotten a relapse of what I'd had before, particularly since there were no sings of fever or other illnesses. But he said that I retained a good bit of my sound, seemed to be finding more ranges of my voice both naturally and in falsetto, seeming to be pushing up and down the ranges, and some of these days I'm going to ask him what my voice COULD be. Told him I forgot to bring in the indexing write-up for his son, kicking myself because I HAD it back at the center and could have just brought one along. He said that next week was fine. I felt tired right from the start, he said it was good for me to have followed my impulse and have done NO singing, that it would have been much worse had I just bulled through trying to get SOMETHING done, as some people would, and ruin their throat and take a longer time to recover. He said that I should go no longer than 10-15 minutes before I got my strength back, but that he thought it would come back quickly: it's not as if "I had to get ready for a performance." He said to keep to tape #3 with the falsetto, with single tones OR closed-mouth, which I felt very comfortable in doing, and that I should follow with $6, doing one with breathing and one with the voice to ease things up with my sickness. I said my voice felt "thicker" and he said it was the junk in the throat and sinuses. I mentioned Andre's thing about "the shelf eroding away if the mucus drips down too much" and he scoffs at it and says that singers USUALLY have more nasal mucus because they're more OPEN and have therefore more SPACES to FILL with crap, and he said that the singer would NATURALLY tend to curve the roof of the mouth more, which would enhance drainage more, too, and he said that he had to learn how to process large globs of mucus all the time. Went until I felt tired, which was soon, but I kept off saying it for awhile, and when I looked at my watch and it was only 4:50 I was amazed until I remembered that I probably started about 4:20 since no one had been there, and no one followed me in after, and he put on some supper soup and we chatted only a second before I left at 4:55, early.
DIARY 14178
3/16/79
RICHARD HILTY LESSON 13
He's happy I'm back, tells me to bring in tape 1 so he can change it to 2, since I seem to be progressing even without much practice, and he puts me into some full-voice that he says I'm doing very well on, and then goes into a series of more elaborate things and then says I can start using the pitch pipe and NOT use the tape, saying I should start at D and go up and down what he calls the 1-3-5 which I transcribe as HE-HE-HA-HA-HA, knowing it goes up and down, then to C# and HE-HE-He-HA-Ha-Ha-HE, both with the natural voice, and then hit the F, which he says is the middle of the falsetto, and go HA-HA-HA on the same note, keeping it very windy, doing the falsetto single-note on F, G, and A, and never going about Bb. He said if I ever find myself slipping OUT of falsetto, as I sometimes do, it's because I'm not opening the nose enough and not keeping enough pressure in on my stomach. I try it a few times and everything he says seems to be true. He keeps saying I'm making such good progress I really shouldn't stop, take it more as fun to do, doing it NOT as the duty I try to make it into, saying that Dennis has the same trouble with wanting to try TOO MUCH, and coming to class with a dreadful effort of it when he's trying too HARD. Then he gets a bright idea and says I should go DOWN the scale, so I (no, before, when he said to do the "double peak" which REALLY strains my lung capacity, and write down an elaborate HE-HE-HA-HA-HE-HE-HA-HA-HE-HE-HA-HA-HE, but put the CURVE above it to show that it has three peaks, and he's delighted at how much easier it is to do that his NOTATION, and) draw the downward curve that he describes as 5-4-3-2-1-2-3-2-1, saying that I can get into the lower notes better that way. He also said (his first comment about pitch) that when I sing the 1-3-5 I tend to go up only a HALF notes on the top rather than going ALL the way up, which he suspects is a combination of caution and not keeping quite enough pressure, so I try it a few times and he seems to say it sounds OK, though a couple of times while trying something new I would listen, tense up, and hear myself making the MOST awful sounds, but he took them all in stride, as part of learning, and I seem to be SOMEWHAT more willing to do the same, at least in class. He said the "consciousness of the sneer" was the facial cavities opening up, and was good, though I shouldn't TRY to do that.
DIARY 14198
3/22/79
RICHARD HILTY LESSON 14
He asks how the week's been, and I just saw awful, and he said "Didn't get in much practice?" and I don't have the heart to baldly say "Not at all," so I say "Not much" and he decides I've had too much of the falsetto, have maybe lost ground on my full-voice, so I do more full voice, writing down on the sheet "ENJOY IT" which I laugh and find does me wonders, and he changes my tape from 1 to 2, saying he might make another version of 7 for me since his current one's for a woman, and we chat about his wife Jo's job at an ophthalmologist's which she's quitting to start another career in a number of years, some sort of self-run business in tapes, he says, and she's very smart, reads 900-page books in a day, is a very quick study, has an electric typewriter, and concentrates intensely. So I arrange to talk to her next Wednesday as I feel my stomach being tired and fluttery since I HAVEN'T done anything yet. Come out with the few passages that he can say "That was the best sound yet," and he talks philosophy and tries to put me at my ease, and I DO feel good with him, but I'm just kicking myself all over again for not having practiced. Don't even TALK about the pitch pipe, and he has me do some laughs and then shows me how to put my fingers alongside my nose and pushy sideways, which makes the back of the throat feel open and the sound of my voice MUCH better, and at last he says I can take my hand away from my sternum, and I can STILL feel it pushing out, though I have to keep reminding myself to keep the nostrils open and the stomach tight, and when I change these in the middle of a passage we can BOTH hear it. I ask if my pelvis is under TOO much, and he says "It can't be," and then we both laugh, "But if anyone could do it too much, it would be you!" I should do tape 2 once, then twice through #6 with NO "H" sound in front of the ha-ha-he-he, and NOT do 4, and maybe even alternate falsetto with pitch pipe work so that my voice doesn't get WINDY in the FULL-voice and keeps the flexibility he thinks I've been getting. SOME of the full-voiced sounds feel good, though I'm tired, and he says it might be GOOD that I'm tired, since I'm thus not trying TOO hard and messing it ALL up.
