Close to 30 years of experience of listening to, learning, singing and teaching Georgian songs have brought me many insights regarding the workings of the human voice and the roles of sound and vibration in our lives in the broadest terms.
While my workshops involve learning some Georgian songs, I seek above all to shed light on how we use our voices and how we respond to sound and vibration.
In my experience, many people who have sung in amateur and semi-professional choruses and vocal ensembles use only a small fragment of their vocal resources.
With the know-how that I have gained, I can often listen to and look at a person who is singing and intuit how their voice could expand if they tried out the simple exercises that I have developed.
These exercises involve gaining awareness of vibration within and on the surface of the body and increasing its intensity and presence. The flow of this vibration is often impeded by too much muscular action, particularly in the jaw, neck and abdomen, which can be addressed with exercises to help singers to inhibit these movements.
Exploring simple notions of placement helps singers to further reduce their effort and to gain a more stable and satisfying individual sound.
Exercises involving humming, the singing of vowel sounds, touching and movement in pairs or groups, allow people to find ways to let their voices meet in harmony without counter-productive efforts to make their voices “blend”.
The richness of Georgian singing comes not from the force deployed by the individual voices, but rather the quality of the meetings between them: the way in which the bass enhances the top part and the middle part nourishes the bass for example. These vocal connections, and the effortless expansion they affirm, build new group singing reflexes that can easily be applied in other repertoires.
On an even simpler level, awareness of vibration in the body has enormous implications for the quality of our listening: we can shift some of the focus from our ears to the body’s underused capacity to receive sound vibration.
With these exercises, workshop participants discover a “technique” so simple that it barely deserves that word. They come away with practical tools that they can immediately implement in their individual and group singing and easily share with their fellow singers from all backgrounds, in all styles of singing.
For upcoming workshop dates, please contact me at kane.frank@gmail.com
