Many of my clients want to improve their breath control, so they can sing longer phrases. This is a great goal, because the ability to extend a phrase may greatly serve the musical phrasing required, or make the text more comprehensible if there are less interruptions by breaths taken. I have spent years working on my breathing capacity, to give myself plenty of “margin” when faced with a particularly complex or challenging phrase in a song or aria. This margin gives me the freedom to be emotionally spontaneous during a performance, and not limited by a lack of air! A good example – which many sopranos will recognize – is Richard Strauss’s Beim Schlafengehen.

There are actually two issues at play here. The first is using air efficiently in singing. Things like good compression, ideal vocal fold position etc. But equally as important is efficient breathing itself. Note that I’m not talking about ‘supporting the voice’ or use of air here. This is simply looking at the act of inhalation.

I truly believe that to improve breath control in singing, we crucially need to address how we breath in everyday life.

Why breathwork for singers?

I qualified as a CPCAB Level 2 Breathwork coach earlier this year, as I became increasingly interested in the effect breathing has in our wellbeing, as well as the effect it has on singing. I have worked with singing clients who suffered from PTSD, anxiety, asthma and other conditions that can affect our breathing, and I wanted to make sure that I fully understood the complexity of breathing and breathing dysfunction, so I can help clients more holistically.

Breathe well, live well

I hope most people today understand that breathing through the mouth is probably not the most ideal way to breathe. There are thousands of research papers giving us the scientific evidence for this, so I won’t delve too much into the benefits of nasal breathing in this article. If you’re interested in finding out more, this is a good place to start – https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5466403/

So why am I talking about nasal breathing in a post about classical singing, when we singers all know that it’s pretty much impossible to nose breathe while singing songs and arias – there simply isn’t enough time for that.

Well, hear me out!

It’s becoming increasingly clear that breathing through the nose is an “important function of preparing inhaled air to reach structures of the respiratory system” (ibid). This is because it is:

* anaerobically much more efficient
* encourages oxygen down to the lower lobes of the lungs
* incentivises the diaphragm to extend downwards more, thus allowing more air to enter the lungs
* which in turn takes the trachea with it, causing the larynx to descend via a ‘tug’ or ‘pull’ (tracheal pull)
* resulting in a slightly lower laryngeal position which is ideal for classical singing.

The bottom line is, even if we can’t use nasal breathing when we sing our repertoire, we should darn well practice it in all other aspects of day-to-day life. For this reason, I encourage all my singing clients to breathe through their nose and to feel the ribcage expand during warm up and vocal exercises. In this way I’m trying to encourage them to practice the benefits of full, efficient breathing techniques. This in turn creates a memory in the body as to how a proper breath ‘should’ feel, which is extremely useful if they find themselves in the middle of singing a difficult fast aria, when there isn’t time for nasal breathing.

I also suggest that they pay close attention to how they breathe during the day, even when not singing. Are they able to maintain nose breathing, feeling the gentle expansion of the ribcage, or are they snatching shallow breaths through the mouth, allowing the chest to rise? If they manage to achieve an efficient way of breathing most of the time, it will definitely improve their breath management in singing. And most importantly, it will make them better singers all round.

Case study:

A young singer came to me for voice lessons, after having studied some years with a well-known opera singer, as she felt something was missing in her approach. This singer’s focus was more towards musical theatre and straight acting, rather than opera, although being a high soprano, much of the repertoire she was singing was sitting in a more head voice dominant tessitura, and involved very little mixed belt/belting. After a few lessons, she opened up, and told me of a childhood experience that had caused some trauma, physically and emotionally, and this explained a particular behaviour that I had noticed during lessons, and it explained her hypervigilance. One of the main issues she had was a larynx that would not release in to a lower, more relaxed position, as well as struggling with keeping the throat open and the soft palate raised, when appropriate. In addition, her main complaint was that she didn’t want to sound like a “choir boy” any longer! The usual exercises weren’t as effective as I’d hoped, and one day I realised that as long as she was in a state of ” fight or flight”, with the sympathetic branch of the nervous system constantly activated, we would struggle to achieve our goals. From living in a state of hypervigilance and sympathetic nervous system dominance, her breathing was constantly high and shallow, and her scalene muscles in the neck constantly activated. In fact, they were so constricted and shortened, she simply could not achieve an optimal resonance space , with a relaxed larynx and high soft palate. This had caused a tightness in the whole neck and throat area.

I realised that this was an issue that needed to be addressed outside of voice lessons as well, so I suggested that she spent considerable time working on diaphragmatic/ belly breathing, at least 10 minutes daily. I instructed her to sit in a comfortable, relaxed position with both hands placed on her belly, and then just start breathing normally, simply observing her breath. She was instructed to start to feel how the breath went deeper in the body on inhalation, so that she could feel an expansion in the belly.

This singer came back a few weeks later, very happy, and very different! The hypervigilance seemed less, and a postural dysfunction that I had observed in the beginning was now much less noticeable. However, the most exiting thing was that her sound had changed significantly, and in her own words, she ” didn’t sound like a choir boy anymore”! In addition, shortly after she was successful in an audition, and got contracted for a fringe musical theatre production in London!

To me, this drastic change in her singing depended mostly on a change in her breathing, and consequently a more regulated nervous system. When these fundamental physical functions were improved, she was able to assimilate and execute so much more of the pure vocal technique aspects of my teaching.

I find it endlessly fascinating how singing affects breathing, and breathing affects singing, and how it all affects our nervous system and bring it into a more balanced state!