Teaching the Bel Canto Technique: A Practical Guide - with Anecdotes from Africa

By Colleen Philp

Colleen Philp's practical guide to the Bel Canto technique will help singers, drama students, singing and drama teachers, choir conductors, and students who are studying methods of teaching, to learn how to use or teach the Bel Canto technique of singing and how to keep their voices safe from vocal misuse and abuse. Her Anecdotes from Africa add delightful insights into her life as a teacher of Voice in South Africa, and her warm, lasting relationships with her students.

     It could be placed in libraries at schools and universities all over the world because, although there are many books on Bel Canto, there are not many, if any, on HOW TO TEACH in the Bel Canto tradition.

     Teaching singing is difficult because one is dealing not only with the technique involved, but also with any physical impairments, as well as the psychological approach of the singer. This is the first book to contain the material in Chapters 4 to 7, which cover passagio, tips from famous singers and voice teachers, vocal abuse and misuse, and correcting vocal defects.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Colleen Philp
• Release date: May 23, 2024
• ISBN: 9780796171658

Colleen Philp

Colleen Philp was one of South Africa's leading lyric coloratura sopranos in over three decades, in a professional singing career that featured foreign tours, gala soloist performances with major orchestras, and a long tenure as a classical recording artist on the country's national broadcaster, the SABC. In parallel, for 36 years she also served as one of the region's leading voice teachers (teaching well over 300 singers in South Africa), and was senior lecturer at OSCA (the Opera Studio and Choral Academy) at UKZN for 26 years. Many of Colleen`s students were awarded scholarships to esteemed schools overseas, and went on to stellar international careers; among them, sopranos Nozuko Teto and Dr Bronwen Forbay. Having studied the Bel Canto voice technique under South African opera doyen Joyce Barker, Colleen is dedicated to spreading this richly fruitful method to singers around the world. Before writing this practical guide, she interviewed and sent questionnaires worldwide to ear, nose and throat specialists, voice teachers, professional singers, producers and directors of opera and musicals, and choral conductors. Her own singing career focused on a recital and oratorio repertoire, as well as opera in concert. One of Colleen's most celebrated performances was the soprano role in a major production of Haydn's Nelson Mass at St Paul's Cathedral in Durban, which can be heard at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMF4LRLlopII4PKxM_NfLBm1ZazLqI1hZ She lives in Durban with her beloved husband Garry, and is devoted to her three children, six grandchildren, and one great-granddaughter.

Book preview

Dedication

This practical handbook on teaching singing is dedicated to the memory of Joyce Barker, my teacher, mentor, colleague and dear friend.

Its contents are gleaned from 36 years of teaching singing, both privately and at three different tertiary institutions in KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa (mainly 26 years at the University of KwaZulu-Natal [UKZN]), but most of all from my final years of coaching with the superb singer and teacher of international standing, the incomparable Joyce Barker.

She only wrote 14 unpublished pages of notes on her teaching, which I include in this manual with the permission of her late husband, Elwyn Dyer. Although her teaching on when young singers should begin serious vocal study (see Chapter 1, section 8) is questioned by some these days, it is better to be safe than sorry: In later years, there can be regrettable damage if the young singer starts training too soon. I have often observed this, especially in the sad case of one young tenor who was declared unteachable by a top teacher years later.

Joyce’s untimely death at the age of 60 was a great loss to the voice teaching community.

Acknowledgements

Thank you to Max Loppert for the Foreword, and grateful thanks to my husband Garry for researching the pictures, for his unfailing support and for his wise advice. Thank you too, to Anne Denniston for the formatting and editing of the book, and to my former pupil, Dr Bronwen Forbay, Associate Professor at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina, for acting as a consultant and adding the International Phonetic Alphabet to the exercises in Chapter 2. She is hailed by @opera_magazine as ‘a singer at the top of her game’.

My grateful thanks go to all the famous singers and voice teachers who have been quoted in this book. I salute you and thank you for the wonderful advice you have given to so many young singers via the medium of master classes, TV programmes and workshops.

Preface

This book has been written by me to assist singers, drama students, singing and drama teachers, choir conductors, and students who are studying methods of teaching, to learn how to use or teach the Bel Canto technique of singing and how to keep their voices safe from vocal misuse and abuse. It could be placed in libraries at schools and universities, both locally and internationally. It is not intended as a history of Bel Canto as there are many books available on the subject – but not many, if any, on HOW TO TEACH in the Bel Canto tradition. I studied in the famous line of Bel Canto, starting with Manuel Garcia, both Senior and Junior. The closest we can get to hearing the characteristic sound of the Garcia School today is a recording made in 1904 of Nellie Melba singing ‘Sempre Libera’ from Verdi’s La Traviata. She was an Australian coloratura soprano who studied with Mary Ellen Christian (a former pupil of Manuel Garcia) and Pietro Cecchi (1870–1886). She then left Cecchi and went to Paris to study with Madame Marchesi who, on hearing her, rushed out of her room and cried, ‘I have found a star’.

My own past student, Dr Bronwen Forbay, was heard singing this aria exquisitely in a performance of La Traviata in Cape Town some years ago. The audience were in tears at her presentation.

The wonderful Madame Marchesi prepared a small book of technical exercises that are absolutely invaluable and are included in this manual. She taught Garcia’s method but did not come up with anything new or different. Garcia Jnr wrote an early book in 1894, Hints on Singing, of which I have a treasured copy.

The great heavy dramatic soprano, Joyce Barker, was privileged to study with Senor and Madame Basiola, who were under Antonio Cotogni, Cotogni with Marchesi and I with Joyce. I have included a very brief history of these early teachers and some of their students (p. xviii). Two other famous 18th century teachers of this style were Antoni Bernacchi (1685–1756) and Nicola Porpora (1686–1768) but there were many others.

Mirella Freni was a master of the Bel Canto style of singing, which she passed on to many young singers at her Academy in Milan. ‘I don’t want real emotion to get lost,’ she told The Times in 2002. ‘Without that it’s just mathematics’.

‘Belcanto requires a natural tone and supple vocal technique’ (Mirella Freni).

One of the notable characteristics of Bel Canto singing are the long legato lines as the notes are joined imperceptibly together. Each word must link on to the next without a break in the line’ (Colleen Philp).

This method [Bel Canto] has been tested by time’ (Lamperti 1905).

The aesthetics of early Bel Canto were fast coloratura and embellishments, varied with beautiful melodies delivered with a bright, brilliant tone quality. Then came the new heroic singing style with long dramatic lines, replacing the coloraturas. As orchestras and opera houses grew larger, singers were pushed to invent new techniques. This demanded abdominal breathing support (singing from the root of the body). By the end of the nineteenth century the delicate ornamental style was vanishing and giving way to the voluminous declamatory style, with the emphasis on vocal resonance.

Joyce Barker (heavy dramatic soprano) was once asked by an international conductor in a rehearsal ‘Joycie – just how loudly can you sing?’ He gave her a note and she started singing, gradually increasing the volume with the help of her impeccable technique and the root or pyramidalis muscle. As the resonance increased intensely, one of the windows in the rehearsal theatre broke.

For my book, I have conducted interviews and issued many questionnaires on the subject of vocal misuse and abuse to both local and international voice therapists, ear nose and throat specialists, professional singers and voice teachers, choral conductors, school music teachers, producers and directors of opera and light music. I studied anatomy for four years to become a radiographer, achieving both the British Diploma and the South African Diploma in Radiography, and I worked in five hospitals in KwaZulu-Natal, as well as studying and teaching Singing and Vocal Teaching Method. I therefore feel I am qualified to write the short chapter on ‘Advice re Health of the Voice and Body’ (Chapter 1  on p. 85).

Many of my students have requested that I attempt the difficult task of putting it all down on paper and so I began, having gathered together my teaching notes and repertoire lists from the years of teaching at university level and earlier private teaching.

Teaching singing, as many of you will know, is a difficult business because one is dealing not only with the technique involved, but also with any physical impairments, as well as the psychological approach of the singer. This is the first book to contain the material in Chapters 4, 5, 6 and 7.

This manual is best printed out to allow both teachers and singers to lay it open on the piano while working on the voice. Order a PDF by emailing [e-mail] with proof of purchase and specifying A4 or letter size.

For practical purposes, I have referred to singers in general as ‘he’ but this, of course, includes female singers.

I have not included diagrams of the vocal apparatus as they are already included in many books on this subject. Joyce Barker did, however, deal with the vocal apparatus in her excellent Notes, which are included in this manual (p. 5).

Examples of my singing can be heard on YouTube (under Uploads from Colleen Philp), as can the singing of Joyce Barker herself, especially as Turandot.

For the purposes of this manual, I have used the English names for the vowels described in the list below and shown as they appear in the International Phonetic Alphabet:

■ /a/ - bright ‘ah’ (as in the British Received Pronunciation of ‘ask’)

■ /ɔ/ - open ‘o’ or ‘aw’ as in ‘dawn’

■ /eː/ - pure (closed) ‘ay’ as in ‘chaotic’

■ /ɛ/ - open ‘eh’ as in ‘met’

■ /iː/ - ‘ee’ as in ‘bee’

■ /oː/ - pure (closed) ‘oh’ as in ‘obey’

■ /uː/ - ‘oo’ as in ‘who’.

Foreword by Max Loppert

For me, it is a privilege to have been asked to write this foreword. Among other things, it permits me to repeat in written words what, on more than one visit to South Africa, I have publicly expressed in person: my great admiration for Colleen Philp, as a teacher–guide trusted and loved by students, and – of still greater relevance here – as an exponent and communicator of a vast store of wisdom, both practical and theoretical, about the workings of the so-called classical singing voice.

This publication functions, happily, as a distillation of all that wisdom. While, at its start and regularly throughout, Colleen pays tribute to the mastery of metier of her own singing teacher – the late Joyce Barker, probably more widely familiar as possessor of one of the most remarkable soprano voices South Africa has ever produced – no-one reading through its contents will be left in any doubt that, as a result of her own teaching experience, the pupil developed, no less than the teacher, the same mastery.

As such, and not least because Colleen’s ‘track record’ with singers is already widely known to be studded with success (e.g. at least four of her former students, the sopranos Bronwen Forbay, Nozuko Teto, Suzie Stengel, Fae Evelyn and Sarah-Jane Brandon, have made their mark, or are beginning to make it, in a wider international context), this aptly named Practical Guide will surely be guaranteed a warm welcome – and not just locally. As a vade mecum for singers in need of specific technical workouts or the solution to specific problems of vocal delivery, its usefulness will be obvious. But not only for singers: as a non-singer (alas!) who nevertheless has spent a lifetime listening to, and pondering the whole business of, singing, reading the Guide has enriched my knowledge of the art by answering questions I didn’t know I needed to ask!

My own connection with Colleen is worth mentioning at this point. In the late 1990s, following my early retirement from the London Financial Times after 25 years as its Chief Music and Opera Critic, I spent two marvellously rewarding three-month periods in Durban. I was based at the University of KwaZulu-Natal’s Music School, working there on a private project as a very privileged Honorary Visiting Scholar; and, to pay the school back for its generous hospitality, I gave a course of lectures and also sat in on the opera class that Colleen, then the Music School’s voice teacher, gave once a week. The facilities were minimal, and Colleen herself was not yet a full staff member; but what voices my wife Delayne and I heard! It was instantly clear that they had been nurtured by their teacher with extraordinary skill and a knack of letting them emerge unforced and unpressured. The class seemed to be bursting with talent of an astonishing kind. More astonishing still, when later on the two of us got to know some of the young people in the class, were the lengths the youngsters were going to, the real hardships some were prepared to endure, in order to learn this sort of so-called classical singing.

From this was born the idea of creating the Music School’s own Opera Studio and Choral Academy. Our fundraising efforts, and those of countless others, led to its establishment early in the millennium. Colleen and her students were its true inspiration. Until her retirement, she was, of course, its principal singing teacher and, though its birth and growth have by no means been without difficulties along the way, its survival is a cause for optimism. One reason among many is that, in the last decade or so, the wider world has begun to recognise the vocal riches South Africa has to offer the international opera scene. This Practical Guide can, I feel, be taken as a sort of symbol of this whole cultural flourishing – and indeed, the very existence of so user-friendly a manual will lend powerful muscle to its continuation.

Anecdotes from Africa

Teaching in South Africa during the transition from apartheid to democracy

Africa produces amazingly rich, powerful and resonant voices.

In my early years on faculty at the University of Natal (now called the University of KwaZulu-Natal), located in Durban, South Africa, I asked one of my postgraduate students, the late Phelelani Simon Mnomiya, why he thought South African people of colour had such beautiful voices. After five stirs of his cup of tea, his response was,