I’ve been working on a Directed Study with a grad student, and they are exploring extended techniques in a big way. We started riffing on what that expression “extended techniques” really means, and I posited that it offers us, as vocalists, a way to expand our repertoire of sounds that goes far beyond what we might expect of or even allow ourselves, particularly as classically-trained singers. We have a lot of interpreted and ingrained “rules” around how things are supposed to sound, the sounds that are acceptable or even desirable. And we contort ourselves into pretzels sometimes trying to achieve those.
Contemporary Commercial singers have a much richer palette of vocal sounds and colours that they consider using when they create their signature sound, and in particular, when they want to express big emotion. They aren’t as fettered as us classical folks, who fear making a sound that we think might be deemed unattractive. It’s such a trap! So extended techniques for us can be quite freeing–we have permission to make sounds that are more primal, more guttural, more coming from the centre of our being and very much based in expression of mood or emotion, or even just soundscape.
For this particular student, what we began to notice was that whenever they gave themselves over to simply allowing the instruction in the graphic score to be embodied and connected to an intention, rather than worrying whether the sound was “right” or “exactly the composer’s intention” (who even knows that?), it meant being more connected to a deeper self. This, in turn, resulted in a fuller breath that connected to a desire to communicate sound that was embodied, free, expressive. So this singer, who had previously felt so encumbered by notions of acceptability, could identify themselves instead as a “Noise Actor” with express permission to make the full gamut of sounds at their disposal and whim. Result: vocal freedom, connection to identity and what felt like personal truth. Love it.