Heart-based Singing

Agatha Carubia and I became really close friends during our first few months together at Juilliard, and remained friends until geography parted our ways. She was my first singer friend. Before knowing Agatha I thought that being able to sing well had everything to do with being able to find pitches, and having an inborn gift of a beautiful voice. Young Agatha had so much more than a beautiful voice. She had a deep physical and emotional connection to the essence of the music she sang, and was a truly kind and loving person (a rarity at Juilliard). She was from New York (Queens), and spoke with a strong New York accent, but when she sang her diction was pure and clean, and her vowels were beautifully Italian, German, or French, depending on what she was singing.

I came to learn that Agatha's young artistry came from a lot of serious study. One of my first memories of her was when she described the whole narrative of Robert Schumann's song cycle Frauenliebe und Leben in a most personal way. I had never known any singer to take her music so personally, especially at eighteen.

We spent many months working on a program together that included Ravel's La flûte enchantée from Shéhérazade and Bach's "Schafe können sicher weiden" from Cantata 208. Agatha brought me to visit her voice teacher Madame Freschel, who she still worked with (on the side) while studying with her "official" teacher at Juilliard.

Actual technical instruction in the physical aspects of flute playing were not anywhere to be found in my lessons with Julius Baker, so I tried to build a flute technique based on what I observed in Agatha's singing. And then I translated much of that into string playing when I became a string player again. In adulthood Agatha became a great voice teacher, combining her traditional bel canto training with a life-long practice of yoga, and teaching singers in all areas of music (including pop music and jazz) to use their voices in ways that are naturally expressive, physically healthy, and that draw upon location-specific sources of energy in the body.

Her 2015 book is short (eighty-eight pages), beautiful to look at, beautifully written, and incredibly practical. It offers advice that can be used by all musicians, whether they are singers or instrumental musicians. And Agatha addresses little things (which are big things) like dressing up to sing because it is fun, and learning the text by heart before you sing it as a song. She organizes body awareness using the chakra system as a model. It provides a set of body images that focus attention on parts of the face (the brow, the nose, the lips, and the chin) in addition to the parts of the body below the head. I find these images really helpful since string players can compromise expressiveness by holding tension in their faces.

She writes about vocal technique as "an inner dialogue on the mental plane, flexibility and coordination on the physical plane, and an opening in the emotional plane." On support: "If you were not sure you were supporting by consciously using your air, you weren't." One of my favorite statements is about vibrato: "Vibrato happens naturally when you stop pushing your voice and let your vowels spin freely on your breath. . . . You do not make vibrato, you allow for it to happen." This translates directly to string playing and wind playing, and is true for singing and playing music from all times and from all places.

Fortunately Agatha's book is available in many places online, but if you go to her website you get to hear her sing.