A Note From Hannah Harrow, Alex\u2019s Teacher:<\/strong><\/p>\n “Why do I love to sing? Singing is my most deeply personal and honest means of And that\u2019s why I love it so much. Whether I\u2019m listening to an 11-year old composing a song about her favorite animal, or coaching a high school student on his musical theater audition piece, or helping an adult student prepare for a recital debut, I love to hear and see people\u2019s unique personalities come to life through their songs. Singing can meet you right where you\u2019re at in life, and give you the confidence to express yourself.<\/span><\/p>\n And, so, if you\u2019re a 14 year old boy who loves playing video games and fighting monsters, there\u2019s no reason why your singing shouldn\u2019t meet you right where you\u2019re at and be relevant to where you are in life. Below, you will read an article on vocal technique written by Alex, a 14-year-old student of mine who loves to play video games, watch basketball… and sing Italian arias.<\/span><\/p>\n Together, we developed a healthy and creative vocal technique for Alex that utilizes his love for fighting monsters and his vibrant imagination. We took concepts like breath energy, vertical vowels, and mask resonance… and put them into a context that Alex can relate to and have fun with. We call our vocal warm-ups \u201cattack strategies.\u201d And you can use these different warm-ups, each with different note patterns and vowels, to fight different kinds of monsters and shoot different weapons. For example, when we sing any exercise using the vowel O, we imagine that as we round our lips for that vowel, we are shooting an O-shaped bomb out of our foreheads. When we sing the vowel \u201ce\u201d, we imagine lasers shooting out of the top of our heads.<\/span><\/p>\n We hope you enjoy reading about how to fight your enemies with a correctly formed \u201cO\u201d vowel and about why this 14 year old thinks other teenagers should try classical voice lessons!”<\/span><\/p>\n A Note from Alex:<\/strong><\/p>\n Who are you?<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n We always do warm-ups at the beginning and we usually go through a song, fix something and then go through it again. <\/span>Since the beginning of lessons, we have invented a different type of vocal warm-up strategies. The vocal warm-up strategy is that we view all of our warm-ups as attacks.”<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n VIDEO GAMES MEET \u2026 ITALIAN ARIAS?<\/strong><\/p>\n By Alex Urlaub<\/p>\n What if I told you you could go to voice lessons and drop bombs on your enemies? Or shoot [i]-lasers out of your head? Or defend yourself with your [O]-shaped shield? Or pour poison down your enemy’s throat with your [uiuiu]? What if I told you that every Italian song you sing is a sneak attack, where every vowel sound shoots a different type of laser? If I told you all this, you would probably want to go to voice lessons, right?<\/p>\n My name is Alex. I am 14 years old. I like to play video games and watch the Boston Celtics \u2026 and I like to sing. I have been studying voice for two years with Ms. Hannah Harrow and I am going to tell you about my special warm-up strategy and vocal technique. It all started two years ago when we were talking about Batman, a unicorn, and an owl during the warm-ups in our first lesson. And then we had the idea to make each warm-up into an attack because I love playing video games. Here is a sneak peek from the notebook we created to keep track of all my attack strategies (or, vocal warm-ups!) Each warm-up has a different strategy to help me sing better, and a different type of monster it can fight. <\/p>\n It is more fun to warm up when we use these attack strategies. Because I use the attacks to think about good vocal technique, I feel more ready to sing the actual pieces. My goal is to illustrate and publish a vocal warm-up book with my teacher so we can share our strategies with other singers. My favorite aria so far is Nel Cor Piu Non Mi Sento<\/em>. It has a lot of faster notes in it, and all of the different vowels are really fun to say. It is fast and happy. Sometimes, I even catch myself singing in Italian outside of lessons. I remember one time I was playing a video game and I was winning, so I just started singing Gia il Sole dal Gange <\/em>because it expressed my excitement and I love the song!<\/p>\n Nowadays teenagers might think that classical singing is boring, because most music today is rap and that\u2019s what teenagers listen to. But, people are missing out on the classical stuff… that is also fun! Not everything has to be rap! There\u2019s so much to love about classical singing: the different dynamics and how you say the different languages and how the words flow together…. It is just something so different and unique!<\/p>\n So here’s my advice to you if you\u2019re thinking about classical voice lessons. You have to be willing to try something new; singing can be hard at first, but, in the long run it became one of my favorite things. Practice helps, as it should, and singing will also get easier with experience. Classical singing can <\/em>be boring…but it can also be fun! So, I say forget what you might have heard people say about classical singing… and try something new!<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Voice Student Alex Urlaub, Vocal Warm-up Strategy By Alex Urlaub, ECMS Student with a note by Hannah Harrow, ECMS Voice Intern A Note From Hannah Harrow, Alex\u2019s Teacher: “Why do I love to sing? Singing is my most deeply personal and honest means of emotional expression; singing is relevant and relatable to my life experiences; […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":12276,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"advgb_blocks_editor_width":"","advgb_blocks_columns_visual_guide":"","footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[19,191],"tags":[190],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-12196","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-noteworthy","category-switching","tag-switchingtype"],"acf":[],"mb":[],"author_meta":{"display_name":"Noah Lapidus","author_link":"https:\/\/www.esm.rochester.edu\/community\/author\/noah-lapidus\/"},"featured_img":"https:\/\/www.esm.rochester.edu\/community\/files\/IMG_7560_crop-500x751.jpg","tax_additional":{"categories":{"linked":["Noteworthy<\/a>","Switching<\/a>"],"unlinked":["Noteworthy<\/span>","Switching<\/span>"]},"tags":{"linked":["Switchingtype<\/a>"],"unlinked":["Switchingtype<\/span>"]}},"comment_count":0,"relative_dates":{"created":"Posted 8 years ago","modified":"Updated 2 years ago"},"absolute_dates":{"created":"Posted on March 29, 2018","modified":"Updated on September 9, 2024"},"absolute_dates_time":{"created":"Posted on March 29, 2018 11:37 AM","modified":"Updated on September 9, 2024 11:39 AM"},"featured_img_caption":"","series_order":"","mfb_rest_fields":["title","author_meta","featured_img","coauthors","tax_additional","comment_count","relative_dates","absolute_dates","absolute_dates_time","featured_img_caption","series_order"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.esm.rochester.edu\/community\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12196","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.esm.rochester.edu\/community\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.esm.rochester.edu\/community\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.esm.rochester.edu\/community\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.esm.rochester.edu\/community\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12196"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.esm.rochester.edu\/community\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12196\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.esm.rochester.edu\/community\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12276"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.esm.rochester.edu\/community\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12196"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.esm.rochester.edu\/community\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12196"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.esm.rochester.edu\/community\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12196"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.esm.rochester.edu\/community\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=12196"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"image\"](\"https:\/\/www.esm.rochester.edu\/community\/files\/IMG_7560_crop-710x1067.jpg\" "\\"Hannah")
<\/a>emotional expression; singing is relevant and relatable to my life experiences; singing gives me an outlet for creativity and imagination; singing allows me to communicate feelings and ideas with people. Singing is the most fun and enjoyable way for me to express who I really am.<\/span><\/p>\n![\"image\"](\"https:\/\/www.esm.rochester.edu\/community\/files\/IMG_7579_crop-e1519320875763-150x150.jpg\" "\\"Alex,")
<\/a><\/em>“I am 14-year-old superhuman. I like to sing and play video games. <\/span>I have been singing for 3 years, I started singing in 2015. I really love to sing. <\/span>I love that it is different and it is not something someone my age would usually do; it makes me stand out!<\/span><\/p>\n![\"image](\"https:\/\/www.esm.rochester.edu\/community\/files\/ALEX-VOICE-LESSON-e1519320368420-500x334.jpg\" "\\"Attack")
<\/a><\/p>\n