Messa Di Voce

So this last exercise is the simplest on paper, but I believe is probably the most difficult exercise to master. This is actually stolen from an old vocal exercise from hundreds and hundreds of years ago. They would have used this as early as they still had Caestrati, if you know what that is, singing. So basically the idea is that you start the note at the quietest volume possible, you crescendo as loud as you can without changing the tone or the pitch at all, and then you decrescendo to nothing again, again without changing the tone or bending the pitch or anything. It's a very difficult exercise, so we're going to try it on the concert F, that perfect note that we worked on a whole lot. Let me try it. I'll just try it for you. That was okay. Now the trick to this is you have to start with just wind, very slow, hot wind with no sound. The quieter the wind, the better, and then you slowly bring your lips together until you just hear them barely start to buzz that F. You may start to hear it before you even feel the lips come together and buzz. You're on the right track if you can do that. I can barely hear that F come out, and sometimes it's not putting the lips together. Maybe sometimes the lips aren't open enough to produce the F, so you have to find that perfect size of aperture for that F to kind of gently whisper and speak. Then once you bring it kind of into being at a piano dynamic there, you'll be able to grow it and then shrink it back down. So the major issues that you see in this, first and foremost, is as players get louder, the tone changes. The way you avoid that is as the sound gets louder, you've got to open up more, more room between your teeth a little bit inside your mouth, and the aperture of the lips has to open up as the wind increases and the sound gets louder. One helpful visualization that works for me when I practice this exercise is I imagine the initial resonance when it's just barely coming out as like a small perfectly round bead or pebble or something, and then it grows to like the size of like a ping-pong ball, and then that perfectly round toned spherical ping-pong ball grows to a golf ball, to a baseball, to a softball, to like a basketball, to like a big giant beach ball that's a little bigger than the bell. And then back down to the little bead or pebble that's perfectly round. And if you do that, you know, you'll be really good. If you feel that the tone changes, that kind of means the ball's gotten flat, right, and the embouchure is flattened out and not as round as it used to be. It may help to do some reps with that old straw exercise on the F before you get into this one to make sure that you've got a good round stable embouchure. Let's try it again. Maybe try to get a bit louder at the top of it. So you can really work that one for the dynamic range. How quiet can you get? How loud can you get? And how smoothly can you go from soft back to loud without any weird sounds or breaking up in the tone or any of that? Now, remember the F is kind of like your potential, how good you can sound. But once you get the kind of down on the F, start moving around in half steps, play it on a G flat or an E natural, and expand the notes that you can do this mezzo da voce exercise with. By the way, the meaning of this exercise in Italian literally means placing the voice. So it was an old vocal exercise that was only available for like the top of the top singers. I mean, a singer that masters this exercise would essentially have to do this in every legitimate note of their range on all five pure vowels for it to be mastered. So E, E, A, O, and U. They would have to start it from the softest dynamic possible on all five vowels and demonstrate that over the entire course of their vocal register they could get this exercise perfect. It's very difficult. It's probably the most challenging vocal exercise that there is. It's so simple, right? And it's the same for these brass. Luckily for brass players, we just have to worry about making one really good sound per note. So like one really good vowel, and that'll carry you a long way if you can get your tone to operate like that. So good luck, work on this one. I think it'll really give you that light touch. Make sure you don't put too much pressure. You won't be able to get that soft feathery touch at the beginning of those notes. Good luck.