Singing for String Players

Posted By: Christopher Whitley, Violin Faculty

I have a terrible singing voice! I’ll be the first to admit it. I can’t sing in tune, I don’t have much of a range and I have a tendency to sing Beyoncé really loudly and really badly… But at the end of the day, my singing voice is my most useful musical tool.

 

 

But I’m a violinist! Isn’t my violin my most useful tool? You can’t play violin without a bow or four strings! You don’t need your voice to play the Sibelius Violin Concerto!

 

 

All this is true, but to really understand the music you’re studying, every musician has to go back to the human voice. For string players, approaching music vocally helps improve our phrasing, tone and pitch, and we need to be able to sing a piece before we even pick up the instrument.

 

The earliest music we know consists of people banging sticks together or singing songs. Even the most massive symphonies can be traced back to the simplicity of the human voice. Many instruments are dependent on the breath of the performer. You can’t play a flute or a tuba without breathing into the instrument and you definitely can’t sing in an opera without breathing first. For string players, our bows act like our breath. The action of the bow on the string creates our sound and we can bow back and forth for hours if we want. Phrases can go on forever and we never really have to breathe, and without knowing when to “breathe”, a string player’s music can end up sounding like a run-on sentence. This can make for a seriously boring performance! By singing a piece of music, we discover when it is most natural to breathe and therefore can create beautiful phrases that make sense to the ear.

 

Creating a beautiful tone on a string instrument requires a lot of attention. We need to know exactly where to place the bow, how much bow to use and where we place the bow in relation to the bridge. It’s really easy to get lost in the details! Often times the easiest way to discover your beautiful tone is to have an idea of the sound you want. We can imagine it or we can sing it! There are so many sounds we can create with the human voice – low and booming, high and silvery, loud and aggressive etc. If we have a specific idea of our tone in our head and in our voice, the bow will often create it for us without too much work! It’s like magic!

 

 

Our “imaginary singing voice” often comes in handy for intonation as well. As I said before: I cannot sing in tune! But the singing voice inside my head sounds like Pavorotti and gets every note right every single time! Just like imagining our perfect tone can create a beautiful sound, imagining the perfect pitch often helps our fingers find the right notes. Because string players don’t have frets or keys, we have to know exactly where to place our fingers. We obviously need to practice scales and arpeggios (for the rest of our lives!), but in the middle of a performance we need to rely on the voice in our head to guide us to the right pitch. Having a clear concept of intonation in our imagination will lead to intonation success!

 

So keep singing out loud or in your head and you will find string-playing to be much easier and much more enjoyable – though you might want to do it in the privacy of your own room!