Singing is Essential
Friday, April 15, 2022 by Billy Roberts | Singing
I can finally say that singing helps my horn playing, and vice versa. I can’t really remember a time when I wasn’t singing, and since age four, there have only been four years of my life when I wasn’t singing with a choir. Three of those were when our second child was very young. The other was during COVID season. Although my primary instrument throughout high school, college, and the first decade beyond was the French horn, the desire to sing well often overpowered my motivation to practice the horn. So much so that at one point in life, when I was using too much breath pressure to sing and attributed that to my horn playing, I actually gave up the French horn until I could work out my vocal issues.
When I felt pulled toward education, I wanted to be as marketable as possible because I already had a family and didn’t want to move. I majored in math because I was intensely drawn to it, but also because it seemed useful. My first summer as a math major, I spent twenty minutes before each calculus class doing a vocal warmup. That really got my mind ready to learn early in the morning. I doubted that I could be a good music educator, because I was more concerned about my own performance than trying to handle a classroom full of music students. I knew I didn’t want to be a full-time band director. However, I was more open to vocal music education than I had been the first time through college.
Around the time that it really hit home that Windsong would not be singing for the fall of 2020, I picked up the viola, an instrument that I had neglected for twenty years. At the time, I was serving as a piano accompanist for a choir at a Christian school. As I became more entwined with viola practice, even taking lessons, my daily vocal routine became less important to me. I still did enough vocal exercise to keep touch with the fundamentals of voice, but that changed for about six months after I picked the French horn back up as well. The next thing I knew, I was trying to juggle four musical priorities: French horn, viola, voice, and piano. Needless to say, I had to start making tough choices. Music was not my day job, and I had a wife and two young kids that needed me in the evenings.
Just a month ago, I still felt that I could give adequate time to each of these instruments with about eight hours of practice time per week. I was able to get in a full hour or more mid-day Monday through Friday for horn and voice, I felt that spending an hour on viola each Tuesday and Friday when I got home from work was doable, and fortunately, piano no longer required a lot of maintenance in order to keep my sight-reading skills sharp. However, as I became more and more absorbed in my own pursuits, it became harder to be fully present when my kids were trying to talk to me. Something had to go.
Singing is essential. For a while I tried to get by with just a 15-minute vocal routine each day, but that clearly wasn’t enough. As I sorted through this dilemma, I first realized that horn is my passion, although I could live without it if I really had to. And piano can be maintained with just an hour of focused practice once a week. But, viola may be gone for now. My two primary instruments are French horn and voice. Although I used to have trouble switching between the two due to the difference in the way each uses the breath, they complement each other now. Supporting the voice with a strong but gentle breath has helped me learn how to sing through the horn. Perhaps horn and voice aren't as different as I had thought.
