Vocal pedagogy of Cornelius Reid

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Aglenntuba
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Vocal pedagogy of Cornelius Reid

Post by Aglenntuba »

Has anyone here studied anything of the sort? It is very much against the grain of most voice teachers today, but I've just had a vocal lesson with one of his direct students and it was very eye opening for me. I make no claims at being a singer, but I immediately began connecting dots to my tuba playing. He is seen as revolutionary by those who agree with them, and I could see a lot of overlap with the teachings of Arnold Jacobs.

I'm mainly just wondering if anyone else has ever made this connection, or even heard of him. I really feel like there's something worth pursuing here, I'm just curious if anyone has done it before me.
timothy42b
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Re: Vocal pedagogy of Cornelius Reid

Post by timothy42b »

There are (or were, it's been a while since I was on there) some very knowledgeable people on Modern Vocal World forum.

You might try a search there.
royjohn
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Re: Vocal pedagogy of Cornelius Reid

Post by royjohn »

I'm an amateur singer, but have studied a lot about vocal pedagogy and read some of Reid's work. You'd have to say more about what you found in it that applied to tuba. A lot of what he taught applied to a two register theory of voice and the blending of the registers. While as the saying goes, you can find three opinions from any two voice teachers (some of them do tend to be doctrinaire) those who look for commonalities would find them in Reid's work and that of other famous voice teachers like Vennard and Richard Miller.

I think what the voice and the tuba have in common is breathing. Many voice teachers work on getting a full breath and then spinning it out slowly and that might apply to tuba to some extent. This comes about through a disciplined tension between the muscles of inspiration and expiration and is sometimes called "la lotta vocale" or the vocal struggle. This is a lot less extreme than it sounds and mainly means that to fine down the amount of breath used (esp. for soft singing) one has a sensation of holding the rib cage up and the diaphragm down so that you're almost breathing in, but you're actually breathing out a little. The inspriation muscles hold on and keep the exhaling muscles from doing too much. It is hard to describe and it would be easy to quarrel with what I'm saying, but if you've experienced it, you'll get the idea. The breath comes out so slowly that you can sing without flickering a candle flame (with a pp tone).

Is this something like what you're getting at? You'd have to describe it further...
royjohn
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