Author: musicalitywrld

Christopher: If there’s one thing that will strike the most fear into the heart of the average musician, it’s not scales. It’s not being asked to play something you haven’t prepared. It’s not even being asked to improvise.

Those can definitely all be scary! But for many musicians, one thing is scarier than all of them: SINGING.

What if there was an easy and natural route into starting to sing that didn’t even begin with you singing a single note?

In today’s episode, I’ll be sharing a clip from a recent masterclass which reveals exactly that. Here we go.

So, in our last episode, we had our mini-interview with Michaela Bartoskova, one of our Guest Experts here at Musical U. And you got a sense of where she’s coming from as a voice teacher, a singing teacher, and her really holistic perspective on the human voice.

Not just “how can I sing songs and get the notes to come out right”, but really this very deep and personal thing that our voice is, whether we’re speaking or shouting or singing.

And it sets the scene, I think, for what I want to share with you today, which is a clip from the masterclass she gave for our members.

And it was a tricky one to pick a segment from! Some of our masterclasses, you know, I can pick any five or ten minute segment, and it’s packed with all these interesting things, and we can just pull that out and it works great.

This one was such an immersive and progressive experiential masterclass, it was actually impossible to pick a section from the middle because you wouldn’t be prepared for it, you wouldn’t have done the exercises building up to it and so on.

So I’ve chosen a section right near the start, where Michaela was just starting to bring attention to the process of breathing.

Even in this introductory section, though, there were two fascinating nuggets, quite aside from the power of the exercise, which I hope you’ll follow along with in a moment when we dive in. But there were two fascinating nuggets.

One was around overcoming performance anxiety, and the other was about breathing and the emotion of singing, bringing emotion into singing and how the breath affects that.

So pay attention for those, and please do join in with this exercise if you’re able to. You’ll get the most out of this episode if you go along with it and you actually pay attention to the things Michaela is inviting you to. Here we go!

———

Michaela: The whole masterclass is based on the experience and even though I will talk at the beginning a little bit about the anatomy and everything, it’s based on experience.

And the reason why I’m saying this is do take care of yourself. Do take care of yourself. Do take care of your voice. If you feel there is something you don’t want to do, then just watch and relax. It’s much better to listen to your body than to go against the body’s instincts.

But also try to challenge yourself if you want to. So you can find the balance between relaxing and following and challenging if you like that.

So, yeah, do take care of yourself. And I don’t think I will mention that anymore because I won’t remember it. So now the responsibility is yours taking care of yourself. And I think that’s all I wanted to tell you.

So let’s start with a little bit of relaxation so you can lean back wherever you like to. You don’t need to adjust the camera, just lean back. If it’s okay to have your feet on the floor, you can close your eyes if that feels safe and you are willing to close your eyes.

Sometimes people don’t want that, but if it’s okay, you can lean back, relax your arms, relax your jaw, relax your belly, and just notice what is happening with your body when you inhale. What is happening with your body when you exhale.

So it’s not about fixing anything, it’s not about controlling, it’s not about making the inhale longer or exhale shorter. Just observing what is happening, mostly with your torso, when you breathe in and when you breathe out. And also notice how your body is intelligent, that it knows when your lungs took enough air and you start to exhale. So notice the transition between inhaling, exhaling, back to inhale.

And if you want to, in a second, I will ask you to drop an “s” sound onto your exhale. So it’s like we are going to be hissing out. You go as long as you want to.

So you are going to breathe in through your nose and then hissing out on the exhale. And then try one more time on your own and notice what’s happening with your torso when you are hissing out.

And then let’s go over this exercise slowly. You can open your eyes and I will tell you just a few details about breathing. I don’t like to talk about breathing too much because from my experience, I feel people. I don’t know, it feels like people get overwhelmed.

People don’t want to know about breathing. They are like “girl, I’ve been breathing my whole life!” Like, what is like new? What’s new there? So I won’t talk about breathing too much. But there are some things I think I’d like to tell you.

The first thing is: I see, maybe you notice that as well, our society, we don’t have time for anything. We always, there’s something to do, we always need to do more.

So our breathing is very shallow. And if you experience ever performance anxiety, also our breathing gets very shallow. So it’s good thing to breathe, take time to breathe.

If you take away something from today, that would be enough. Taking time to breathe. Because people just don’t have time. They just breathe in, breathe out, just taking time to inhale and taking time to exhale.

And if you want a little tip for the performance anxiety, longer exhales calm the body down. I often say counting in, counting for three for inhale, and double the number. So counting till six on the exhale, it calms the body down. It affects the parasympathetic nervous system.

So that might be something you might, or maybe whenever you feel stressed and overwhelmed, just longer exhales will bring you back to the present moment. So that is a little bit about breathing.

And the last thing that I think is very interesting about breathing. There are two types of breathing.

One type of breathing is involuntary. It’s for surviving. It’s the one that you are using right now. When you are listening. You don’t need to think about it. The body does it for you.

And the second type, it’s intentional, is voluntary breathing. It’s mostly experienced when we do breathing exercises, also when we visualize, imagine things. Also performance anxiety, right when we are in the room on our own, but we are already thinking about the terrible stuff that can happen, our breathing is affected by it. And also the intentional voluntary breathing we use when we speak or sing.

And for speaking and singing, the best thing is to use both types of this breathing.

The voluntary, so we know when we want to breathe in and when we want to breathe out. But also the involuntary, the survival breath, if I can name it, if I can say it this way, it brings all the emotions.

So if you sometimes experience singing and you didn’t feel much, it was mostly based on the voluntary breath. When everything is a little bit rigid.

So we need the involuntary surviving breath to bring in the emotions, to bring the emotions into the voice. So it’s good to connect both.

———

Christopher: What did you think? How did you get on? Did you take part in the breathing exercise? Did you become more aware of what your torso was doing? And this idea of the voluntary and involuntary breathing?

There were two really fascinating tips there, I think.

One was this idea of extending the exhale to calm down the nervous system. That alone can have a massive impact if you get nervous about performing or get nervous anywhere in your life. Just that idea of breathing in for three and out for six, or whatever the count may be, is a really powerful one, one I make use of regularly. So do take that away and put it to use.

And then the other, that there are two types of breathing. And it’s kind of obvious when you stop and think about it. But have you ever stopped to think about it?

And if we only focus on the voluntary, intentional breathing when we sing, we’re actually missing out on the emotional connection that comes from the involuntary automatic survival breathing. I thought that was really fascinating. Really cool.

So from there, in the masterclass, Michaela went on to cover more body awareness with breathing.

She explained some of the anatomy that’s at play, and then she took people into humming. So this was a really clever approach, I thought. And I said in the masterclass, I felt a bit silly because I’d spent so many years with singing teachers doing a lot of humming but then forgot about it for 20 years!

But it’s such a powerful route into singing because you start to really feel the resonance of the sound, but it’s somehow less exposing than singing out loud. And so she brought people through various humming exercises to feel the resonance and start to explore, and then varying the pitch, starting to play with vowel sounds.

You know, we really love “so simple, it can’t fail” approaches here at Musical U. And, for example, when we’re helping people learn to sing in tune, we have this “Jeff the Robot” exercise, which I think I got from George Bevan at Monkton school originally, but turned it into a robot thing.

And the idea is, if you think you can’t sing a note, even just to say, if your name is Jeff, you say, “my name is Jeff”, and then you just extend that last word, “hello, my name is Jeeeeeeeff”. And that monotone sound, that’s a note.

So anyway, that’s an example of a “so simple, you can’t fail kind” of approach. And what Michaela presented in this workshop with the progression from breathing (which undeniably you can do!) through to starting to add sounds like that hissing, through to humming, through to starting to sing – it’s just, it’s kind of infallible. It’s going to get you singing. And from there, it’s just a matter of getting better and better at it.

So I loved the way she brought our members through that progression in the masterclass. If you’re a member of Musical U, that full masterclass recording is available for you inside the membership right now. You can pick up where you left off and continue with those exercises.

You can learn more about michaela at michaelasound.com, we’ll have a link in the shownotes.

That’s it for this one. Cheers! And go make some music!

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Christopher: Can you sing?

If not… can you breathe?

Funny question, I know! But we had a recent masterclass which joined up those two questions so beautifully. And as I recorded yesterday’s episode where we were doing “Inside The Book” and looking at the singing chapter, and all of the reasons to sing, all of the benefits of singing for musicians, it made me want to share this particular guest expert interview with you.

It’s with Michaela Bartoskova, who’s a voice, singing and yoga coach, and her masterclass at Musical U was on the topic of “When Breath Becomes Voice”.

Michaela is a specialist in the voice beyond just singing – into breath, into speaking, into movement. She has such a beautiful, holistic perspective and it made her masterclass really special. And kind of provided a new way into singing for a lot of our members.

So why is breathing important for the voice? You’ll hear more from Michaela in just a moment, and in the Masterclass excerpt I’m going to share this week, but the bottom line is that the driving force behind our voice comes from breathing. And so any kind of tension or resistance you might have to the idea of singing, actually just breathing and approaching singing through breathing can provide a new gateway that’s much easier for you to go through.

So in this mini-interview, you’ll learn a bit about Michaela’s background, how she came to focus on the breath, and particularly with singers who came to her and were nervous to even begin singing, or had a lot of resistance when they tried to sing.

She also shares her answer to “what does musicality mean to you?” and it’s a really lovely and unique one that I think you’re going to enjoy.

So without further ado, let’s dive into our mini-interview with Michaela Bartoskova.

———

Christopher: Welcome back to the show! Today I’m joined by Michaela Bartoskova, who is a voice, singing and yoga coach with a fascinating range of expertise and a particular focus on your relationship with your voice and the role of breath in speaking, singing, music-making and performance.

When I read Michaela’s bio, I was so excited to dive into about seven different things with her! So I’m going to try and narrow my focus in this conversation. We’re very fortunate to have Michaela with us as our Guest Expert here at Musical U this month, I’ve grabbed her for this quick interview before our monthly masterclass for all members, which will be on the topic “When Breath Becomes Voice”, and then she’ll be in with us this coming week, coaching each of our Next Level members as well.

Michaela, welcome to the show!

Michaela: Oh, thank you so much for having me. I’m very excited, and I can’t wait.

Christopher: So I’d love to start with my favourite question to ask musicians and music educators, which is “what does musicality mean to you?”

Michaela: You know what I think? Daily life. Just even walking down the street, you hear lots of noises, especially in London, the traffic, sometimes it’s just too much.

And then right now, spring. So birds are singing. So I think that kind of like a daily sound.

Does it make sense? Am I going somewhere with this? I think that’s musicality for me. So it’s not just about making beautiful sound or creating beautiful tune.

It’s about even, like, our heartbeat, it’s like the rhythm itself. So that might be, like, a starting point for me when sometimes I improvise on my own and I don’t have anyone around.

So I think that, like, taking whatever the life and day offers me. A rhythm, a sound.

And I think that’s where I would start with “what is musicality”

Christopher: Wonderful! A very, very human and natural and environmental definition there. That’s lovely.

So, as I mentioned, your bio got me excited in a whole bunch of different directions, because you’re an expert in some things I know about and some things I don’t know about and some things I’ve never heard of!

But, for example, Fitzmaurice voice work. Alexander technique. Linklater Voice. Mind-Body Centering. The Feldenkrais method. Estil voice training. Somatic voice work. The LoVetri method.

Like, I could have an hour-long conversation with you about each of these! But I’d love if you could give us a bit more of a picture of who you are and where you’ve come from and maybe where some of these things have factored into your own musical journey.

Michaela: A great question. I started with singing, and when I moved to London ages ago, I realized that there is a field focused just on voice. And I was just like “oh my god!” So they are like people who dedicate their life to work with people and their voices. And I was just mesmerised with it.

And I love to learn. So I jump into studying the anatomy, studying the singing, studying singing exercises, studying singing songs. And then it was speaking, and then it was public speaking, and it was then working with actors, and then it was, okay, so actually, the body is inside, or the voice is inside of our body. So it would be nice to, like, work with the body. That’s, like, that’s the instrument.

So I look into working with movement. Often when I say that, people get scared, and I’m like, it’s more like, embodied, mindful movement than, like, going to the gym and exercise and work on our abs!

So I look into how the voice is connected to the body, and then it just took me wherever I wanted to.

And I think the reason why I started to teach was to learn more, because I was “okay, I gained this knowledge. Now I’d like to share it with everyone”. And with sharing and teaching, I realised, okay, I think I want a little bit more. So I added always something on top of what I knew.

And this is where we are now. And also now I write research papers because the voice is very abstract, and it’s very difficult to put it in a certain form.

So I thought, let’s look into the science. And, well, I’m still writing papers on the connection between voice and the body because it feels like there’s a huge gap. So I’m focusing on that, and I don’t know what’s next, but I’m very excited.

Christopher: Wonderful. And as you know, our community here at Musical U is made up of all kinds of musicians. Some of them would consider themselves singers, some of them primarily instrumentalists, but we have ingrained in them the importance and power of singing, even if that’s not their primary instrument.

And others who’ve joined us more recently might still be a little bit skeptical about singing and might think the idea of talking about breathing or their breath was irrelevant to playing blues guitar or on stage and that kind of thing.

So I’d love if you could share a little bit about, you know, for the average musician, why would they consider diving into this world of voice and breath training or work or exercises? How could that help them?

Michaela: I don’t want to force anyone. So if you feel like it’s time to look into what your voice can offer you, then it’s time to do that.

Otherwise, the voice is very private thing. And I think that’s why people are not always willing to sing, because it shows how you feel without sometimes wanting to share that. So I think that’s why people get private about their singing.

And the other thing is, there are so many traumas from childhood. What I’ve heard from my students and clients, it’s painful. It’s painful.

And I’m not surprised that people are not willing to go there if it’s just not the right time. But you have no idea how people’s life can change if they start to just make sound. Not even singing.

First of all, they are very beautiful. They turn into a beautiful person. I don’t know what it is, but they start to be very beautiful.

And then lots of different changes regarding speaking up for themselves, taking sometimes certain stand or certain role in the family. It also changes. It can be interesting.

It can be interesting, and it’s also wonderful. I don’t want to scare anyone! It’s also beautiful.

Christopher: Fantastic, yeah. What really came across to me there is the deep, personal significance of our voice, right?

And maybe right now you’re using it for singing, maybe you’re not. Maybe you feel comfortable speaking in front of a group or raising your voice in a discussion or argument, maybe you don’t.

But however you feel about it right now, it’s always personal and it’s always really impactful, right?

And so I love the way you talked about it there for the opportunity to almost change who you are or become more of who you are through getting more in touch with that voice.

Michaela: I don’t want to. I don’t want to talk about this, but I feel like right now it’s maybe the right time.

It sometimes feels like the voice is your soul.

Which is like, I am not spiritual, but that’s what kind of coming out of what I see when people start to make any sound and it touches all the, yeah, as I mentioned, it touches all the emotions. And you just show who you are as a person.

And not everyone is willing to see that. So sometimes it’s just like, not like the people around, but it’s just the person herself or himself.

They are not willing to face themselves. So just taking time and going slow.

And also one last thing, because I teach and I always learn something these days I’m noticing when people start to feel safe, it’s incredible how everything opens up.

The voice also, but the life too. When people start to feel safe, they start to trust themselves. They start to go for the stuff they wanted to.

So it’s a lot about safety, too. So if you don’t feel ready, then just take it slow.

Christopher: Wonderful. Well, I can’t wait for the masterclass now to share some of this with our members live and give them a peek into the kinds of things we’ve been talking about just now!

For those who are watching or listening to this interview and want to know more about you and the work you do, where’s the best place for them to go?

Michaela: I have a couple of websites, but the best one, I try to keep everything under control there is my name, Michaela, so Michaela Sound. So michaelasound.com.

Christopher: Fantastic. And we’ll certainly put a link to that alongside this video or in the podcast shownotes. Thank you.

And give people a little taste of what you’ll be covering in the masterclass today. What will we be focused on and what will people experience?

Michaela: It was actually difficult to pick a theme, a topic because we can go all over the place.

But I was thinking, I want the people get out of it, something they can take home and practice if they want to.

And I want them to experience, to have an experience, not just sit down and listen.

So today is going to be about connecting the breath with the sound. So it’s not even speaking or singing, it’s just connecting the breath with the sound.

And I will mention it, I think at the beginning today when we start, it came to me to connect the breath with the sound when I started to teach ages ago, when the people came and they started to share all the horrendous stories and I tried to make them sing and I felt and I saw how everyone is tensing and they are shutting down, often the shoulders, like, we are just closing.

The whole body language is like closing, so we are protecting ourselves.

So I was like, okay, I don’t think this is the way and I don’t want to teach these classes because people just suffer. So I thought, okay, let’s start with a breath.

And people relaxed a lot and then we started to make sounds, just dropping the sound on the out breath, and that kind of unlocks safety, as we mentioned. And people started to believe that they can make sound, sing, speak, and they can do what they want. So that’s what we will do today.

Christopher: Lovely. Fantastic. Well, I can see our premium members filing in, ready and waiting for the masterclass, so we should wrap things up and get ready for that session.

The recording will of course be available for all of our members in due course to enjoy at their leisure. Thank you so much for joining me for this quick pre-masterclass interview, Michaela, and let’s head over there. Thank you, everyone, for watching and we’ll see you back on the show again soon.

Michaela: Bye bye. Thank you.

———

Christopher: Wasn’t that cool? I don’t know what I loved more, her deeply natural answer to “what is musicality?” or the way she talked about singing with such sensitivity and appreciation for both the deeply personal nature of singing and how powerful it can be to explore singing as a musician – or indeed just as a person in general!

I love that she mentioned the importance of feeling safe.

That’s been huge for us at Musical U as we’ve tried to encourage people into singing. Just making sure we do it in a way that lets them take simple, gentle, private steps forwards. It makes all the difference.

And it’s kind of the extreme contrast of those painful childhood experiences she alluded to. You know, for a lot of people, it’s that, you know, experience at five when you’re put in front of the whole class and asked to sing back a note on piano and you don’t nail it first time, so you’re told you can’t sing.

We want the polar opposite of that, where you feel relaxed and safe and comfortable and private. And she cultivated that kind of safe space so well during our masterclass and then in her workshop with our Next Level members.

So I’m going to be back tomorrow with our next episode, sharing a little section of that masterclass, which, like I mentioned, was a big hit with our members and just opened up singing in a new way for a lot of them.

Until then, cheers! And go make some music!

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