The three voices

You have a head voice, a chest voice and an abdominal voice. I briefly discuss these in Re-Imagining Your Body, Part One, with the goal of extending understanding of the head, chest and abdominal body centres. Here I'm interested in these different voices in their own right.

They’re not really different voices – though they can certainly seem so – but integral components or aspects of your one whole voice. Still, there are good reasons for treating them separately, which we’ll come to. As far as I’m aware, the distinction between these three voices derives from the work of voice teacher Alfred Wolfsohn, who used an exercise known as ‘violin, viola, cello’ in which singers would first sing the word ‘violin’ by placing the resonance in their heads, then the word ‘viola’ by placing resonance in their chests, and finally the word ‘cello’ by placing resonance in their bellies.

Wolfsohn’s work is still much less well known than it deserves to be. I think the main reason for this is its complex double relation to both psychotherapy and professional music training, which generates the puzzled question: ‘What exactly is this?’. On the one hand, Wolfsohn’s ideas lie behind the Voice Movement Therapy developed by Paul Newham (of which more below), which I've referred to in a previous post. In fact, Wolfsohn initially developed his ideas as a form of self-therapy to overcome the severely damaging impact on his own voice and personality of his traumatic First World War experiences. He also came to relate his ideas closely to Jung’s. But in his post-1945 practice, when he was giving singing and voice lessons in London, he was not directly concerned with developing a form of voice therapy for others. His ideas and motives were primarily artistic. He regarded the specialization of singers as sopranos, contraltos, baritones or basses as arbitrary and over-limiting. And he felt that the pursuit of the ‘pure’ or ‘beautiful’ voice left out too much of the voice’s potential expressiveness. This overlapped with his interest in Jung; for one thing he wanted men to discover their ‘female’ (anima) voices and women to discover their ‘male’ (animus) voices, and for another he wanted the voice to be able to express the darkest human experience (what Jung calls the 'shadow'). Moreover, he continued to believe that the wholeness of the voice and the wholeness of the personality were two sides of a coin. For Wolfsohn, in other words, there was no simple line between art and therapy. Even so, his main professional goal at this time was to extend artistic expressiveness. By far the best example of this in practice remains Peter Maxwell Davies’s Eight Songs for a Mad King as sung by Roy Hart, the student of Wolfsohn for whom it was written. Hart was the only performer at that time who had the vocal range and the timbral expressiveness to sing this extraordinarily demanding work.

You can find out a lot more about Alfred Wolfsohn through the website of the Roy Hart Theatre, where you can also order CDs of some rare recordings. For me, the recording which best reveals the artistic potential of Wolfsohn’s work is not so much Jill Johnson’s extraordinarily impressive singing of soprano, tenor, baritone and bass arias from Mozart’s The Magic Flute, for this can seem like a (brilliant) ‘party trick,’ but the same Jill Johnson’s extraordinarily expressive recitation of Rilke’s poem “Cornet”. (Both are on the CD Alfred Wolfsohn: His Musical Ideas.) But maybe this reflects my own stronger interest in the potential expressiveness of the spoken as against the sung word.

Wolfsohn had two overlapping goals in the ‘violin, viola, cello’ exercise. The first was to extend the range of vocal pitch. The singer aimed to sing the widest range of tones for each word, and this helped to extend overall pitch range. The second goal was to increase the variety of different timbres, by exploiting different sources of resonance.

To some extent these different timbres are analogous to those of the real violin, viola and cello. It’s interesting, though, that Paul Newham has taken the instrumental analogy in a different direction (see especially Chapter Three, “The Voice Tube,” in his Using Voice and Movement in Therapy). He distinguishes instead between the flute, clarinet and saxophone timbres of the voice. The reason for this is that each of these instruments is tubular; as we go through the set, both the tube’s length and its aperture increase. This reflects what happens to the vocal tract, or ‘voice tube,’ itself as the timbre changes.

Pehaps, in the psychotherapeutic context, Newham needs to give a more precise, even (semi-)scientific account of the somatic facts. The vocal tract is relatively short, after all, extending from the larynx to the mouth. It can be shortened or lengthened, and it can be dilated, creating the basic range of timbres. As Newham points out, however, “the muscular movements which lengthen and dilate the tube are so subtle that most clients find it hard to sense them and control them” (75). For this reason, clients are invited to work with what are more cautiously called imaginary resonators, the head, the chest and the belly.

For normal use of the voice, resonance is produced in the hollow areas of the chest, pharynx, mouth, nose and sinus passages. With these alone, in combination with variations in the vocal tract, a wide range of ‘vocal colouring’ can be produced. But subjectively it’s possible to engage other ‘resonators’ and this can have a strong physical impact on the character of the voice. The (at least partly) ‘imaginary’ nature of such resonators is well indicated by Grotowski’s suggestion that the actor should imagine a mouth in the appropriate part of the body, from which the voice then seems to come.

But the point of using head, chest and belly resonators in Voice Movement Therapy is not solely to enable clients to find their full range of vocal expressiveness, through an approach that may be as much imaginative as physiological. Its goal is also to engage the underlying psychosomatic associations, and this is an area where the literal and the metaphorical combine. In Newham’s first exercise, the client makes sudden transitions from the belly voice to the head voice and back again (jumping over what he calls the heart voice). This, he says, “recapitulates the action of vomiting” (78). (For the very young baby, after all, the voice tube and the feeding/regurgitating tube are the same thing.)The client needs to confront this because “underneath the fear of vomiting is the psychological fear of expelling psychological material that is ‘sick’” (79) – which is probably part of the reason the belly voice becomes repressed in the first place. Jumping between these two voices also allows the client to experience what seems the opposition between “the thoughts of the head” and the instinctive gut feelings of the belly (79). Only after this is the emotionally-charged heart (chest) voice introduced. Then, by working more smoothly through the voices from head to heart to belly and back again, without those awkward jumps, the voice – and with it the self – can be experienced in a more integrated and ‘wholesome’ way.

Newham stresses that the labelling of flute, clarinet and saxophone timbres is arbitrary, because the length and dilation of the vocal tract varies continuously, not in jumps. But I think this is only half the truth. Once we invoke the head, chest and belly ‘resonators,’ then there does seem to be a qualitative ‘jump’ from one voice to the other (even when the ‘heart voice’ is introduced between the other two). I don’t think that full integration of the three voices is possible, except in the sense that a ‘whole self’ needs all three of them. This is simply to say that they remain qualitatively different.

Lastly, I don’t like the simple association of thinking with the head and I argue elsewhere that our thoughts only seem to take place ‘in the head’ when a) they’re verbalized, and b) we ‘catch ourselves thinking’. Even so, what we might call the vertical organization of the three voices has significance. The belly voice has an archaic or ‘primitive’ quality; it seems to connect us with the ‘brute beasts’. The head voice, in contrast, is an ‘articulate’ voice, suited to the precise formulation of semantic meaning. The way it seems ‘cut off’ from the rest of the body reflects the way that language has ‘overwritten’ other more physical sources of communication. Lying between these, the chest (heart) voice is one in which ‘mere’ verbalization becomes enriched with a deeper ‘physiological truth’. It integrates in itself certain qualities of the other two, but in a way that transforms and reconciles these qualities.