A GREAT SINGER ON GREAT SINGING

Jerome Hines Challenges Voice Scientists and Singers

An Interview by Joseph Shore for

The NATS Journal Jan./Feb.1995

Jerome Hines needs no introduction to singers or voice teachers. For over fifty years his name has been synonymous with great operatic singing. Clearly, singers like Mr. Hines, would offer voice science a wealth of material for study. He also provides a wonderful role model for singers.  On November 3, 1993, five days before his 72nd birthday, I talked with Mr. Hines about singing and vocal training.

Shore:  Jerry, first of all, I  want to wish you an early happy birthday and thank you for taking the time to talk vocal shop.

Hines:  Thanks, it's my  pleasure.

Shore:  Jerry, I believe that great singers show how the vocal organs work at their peak efficiency. Therefore, I believe that studying great singers is very important to voice students. They need to learn by observing the peak efficiency of the great singer's art. When you were a young singer, did you learn by listening to other great singers?

Hines: To a certain extent.  My first record I bought was Jussi Bjoerling and I was thrilled to death. Then I began to listen to Pinza. The singer who influenced me a lot for a while was Titta Ruffo. I remember one day, I asked Maestro Curci, "Which sounds better?" and I sang the way I thought Titta Ruffo would sing, and then the way I thought Pinza would sing. And Maestro Curci said, "Look young man, your voice is so beautiful, if you do something wrong it still sounds right. Its very hard to teach you." Of course I was at the stage of trying to imitate this, imitate that and I admired both Ruffo and Pinza. One is a baritone, one a bass and they sang completely differently. And I would think I emulated more in the direction of Pinza. I was imitating that rounder sound that he would make.

Shore:   If I may add, you certainly have surpassed him in vocal technique and beauty of tone.

Hines:   I'll tell you who influenced me a lot on recordings. It was Mardones. His was the most impressive of all the bass voices I've ever heard. Pinza's was the most beautiful in color.

Shore:   Jerry, in just a few days you are going to be 72. You are still singing wonderfully. Many people are surprised at that. I am not. I'm grateful for it but I'm not surprised. Great singers keep their voices if their bodily health permits. Nevertheless, a lot of people want me to ask you the big question. How have you kept your voice all these years?

Hines:   It's a question that everybody does ask me and it's not a  simple answer. First of all many of the things I do are things that other singers do and they don't last as long. So its not exactly the answer. No matter what techniques and what disciplines you go through, I think there is one factor more intangible and that is the motivation to pick yourself off the ground when you've been totally bloodied and smashed and say, "Let's fight some more." At a certain point people  would just say, "Oh, come on, I've just had it. I can't take anymore." I recall saying that to myself in 1971 or '72. Why did I continue after that when everything seemed at an end? I was down to one performance a season at the Met. My big competitors were out of the picture. London was out. Siepi was going out. Tozzi was going out. I said, "Here's the handwriting on the wall. Its time for me to go out. I'm not doing that well."  What made me pick myself up?  For me, the spiritual background, my Christian faith, helped.  So the motivation part is all essential in keeping my voice, but then there are the human factors of discipline. One of which is vocal technique. When I made my 30th year at the MET--eventually you know I made 41 years--the New York Times called me and said, "We're doing a story on you, Dorothy Kirsten, and Robert Merrill. You all debuted in 1946."  We three were being interviewed and I said, "I don't think it's a coincidence that two of the three study with the same teacher, Samuel Margolis." Bob Merrill is still going and singing quite beautifully. I just did FAUST on Sunday night and it went awfully well.  

Shore:   Do you warm up any differently now than 30 years ago?

Hines:   No. Not at all. I've added a few things but I haven't subtracted anything.

Shore:   Has your range changed?

Hines:   Not really. I faced up to and won the battle with one of the symptoms of aging which usually portends the end of a career. Several years ago my wife (Lucia Evangelista) began saying, "Honey, the high voice is strong and heroic but the lower and middle is getting foggy and thinned out." Now we've seen our great colleagues even at the age of 69 or 70 have a tremendous high voice but the whole middle is just a bag of broken glass. When they say they are singing on the "interest", they have to. The capital has disappeared. I was seeing that happening and my first reaction was, "What do you expect at my age?" But I had fought that kind of battle in the past and always won by saying, "Stop blaming it on age. If you were 30 years younger and had the same problem, you'd say, "I need a new teacher." I said, "I'm going to assume that it is not age but that I've gotten off the track," and I tried to analyze what causes this general trend among singers. In analyzing this problem, let me first say that 95% of the singers I know are not blessed in the way I believe you were blessed. I think that when you started singing you had a high voice.

Shore:   Yes, that's right. I did.

Hines:   Right, exactly. People like you, Leonard Warren,   Cornel MacNeil, some other people I've sung with, they had it from  day one. But you guys represent about 5% of the singers. 95% need to develop the last half octave to our voices. I couldn't sing above D4 when I started. I had to learn it. It took me some years of struggle to acquire it. Now what that does to us is it begins a quest for the high voice. That quest never seems to end. The middle for most of us was natural and easy. We didn't know how we did it. We just did it. And so when it begins to atrophy from disuse some people say, "What do you expect at my age?" They start saying "I'm living on the interest instead of the capital." I say, "Old people I know living on the interest have retired. I want to spend the capital." What is the capital? It lead me into a study of what we mean by chest voice. My first teacher,  Curci, said that the middle and low is the foundation of the voice, and when that goes, that's the end. I never forgot those words and I began to get chills when mine began to thin out. I found the answer in an unexpected way. When I wrote Great Singers On Great Singing, I was exposed to an idea that was new to me. Pavarotti said to me, "I don't believe in placement." I began experimenting with what he was talking about which is really sort of the Melocchi school which I'm sure you're acquainted with.  (Note: Mario del Monaco was perhaps the most famous pupil of Melocchi. >From his descriptions, this school appears to have wanted the "sung" vowels to be very close to speaking values throughout the whole singing range. {Del Monaco interview, "Nothing Is Forgiven Me"}. There are many technical implications for this. One has been pointed out by Sundberg;  singing pitches higher than the first formant frequency of the vowel requires greater "vocal effort" and may "strain the vocal folds" unless the singer raises the frequency of the first formant, usually by opening the jaw wider {Sundberg, "The Acoustics of the Singing Voice," Scientific American, 1977}. Opening the jaw wider for /i:/, for example, causes the vowel to "migrate" (Appleman) to /I:/.) Attempting to avoid that migration causes greater "vocal effort" (Sundberg), presumably by the lateral cricoarytenoids.)

 When I brought it up to Franco Corelli, who I knew had studied with some spin-offs of Melocchi, he said, "Well, what Melocchi said is valid but you have to see if you have a throat that's adapted to it and you must use it with great moderation." So I began experimenting with what Pavarotti was saying. The sound begins right here in the larynx. You don't put it anyplace. Its just /i:/ /e:/ /a:/.  (He demonstrated vowels with great medial compression, i.e. they sounded closer to "pressed phonation" than "flow phonation.") Now when I began doing that, if I'd try scales for a couple of minutes, I'd be hoarse. That's what Corelli was saying: "You have to see if your larynx can stand it." What it  means is, "Do you have the muscular development in the larynx to stand it?" At first the muscles were strained. The muscles were weak. So I persisted for maybe a couple of months until I found that I wasn't getting hoarse anymore doing it. My larynx muscles were adapting to it. Then I kept asking myself, "What does Corelli mean by moderation. How do you moderate it?" First I began by asking, "How does one sing a completely unmodified /i:/ vowel on the high voice, for example, without opening the jaw and modifying to /I:/?"  I began working on that until I could sing a very secure but unmodified /i:/ vowel all the way up the scale. I found that in order to do so I had to supply a lot of "appoggio".  I could not let the breath pressure grow. I could feel that little pinch sensation that Pavarotti spoke of. It is that muscular effort in the larynx that closes those vocal folds. Now I said, "This is not a sound that I want to produce on the stage." It is not a beautiful sound, but it took a certain muscular development to be able to do it. Now I began to say, "How does one modify that so that it might be beautiful enough to use on the stage?" What I finally came up with was a feeling of making a space down deep under the sternum, so that from the vocal cords down it was almost a triangular feeling with the apex of the triangle at the vocal cords. There was no sensation of placement above the vocal cords. Now when I would make a sound like this my wife would say, "The voice sounds very baritonal instead of bass." I continued to experiment and I discovered that when I got this sensation of space down deep under the sternum and took this unmodified /i:/ down the scale, my low voice was restored to the richness it used to have. I kept remembering old Dr. Leo Reckford, my laryngologist, who would have me put out two fingers. He would pull on the finger tips and he would say, "That's falsetto." Then he would squeeze the two fingers together at the knuckle and say, "That's chest." The squeeze was chest to him. That squeeze I needed to make that unmodified /i:/ was chest voice. This whole concept restored my lower and middle. The point is that I can sing my entire range this way with no placement but it narrows my voice. When I want to go to what I was taught by Margolis, I have to let go of that, make the throat and mouth feel like an empty pipe and then I feel that the sound is being made in the dome of the hard palate and everything is up in the mouth, not coming from the vocal cords.  In the era of Warren and Merrill, everybody would say, "Warren does not have the magnificent middle of Merrill but Merrill does not have the magnificent high voice of Warren." The problem was that Merrill was trying to take the technique of singing in the dome of the hard palate up into the high voice.

Now you had stirred up my thinking about this other thing, the singer's formant, and I began experimenting. When I sang the FAUST last Sunday, my manager Jim Sardos and my wife both said, "You've never sung the high notes as well as you do now."

Shore:    Jerry, you have certainly given voice scientists something to consider for study. It would be fascinating and informative to do EMG's on your laryngeal musculature to see exactly what your exercises did. I am almost reluctant to make any comment for fear of jumping to a conclusion, but  if I had to make a guess, I would say that you may have discovered a way to defeat one of the main effects of aging on the vocal folds. Dr. Titze has recently written about the effects of aging on the vocal folds. He says that since muscle cells of the vocalis muscles atrophy with age, the vocal folds tend to bow (Ingo Titze, "Critical Periods of Vocal Change--Advanced Age", The NATS Journal, March/April 1993). It could be that when bowed vocal folds are brought together by the lateral cricoarytenoids, greater adduction forces may be required to completely close the glottis. Otherwise the bowed vocal folds could allow too much air to pass through.  That could possibly cause the loss of strength and timbre in the middle and lower voice that you described as typical of your older colleagues. I am guessing--we certainly need studies to really tell-- that you used your squeezed vowels to teach your lateral cricoarytenoids to supply more medial compression than they were accustomed to supplying when you were younger.

Hines:    That sounds right. And when I was younger I wouldn't have needed so much because the cords were different.

Shore:    That is possible. You'll need to let a voice scientist like Dr. Cleveland or Dr. Sundberg study you to be more certain. The only aspect of your description which I think is in error is the idea that the "squeeze" or medial compression corresponds to chest voice. Dr. Van den Berg's studies showed that medial compression is found in falsetto as well, although it may be less active (Van den Berg, Vennard, et al, "Voice Production: The Vibrating Larynx").  Both Dr. Van den Berg's and Dr. Hirano's studies seem to show that chest voice is the product of vocalis muscle stiffening, not predominantly medial compression. (Sundberg, The Science of the Singing Voice, pp.53-54).  In fact, the bodily vibrations in the chest associated with this register are much stronger when the medial compression is just sufficient to keep the vocal folds together. In "pressed phonation" there is great "squeeze" but very weak vibrations are sensed in the chest, according to Dr. Sundberg (Sundberg, Ibid. pp.161-163).

Hines:   You're right. The squeeze is only a part of it.

Shore:   Tell us what you got from Margolis.

Hines:   The factor I got from Margolis that has kept Bob Merrill and me singing so long is fast moving scales. We basically sang fast moving scales with a slight impulse which he called a half "h" between the coloratura, not quite a detachment. Maximum speed and flexibility and  maximum volume. He wanted a big sound produced with flexibility. That flexibility has a lot to do with keeping the voice young. There is a tendency if you have a large voice to get muscle bound.

Shore:   And you have always had terrific coloratura.

Hines:   Yes, the voice should keep that flexibility and that will help keep the singer young. With Curci when I was young I had that depth of sound as well as the brightness. And now that I've restored the low voice with a rich sound this spacing under the sternum explains something more to me. Rosa Ponselle told me Caruso always told her to keep a "square throat". That didn't make much sense. Now I think I know what he meant. When you sense this spacing under the sternum, which you keep as you go up into the higher voice, that's the square throat.

Shore:  You have mentioned that sensation several times.  Does that spacing have anything to do with the way you use the diaphragm?

Hines:   I think there is something laryngeal happening.

Shore:   It could be that the sensations you have are actually produced by a breathing technique which increases the degree of tracheal pull on the larynx. All of your empirical descriptions of the sternum and space, with the impact on tone quality and range, are consistent with a strong tracheal pull. Von Euler, Leanderson and Sundberg have shown that the tracheal pull on the larynx provides just such benefits in tone management, especially on high notes (Sundberg, "Breathing Behavior during Singing," The NATS Journal, January/February, 1993). Your sensations would be great material for studies.

Hines:   All right, that's ringing bells when you say it. There is something tracheal. This is not just pulling the larynx down. I can pull the larynx down voluntarily, and not by pushing down on the tongue. I can pull it down from below. But this is a feeling of lateral expansion under the vocal cords. I am not sure exactly what causes it.

Shore:   One of the great things about you is that you have an open mind, are still experimenting and still learning.

Hines:   Oh, like crazy.

Shore:   Jerry, you read my lectures on the singer's formant and you said you made some experiments on your own articulation based on them. You said you were able to get high notes you never got before. Tell us what you did and what happened.

Hines:   I wanted to see what enabled some singers, like yourself, to be able to sing high notes as easy as the middle voice. I played with that after discussing the singer's formant with you. I was emulating a tenor who has this facility with high notes and I was able to get that result when I felt as though the resonance chamber I was aiming for was down below the tongue in the area where the vocal cords are.

Shore:   Well, you're right. That is the key chamber. The expanded larynx ventricle is a key factor in the strong singer's formant (Sundberg, Ibid. p.121).

Hines:   That would be the way Warren and the others were singing their high notes. When I got that articulation all of a sudden the high voice became as easy as the middle. I found that once I got that feeling of expansion in the larynx I still had to add in some raising of the soft palate to get that two-way stretch singers talk about or I would still labor a little bit on the high voice or it would be lacking in brilliance.

Shore:  I would liked to have seen studies of Warren's articulation and phonation for those great high notes. It certainly does sound as though his singer's formant was very strong. Many great singers in your book talk about that feeling of two-way stretch you just mentioned. I wonder if it could be related to the support certain extrinsic muscles give to the larynx. Husler and Quiring believe that the stylopharyngeus and palatopharyngeus muscles support the larynx by a pulling stretch upwards, which must increase for higher notes. We need studies on great singers to be able to speak more definitely (Frederick Husler, Singing, the Physical Nature of the Vocal Organ, pp.23-30). The trouble is in accessing those muscles with EMG's in a way which would not be so invasive as to render the study meaningless.  

Dr. Van Lawrence does tell us that the support of the larynx from below the hyoid bone is accomplished by muscles which attach to the hyoid bone or the thyroid cartilage and connect to the sternum (Sternohyoid, omohyoid, sternothyroid). Their pull down, he says, is quite important, especially on high notes. So important, that if those muscles are damaged by surgery, the singer may lose his/her high notes thereafter. (Van Lawrence, "Singers and Surgery," Vocal Health and Science, p. 49.) This important function they provide may give part of your sternum feeling you described.

Shore:   Jerry, these questions have been mostly technical. I'd like to ask you a few questions about the art and profession of singing. Boris Christoff, one of your basso competitors, who just recently passed away, said in his Opera News interview some years ago, that young singers today all sound alike, that is, they have less distinctive timbres. Do you agree?

Hines:   Let me put it this way. We are facing a generation of young singers who are much more diminutive in their approach to singing. I will sing King Mark with a Tristan who I feel should be doing Almaviva.

Shore:   Jerry, a few years ago a major regional opera company did DON CARLO  and hired you to do the Grand Inquisitor. A young international bass of the current generation, who I will simply call Mr. X, was the Philip. The Chorus Master is a friend of mine and he relayed this account of the show. He said, "We all thought Mr. X was sounding just fine as Philip until out walked Jerome Hines as the Grand Inquisitor, and he made Mr. X sound like a teenager. WE HAD ALL FORGOTTEN WHAT A REAL BASS SOUNDS LIKE."

Hines:   I have a tape of that performance and Mr. X sounds like my little boy!

(Shore: While Jerry was alive I never revealed who "Mr. X" was but now that Jerry is gone I don't mind revealing that Mr. X was Sam Ramey and the opera company was Tulsa where Ramey was singing Philip and Hines was the Inquisitor.)

Shore:   Can you describe the differences in the way singers sounded when you were coming into the business 50 years ago and how they sound now?

Hines:   Yes, when I came to the Met, Robert Merrill and Leonard Warren sounded more like basses than most of the basses you hear today. Take Lawrence Tibbett. He had a big, world-class sound. It was a richer, heavier sound by far than what you hear from baritones today.

Shore:   You know that some people want me to sing bass roles today, even though you and I both know I'm a baritone.

Hines:   Of course. You're absolutely right. You sound the way a real baritone is supposed to sound.

Shore:   Do you think this trend towards lightening voices depends on poor teaching?

Hines:   Yes. You know when I first did Wotan I thought the only way I could sing it was to pull the voice up. That was a grave error. Singing Wotan like that almost did me in. But I have one recording of my Wotan at Bayreuth. For some reason that performance I started Wotan like a deep, black bass voice and I didn't get tired. I went through the role like gang-busters. The high voice was greater than ever.

Shore:   One possibility--and it's just a possibility without studies-- is that the articulation you chose to keep your voice deep--presumably a long vocal tract with a low larynx-- also enabled you to sing the high notes easier. The muscles which lower the larynx are the sternothyroid muscles (Sundberg, Ibid. p.132-133) and some researchers believe that they help the cricothyroid muscles for rich high notes (Husler, Ibid. pp.23-30). I have always thought that a study  of the sternothyroids and the cricothyroids in rising pitch would yield fascinating results in you.  I do know that the images we choose effect laryngeal and vocal tract function.

Shore: Jerry do you think that we in the universities should hold up the professional singer's voice as a model for our young students?

Hines: Oh, absolutely. I'll give you an example. I went to a major university to do a series of master classes. They had a recital the first thing when I got there. The worst singer on the program was a tenor. He was just a disaster. But he had a couple of notes that really got my attention. I heard buried in there another Mario Del Monaco. I took him aside and told him to come for a voice lesson within the next day or two. He came in with "Nessun dorma," and "Ch'ella mi creda." I started working with him. I said, "Don't be afraid of it. Sing with some real guts," and I started showing how to do it, how to correct the high voice. Within an hour he was just knocking the socks off of it. So I spoke to the chairman of the department and said, "Come to this guy's next lesson. I want to get your opinion." So she did, and he just sang up a storm. At the end of the lesson she said to me, 'I WOULD NEVER HAVE GUESSED THAT HE HAD THAT VOICE IN HIM, AND IF I HAD SUSPECTED IT, I WOULD HAVE BEEN AFRAID TO HAVE LET HIM SING THAT WAY FOR FEAR HE WOULD HAVE HURT HIS VOICE AND I WOULD HAVE LOST MY JOB."  Then she said, "YOU KNOW, I THINK I HAVE A CONFESSION TO MAKE. I THINK THAT WE VOICE TEACHERS IN ACADEMIA ARE DESTROYING A WHOLE GENERATION OF SINGERS. WE ARE AFRAID TO LET THEM SOUND LIKE OPERA SINGERS FOR FEAR THAT THEY MIGHT HURT THEIR VOICES AND WE MIGHT LOSE OUR JOBS.'  And that was her confession to me."

Shore: This has been great. You have refreshed my memories of your  Wotan which I will always remember, along with your Boris, Philip, and Gurnemanz as peak experiences in opera.

Now remember Jerry, you have already put it in print that the bass voice doesn't begin to age until 80, so we expect to hear you sing for many more years to come! Thanks for taking the time today to talk vocal shop. Thanks for giving us so many new ideas for studies and happy 72nd birthday.  

Hines:   Thanks buddy. You're welcome.