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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."