Lo­cal singers pos­sess beau­ti­ful vo­cal tones says Dr Robert Hen­ry, mu­sic ad­ju­di­ca­tor at the 30th Bi­en­ni­al T&T Mu­sic Fes­ti­val tak­ing place at Queen's Hall in St Ann's, Port-of-Spain. He should know, af­ter all, he's a son of the soil.

Based in the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca, he works at the Cen­tre for In­no­v­a­tive Teach­ing and Learn­ing at In­di­ana Uni­ver­si­ty. But in the ex­e­cu­tion of his du­ties at the Fes­ti­val af­ter a mere two days, he's con­vinced that fail­ing to form prop­er vow­els along with im­prop­er breath­ing tech­niques, were two im­ped­i­ments com­peti­tors must over­come in or­der to im­prove the qual­i­ty of their per­for­mances at the event pro­duced by the T&T Mu­sic As­so­ci­a­tion (TTMA) and spon­sored by BPTT and Sco­tia­bank. He said: "Breath sup­port and man­age­ment needs to be de­vel­oped. When the breath sup­port laps­es, then you get those hic­cups in the tone. For the in­di­vid­ual singers, I want to say gen­er­al­ly, you al­ways want to work to­wards good, sol­id breath sup­port. That's go­ing to be what saves you when you have to do the long phras­es and the high notes. Prac­tice go­ing high­er in a way that lets you keep the full res­o­nant sound and it doesn't start to squeeze. That's so com­mon in singers; they start to squeeze when they get high­er."

But as fate would have it, over­com­ing shal­low pat­terns of breath­ing was not some­thing vo­cal tu­tors of soloists as well as chorale di­rec­tors should pay at­ten­tion to. Teach­ers of wood­wind and brass in­stru­ment, too, need to pay close at­ten­tion this, said Hen­ry. At Mon­day's in­stal­ment of the pro­gramme, Hen­ry laud­ed the cal­i­bre play­ing of wood­wind soloist Devin De­bie who de­liv­ered the mu­sic item Fan­ta­sy by Gabrielle Fau­re. The judge point­ed to the in­tri­ca­cies con­tained in the piece, but main­tained the po­si­tion that breath­ing from the di­aphragm was al­ways in the best in­ter­est of such a per­former. A day lat­er he made sim­i­lar com­ments to con­tes­tants in the clar­inet class. He joked that soon enough, the au­di­ence, on cue, should be able to re­cite this piece of ad­vice to com­peti­tors when the need arose, hav­ing heard him re­peat it so fre­quent­ly. He told De­bie: "To me, as a soloist, the most im­por­tant thing is to have your breath un­der you at all times. So, I felt that be­cause of the ex­act tem­po of the An­dan­ti­no, he was not re­al­ly able to play the phras­es the length that he want­ed, be­cause it was just a shade slow, tonight."

Hen­ry's suit of rec­om­men­da­tions to com­peti­tors, were not re­served for com­peti­tors in the two for­mer cat­e­gories. He had help­ful tips for the pi­anists in the spot­light, too, but the au­di­ence, judg­ing from their re­spons­es, lapped up his earnest de­sire to im­part knowl­edge with ease. When it came to a pi­ano recital, he said, there are styl­is­tic is­sues. "...the ju­di­cious use of the ped­al. When you are play­ing the pi­ano, the ped­al can be your friend, or it can be a great hin­drance to you. "So when does it come time to not ap­ply the ped­al? Let's say Mozart or Bach. I think that could be de­struc­tive to the mu­sic be­cause it hides a lot of the won­der­ful ar­chi­tec­ture that you'll find es­pe­cial­ly in a Bach. If you're go­ing to go for a beau­ti­ful­ly played piece of mu­sic, more or less faith­ful to how the com­pos­er in­tend­ed it to be heard, that's one of those con­sid­er­a­tion: the use of the ped­al. An­oth­er un­for­tu­nate fea­ture of the Fes­ti­val, for Hen­ry, was the fact that con­tes­tants along with their tu­tors were tak­ing pieces at a tem­po to match the skill of the con­tes­tants, which in his es­ti­ma­tion, made all the dif­fer­ence in the world.