I first met Ian on the island of Funen (Fyn).
I was lucky enough to take part in several of his week-long courses at Svendborg Højskole and through the Danish Artists’ Union (Artistforbundet). Those were weeks full of singing, immersion and inspiration – experiences that still shape my teaching today.
The teaching day always began in a large circle. “The circle of love,” as he called it. The work started with Ian’s own breathing exercises. Only afterwards did the voice come into play. That was his way of preparing the body, so the voice had the best possible conditions to work from.
After the breathing work came his own system of warm-up exercises – scales and melodies he had developed himself. We sang through the voice’s entire range, from the lowest to the highest notes, regardless of whether we were sopranos, tenors or basses. The voice wasn’t meant to be divided into registers, but experienced as one connected whole.
A central part of the work was finding what Ian called singing in the mask. Not as an artificial placement of the sound, but as the experience of the voice suddenly finding a place to ring freely. When that happened, the voice became lighter, more resonant, and far less strained.
But technique was never a goal in itself. Ian kept coming back to the most important thing of all: your own personal voice. He wasn’t looking for a particular sound or a particular school. He listened for the voice that could only be yours, and he had a rare gift for helping singers find exactly that.
What I remember most vividly is his enormous knowledge of repertoire. He could listen to a student and find a song that fit so precisely, it felt like receiving a letter from home. Not because the song was necessarily easy, but because it said something about the person standing in front of him.
He also had a wonderful gift for making complicated things simple.
I can still hear his distinctive English voice saying:
“You’ve got to pull up in the inner ring muscle of your ass.”
Behind the humorous phrasing was a simple idea: let the outward breath begin deep in the body. I’ve carried that thought with me ever since, and translated it into my own language in my teaching.
Much has evolved since then. I’ve found my own paths and my own images. But something of Ian Adam’s teaching lives on – not as a method, but as a natural part of my own teaching.