What is legato?

When a coach or teacher tells a singer to sing legato (legato means ‘tied together’ in Italian), what does that mean?  

Singers begin singing legato, or more smoothly, but what is true legato?

I have always been taught that true legato is actually the air constantly and smoothly coming out of the lungs. 

Many young singers need to look at how they study music and the phrases they sing.  Most pick up the music and start singing the words right away, fumbling with pronunciation as they fumble with the notes.  This is not the way to study a piece and makes singing legato impossible.

Furthermore, our body remembers this through muscle memory and we then need to go back and learn to sing true legato in the middle of studying a piece of music!

The best way is to have a study plan and learn to sing the music correctly from the first time you look at it.

What a singer needs to do is study the notes at the piano, phrase by phrase, and sing, ‘ah’.  Singing “ah’ is easier on the voice and combined with good support, can help the singer discover a true legato, which is the air smoothly and freely coming out of the lungs.

So when you pick up a new piece of music, sing, ‘ah’  or ‘oh’ or whatever vowel is easiest for you, and sing the song several times, phrase by phrase with just a vowel, and in doing so you will have an easier time at discovering true legato which is; the free and easy flow of air out of the lungs. 

The body memorizes this good free feeling very easily. 

It is at this point that you then add the words (which have
been studied and translated), and combined with body memory, helps keep a true legato line in the sound, even with the words added.