Lisbeth Hultmann

I have been singing all my life. I was singing before I developed language and could speak. My singing education started when I was nine years old, when I got through the eye of the needle to join the DR-Girl Choir (Denmark Radio’s Girl Choir) and straightaway became a soloist.

I continued to educate myself as a young girl under the tutelage of opera singers:  Sylvia Schierbæk, Kirsten Hermansen, Anne Lund Christiansen and Professor Kirsten Buhl Mølle. I studied music at Copenhagen University, which became only a two-year term of study in that I was encouraged to apply for entry to The Jutland Opera by the time I was 21. There I stayed for 3½ years before looking for other avenues.

 A breakthrough became a renewal

I felt the ‘human’ aspect of singing was missing. I wanted to see the broader principles in a person’s life corelate with artistic expression. I wanted to see something at stake. I wanted to see a greater correspondence between people and art, where it was genuineness in a person that became expressed rather than a formalized idiom or cliché. I wanted to see something closer to true expression. I wanted to get in behind the masks.

I left the opera to take an education as a Gymnastic Coach, as I believed that contact with the body was missing in the performance of classical music; on stage the body typically was postured in a static position, such that one stood quite motionless when singing. The lack of bodily movement would cause many classical singers muscular tension and pain. Training as a Gymnastic Coach provided me further inspiration for how to unify the body and voice, which I began to teach.

Through the 80s I set out upon wild experiments with my voice. I participated in vanguard (avant-garde) performances, which included Ars Nova, the Sculptor Theatre and Kirsten Dehlholm; I collaborated with composers Birgitte Alsted and Per Nørgaard and dancer Marie Lalander. I put my abilities to a test by producing my own performance called “Dreams in enclosed spaces”, which I put together with a team of semi-professional dancers and singers on open stage, Amager. I furthermore starred in several experimental performances both on TV and at various theatres in Copenhagen.

However, I became doubtful as to whether I had acted too quickly and too wildly, so I returned to Denmark Radio and the DR Concert Choir. I was a singer in flesh, blood and soul and wanted to be quite sure whether the traditional way was after all me. After two years it became clear that it was not. I resigned my position and moved to the countryside with my family, where the large property afforded an opportunity for setting up concerts and offering lessons. It was here I became self-employed, where I developed courses and training sessions in voice and nonverbal communication for business and private students

Digging deeper

Over several years Lisbeth taught many courses for voice training and personal development for a very broad target group in Denmark and abroad. She thereafter took a decisive step in her interest to properly and respectfully guide various students and clients along their own pathways. She took an education as a Gestalt therapist.

From then on, my work changed radically. I could guide people through the tunnel leading to the freeing up of traumatic and trouble-bound psychic knots. During this period I also began to detect the many different patterns that can characterize a voice.

In 1995 my first book was published: Stemmens kraft (The Voice’s Power). In the following years I held many lectures for businessmen and courses for diverse professional groups. The book also paved the way for numerous interviews on TV, radio, newspapers and for weekly publications over many years. Stemmens kraft was published again in 2004 and 2013 and reissued in English in 2013 with the title: The Power og the Voice by John Hunt Publishing.

The voice as a snitch

My new book, Stemmen er en sladrehank (The voice as a snitch), is a result of all the experiences I have had along the way in working with others. The book was originally conceived by the students of voice development, which is a course extending over many years. As the work proceeded, however, it became clear that the book has a larger range of relevance. I hope that all the personal developmental processes that predispose a finished result can be enriched and that satisfaction can be created there where a reader can benefit most.

I was born in 1953, have one daughter and three sons, and live in Gilleleje, Denmark.