Somatic Voicework™ The LoVetri Method Teachers' Association

Jeanie's Blog

Empowering Your Own Voice

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Your voice is only as powerful as you allow it to be. You have to look not only at how you sound, but what you do with how you sound, and what you think about that. You have to give some thought to the impact your voice has in the world, in the minds of others, and you have to be able to take responsibility for all of that.

Taking responsibility is something that most people resist. Blame is much more popular than responsibility. We were taught that George Washington told his father, “I cannot tell a lie, father, I chopped down the cherry tree.” (which, it seems is not a true story at all), and then his father said, “George, I am not going to punish you because you told the truth.” Hmmmmm.
We all know that it isn’t easy to say, “I am responsible”, if the thing you are taking responsibility for is a mess. And, carried to its fullest, even if you had nothing deliberately to do with the mess, if you are the head of a group of people that messed up, you are still the one who has to answer for the group’s disaster. The captain is in charge of the ship all the way up to and including going down with it, if necessary. We’ve had some fancy “resignations” in the business world recently, because of this same scenario. The CEO maybe didn’t make the bad transactions but he is supposed to know what’s going on during his command.
If you tell the truth with compassion and speak your mind with clarity, if you listen to others without judging what they are saying, and if you strongly support your own point of view but support others who disagree with you just as strongly, you are empowering your voice in the best possible way. If you are going to apply that to singing, you can think of being the best singer you know how to be, challenging yourself to constantly work on your art, without harming or interfering with anyone else or criticizing anyone who does not work as hard but seems to be more successful than you.
Your voice is strong because you choose it to be. It represents you in the world. Some people may resent you for that, for owning your strength and authority and for standing tall for what is for the greatest good of all concerned, perhaps because their own integrity is less than wonderful and they are jealous.
Keep on keeping on. Do not allow yourself to fall victim to others, to the world, to anything outside yourself. Dwell on your inner resources, your strengths, your capacities to speak and sing forthrightly and with your own truth ringing out energetically. In this way, your generosity of spirit will make it possible for others who need a guiding light to be lead, and it will allow you to know who you are, what your voice is and what it wants to communicate, and it will slowly grow stronger and more powerful because of your intention.

Each Individual On His or Her Own

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Wouldn’t it be great if we could really get inside someone’s head and transfer what we know, like a Vulcan mind meld? It surely would save a lot of time! There have been some truly brilliant minds in history and it certainly would have been a great blessing to have been able to transfer the knowledge and experience they had gathered in their lives to others who perhaps could have been “repositories” for that miraculous wisdom.

Right now, though, there is no such thing. This is a trial and error universe. No matter how much someone else tells you, you still have to try it out for yourself and see how it goes. What works for me might not work for you. Or, you might think you understood what I said about what I do, but maybe you didn’t, and then it wouldn’t work or would work in a different way. It’s hard to know. It’s frustrating to think that each person is on his or her own, particularly as we become adults and take on the responsibilities of being “grown-ups”.
We all know that we are gaining insight as we get older, adding to our knowledge through many different avenues, weighing and measuring how we do as we go along. In “middle age” somewhere, we have enough life experience to be a little better at figuring things out and we can perhaps give others guidance, based on what we have learned, but it isn’t always so that the information we dispense is the answer. When we age, going toward our “golden years” we either stay present, keeping up with the trends that emerge, or slowly withdraw our attention from the outside world into our own smaller universe. Finally, when Time catches up with us, whatever we learned or did not learn we take with us into that “next place” (if you believe there is one, like I do). Who knows what happens after that?
Maybe you can write a book, or make a recording, as I spoke of the other day here, to preserve some part of what you know, and make it available to those who come after you. Maybe you will spark something new and important in that person, even if you never meet them or learn what they do with your inspiration. If you don’t do that, however, the influence you’ve had is only through the people you have had some personal contact with over time. It could be a small group of friends, family and co-workers whom you’ve touched. For each of us, it’s different.
So, with singing, all we can do is listen, talk and try. We can share what we know, we can talk about how we feel, we can analyze the experience this way and that. We can write about it, we can record our sounds, we can sing in performance. In the end, that’s all we have. If each person takes responsibility for his or her learning and development — if she seeks guidance, if she asks for help, if she is open to learning, she might increase her understanding and deepen her experience of “being a singer”. In the end, it is she alone who sings, who studies singing, who works with what she is learning or has learned and makes something of it, or not.
It’s possible there is no such thing as a “bad” student or a “bad” teacher. It’s possible that the problem is simply that the student and teacher are mis-matched. It’s possible that the singer and the information don’t fit together well. Perhap, if you seek something with enough determination and will power, you will ultimately have within you all that you were looking to find. And then, what will you do with it? Will you take it with you or will you give it away?

The Song Is Over But The Melody Lingers On

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We don’t know how the great singers of the 15th, 16th, 17th and 18th centuries sounded. There are some writings about them and musicologists think they have figured out what the sounds were like. They have decided that certain things about music from those times are stylistically correct and others are not, based on what they have read. When they get new information, they change their thinking. One very big assumption was that there was generally no vibrato in the early days of classical singing. Straight tone was considered somehow “better” in certain circles, especially that of choral conductors, but now, that is held less rigidly as an idea. Things change.

The “castrati” were supposedly able to sing with great power and agility and were famous in their day for their feats of vocal stamina and expertise. We don’t really have an idea of how a mature male would sound after having been trained for decades even though his voice had never changed. It surely wouldn’t sound the same as any of the present moment lyric tenors who sing in a very high range, or as our countertenors who sing mostly in a “re-inforced” falsetto, but who also (typically) retain their normal chest dominant speech.
In fact, the world of musicology and ethnomusicology is fascinating because it looks at music as an expression of history and culture. I wonder what scholars of two or three hundred years from now will make of our musical culture? We leave behind millions of recordings and many thousands of films and TV shows of all kinds for them to see and hear but they may not be able to understand who was famous for what reason and why some music stayed around but other music disappeared.
You don’t much hear now what used to be called “Irish Tenors” or light lyric tenors. Even the famous “Three Tenors” who were actually from Ireland weren’t all “Irish Tenors” in the sense that John McCormack was, or even Dennis Day. Robert White, a present moment light lyric tenor, is in this category and he has had a very good career, but it’s a special niche which, for the moment at least, is not much in the “mainstream”. I guess Michael Jackson was a lyric tenor but we hardly think of him that way, mostly due the style of music he sang and the electronic interface that was always there impacting in his vocal output.
I often think that the classical music that will go on into the next several hundred years is that which was written for films. The average person can relate, for the most part, to the music written by John Williams, and understands it to be “classical” even if the classical world turns up its nose at him. Modern composers, whose music is well accepted by the cognoscenti, may have their music described as being “ethereal” or “transcendant” but, frequently, it’s not very memorable. Hmmmmmm. People remember what touches their hearts, not what impresses their intellect. Time will tell.
Indeed, when the various famous vocalists of the past hundred years died, they left behind their energy through their vocal recordings or even their movie musicals, in a way that no previous human beings had ever had an opportunity to do. Even though some of these great singers have been dead for quite a while, we can still hear them every day on the radio, as background music in the restaurants, or in other venues. If it’s true that the sound carries the vibration of the soul, in a very real way, these people are more with us than gone. Something to ponder.
In a way, their song may be over, but their melodies linger on. That’s true for John Lennon, for Billy Holliday, Judy Garland, Frank Sinatra, Pavarotti, Tebaldi, Elvis, Michael Jackson, Barry Gibb, and Whitney Houston. It could be true for you, too, if you make a recording. Wouldn’t you like your melody to stay around after you are no longer amongst us?

When It Goes

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I have recently been diagnosed with a vocal fold weakness. I noticed it because my voice began acting erratically in April and just wouldn’t “behave” no matter what I did. I sang at a benefit, two operetta pieces, and had almost no sound when I came in on A440.

I subsequently went to my good friend, Dr. Peak Woo, one of NYC’s best otolaryngologists, reporting to him that the left vocal fold was weak and not working properly. He looked at me with his super high speed camera and said, basically, “That’s right”. It is below the right fold, bowing a little and not really vibrating, instead making a kind of spastic shaking, at least in chest register and in chest mix in middle pitches. My high voice is unaffected and I can vocalize to F above high C. Go figure.
I was, at first, very depressed because all that can be done to help me is to have an injection in the fold, to prop it up and help it close and meet the other one. I don’t think it will help the vibratory issues. It’s risky, temporary, and not much fun to contemplate. The weakness could be from age (I’m 63), it could be from an old injury (I have twice burst blood vessels on this fold from coughing due to severe bronchitis, even while medicated), or it could be from the fact that the entire left side of my skull is 3/4″ longer and therefore droopier than the right side, indirectly effecting the larynx through the muscles of the throat and neck. We will never know.
I decided, however, to do whatever I can to see if I could help the folds work better. I started practicing right after the diagnosis. If you heard me practice, your eyebrows would raise. I sound scary, mostly on purpose. I know what I am doing, however, and I understand how far to go. I don’t tire myself out, I don’t get hoarse, and I am getting results. The noise which is quite prominent both in speech and in singing diminishes as I warm up and eventually goes away and stays away for quite some time after I stop. I can match pitch, control volume and keep the sound going, although with some slight constriction and an occasional unplanned glitsch. I don’t sound optimal (at least to myself) but I must be doing decently because I sang in June at my godson’s wedding and got several comments from complete strangers. They didn’t have a vested interest in telling me I sounded good so I accepted the complements as a way to validate that I’m not dead yet, vocally speaking.
I don’t know how long this phase of things will last or what will come next. I don’t know if I will continue to be able to teach and sing, but I will continue to try to do both. I don’t know how I will sound next week or next month. All I can do is keep practicing and keep a positive attitude.
I cannot imagine my life without being able to sing and sound good. I have been singing since I was 7, but I do know that life goes on, no matter what, and that I am first a human being and that isn’t going to “go away” until I’m in the ground. People face worse challenges every day and we can remember that the ones who strive to overcome sometimes are victorious.
I wanted to share this with those who read this blog regularly, because it might effect my point of view and my experiences and I thought I should be honest in case that shows up in what I write. From time to time I will keep you all posted to let you know how I’m doing.
When it goes, it goes, but as long as it hasn’t yet gone, I’m not giving up. I’m a tough old bird.

Those Who Can, Can and Those Who Can’t — ?

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Why are there so many folks who teach who sound lousy themselves? What’s up with that? Shouldn’t a teacher of singing have found a way to sound good?

I guess not. There are plenty of people who can present a good argument that you don’t have to sing yourself to teach others to sound good. I guess I can go along with that. What I find hard to accept is to think that someone who has never felt how different it can be to sing in various different vocal qualities can teach another person to learn how to create those different qualities entirely from their discernment of outside feedback.
Many singers are taught to sing “by feel”. In fact, it is the predominant method used by most teachers of singing. “Feel the resonance in your forehead”, they say. Feel the sound in your eyes, your cheekbones, your sinuses, your facebones. Feel the breath moving. Feel. Go by the feeling.
So, how do you get someone to feel a sound that doesn’t do “classical resonance” if that’s all you know and you don’t, yourself, know what it feels like to make a belt sound or even a mixy sound correctly, since they don’t depend upon “resonance” very much. Please explain to me how you can get the feeling right if you have never had that feeling yourself.
That leaves listening. Listening is mostly forbidden. You are not supposed to listen, lest you be lead astray by the distortion of having the sound be audible from your ears and also, to a lesser extent, from your bone conduction of the sound. But, how much do we hear through bone conduction? We don’t know. I don’t think it has been studied, because, how would you study it? You can’t get inside someone’s head. You are not supposed to listen lest you, God forbid, fall in love with your own voice. Tsk Tsk.
There’s always how you look. Some teachers of singing insist that the mouth must never open. You must learn to sing with your mouth mostly closed. Other teachers are busy telling you to drop the jaw and open the mouth. Which is better? When is one preferred? The profession can’t say, as no one has studied that either.
So, if you can’t sing but you can teach others to sing, my question would be, why haven’t you tried to teach yourself what you are teaching these other people? Don’t you like singing? Don’t you want to sing? And, if you have tried to teach yourself and you still don’t sing well, how do you justify to yourself what you are doing with your students? What is the rationale?
This is not an argument that can be settled. There is no answer. It’s just one of the many things about singing that will remain a point of discussion.
Those who can’t, teach. Is this true? What do you think?

Urgent! Stop Certification and Trademarking!!!

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I heard today that some teachers of singing are “strongly against” certification of teachers of singing and of the idea of trademarked approaches or branded methods of teaching singing.

My, my! What can we do???
Certainly, trademarking is harmful. It makes the people who are not trademarked look bad and hurts them and interferes with their ability to do whatever they do. Trademarked methods cause all kinds of obstacles in the profession because they force everyone to teach the same way, like machines and robots, and they reduce the process to a very low norm, bringing everyone down. Trademarked methods that grant certification say that the person granting the certification has decided that she knows more than everyone else and that she is the only right one and that the people who get her certification are automatically better than the people who don’t get it. Really, how can this be right?
Absolutely everyone should keep making up terminology and exercises at random as students come along, assuming that each person and each lesson is an entire new universe and that we as human beings never ever have any consistency in our vocal production. We should realize that everyone is always totally unlike every other person on earth and that no consistent approach to teaching can ever be effective. And we should remember as well that all human beings are identical, having the same equipment, and that everyone should fit into a pre-conceived mold and arrive at the same kind of vocal destination.
All music should be regarded as being the same, because it’s all just notes and rhythms and it all has to be sung by a human being with a larynx and lungs. Trademarking methods and certifying people who study those methods is an insidious attack on free thinking and the free marketplace. How dare the people who turn teaching into a commodity get away with this behavior, when we all know teaching singing is an art form, a mystery and a very personal expression!
It’s a shame, since the people who are busy creating trademarked methods and certifications are typically not those with terminal degrees but only simple life experience. They may not know the significant ingredients of voice science, vocal literature, or have artistic sophistication, which, as we all know, are very important especially in “non-classical” singing. They have been known to get things from different styles mixed together at random and pollute the pure expression of song.
We all should be firmly against trademarking of approaches to vocal pedagogy in any forms and absolutely against any university, conservatory or department that allows any method to offer certification under its imprimatur. We should assume that such institutions do not know any better and are being duped by the perpetrators of these “trademarked methods”. We should assume that even prestigious schools with long histories and strong reputations for excellence do not understand how foolish the support of any such individual is and how much damage is being done by trademarked methods and certification of teachers of singing. Why, even the oldest organization of teachers of singing, The New York Singing Teachers’ Association, has a Professional Development Program that certifies those who complete its courses! How unfortunate.
My, my!!! My, my, my, my, my, MY!!!
And just in case there is someone out there who doesn’t know, I have a trademarked method, Somatic Voicework™ The LoVetri Method, that certifies all who take the courses I offer.

Don’t Know Much About History

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I was at a dinner over the weekend with several people in their 70s. We were discussing how much of what we would consider “general knowledge” is simply not out there in the minds of many young (and not so young) people. We each cited having encountered a sad lack of knowledge of the history of the USA in the 20th century, in every area from politics and government to science and the arts. Some young people do not know when the Second World War was fought, who was in it and where the main battles were in even the most general terms. Many are not familiar with other areas of what used to be considered general knowledge as well.

This is true, unfortunately, about a great deal of the arts and specifically about singing. Unless students are taught basic American Music history, going back to the beginning of the 20th Century, they often know little about it. Sometimes, in music theater programs, they get information about the early days of Vaudeville and Broadway, but not always. They may get the history of jazz in a jazz degree program, but not necessarily with an emphasis on the singers. If you get a classical degree, you might learn about 20th century classical composers of both American and European origin, but it varies. Even in theater programs you may or may not learn about the great performers even though you would likely learn about the great playwrights.
Some young singers are encouraged not to listen to a recording in order to learn a song and there is merit in this idea. It’s hard not to copy what you hear, even if you don’t want to. Nevertheless, if recordings of many singers doing a particular song exist, listening to them after you are familiar with the basics would seem to be a very important step, as hearing what many different people have done with the song should be very illuminating. It can be a useless exercise, though, if you don’t know what to listen to.
In fact, I wonder sometimes if young people are taught how to listen at all. Does anyone actually take a vocal recording and dissect it for the students to hear all the many factors involved? Think about it. There are so many ingredients in a song: the lyrics, the meaning of the lyrics, the melody, the rhythm, the dynamics, the phrases, the accompaniment or orchestration, the tessitura of the line, the use of the vowels and consonants, the use of rests and syncopation. Almost endless things that can be considered, separate from the key, the tempo, the meter, and the kind of vocal quality the person has. There are vowel colors, register qualities, and tone qualities like breathiness, noisiness or nasality and vibrato including its presence, absence or intermittence. No one hears all these things automatically as a student. They have to be learned. In fact, I can’t help but think that some professionals don’t hear all that is there to be heard.
Even if you are an innovator, you need to know what has gone before so that your innovations can be different than what already exists. Those who set out to write or create “something new” have to know about the “something old” in order to move in a different direction. Clearly, this isn’t always the case. The idea that you have to create out of nothing is a deception of the ego. Unless someone is going to come up with a musical system, with different frequencies, and a different set of written notes (John Cage et al not withstanding), we only have the octaves of the human throat and the range of notes in the orchestra to draw from.
If you don’t know much about history and you are going to teach or compose, start digging. You have a responsibility to carry that information with you before you begin.

Saying Yes When You Should Say No

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Sometimes people are thrown into situations in which they have no experience. For various reasons, sometimes it falls to an individual to deal with something they have not encountered before and have no training to address. Sometimes, particularly if it only involves the person and no one else, and the endeavor isn’t harmful, addressing this challenge can be exciting and it can turn out to be a teaching tool, providing expertise that is valuable indeed. If, however, others are involved, and those others are vulnerable to the result of the person’s lack of experience, that’s a bad situation.

Facing this situation, someone with integrity would quit, withdraw or seek outside help. That would be the thing to do to avoid having others pay the consequences of your lack of experience. More realistically, though, if the situation were a job and you needed the money, you might not withdraw under any circumstances, because you would rather jump in and do whatever you can than be without the security the job seems to be offering. Understandable but not good.
Life being what it is, there are plenty of times when people are asked to do something for which they are completely unqualified. If only it were so that the people who were doing any specific job were always the best, most qualified people to do it. Right.
The Metropolitan Opera has decided the way to get new audiences is to bring in people from outside the opera world who have “new” eyes and “fresh” vision. Unfortunately, some of these people don’t even want to know about the traditions of opera, or about singers or singing, they want to “do their thing”, regardless, and most of the new productions at the Met reflect that lack of sensibility of deep understanding of all things opera. It shows and not in a good way. The same is true of Broadway, where composers who have no experience with trained singers are invited to write musicals because they are successful in other areas of the music business. Sometimes they write music that is almost unsingable, sometimes they write songs that sound like first year compositions of college students, but if they have made a lot of money elsewhere, no one seems to care.
Recently Stephen Schwartz was asked to write an opera (Seance On A Wet Afternoon). By his own admission, he didn’t bother to find out about the “passaggio” that singers “don’t like” until after the work was already written. Oh. How about some research, Mr. Schwartz? You who wrote a piece like “Defying Gravity” which could have been subtitled “Defying Vocal Fold Behavior”. Does it not occur to you that some investigation into how singers sing is warranted?
I had spoken to another present day classical composer who was commission by San Francisco Opera a few years ago. He informed me that he knew more about singing than any of the singers he worked with because he had sung “for years” in a chorus. He said that singers were “too afraid” to really sing. Unfortunately, the music this man wrote was not appropriate to the traditional parameters of the very skilled, excellent and experienced classical vocalists he hired. They were justifiably “afraid”. He knew more than they did. Oh.
Now, I have to say this and I know it sounds bad, but most of the time I am talking here about men. There are still far fewer women composers in either classical music or on Broadway and very few successful female conductors. There are a few women directors and choreographers, but the majority of the positions of power, at the top levels of the business across the board in terms of style, are still occupied by men. Maybe that doesn’t matter, but I can’t help but wonder how different things would be if the proportion was the other way around.
And, I dream about going to shows or concerts or opera where the people in them can all really sing and act or play, where the conductor understands how to keep the orchestra from drowning out the singers, where the production doesn’t insult the intelligence of the audience or the dignity of the performers, where the music is heartfelt and not written by a robotic or formulaic dolt and where the production values have something to do with (a) the plot, (b) common sense, (c) imagination, (d) communication and (e) respect for the audience and the artists.
One way that things would be improved is for people who are asked to do something that will effect others for which they have neither natural aptitude nor experience or training is for them to decline to take positions of responsibility, for the sake of everyone else. Such unselfishness and courageous honesty would be a boon for the rest of us.
I know, I’m being silly, as we know that life is never that way. Still, I had to say it anyway, as I just came from a production of a musical that was pretty unsatisfying because the people in charge had not much idea of what they were doing. That didn’t stop them from charging money to the young people performing in the show. (It’s an annual “summer festival” for which the performers pay). My guess is that the same director will be back again next year doing this again. Why? Because he is already there and is surrounded by youngsters who don’t know the difference. Clearly, the people who hired him don’t know the difference either. Big sigh.

Vested Interests

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Those of us who deal with singing all have opinions about it. I am very opinionated and not afraid to say so. My opinions about singing have been posted here for nearly six years and have not changed much. I am quite clear about what singing is (to me) and what it seems to be in the world in various styles, and even cultures. Granted, there are probably some kinds of singing I have never heard, but I strive to stay on top of all of what can be found without making the search an end in itself.

In addition to singing, I am interested in speech and in various kinds of non-melodic utterances that we humans make. In fact, if it comes out of someone’s mouth and can be recognized as a sound, I am interested in it. This being so, I have to also, by default, be interested in various kinds of silence.
Most of us do not experience wordless silence unless we are very sleepy or drunk or maybe drugged. The “I’m talking to myself in my head” experience is a hard habit to break. We don’t do that, though, when we are actively listening (like when something grips you in a TV show or movie). Then, of course, we are listening to someone else’s voice in our heads, so it’s not exactly totally silent.
If you walk out in nature, observing the sounds of the breeze in the trees, the birds, and maybe the insects, or the sound of your own footsteps if it’s really quiet, you might not “think” while you do this. Try it sometime. See if you can go longer than 30 seconds without making some verbal comment in your head. See if you can stop thinking altogether and just perceive through your senses. You might understand better what life is like for animals who are certainly present and attentive but do not have “thoughts” (except possibly for some of the animals who have been taught to do a kind of sign language or respond to a verbal command. The jury is out on that so far.)
Contrasting this silence to the sounds we make when we speak, sing, shout or laugh is vital. It allows us to listen without comments going on inside our heads. It is a mark of really listening, hearing the sound, without putting your own mental judgements on it as is occurring. If you want to hear the messages of the sound itself (not the words of a song or story) you have to learn to listen through stillness. It is a profound experience.
You can also learn to do this with your own voice. Make a sound because you can and then another and another, without any purpose whatsoever, and without any specific goal. See what it feels like to live as sound, like a baby does, without regard to anything else.
Then, if you have opinions which you have garnered through years of intellectual inquiry, diligent study and life experience you will understand that you can hold them passionately, take a stand for them and what you believe they mean, and still realize that they are not who you are, they are not right with a capital R, and they are not going to matter 500 years from now to anyone.
Having a vested interest in anything becomes a trap. Stay open. Be open. Let go. You never know what you will discover next.

Working With The Problematic Voice (amended)

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If you don’t have any radical techniques or approaches, if you just do reasonable things, you can be quite successful with people who have a nice voice, a decent ear and are motivated to practice. If they are also naturally expressive, you could end up with a person who sings very well.

But if you have someone come to you for lessons and that person’s voice is not functioning efficiently or is below normal, or maybe even way below normal, you had better know what you are doing. There are so many ways singers can get into trouble and so many bad habits they can develop, it’s not just a walk in the park to help them not only stay safe but also be expressive in whatever way they desire.
The only devices we have are the pitches (specific frequencies from lowest bass to highest soprano), the level of volume (from about 70 Hz to 110 Hz – or pianissimo to fortissimo), and the vowels we sustain. Yes, you can sustain a sound on a hum or by hissing out the air in your lungs, but most of the work of singing is done by concentrating on vowel sounds and their behavior. You also have posture and the inhalation/exhalation process that takes place in the torso. All of these things combine to produce sound made with ease and freedom.
When the inside muscles of the throat and mouth are doing the wrong thing or not doing anything at all, the old idea was to say to the person, “You should not sing. You should not even try to sing. Go home.” The reasoning was: you sound “bad”, you have a “bad” voice, you are not “talented”. The foundational belief that some people can sing and others cannot was not actually challenged by anyone. Since the typical training for singing perpetuated this myth because it was only musical and not functional in approach, it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Either you could sing in the first place and got better with help or you couldn’t sing well in which case you were told there was only one option — to give up! Many people did.
The truth is, however, that there are a great many people out there now teaching with some kind of functional approach. That’s the good news. Unfortunately, we have gone from another old adage: Never think about the throat, to a new one called, manipulate your throat muscles on purpose while you are singing. This is not an improvement.
A freely produced sound does not ask the vocalist to do anything while singing except sing.
The idea is that one gains control over the sound by practice, aiming at the kind of sound one would need in whatever repertoire one is singing. Control over inhalation and exhalation is important, too, but there are ways to develop “breath management” by trial and error and not just through deliberate instruction. If you were dealing with any high level, long-term, successful singer who has had a career, you cannot automatically assume that training was a part of that person’s path to becoming a professional unless the person is singing classical repertoire. People learn by doing and if what they do works, they typically stay with that, with or without a teacher.
If the person has to “do something” while singing, other than communicate the words and their meaning or the expression of the melodic, rhythmic or vocal elements of the music itself, something is wrong. Holding the larynx down, pulling it up, making the sound go into the nose, keeping the throat very still…..all of these are things that singers are taught to do on purpose that make free, unadulterated singing impossible.
This does not preclude, however, that beginning singers wouldn’t find it hard to execute the kinds of sounds they ideally seek to produce. It takes quite a bit of time to get maximum acoustic vocal function to be both available and easy. This is the reason why I always say that songs should be BELOW the level of the technical exercises because if they are not, the singer has to struggle and can’t really express very much of anything that will feel and sound authentic.
In working with a problematic voice, the singing teacher has to have in his or her mind the idea of what a well-balanced, well-developed voice does while singing. This knowledge has to be colored by what a career-oriented voice does in each of the separate kinds of repertoire, and has to be coupled to the ability to evaluate the voice in terms of its optimal function, before any other criteria are applied. It also has to include the desires, goals and wishes of the vocalist (unless it is a young child who might not have any aspirations yet) and stick to them as closely as possible. By examining the characteristic behaviors of anyone’s voice and associating it with its pitch parameters, it is possible to assess what is interfering with free vocal production. Then, through the use of exercises designed to provoke change in the habitual patterns of the vocalist, the musculature effecting the sound can be coaxed into new behaviors and responses. SLOWLY. Over time. No deliberate “doing” of the throat is necessary once the new behaviors become automatic responses and no one has to be stuck in any one kind of vocal production if they are willing to learn others and keep them available through practice.
Therefore, the problematic voice can get to be a voice without problems. It can go from sounding “bad” to sounding “good”. It can become musically expressive. When that transformation is complete, it is likely that the sound being made by the vocalist is quite different than the sound when it was “off” in terms of function. Or, it can remain “characteristic”, with obvious flaws, but those flaws will no longer inhibit what the artist can sing. Rather they will be trademarks of the sound but not limitations of expression or of vocal health. There will not be a need for the vocalist to “make” something happen while singing. Such adaptations will simply melt away.
No one can ever say what another person will or will not do or what that person is capable of accomplishing. No one has the right to say “You should give up,” particularly if the person doesn’t want to. No one can say you have to sing a certain way or you can’t sing a certain way. That determination comes from the above stated criteria: personal and musical goals, dedication to the process of improving as a singer and a willingness to practice.
Working with a “problematic” voice is a great gift if you know what you are doing. It is thrilling and challenging and very rewarding if you are patient.