The LoVetri Institute

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Working With A Conflicted Student

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Fear of success, fear of failure. They can exist in one person. If they do, they will surely prevent the person from getting anywhere, no matter what they attempt or say.

Unfortunately, we can encounter these two psychological states in any student. It takes a while for a teacher to discern these patterns, but after a long enough time, they begin to show up. It could be that after a particularly good lesson, the student cancels the next lesson or is sick, and then takes a while to get back to that good place. When she finally gets there again, another cancellation happens or she has to postpone the lesson because of other urgent matters. If there is a third occurrence of this cycle, you can start to be suspicious. Fear of success is lurking around the corner. “Too good” is frightening.
If you have a student who wants “extra lessons” or “extra time” and practices up to and including being hoarse, and who wants to learn really hard repertoire and audition for every possible show, and doesn’t seem very patient with the process. If the student is always talking about famous singers and maybe disparaging those who “don’t have it all together”, and they read every book and article and ask a million questions, and this goes on for a long time, put up your antenna, fear of failure is in hot pursuit of your student.
Self-sabotage is real. People who have deep seeded “issues” create reasons to fail. Regardless of ability, interest or talent, and regardless of motivation, finances or stated goals and desires, make no mistake, these students are out there and they can be a cause of great sadness and frustration for teachers.
I had a student who worked with me for two years towards a classical recital. She was a graduate student, transferred from a school that was very demanding. She had had to drop out due to contracting a serious illness, never going back to complete the degree. She decided to work with me privately toward a recital-oriented competition. She prepared the full recital program with a good deal of difficulty, and at the last minute failed to get the aria into shape. This disqualified her and made all the time and money she had invested go up in smoke. When she returned, she decided that she wanted to switch from doing classical music to doing music theater. We re-worked the technique to make that possible but she missed many lessons due to severe sinus problems. She had a car accident. She got engaged and then broke the engagement. Still, she swore that she was serious about singing and having a career, even though the lessons were not consistent. Then she decided that she had been wrong in choosing music theater and wanted to go back to classical. So we returned to lessons in that vein. In between she had other jobs to earn money and lived with her parents and her aunt, commuting between NYC and Long Island. After doing this dance for about three years, I began to lose patience, but she had sinus surgery which helped, she got work in a small theatrical company and she seemed to finally be singing consistently. I urged her to work with a good classical coach because she was approaching an age that would preclude her being in apprentice programs or competitions for younger singers. I urged her to see a good friend who is a classical coach and teacher to polish up her repertoire and get out there.
She told my friend that she had never learned to practice properly [?]. She couldn’t sight read or work on music on her own. Her languages were poor. She had no rep. None of this was true, although she wasn’t the absolute best at any of these things, both the accompanist for recital and I had heard her sing enough to say that she was at a good professional entry level in all capacities. When I was told by my friend what she said, I was astounded. What had she been doing in undergrad training, in graduate school and with me?
Nevertheless, being very diligent, my friend, her new coach, started over again with her, working on all these things, building them up, assisting her with repertoire choices and vocal problems as part of helping her get ready for opera auditions. She tried to help her by getting her small jobs and other opportunities to launch her career. But things started falling apart. Missed lessons, excuses, lack of keeping up with the planned activities. Finally, the student stopped going for her coaching sessions. We heard via the grapevine that she had gone on to a new teacher, probably to start all over again.
She had a beautiful voice. She was a fine performer, she could dance. She was smart, she was very attractive and personable. She could have been successful at either classical singing or in music theater, but she will never succeed at either. She was afraid of both success and failure. She wasted my time, the accompanist’s time, the other coach’s time and her own time. And lots of money.
If you are an open, trusting teacher and you have a student who presents to you as being talented, motivated, willing and capable, it’s hard not to become at least a little invested in their success. It’s hard not to give the person a break if they get sick, or have personal problems that interfere with their lessons. It’s hard not to want to boost the student up after a bump in the road and encourage them to go on, trying again, to reach for the gold.
This story did not happen decades ago, it happened within the last 7 years, while I already had over 30 years of teaching experience behind me. I describe it because sometimes you can’t know that the student standing in front of you by the piano is not ever going to be able to use anything you are doing, hear anything you are saying or come anywhere near their stated career goals until you have gone down the road for a long time. It will always be frustrating when it finally becomes clear that there are problems bigger than those which can be addressed as part of singing training. Sometimes it will actually be painful emotionally to face this. It will catch you by surprise but it will happen again. Such is the price we pay for being trusting, and trust is required if we are to teach well.
Working with a conflicted student has no map. You will not read about this is anyone’s book, but if you teach for a year or longer, you will have this experience. Just know you are not alone.

Cross Training Too Early

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If you can hardly sing at all, is it good to try to sing a little bit of everything all at once or just do one thing?

We really don’t know the answer to this question since the idea of cross training (in an athletic sense) hasn’t really existed before, in terms of singing. We don’t much know what goes on with kids who grow up singing in several styles, and continue singing them well and for a long time into adulthood, most particularly if one of those styles is classical.
My guess is that a lot depends on the individual, the type and amount of training, and the goals of the student and teacher. We don’t have any literature in the field to guide us, nor research. Too bad.
Writing strictly from my own personal experience, I would say that it is probably true that most young singers benefit from what has been the generally available approach in classical training. That’s pretty simple, actually:
Stand up straight, breathe in “down low”, tighten your belly as you exhale while singing and aim the sound “towards your face”. Relax your jaw, open your mouth and keep the sound steady, looking for your preferred version of “resonance”. Learn rep, in the monster yellow book first, then add the Germans and the French. Maybe, also, add the Brits and a few Americans. Go sing.
A well developed head register usually has to be cultivated deliberately and takes some time to really work. Most people are chest register dominant, so finding head register and making it work is usually a good idea, as it will help balance the sound overall and prevent chest register from causing problems.
If you are going to sing other styles, however, you also have to make sure your lower or chest register functions well. If you go by one of more typical approachs to teaching CCM styles, you simply stick closely to speech, get louder as you go higher, put in the consonants, aim the sound “into the nose”, and don’t worry about sounding “ugly”. Learn songs.
If you want to sing anything else, just do whatever you do, learn to “support” and hope for the best.
If you have any trouble with any of the above, especially in working them back and forth alternately, good luck. You either figure it out or you get into trouble. It’s up to you how to put the divergent styles together and make them partners rather than enemies.
Not a way to cross train, I would say.
If you want to learn about singing you have to learn about making vocal sound across the board and about the interface between speech and song. Sometimes they are related and sometimes they are not. What David Daniels does has very little to do with normal male speech. Likewise Diana Damrau. No normal adult female speaks in the pitches above C6 or high C but a coloratura soprano sings there quite frequently. Most high belters are singing in a pitch range and at a volume level that is far away from speech, too. And, if you speak at a conversational level and in a typical pitch range you are far away from what a trained actor would do with her speech in a play. There is much to learn and much to cultivate. What kind of interaction is most beneficial in learning more than one approach at the same time?
Again, from a purely objective point of view, we don’t know.
What I think would be ideal is for the student to sing in just one style for at least two years without having to deal with anything else. Then, slowly, other functional parameters could be introduced. Typically, however, there isn’t that luxury of time so we see a lot of students learning technique (not necessarily function) and classical repertoire from classical teachers who also have to teach them music theater songs (but who are not necessarily also teaching a different kind of function) at the same time. Sometimes the students also sing, gospel, rock and pop as well.
There are also many occasions a student who is a great belter has to learn to sing “classically” in order to get into a college music program or voice department. It can take time to do that, too, but it’s certainly possible. Is there a “best way” to do this? And, if the kid wants to be a big fat belter but the parents require that the young woman get a college degree “in music”, is it a plus to disrupt naturally good belting just to learn “An Die Musik”?
In the long run, the more the teacher understands what he or she is doing, and what the goals of the training process are, the better the odds are that the student will succeed. The more the student is motivated and has decent ability at the outset, the better the odds are, also, that the student will succeed and that, in a few years (2 to 3), the capacity to sing decently in a classical sound and a commercial music sound with equal success will emerge. The ability to specialize, though, might not be possible unless the singer has some clear goal of a career in a specific field and knows what the expectations of that field are in terms of the vocal quality and style.
The potential for the vocalist to end up like scrambled eggs also exists in this approach. The student can easily be confused and the voice can end up exactly nowhere. That often leads to discouragement and to giving up, particularly if the teacher blames the student for this “failure” as is typically the case.
If you find yourself in a position of having to train young singers in more than one style, most especially including classical styles, you need to really know what you are doing. If you guess or just dabble you run the risk of really disturbing the equilibrium of the student’s voice and psyche. Remember, first, do no harm.

Change

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Everything evolves but some things evolve faster than others. Classical music does change but not very much. The tenors today don’t sound all that different than the old recordings of Caruso. The current sopranos don’t really seem all that different than Rosa Ponselle.

CCM styles change more frequently, probably about every decade or so. The “popular” music of the 1930s bears very little resemblance to our present moment pop music. 60s rock doesn’t have a lot in common with most of our present moment rock bands.
Broadway goes all over, however. We have revivals that very much resemble their originals (How To Succeed) and we have revivals that are hardly recognizable (On A Clear Day). It used to be that being a lead on Broadway made you a star……..you went on the Ed Sullivan Show, you made a hit record, and you went to Hollywood to do movies, then maybe TV. Now you have to do that in reverse. You make a movie or maybe a TV show, you maybe have a record (or not) and then you get put in a Broadway show regardless of whether or not you have the ability to sing, dance or act. Christie Brinkley as Roxy in Chicago……..a dream come true.
Broadway revivals are a rare breed of entertainment. They have their own universe. It is true that auditions are pretty much the same now as they were 50 years ago. You walk in, you sing your 16 bars with the pianist, you go home. If you get called back, you do it again, maybe for a longer time, you go home. If you get called back again, you sing, read, act, dance, whatever until they are able to decide, then you go home. You either get the job or you don’t. Been the same for decades and decades. Why? I’m sure no one knows except that theater folks really respect tradition.
If you are able to stay in touch with the world as it moves and changes you will somehow understand the expectations of those in each style in terms of what is expected professionally. If you do not, you might just be stuck in the way it was when you were a student or a young performer. If all your students ever performed were traditional Broadway revivals, that could serve. If not, that wouldn’t be so wonderful.
If you are teaching classical singing it’s probably not such a big deal if you haven’t changed much. That field hasn’t either, so nothing is lost.
If you teach both, you need to know both. CCM and Classical are different and that matters.

Holding Down The Fort

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I have written here recently about economics and how it influences everything.

Politically, I could be described as a screaming ultra-liberal Democrat, which I consider myself to have been since the Vietnam War. The world I would have liked to have seen now absolutely doesn’t look like the world that we have actually created since all those protests back at the end of the 60s.
Economics rules the world. Profit-making, even at universities, has just about taken over.
If the job of schools, universities and conservatories, is to make a profit, there is an increased pressure for them to offer music theater programs because those programs draw in students and parents will pay for them. There are new degree programs every day, both bachelor’s and master’s programs (although no doctoral programs yet in anything other than classically oriented topics) and the number of young people who graduate with training aimed at music theater and jazz increases accordingly. Hundreds, maybe even a couple thousand students, graduate looking for work as vocalists in some style, every year.
If you have that many new people looking for work and only a few professional jobs available, eventually some of these individuals are (a) going to go back to school to get a degree in another profession so they can survive, or (b) going to decide to let performing be a hobby, and sing on weekends, in the evenings and on vacations, or (c) going to end up teaching somewhere, either privately or in a school setting.
You find out soon enough after you graduate, particularly if you come to New York or any other big city, how hard it is to get paid for doing what your education was supposed to be training you to do. You could also find out, painfully, that what you learned wasn’t what you needed to learn and that your training was almost useless. You might find out, too, that you are not cut out for the really competitive, sometimes cutthroat world of show business or entertainment. You might have been the cute soprano lead in your school’s musical or the young guy who always got a good solo or attention from your department, but in NYC, you are just another one of thousands of talented, attractive and motivated people looking to get a job. It’s very hard to set yourself apart and get a chance to work, and consequently to gain experience and exposure. Yes, a few lucky people do manage to do that each year but it is far more the exception than the norm that you come to NYC, go to an audition and get the job, get paid a decent amount of money, get good reviews and go on right away to another job and another in succession. In fact, doing so would qualify as a bonafide miracle.
I don’t know that universities keep track of their stats — of who graduated and went out and had a career in performing but I know they brag about those that actually do make it. I wonder, however, if they look at how many they graduate who do not succeed. The percentages have to be that many more fail than make it. In some cases, keeping track of these failures would seem like a reason to look at what the training program/degree actually offers a student, and then, perhaps also be a cause for adjustment of the training programs themselves. Of course that does happen, but not in all cases.
The people who hold down the fort in university training programs are often interested (understandably so) in getting tenure, having good benefits, purchasing a home, and building a family. Once they get these things, they are loath to lose them. In order to keep their jobs going, they must learn to work in cooperation with the university’s Dean or other administrator in charge, with others in the department and with the students. They have to find a way to get their students through the bachelor’s requirements, or master’s degree programs, and hopefully do so with some semblance of honesty and integrity. It is my experience that most (yes, most) of the teachers I encounter do just that. They are working hard to maintain not only professionalism (in a profession that has not even one regulating body or set of criteria for what “professional” actually is) but also a sense of caring and commitment to their students’ overall mental and emotional well being.
We all know, however, that there are teachers and even entire departments that are a mess and shouldn’t be doing anything with music or education because they are completely unable to provide even basic information that has to do with the requirements of the profession outside of school. They teach to some imaginary model made up by the department chair who might not have been involved in anything professional outside of school for decades, or in some cases ever. They try to teach to some “in-house” idea of what the person in charge wants the students to learn, sometimes for reasons that may not make any kind of sense. The teachers attempt to do this because they are stuck in a situation that isn’t easily adjusted and might be unable to do anything else to earn a living. In the most extreme cases, the teachers dare not protest what they know to be an awful situation but must put up for a long time….sometimes for their entire careers. The person in charge may be there for a very long time, too, so nothing changes. Sometimes the persons in charge can refuse to hire teachers who are excellent, lest it make them look as bad as they actually are. Sometimes they actually fire people who are good because they are……good. I know this to be true because I have seen it happen more than once.
At first when I encountered this situation I found it to be rather shocking. Now, when I find out about it I still find it unsettling and disturbing but not surprising. It’s hard to know what to say when I have a young person come to my private studio telling me he has “just graduated with a degree in music theater” who can’t sing the repertoire at all, and in fact, knows nothing about theater or music that would be useful to him in pursuing a career here. If the student seems open and willing to learn, what can I conclude except that the school is to blame?
The teachers who somehow manage to hold down the fort by being excellent, caring, up-to-date with standards outside of school, who have integrity and are dedicated, make an enormous difference, even as we see them being pressured more and more by the needs of the schools to make a profit, regardless of what that entails. If you are in such a situation, pat yourself on the back for doing a great job. Hold on fast to the idea that your personal contribution might be the one thing that allows a graduating student to know something that he or she can actually use when out in the world looking to become a professional vocalist in any style.

Doing What You Said You Would

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We live in a time when people do not really have much interest in “keeping their word”.

Not so long ago a handshake was considered a valid legal agreement because it meant that you had “given your word”. Now, because we live in a time when there is no one reliable source of information that is always honest, no one really knows what is true. If you read the papers and listen to the news, you hear one thing one day, another the next. Nowhere is this more true than in terms of what we are told to eat or not eat or in the larger political arena.
If you give anyone or anything your “promise” you are making a binding contract with yourself to do as you have said you would. If you take that seriously, meaning that you will do whatever you can to make sure that you carry out your promises, ultimately, it will have great benefits in your life. People will know that you mean what you say, you do what you say you will do and you are as “good as your word” in that you are reliable, dependable and honest. In these times, that’s a lot.
If you adjust what you do, after the fact, thinking it doesn’t matter, but you do not go back to the situation or the party involved and say that you have to change your original agreement, you might get away with it, but you can’t do that too often or it erodes your reputation.
Integrity is being true to yourself, true to what you say, true to how you behave over time. If you do what is convenient instead of what you know is right, you will eventually pay a price.
I know, we live with this kind of behavior every day in every kind of situation. That’s one of the reasons the world is such a mess. People don’t listen to what they say, they don’t care what they say, they just talk. People don’t take a stand and back it up with their actions. They take a stand and then, when it’s difficult to remain steadfast in that position, they back away. They “adjust”, even if that adjustment flies in the face of all that they profess to believe.
The words that come out of your mouth cannot be taken back. If you value your word, if you tell the truth as you see it, you will think before you make a promise, particularly if it is one that involves other people and has larger consequences. The more care you give to what you say, they more people will listen when you do speak. And, the more your word carries with it the weight of responsibility, the more you have to take responsibility in how you use it.
We are in a time when people will say anything just to get their way. There are few consequences for “flip flopping” or for just plain lying, but that doesn’t mean that it works in life to behave that way. And, if you promise to do something that you can’t do, for any reason, and you do not go back to the person to whom you made the promise and fix that broken agreement, you will lose their trust, and rightly so. If you give away your own integrity because you don’t have a clear set of values to live by, or you don’t care how people see you from one day to the next, you have nothing. Without your own integrity, you are lost.
What does this have to do with singing? EVERYTHING. If you sing, you magnify what you are saying, and if you do not sing the lyrics with a sense of purpose and truth, your voice will not carry with it authentic authority and power. People truly respond to vocal sound that is coupled with depth of meaning. They experience the impact of that sound at a cellular level. If that were not true, great artists such as Luciano Pavarotti, singing an entire evening of music in Italian, would not have attracted half a million people to his Central Park Concerts. Many of those people were not opera fans and certainly most of them were not fluent in Italian, but there they were, listening to his amazing voice filled with conviction in his singing. It carried great emotional power in every phrase.
If you sing and you never look at your own voice as it extends out into the world in the other aspects of your life, you should. If you promise things lightly and never get around to doing them, if you say you will do something and you don’t, but then pay no attention to that, don’t be surprised if other people make promises to you that they don’t keep either. They find out soon enough that you don’t really care by observing your own behavior.
If you sing, take a look at what you are singing and understand it in the fullest sense of the words, what they are literally, what they mean, what they imply, what they would do out in the world if you were not singing, but living them in life. It matters.

When Economics Drives Everything

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It’s helpful when the people who are in charge of an artistic endeavor have knowledge, experience and skill. It’s helpful if they have developed tastes and a broad perspective. It’s very helpful if they look at their art as an opportunity to make a contribution to the world by shaking things up, by allowing the audience to be touched or moved, or by transforming life through the creation of the artistic expression or through it’s execution.

When the artist Christo executed “The Gates” in Central Park, people got to look at and walk through those gates and “experience” what that did to them and to their perception of the park and to the others who were also there at the same time. It allowed them to feel something new and different and react to it, and there were all kinds of reactions from being thrilled to feeling a sense of disgust. Such is art.
If the idea of art shifts to being one of making money, things change. If you are designing an artistic product with the idea of “this will make us rich” as the underlying motivation, you will have a different attitude, different goals and different criteria.
About 75% of all Broadway shows lose money. That means that if you invest in a show, you have to be a very brave soul or someone with a lot of money that doesn’t care if it goes up in smoke. If you give money to an artistic organization, you have to hope that it doesn’t get squandered on on things that are peripheral to the project itself. If you value art for art’s sake, you have to understand that not all art is going to make money, or be “successful” or be “popular”.
Artistic organizations in this country continue to struggle with less and less government support, with less interest on the part of audiences, and with difficult issues about the trends in artistic creation. They are more and more turning to investors or backers to help them create their work. In some cases, the investors are content to sit back and watch what the artists develop. In other cases, however, the investors want input into the artists’ process, and can even try to exert influence on what is created. That can be a recipe for disaster.
When economics drives everything, we all lose. Forcing art to be a “money-making endeavor” isn’t a good idea. Allowing creative minds to find avenues to expression is valuable in itself. It’s true, sometimes an artistic idea will end up making a whole lot of money for lots of people. When that happens accidentally, that’s great. But when it doesn’t happen and people decide that not making a profit is a reason for the art to go unsupported, that’s not great.
I passed the Multi-Plex movie today. All the movies showing there were clearly made for 14 year old boys who love the technology or for little kids who like cute cartoons. The market research has decided that this “market slice” is who spends the most money and that these movies, without much plot or dialog, are the easiest ones to sell overseas. The artistic output isn’t as important as the format which has been shown to bring in the most profit. It is, in fact, astounding that other kinds of movies get made at all. It’s an interesting situation.
When economics drives everything, we all lose. Art should exist just because. When we have to turn art into a profit-making enterprise, regardless of what that does to the artistic process itself, we are going in the wrong direction. Too bad the people who have money to give or invest don’t always have that feeling.

Making Trouble

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Some people like to cause a stir. They exist to constantly get underneath other people’s skin. It makes them happy to make other people unhappy.

People like this do not do well in organized institutions where “collegial cooperation” is paramount. People who have a strong will and strong opinions are considered overbearing and irritating. People who are insistent and pushy are annoying. They don’t easily “go along” with whatever policy is in place if they think the policy is wrong. Mostly, they end up outside the loop.
People like this are necessary, however, in every field. Without them to push the envelope things would stagnate and get rigid. The pains-in-the-neck people who don’t want to “cow-tow to the party line”, who don’t want to “go along to keep the peace” and who don’t care how other people view them or their work, are the ones that uproot the moldering detritus and allow the stench to float up towards those who look no further than the end of their up-tilted noses.
The rub is this, if you are so far outside the loop that no one knows you exist, no matter how startling and earth-shaking you may be, no one will hear your ideas and they will die with you, doing no good to anyone or anything.
The successful annoyers figure out soon enough that the trick is to be just enough “inside” the organization or group to be tolerated and stay there long enough to gain some credibility thereby finding a way to make those “annoying” and “irritating” ideas just palatable enough to get some airtime. Not at all an easy task. Nevertheless, if you persevere, you might succeed. Then, you might still be avoided and ostracized, but at least you will know in advance that the reason you are treated with disdain is because what you are saying resonates, even if it is subterranean vibration. To some the message might be abhorrent, but if it’s truthful, it cannot be denied forever. The more substance the message has, the more it rankles and the more it disturbs, and the harder it is to ignore. Sooner or later, someone else will take up the cause, and then, the tide truly does begin to turn.
We live in a peculiar time when no one really knows what the “truth” is. There are so many versions of it and so many places to get it and so many people peddling it, it is impossible to know what is or is not really truthful. I do believe that even the people who think they know the “truth” don’t know if what they are saying is true or not, but they have convinced themselves that it is. In the case of intellectual information, like with finance or government, it’s anybody’s guess as to who to believe about what topic. In the case of a skill, however, we don’t have to rely on the brain alone. The body, which has no stake in what the egoistic mind has to say, will always let you know what it likes and what it doesn’t like if you allow it to communicate to you. The body will always tell you, “Yes. This works,” when it does. If you need to know, “Should I listen to this message even though I can’t stand the person delivering it?”, ask your body. Listen to your gut, to your heart. There are no lies in your body.
Therefore, if someone disturbs your peace of mind or your sense of self, and rattles you to your core, but in so doing imparts to you something you badly needed to encounter, be grateful rather than angry. If the price you have to pay is to be aggravated but in return you have been stirred out of your stupor and can again fly free, pay the fee willingly.
Do not look to always have everything be “nice”. Nice can be deadly. Knowledge is sometimes a bitter herb that you need to taste in order to appreciate something sweet. Let the irksome trouble making irritators guide you once in a while. You never know what you might find when you aren’t looking.

Why I Hate Competitions

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I had occasion this evening to attend an amateur singing competition for kids and young adults. They had been selected via video clips and were in a semi-finals to compete for a nice package of prizes and money totaling about $25,000 as the grand prize for the winner.

Unfortunately, the range of ability in this competition was very wide and two of the most talented contestants did not make it into the next round. This wouldn’t have been so awful had not two of the final four chosen been so rotten. These chosen kids (both age 11) sang B A D L Y. One had material that was poorly chosen and totally inappropriate for a kid (Why Don’t You Do Right?). The other girl sang an Andrea Bocelli song in a yodeling voice (with a huge cracking break between chest and head) ending on a sustained high pitch that was one full tone sharp and was dressed, of course, is a ball gown.
Since at least two others in the group of 10 were pitch perfect and very effective, I thought this choice was just insane. True, the other two of the final four who were sent to the finals were good and should have been sent on, but it must have been very upsetting for the two really good kids to lose to two who were so bad.
How could this happen, you ask?
The judges, that’s how. Four men. Not names I knew. Clearly, not singers or musicians of any level of skill. Why else would they have made such blatantly poor choices? You didn’t have to be a musician to realize that two of the four who were chosen were lousy. My husband, the chemist, could tell, and he is no expert.
It should be IMPERATIVE to have judges of any kind of a contest in which people are going to sing and compete for money and “fame” to be knowledgeable about SINGING. Not song writing, not producing, not being a dj, not being an owner of a music store, not being a teacher of clarinet, not being a band leader of a high school marching band, not being a local celebrity or politico. NO. It is necessary to have judges who are experts at singing. How hard would it be to get such judges? I was only two hours out of mid-town Manhattan. There are a lot of music colleges in the area. Surely, if anyone really cared about who SANG the best, they could have made the effort to get judges who would have picked the kid who played gangbusters piano and sang a great cover, and the kid who did her own very good version of “At Last” even though she was only 15.
I realize that the TV model has made this worse. Randy Jackson and Simon Cowell do NOT know singing, but they think they do because the are producers. This goes back to the same old saw I am always grinding that people think singing is “just singing” and that it’s really no big deal. When the general public has zero music education it may be that they can’t discriminate between lousy and good, but there are still music professionals who are singers first who would be able to pick the performers who stayed in tune (at least) and who sang with some clue about what was supposed to be happening.
This is why I NEVER watch the TV competition shows. I find them, as I found all the many local competitions I ran or judged here in NYC, to be exceptionally frustrating. Even the judges who were members of the professional associations here often had no clue. You can join the singing teachers organizations without being able to do what you profess to teach, (crazy, but true). Another old saw and a different post.
The kids who were good and lost anyway had to go home knowing that the girl who sang a full tone sharp and the girl who sang a song that no eleven-year old should touch and who had no idea what she was doing when she sang it, got a shot at the big prize. If they are spunky, the loss will mean nothing to them and they will keep going. Show business is the most competitive of professions and if you want to sing, you have to be able to stand up to rejection after rejection after rejection without letting it bother you in any way. Tough, yes, but real.
It’s no picnic, even to the listeners in the audience, but really folks, it makes me want to run up to the judges and scream……….What’s wrong with you? Are you deaf?

Small Time – Big Time

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I’ve heard recently that recording artists have so much done to their recordings that it’s nearly impossible to know what they actually sound like live. They probably don’t know themselves what they sound like live. I don’t view this as a good thing.

Yet, sometimes you can find really wonderful music in your local neighborhood “joint”. Folks who really want to sing (or play) will find whatever place they can to do so. Often they aren’t paid, or given only a “tips” jar, but they sing anyway. I’ve heard really excellent music in places that are tiny, out of the way, and nearly invisible.
I admire the performers who are so dedicated they do whatever they can to get out and make music and share their gifts with the world. I feel sad to think they don’t get paid, but that is a reflection of so many aspects of our present culture and mentality, it can’t be addressed here. I also admire the places that allow performers to appear, at least giving them a venue and an audience but I also find myself angry that the owners can’t ante up any decent money for the artists.
Around the New York area we are blessed with an abundance of many people who are talented, well-trained and experienced. The quality of their music is high, sometimes very high. We get very spoiled. It isn’t just young “wannabee” performers who are out there, sometimes it’s older people, too.
Things being what they are, many talented people realize after a few years of “trying to get a break” that they can’t go on. They give up and get a “real job” or a “job job” in order to earn enough money to have a life. Many of them adjust and adapt to a life in an insurance agency, or a law firm, or an investment house, or in a restaurant behind the bar or as a manager, or of going into teaching, while understanding that choosing to work this way “ain’t so bad”. That doesn’t mean that they don’t miss the muse that lives in their soul who keeps saying, “Go find a place to perform! Go get a gig! Go find an audience who will listen to you!!” Sooner or later, if that voice is persistent enough, you will look for a place to sing, even if it’s for no money.
So, until and unless average people have some motivation to seek out music — good music — because they would rather hear someone who can actually stand up and sing without an army of technicians helping them make a decent sound, and until we have audiences who are always willing to pay for that privilege, we will be left with the situation we have now. Some of us have some really great folks to hear, but they are stuck with having to give away or almost give away what they have for the love of doing it, and this is, naturally, both a plus and a minus.
Sometimes the folks who are deemed “small time” by the profession are the ones that have the goods “big time” when it comes to performing. Sometimes the music is as good as you would ever hope to hear. If you have a venue near you that brings singers or musicians in to perform, support those places and encourage them to PAY those performers (not just via a tip jar). It’s the least you can do.
And, if you are a performer, go ahead and play wherever you can and don’t worry if it doesn’t seem like it’s a place you had dreamed about. You never know who might show up in the audience, even if it’s a hole in the wall place, and you never know who will talk about you the next day or the next week. If you can keep your heart open and sing for the love of it, you will energize yourself and open unseen doors. Thinking big is the first step to becoming big. Don’t forget.

Ain’t No Mountain High Enough

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What is excellence? Isn’t what we are watching on the Olympics representative of excellence in every way? Of course.

Still, the commentators are criticizing the gymnasts, the divers, the runners, pointing out where they have fallen short, lost a tenth of a point, been “slightly off”. It boggles the mind. Yet, in our own profession, not being able to sustain a high note at the end of a song can ruin a career. Not being able to sing the big aria, even though you can sing the rest of the role, can keep you from being “a star”. If you can’t sustain Elphaba for at least a few months, you aren’t going to go on to other shows with a solid reputation for reliability. Excellence in these instances isn’t an option it is a necessity.
The people who reach the top of any profession are a very small minority. So many things have to line up just right in order to get the prize, whatever it might be. Even amongst those who are real competitors up until the very last competition, audition, or interview, only the winner is the winner. The old phrase is “to the winner goes the spoils”. That is as true now as it was when the phrase was coined a very long time ago.
Artistic expression, however, isn’t supposed to be competitive. It’s supposed to be unique, creative and compelling. What someone else is doing alongside you, shouldn’t matter one bit. Unfortunately, though, that isn’t typically how it is. Those who are really different do not fit into a “niche”. They have no category. That makes them hard to understand, relate to, and it makes it hard for them to succeed. Those who are very much like others may not leave the world with a new form or expression, but they often are the ones who work and continue to survive, because they can take on any requisite form successfully. The excellence in these circumstances isn’t so straight forward. Can you achieve excellence even if you don’t win the prize?
Pop music is typically dominated by young people who are, for the most part, quite attractive and able to dance very well. They may or may not sing really well, but that isn’t as important as the overall effect they create, of course with a whole bunch of help from an entire team of support personnel. Who knows if a vocalist, alone, could have a career, if you took away her arranger and arrangements, her publicist, her hairdresser, costume designer, engineer, dancers, musicians, dietician, trainer, tour manager and personal manager. The vocal element of things is pretty small and insignicant. I would say having a great body is more important than having a great set of chops. Too bad. For every Adele who becomes a star there are countless others who aren’t so lucky but perhaps just as talented. Are those who need an army to achieve excellence really excellent? Who can say?
The idea that successful people, including singers, will let nothing get in their way, is a very important premise. When someone is driven to be “the best ever” and is willing to make any and all sacrifices to get to their goal, it makes for greatness, surely, as long as the person doesn’t forget to be human along the way. Sometimes people who don’t win the prize have made the same effort, the same sacrifices, and had the same goals, have also had less support, or less encouragement, and, consequently, maybe also less success. Aren’t they great, too, even if we never see or hear them?
If you are seeking excellence, all you can do to achieve it is begin the journey. Being a good singer can mean being “good” in a lot of different ways. It’s important to define “good” for yourself if you sing so you know what it means and then it’s necessary to check with others to see if your idea lines up with most people’s, at least at the beginning. Then, using whatever resources you have at hand, you must begin pursuing your vision with energy and commitment. If you do not give up, you will be rewarded in good time. Perhaps not in the way that you had originally envisioned, but in some way. Sometimes the rewards are actually better than the ones you originally had in mind.
If you desire to climb to the top of the mountain and if you are willing to pull your heart and soul into your goals, even if you do not get there, what you will gain on the journey will be a reward, perhaps of even greater value than standing at the top.
Take a lesson from the Olympic athletes and go for the gold. Find your voice, find your message, sing your song. Let nothing stop you. If you reach the top of the mountain you will know you have reached your goal, but even if you do not make it, you will encounter your own version of excellence as a reward.