Somatic Voicework™ The LoVetri Method Teachers' Association

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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.

Resonance Strategies and Formant Tuning

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Thanks to advances in voice science we are learning more and more about “formant tuning”, sometimes also called “resonance strategies”.

The idea is that the first formant and the first harmonic can link up to give the sound a “boost” acoustically. The second harmonic and second formant can do something similar. They move around, sometimes intermingling. This phenomenon is just being explored and there doesn’t seem to be to much controversy about it yet.
On it’s own, it’s great information to have. Every sound we make can be explained as some grouping of those five primary formants that are the resonating frequencies of the vocal tract. EVERY SOUND. There may be other formants, above those, but they don’t seem to have much of an impact, at least with the information we have now. So, all the fancy maneuvers we learn in the voice studio can be reduced down to five numbers. That’s it. Humbling, no?
Unfortunately, as with everything else, this new information has already begun to be new jargon in the world of teaching singing. It has begun to substitute for the use of the word “placement” and that’s not good because replacing something that didn’t work with something else that doesn’t work is not improvement in any direction. Telling someone that “their resonance strategies need to be different” is no better than telling them that “the tone should vibrate in the mask.” Asking a student to align the first formant with the first (or second) harmonic is just as useless as asking him to align his cheekbone “resonance vibration” with that of his eyebrows.
The formants align because of the pitch, the volume and the vowel sound, and the shape we make while singing one. There are multitudes of possibilities with vowel sound shapes and very small differences can make the sound “maximally efficient” or not quite “good enough”. The jaw, the tongue, the mouth/lips, the back of the mouth (velo-pharyngeal port), the height of the back of the tongue, the height of the larynx and the amount of open/closed quotient as well as the depth of the vocal folds during vibration all play a part in the overall sound we hear when someone sings. The “at rest” position of the length of the folds, the size of the larynx, the size (both diameter and length of the vocal tract) of the throat and mouth cavities, and the bones of the head and face all play a part as well. And “resonance” as a destination isn’t needed in anything but classical repertoire and some kinds of music that might be done acoustically.
So you still have to find a balance of register quality and make an undistorted vowel throughout your range if you are to sing with a maximum of efficiency and a minimum of effort. Since these configurations change as pitch and volume change, it isn’t so easy to “just do this” without training, and training has to last quite a while for it to become second nature or automatic during singing.
Therefore, I might want to know about “resonance strategies” and “formant tuning” but I can’t really use them as teaching tools. I still have only my ears and my eyes to guide my students to make better (or more appropriate) sounds and I must rely on my ability to discern what they are doing that can be improved, changed or magnified. Since there are so many factors (including breathing), this can take quite a lot of skill and it can also take the student quite a while to do and do well.
Resonance strategies. Vibrating your forehead. Not particularly meaningful as instruction, at least not without a lot of explaining and demonstrating. It just isn’t the same as saying, “Sing that nice AH (/a/) again. This time make it softer, keep your mouth a bit more closed and make sure your head is level and over your torso.” Now, what kind of a sound do we have and can you do it again?
Now I am going to go turn off my “formants” for the night and grab some Z’s.

Intuition

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How do you develop your intuition? What is intuition?

It has been described as “feeling” or a “hunch” or maybe it’s just an inclination to do something. It could be a “sense” of something or an urge. It’s lots of things but hard to define. How do you strengthen it? Are you born with it or without it?
Intuition is about learning to listen to the “little small voice” within (although it may not be something that can be thought of worded thoughts in your mind at all). Intuition is knowing when something seems “right” or “good” or “appropriate” or when it “fits”.
Yes, you can develop your intuition, very definitely. Doing so allows you to be more receptive, more aware, more able to perceive without effort in both a broad general way and also in a very concise finite way, usually at the same time. You can try to think your way to this deeper “knowing” but it won’t work. It’s not about your intellect or your ability to reason. That’s a different facility altogether.
Intuitive skills come from stillness, from meditation, and from paying attention to both. It arises out of a seeking sensibility. If you are searching for something and you take the time to wait and to listen, somehow or other, when you are still, you will find the way, the path to take. Sometimes intuition knows what you don’t admit to yourself you know. It can sense when things are going wrong or going just the way they should. There is no substitute for intuition, so if you want to cultivate it, you have to work on developing it consistently for a while. You need to sit with your desire until you have a sense of what will help to bring you to the end result you are seeking.
Believe it or not, there are exercises one can do to get better at being intuitive. There are things you can practice just like you do when honing any other skill. The guidance that comes this way, on little kitten feet, has nothing whatsoever to do with the guys who were recently in the public eye claiming “Jesus told me to do this”. Hardly.
There is a wonderful interview with the glass masters who were commissioned by renowned glass artist Dale Chihuly who was trained in Murano, Italy. He commissioned two masters from two different guilds who had never worked together create one large vase. The first master was famous for his vases but the second was famous for his “putti” or what we would call cherubs. They were going to do one vase with putti on it (unheard of at the time). When he interviewed the “putti” master and asked him, “Maestro, how do you know where to put the putti? In all of your other works, they have been perfectly positioned.” The Maestro’s reply was, “It’s easy. The glass always tells me where it wants to go.” My point exactly. His intuition was so strong, he “just knew”.
If you do not have such experiences, and many people do not, you are missing out on something wonderful.
Consider coming to my workshop at the Omega Institute on June 15-17. It’s called “Your Voice Is A Healing Tool”. You might have a really wonderful time discovering your vocal intuition.

Because They Can and We Can’t Stop Them

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Something that singing teachers do that is truly detrimental to the profession, and something about which I have written here many times, is label what they do in lessons as if no one else in the world has ever done it before.

Seriously, people, there are only so many sounds human beings are capable of making, given the formant frequencies of a human throat. The vast majority of adults stick to a small pitch range, limited volume under most circumstances and not a great deal of variability. Even trained singers are typically limited to about three octaves of range. The voice is a reflexive instrument, meaning that it responds to the desires of the singer indirectly through the mental images the singer has of what he or she wants to do vocally. If you directly manipulate the muscles of the throat (and many people teach just that), you will never ever sing freely or expressively because holding the throat into a place prohibits such emotional expression. This is a big, big deal and it is completely ignored by many teachers of singing. It is not my idea, it is based on the ability of the body to both breathe and swallow and allow free movement of all the vocal muscles so that the mechanism can easily inhale and exhale without effort. You cannot override Mother Nature without paying a price. If you work in concert with our gag reflex, you can learn to direct the sound without suppressing anything.
What happens typically is that someone finds a certain kind of sound she likes or that he feels is the “right” sound for a certain kind of music. They decide (without checking with anyone from voice science) that this is THE ANSWER, and they teach it as that. They behave as if no one else has figured out how to manipulate the throat, the breath, or the “resonators” in the same way they have and then, sadly, that’s how they set themselves up to teach.
Susan Warblebird has discovered that she and only she can do things with her throat that no one else can do and, by golly, she is going to teach you to do those same things! Yep. Maneuver Number One is sliding the larynx down into the trachea, Maneuver Number Two is hiking it up into the sinus cavities, and Maneuver Number Three is pulling it back into the back wall of the throat where it sticks into the soft tissue. These Maneuvers will make you are fabulous opera singer, a great rock singer and give you the ability to out rap every rapper who’s wrapped up in rapping. Of course, she is in conflict with Wilfred Wobblethroat who has discovered a way to prove that vibrato arises out of the movements of the diaphragm. He has done research on himself to establish that by wiggling his belly button in and out he can jiggle his diaphragm until it makes the pitches go up and down, up and down, like horses on a carousel and presto! The vibrato is right there. This is the famous Wobblethroat Method created by him and only by him. He can teach you to do it, too. (For a price, of course.) You can also purchase his videos, his CDs, his DVDs, his tapes and books, and watch him on YouTube. Unfortunately, he sounds when he sings like he is close to vomiting. A pleasant sound.
Truth be told, all anyone can ever do is organize what we know about human sound-making into a relatively cohesive whole and discuss how that applies to making whatever sounds one needs in order to be able to sing effectively and expressively in any style of music. Calling the things we “discover” plaid or pineapples is of no consequence if we do not understand that what we do isn’t unique, special or even new in any way. Speaking about it in plain, simple English, in a way that makes sense to many other human beings without translation or further explanation is the only way to proceed.
Somatic Voicework™, my method, is an approach to singing Contemporary Commercial Music. It is not and never will be THE approach, the RIGHT approach, or the ONLY approach, and it will continue to evolve and change as we learn more from voice science about how things work. It will always be concerned with the human and artistic factors of making music through singing. I am not ever going to be interested in making “human sound robots”, no matter how important it is for people to sing from a functionally correct place. The terms I use are, by and large, as accurate as I can get them to be and are taken from voice science or long accepted (as in a hundred years or more) pedagogical concepts from classical singing training, or from the marketplace, primarily Broadway. I did not make up one single term myself.
Yet, when I speak to other teachers of singing, particularly those who have a method they are selling to the public, they all have their own jargon. Most of them do not want to let it go because it is theirs. The phrases belong to them. No one else can have them. No.
If you want to understand what they mean with their “coined” words, you have to study with them so they can explain them to you and let you experience them as sound so you can comprehend their label and make it meaningful. It precludes having a discussion amongst equals. It precludes being able to discuss insights about various approaches that are broad based and equal, but different from each other, because the creator of the new terminology is married to the words and the “special” approaches he or she has created.
I have asked a few of these people to change to a more objective terminology in the interest of benefitting the profession at large and of the students who seek to sing in the best possible way. I am always met with the same resistance. “I don’t want to give up my terms because I created them, they are mine, they work and they make sense (to me).” This is a lost cause and very sad. They won’t budge because they don’t have to.
So the profession lumbers along, stumbling over the use of made up words and terms and their relevance to modern day demands placed on singers’ voices in a career.

Everybody Sounds The Same

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When I was a child and heard classical singers on the radio or TV, they all sounded alike. I could recognize that they were singing “opera style”, but to me, one voice was just like another. I also knew that Tennessee Ernie Ford sounded different than Dinah Shore (giving away my age here, folks) and that Perry Como sounded different than Dennis Day.

After I had had some good amount of training, I began to recognize individual classical artists. I began to hear the difference between Leontyne Price and Joan Sutherland (a pretty big difference, but not to me at the time). Much later, after decades of work with classical singing) when I was with other skilled listeners we would play “drop the needle” and see who could identify the singer in the fewest notes. Sometimes it only took one long one to say, “That’s Corelli!” His voice was so distinctive.
The idea that classical singers all “sound the same” has to do with the resonances they must generate in order to heard over a full orchestra without electronic amplification. That similarity is a requirement in all but the highest sopranos, whose voices carry because they are often up on very high pitches which do most of the work of “carrying” the voice. It is the case, however, that there is such a thing as generic training for classical singing and it makes all voices sound pretty much the same: loud, indistinct or imitative. In other words, lousy training makes for lousy sound. When the person singing’s can be described as being “woofy”, “barky”, “hooty”, “over-darkened” or just distorted, you can’t really hear the voice for itself. You hear the vocal production which is off balance or manipulated.
Free singing brings out the individuality of the voice. It encourages the uniqueness of each person’s vocal production. It allows for the vocalist to find through exploration how he or she sounds over time, while learning and performing various kinds of repertoire. Teachers who have a preconceived notion of how the voice should sound even before the vocalist has a chance to wiggle around and try things out are not helpful. Many teachers have a fixed sound in their mind and they bring the student to it, regardless. Guess what, all the students of these teachers sound the same. Is this a surprise?
In CCM styles, it is the same. The people who teach yelling make all their students sound the same because that is their main tool. The people who tell belters to make whatever sound they equate with belting (a squeal, a grunt, a yell, a shout) end up training singers to approach their songs with a “rote” response and then everything sounds the same. If you listen to the great CCM singers, however, who very likely had no training, they sing with real expression, with variation, with a connection to both the musical line and the words, with little effort.
In order to serve a student’s highest good, a teacher must bring out the entire voice and balance it without distorting the vowels. The breathing should be deep, full and easy on inhalation and regulated on exhalation, adjusting the use of the belly muscles to the firmness of the ribcage during phonation. THEN, and only then, should the teacher begin to train the student toward a specific vocal production. Doing it before skews the instrument and will make it nearly impossible for the vocalist, if she is young, to get away from this production on her own later in life, unless she works with a skilled technician who can help her solve this problem.
If you are a student, listen to the pupils your teacher has. If they all sound like the teacher, if they all have “funny” vowels, if they are all hard to understand, if they all have bad high notes or low notes, if they all sound thin and tinny or big and overblown, be suspicious. A group of individual singers can’t all have the same characteristics. The more the training is good and useful, the more the person is recognizable as herself. The mechanical behavior melts into free singing and the ingredients necessary to sing any song in any style become a comfortable default that doesn’t get in the way of either individuality or expressiveness.
When everybody sounds the same, something is wrong.

Exhausting

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It can be exhausting to push against something that is stuck and resistant. Trying to unlock a door that has been rusted shut is tough.

It’s easier to let the door stay closed and walk by, not being curious, not caring what’s there.
Recently, I heard about a treasure found in India in the basement of a temple that has been cared for by the same family for 400 years. There were rumors that it contained a vast store of riches but no one wanted to investigate lest it disturb the god for whom the temple was built. Somehow, finally, someone insisted, and against great resistance from the family and from some of the local officials, the locked door to the deep basement storehouse was opened. When it was, indeed, it contained jewels, gold and silver in great amounts. Quite worth the trouble it took to upset the 400 year old status quo. Of course, after the fortune was discovered, there was a great deal of “discussion” about what to do with it. I think that’s not settled (will it ever be?)
The point is this. One man had to push and push hard to get to the treasure. He encountered resistance of various kinds and it took both persistence and perseverance to get the door unlocked, but in the end, he was victorious. It only takes one person with this kind of determination to turn things around.
Some people are blessed with an enormous amount of determination and a very strong will to go against very heavy odds. Christopher Columbus was one of those folk, and Nelson Mandela is, too. Those individuals who have gone to jail, suffered persecution, been maligned, and seen their families suffer have had to sacrifice so much to accomplish their goals. People sometimes forget the price these individuals pay for paving the way to something new, something often much better. This has been true since the beginning of recorded history. Socrates took hemlock. Joan of Arc was burned at the stake. St. Thomas More was beheaded. John Brown was hanged. Martin Luther King was shot. Resistance can be very dangerous, but it certainly isn’t new.
I think that people who have a vision of how life could be if there was less selfishness, less close-mindedness, less attachment to greed, power and money, sometimes despair because their view of life is seen as being “too pie in the sky”, “too abstract”, “too Pollyanna-ish”. Yet, without the people who see things through rose colored Utopian glasses, nothing would ever evolve. Looking toward the far distant future with optimism is not always easy but some people manage anyway.
I hope that each person who reads this blog will do his or her best to be a harbinger of change. If you are a singer or a teacher of singing, hold the profession to the highest possible vocal standards — the highest standards for teachers of singing, the best possible approaches to blending music, voice and soul into a cohesive whole one person at a time. Do not succumb to mediocrity. Do not fall into “being OK.” Do not let yourself hide in ignorance or arrogance. Seek always to put the music and the voice first.
If you grow exhausted from “fighting the good fight”, take heart. Rest, renew and then go forth again with vigor knowing you are fueled by the best energy and highest purpose. Just do what Winston Churchill advised: Never, never, never give up.