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In literature, a writer has “a voice”. It means that he or she has a way of writing that is distinctive and recognizable. Although I haven’t read many novels since high school, preferring to read non-fiction most of the time, I know that certain famous writers’ styles are so unique that fans would know who was doing the writing without being given the name.

The idea of “having a voice” is strong in our society which supports (at least in theory) the rights of the individual. We are protected by the first amendment (in theory) to “free speech” and to “voice our opinions”. People are encouraged to “speak out” or “speak up” or to “have a say”.

As a child if you were told, “Children should be seen and not heard,” (that was a familiar idea in past generations), you were also being told, “Keep quiet. We are not interested in anything you have to say.” That message certainly says, “You have no voice”. If you spoke up about something and were punished for doing so, that message says “It’s better to keep some things to yourself.” If you were saying something loudly and repeatedly and it was just ignored, that message teaches you to conclude “no matter how strong my voice is, it’s powerless.” If you lived in a home where people were doing something “objectionable” and you were asked to keep it a secret, that message teaches you that “to tell the truth to the world is going to have a cost.”

In some households, children are expected to always be quiet. I once worked with someone who had been told by his father that his breathing was too loud and he had learned to nearly hold his breath to contain the noise which eventually caught up with his vocal health. I have seen people who lived with others who were rage-aholics. If you have a parent who screams and fights with the family, you will learn to dread loud voices and powerful vocal expressions. If you live in a household where you have no one to talk to who actually hears what you have to say or asks you for your opinion, you will feel unacknowledged.

On the other hand, if you were a child singer and you got a lot of attention for singing, you could conclude that the only time you are valuable in the world is when you sing. That would be a scary way to live. If you were someone who had to speak up on behalf of others you might keep that habit and always speak for others and that could make you a bossy control freak.

It goes on but I hope you can see my point. Being heard, being listened to, being responded to after you have spoken, is a crucial element of feeling validated and accepted. If you don’t “voice your opinion” because you think it doesn’t matter or that you have no opinion to voice, that’s not a position of positive power. If you don’t understand how to have “a voice” in your life in a way that matters, you will be unable to “speak up” on your own behalf in situations where that would be a good thing.

If you want to say something to someone else and you can’t (for any reason at all), that uncommunicated message will stay stuck in your mind and your throat until you express it. If you get “all choked up” with emotions you can’t express, or if you “can’t spit out the words” when something powerful happens to you, consider the long term effects of that situation. If you get “a lump in your throat” when you feel an urge to cry, but don’t actually let yourself cry, you have to recognize what that does to the muscles in your throat.

If your voice sounds bad to you and that makes you embarrassed or ashamed, if you would like your voice to do something beyond what it currently does, if you have been criticized for having a voice that doesn’t meet other people’s expectations, you can end up with a very bad “vocal image” of yourself that could be hard to change. That can have a profound effect on your self-esteem and your ability to function in the world.

You have a right to have the best, most wonderful voice in the world. You have a right for it to sound good, even great. You have a right to have it do what you want it to do without explanation or apology. You have a right to sing, to make music, and to use your voice creativity. You deserve being heard and listened to. You deserve having the authority to speak clearly and sing strongly. You have permission to make a “loud noise” and “let loose a joyful noise”. You have permission to enjoy your voice in all its real and metaphorical manifestations.

Do not allow your voice to be silenced. Do not allow others to take your voice away. Do not let others speak for you without your express permission. Speak up for yourself. Speak out for things that matter to you. Speak straightforwardly and with passion.

In order to take yourself more seriously, do not lie. Do not diminish your own truth. Keep your word, keep your agreements, keep your promises. If you cannot, communicate that and take responsibility about mending the fence. If you want your voice to be all that it can be, respect how it is produced in your body, put in the time to keep it in shape, and remember how important it is to honor it at all times.

Listen to others, hear what they have to say. Take in what others are saying and how they are expressing their opinions. Let yourself notice the speaking and singing voices of others. Be careful of what you tell yourself in your mind and what you write on paper to others. Think before you make sound. Once it’s out, you can’t make it go back.

Own your voice. Own what it is, how it is made, and where it goes (both inside your mind and out in the world). Speak truthfully but with compassion. Sing with open heartedness and abandon.

Honor your voice because if you do, it will serve you with honor.

The term Contemporary Commercial Music was created in 2000 to stop the use of the term “non-classical”. It was created to draw all the CCM styles together as a genre equal to but different from classical styles.

To clarify: Classical music includes opera, operetta, art song (recital), chamber music, oratorio, early music, and orchestral music solos.

CCM styles include: music theater, jazz, rock, pop, gospel, R&B, country, folk, rap and alternative (and maybe other styles).

It isn’t a perfect term and some people don’t like it. OK. But there was nothing better and it was time for something.

The differentiation was necessary because the two genres come from different roots, they have different requirements, they have different musical parameters, they are sung in different vocal qualities and they have different professional criteria.

The term has been VERY effective, worldwide, in getting people to think of CCM styles in this specific way. The term has allowed researchers to see these styles as being equal to classical styles for scientific study. It has allowed vocal pedagogues to study CCM styles to consider the differences in comparison to classical styles. It has allowed the CCM styles to garner the respect they deserve, ending the “second-class” status that has plagued them since their inception in the world of academia. It has done a great deal of good and caused no problems or issues whatsoever.

NEVERTHELESS, we now have people coming up with NEW terms to describe these styles. Someone in Australia is calling them “Popular Commercial Music” and someone in looking to create a degree in Popular Music Studies. My question is WHY? If I could I would put the word in 50 point bold in red. WHY? What good does this do? How does it serve the betterment of the profession? What would you want to do that except to say that your term is better? Is it? Really, can’t we agree to agree and just get on with why the term was created in the first place?

People are afraid that if they use the term Contemporary Commercial Music that they are somehow endorsing me and my work. Heaven forbid! The term does not belong to me, to my work or to any aspect of my work. The term belongs to the musical marketplace and to the world. It is there to serve singers, teachers, researchers and educators. It is not “LoVetri’s Contemporary Commercial Music”. Really, people, don’t you care more about the music and the fact that it is no longer a “non” something than who made up the term?

In the not so distant past when you went to an office you had to fill out forms which made you choose from the following two categories: white and non-white. Nice. Good luck for you if you were not in the preferred ethnic group. We also had classical and non-classical styles of music. It implied there was “the real music” (classical) and the other stuff that was NOTHING. NON. NOT. Guess what? Those of us who dealt with “non-classical” music didn’t exactly like that term. Now it is finally going away yet, there are people who are afraid to use it less they give it further credibility– because they don’t want to give me credibility. What nonsense!!!!!!

If you are someone who doesn’t want to use the term Contemporary Commercial Music, then don’t. But understand that not using the term keeps you stuck in the 19th century, it continues the mentality that classical music is still the real deal and it holds us all back from looking at the deeper issues that allow disrespect for our own American styles in the halls of academia to continue. I am not seeking your endorsement or approval. CCM and Jeanie LoVetri are separate and distinct entities and have always been so.

We all have busy lives. Some people have lives that are so busy, they don’t get much sleep. They are pressed from morning till late at night with all manner of busy-ness.

I am one of those people. I am the first to admit that I am very bad manager of my own time and energy. I always think I have more time than I actually have, and because I am interested in so many things, I am easily distracted and can find myself swimming in more than one project at a time. I am the kind of person who starts a new book before finishing the old one. Bad habits all.

Nevertheless, somehow I mostly get things done. I have given up sleep, neglected having a glamorous hairstyle, stopped much attention to my diet, etc., in order to keep going. Since I am and always have been self-employed, no one is forcing me to write (here or anywhere else), to publish, to do research (which I pay for out of my own pocket), to travel (mostly that is a money-losing endeavor), or to attend conferences (which I pay for). I could just stay home, teach private singing lessons, and have a much easier life. I could see my wonderful husband more, spend more time with my friends (who are very patient with me and my life), and maybe take better care of myself overall. I am always striving to change this equation so that it is in better balance, but I don’t do very well. I take full responsibility for these behaviors, knowing they are not optimal, and I work always to keep being better at staying in balance.

One thing I have not let go of, however, in spite of constant reasons why I could, is my commitment to my own singing. I find a way to keep working on repertoire and on vocal technique. Sometimes it is the last thing I want to do. I absolutely would rather do almost anything else than practice, but I make myself sing.

What used to be easy and effortless now takes dedicated work. My throat and my body don’t do what they used to do when I was 30 or 40 or 50, unless I spend the time. If I work at it, eventually everything that was there is still there, but I can take nothing now for granted. If I want to sing, I must make myself sing, even when I would rather watch TV or sleep late. No one cares if I sing or not. Once in a while I am asked to perform (as I did in December of 2011) in public at a concert or at a wedding, but other than that, the only people besides me who hear my voice are my students in lessons and my husband. Why not quit? Why not just say, “It’s too much trouble, now, and I would rather give up and let others do the singing?”

There are many answers to this question, but the one that drives me is that I feel an obligation to myself to sing until I absolutely cannot do so in a way that sounds acceptable. I am not willing to let my singing go downhill without a fight because singing has been the one constant in my life. It has been my joy, my terror, my inspiration, my despair, my comfort, my torment, my teacher and my research subject. It has been there with me through all the stages of my life. To lose singing would be to lose the closest friend I have had, the most ardent companion, the dearest and deepest part of my artistic heart. I’m not ready to say, “I just don’t care any more,” and I hope I never get to that place.

Unfortunately, however, I know many singing teachers who have said exactly that. I know a great many teachers who are younger than I who gave up on their own singing a long time ago. It gets short shrift in their lives. They rarely practice. They never perform. They do not have any real interest in keeping their technical skills at a high level. They do not really care how they sound to their students. They can’t really be bothered with singing, perhaps because they had performing careers that are now over and they feel that without a performing career it isn’t worth the effort. Perhaps they feel sad that they are no longer hired as vocalists. Perhaps they never really loved singing in the first place — they just took up singing because they thought it was easy or they had had some exposure to it in the early part of their lives. Perhaps they are just too tired. I even know one singing teacher who never sings at all for any reason and hasn’t for years. What a pity and how very peculiar!

Nevertheless, whatever their reasons may be, that there are quite a few teachers of singing who do not sing any more always surprises me. If you, as a teacher, do not have the motivation to keep your own voice going in the best way that you can, how can you serve as a role model for your students? What are they to glean from your attitude about the other things you are teaching them? If your voice isn’t doing what it should and you cannot fix it yourself, why wouldn’t you seek the help of others? If you think that you cannot overcome whatever is going on, and you are healthy in both voice and body, then you need new information. As long as you are willing to put in the time, things will get better. In fact, even if you have a voice that has been impaired for any reason, you can sometimes learn to compensate so well that no one will ever know but you that this was the case.

If singing decently is too much trouble for you, you need to take a look at why this should be the case. You need to step up to the plate and deal with yourself and your voice, for the sake of your students if for no other reason. If you choose to stop singing while you are still teaching, you should understand that a great portion of what a student learns from you is found by hearing you sing, not just talking about singing. This should make you ponder whether or not you should be teaching at all. A serious contemplation indeed.

If singing for yourself is too much trouble, perhaps the trouble is not with the singing at all.

I heard years ago that “either you are part of the problem or part of the solution”.

It’s very easy to complain. Most of us complain about something, maybe more than one thing. Complaining is a way of saying “I don’t like this. It’s not right with me.” If all one does is complain, however, nothing really happens. If you want to see what you are complaining about be different, you have to be willing to act.

That is where most people stop. It takes energy to act and many people don’t actually want to expend energy. They want someone else to expend energy. Then, maybe, they might “help”. We have all been asked to donate money, to sign a petition, to send a letter or make a phone call. These days, with the internet, you can do one or more of these things with just the click of a key. It takes a bit more time and effort to go out and stand on a corner collecting signatures, or hand out flyers, or take a survey. It can take a lot of time and effort to go to meetings, or run a meeting, or organize an event. Sometimes, even with a great deal of effort, what you would like to change is so deeply entrenched that you can meet with enormous resistance, even backlash, and with some not so pleasant reaction. In times past, people have been killed standing up for what was right. That is the ultimate sacrifice.

Acting requires a kind of courage. It means that you are willing to put yourself out, go beyond your comfort zone, take some risk and take a position in a public manner. It’s so much easier to stay home and complain.

If you want something to change, you can start by speaking out for that change. You can live as if the change you seek is important to you. That means that you have to live with integrity because if you do not walk the talk then no one will see you as someone who has a right to speak. We don’t like hypocrites. If you want to make something be different, you have to find ways for that difference to show up, to emerge. If you don’t formulate a plan, if you do not have an approach that others can comprehend, you will not be seen as being serious. It’s easy to say, “I stand for change” and then wait for it to happen. It isn’t so easy to write an article that gets published, go to Congress to talk to your representatives, work towards the passing of new legislation, raise money for your cause, get the idea out to many others. Still, we hear every day of single individuals, working alone, who have changed something significant in our society. We also know that two people, such as parents who have lost children, or small groups of people like workers who have been harmed by their employers’ policies, or larger groups of people who see something that is not good in our society and band together to change it, have also made an impact.

If you do not like something, find ways to dig into what’s wrong, write about your findings, attend conferences, seek out people who might agree with you, research the work of others, risk being disliked, judged or even threatened. Take a stand. Do what you feel is best. Hold the example in your own life. Walk the talk.

Then, when you criticize something, people will hear your voice as being one that carries seriousness and weight. They will consider your message more carefully, they will be more willing to join in your cause, crusade or goal. You can do it. You can motivate others to go in a different, better direction. But not if all you do is sit at home and do nothing but complain. Don’t be part of the problem, be part of the solution. Better yet, BE the solution!

We have a resource now that only a few years ago didn’t exist that makes it hard to be unfamiliar with singing. Between iTunes, YouTube, Spotify, and dozens of other sites that have music on them, as well as individual vocalists’ websites and all the various social media that we use, it seems you could hear just about any style from any era since we began making recordings if you were looking.

There is also a huge amount of information about voice training on line, mostly for purchase, but some for free. Just recently someone sent me a website that says your voice is either “passive” or “active” and if it’s passive, you can find the switch to turn it on……..from them. WOW!! Imagine what it’s like to be able to learn to sing in this “magic” way!!!!

There are all sorts of gimmicks in this world, online and off. PT Barnum had it right over a hundred years ago when he said, “There’s a sucker born every minute”.

If you are the kind of person who wants a “get rich quick” scheme (not counting winning the lottery, which is a legitimate way to get rich quick), you might also be looking to “get to sing quick”. Even if you are very talented, like Whitney Houston was, you need training or a mentor and time to learn and develop and gain experience. No one gets to be really great without work, but if you are willing to spend money, someone will tell you that they can “make you famous” if you just buy their materials.

What would be better if you are an aspiring vocalist is to spend time listening to whatever you can find so you educate your ears and your taste. There is so much out there that’s free and useful, particularly things from the past. If you want to be a very good vocalist, listen to everything. Listen to the things you like and the things you do not usually want to hear. Listen to people you have heard about but also find people that you don’t know at all. If you like rock, listen to country. If you like musicals listen to bluegrass. If you like opera listen to jazz. If you are a pop fan listen to old style folk music. Open up your ears, and if you can find videos, open up your eyes, too.

Back in the day when you either heard it on radio or TV, or you bought the sheet music or you bought the record or later the cassette or the CD, you had to build your experience through some consistent approach. Now, if you want, you can listen on the computer, on the phone, on the tablet, on the mp3 player, at home, on the road or even in your pool or at the beach. There really is no reason not to be an “educated listener” and that will help prevent you from being an uneducated consumer of vocal training or instruction.

What was the first thing you did when you got a new board game that came in a box? After it was open and you took out the all the pieces inside and you read the rules. You couldn’t play the game if you didn’t know the rules.

How would it be then, to learn what the game was about if you had to guess? Think of all the possible ways you could come up with a game using a Monopoly board and its equipment!

So, you decide to take singing lessons. Does anyone tell you what the “rules” are? Does anyone hand you a sheet of paper that tells you if you are playing the game the way the game is supposed to go? Do they give you any “rules”? How do you know if there are official “variations” of the game?

Answer: YOU DON”T GET ANY INFORMATION LIKE THIS.

What you get is one lesson’s worth of training at a time. If you are young or a novice, you may have absolutely no clue about singing training, singing proficiency, singing excellence, singing health and you may not gain this information for years, maybe decades. In fact, you might NEVER get it.

What is a healthy sound? What is a marketable sound? Are they compatible? If so, in what way? Where do you, particularly, fit in? Are you talented? Do you have ability? What are your weaknesses? How can they be addressed? If you have career aspirations, how do you meet them? How long will it take? What do you have to do to get to where you would like to go? How do you know if you are making reasonable progress? How do you know if your instructor is helping you or even if she is any good?

This could go on, as you can imagine. Is it any wonder then, that we have students who are confused? That we have teachers who don’t know that they don’t know. We are a profession that calls itself a profession but one that has almost nothing in the way of standards. How do we know that we are being professional? How many singing teachers know, let alone live up to, the Code of Ethics of NATS, NYSTA or any other singing teaching organization? If someone violates that code, does anything happen to that person? What is the penalty for being unethical?

Think about this. Really. THINK.

Recently it has come to light that at least two organizations are pushing ideas that are quite dead. This certainly in keeping with the political struggle that is going on in this country. We have people who want to go back to the 50s, 40s or maybe even to the 1840s and we have people who are looking to the future with new ideas, broad concepts and courage to change the way things have been for way too long.

So it is with singing. We have just had an article in the Journal of Singing that espouses that children should have breathy voices, they should not sing in chest register, they shouldn’t stretch their ranges, they should be left alone to sing in a very small box. That there is NO research on this topic to support these ideas doesn’t seem to matter to the author nor to the Journal itself. This is the national house organ of an association of teachers of singing that numbers about 7,000 people and is in many schools where it is read by hundreds of students. How could this be!?

Another group, a well known girls chorus in California, posts on their website that children should not be given singing lessons. Really? Based on what evidence? There is none.

There are still so many people who have only hearsay to rely on. People who can’t find research, perhaps because there is so little, but also perhaps because they did not bother to look.

If children can be trained to play violin (a weird thing to do with the body), if they can be trained to play other instruments or do sports, why can’t they be trained to develop their voices and bodies for singing?

It wouldn’t be so bad if this information had been published in a small town newspaper or in some other kind of magazine but in a national publication aimed at vocal music experts it is truly a terrible step backward. It goes along with the article that appeared in Opera News a number of years ago that said that an elderly couple had “rescued” Barbara Streisand when she was having vocal problems (she claims to have taught herself) and that Ethel Merman was not a belter. (Too bad she thought she was one herself. If you look on YouTube, you will find her singing there with Garland and a young Streisand on Garland’s TV show, and she refers to herself and the other two as belters). Opera News is the publication of record here in the USA for opera and it has no business publishing articles on belting, but it if was going to do so, it had an obligation to check the information before it went into print. It didn’t.

No amount of ranting and raving from me makes any difference since I am already known in the vocal music community as someone who keeps pointing out how the profession needs to change to get in step with the 21st Century.

Maybe someone else will step up to the plate and speak out on these issues. I would love some company.

There used to be a weekly ad in Back Stage that said, “If you can sing, you don’t need a teacher. If you can’t sing, no one can teach you. If you are in between, I can teach you to sing”. (I’ve mentioned this ad before). It always made me laugh because there was then and there is still now a group of people who believe this nonsense.

In India, I’ve been told, (if I am wrong, someone please correct me in the comments), that people think “either you can swim or you can’t”. They don’t seem to have swimming lessons in India.

If you open your mouth to sing and you “sound good”, what do you do with that? If you are Adele, you write songs and perform them and eventually you get noticed, have a great start to a major career and then get vocally injured. Oops.

She certainly is not alone. Many others have had similar experiences, but not everyone. Some people are lucky. They sing well, they stick to what they can do easily and they don’t take chances. They just do what they do and keep doing it!

If you are someone with a good voice, someone who is musical and expressive, someone who is comfortable in front of an audience, you could go a very long way just on these things. If you don’t have a big career, if no one presses you to go past your comfort zone in any way, you could do quite well without assistance from anyone else. But if you have no idea of how you sing because it “just happens” and you do have trouble, any kind of trouble, you will be at a loss as to how to help yourself. That’s a big black hole.

Conversely, what if you have worked hard to develop vocal chops and have reached a level of professional competence such that most of your engagements are not causing any problems for you? Should you be content with that and stop there or should you keep going, exploring new territory? You might feel like you are stuck in a rut and can’t find a way to break out and explore new territory. You might need outside help to find a new path that emerges from the one you have just traveled. Yes, you can sing, but now what?

A good teacher should be able to help someone who naturally sings well stay singing well without re-inventing the person’s voice or vocal identity. A good teacher should be able to take a professional (or professional calibre amateur) and help him to go beyond his limits without losing what he already has. A good teacher should be able to challenge any performer to be more of who he is, to do more of what he does but also to do what he does not yet do, or to let go of things that he does not need.

There is no “final destination” with singing. You don’t get to a place where “there is nothing left to learn”, not until you leave this earth. If you are stuck in any way and your teacher cannot help you go past this block, get another teacher.

Every year many bright beautiful young hopefuls come to New York City to be in “show business”. Many of them are here straight from college or graduate school, some come while still in their 20s. A few are natives to the area and don’t have to move here. They are of all types, sizes and abilities but they share an innocence, an eagerness and a lack of guile about the city and the prospects that being here, chasing their dreams, will bring to them.

It takes about two years to make headway in NYC unless you already know someone “in the business” or you have a lot (read unlimited) amount of money on which to live. Many times the young people don’t last that long. New York will eat you alive if you are not prepared for its gritty nastiness and “show business” will stomp you into the ground, ignore you and then spit in your eye while you lie bleeding in the street. It takes a very specific kind of person to somehow survive and the two years is just enough to get to a place where you know the ropes, have adjusted your expectations and understand what a big, fat ferocious battle you are in.

Each area of show business: music theater, dance, modeling, acting, musician, or singer has its expectations and criteria and its “way in”. All of them are daunting. The theater business has the clearest guidelines that can be learned relatively quickly. The music business isn’t so cut and dry but if you are good you might be able to land in 802 (the musician’s local union) and at least make a subsistence living. If you are a dancer, there are dance companies that you might be able to get into and if you are a model, there are agencies you can visit, but absolutely no one is waiting anxiously for you to knock on their door. For every job there are hundreds, sometimes thousands, of hopefuls and each individual is no more than another blip on a very big radar screen.

Further, the best of the best come here. At home, you might be up against the few talented, beautiful, well-trained people in your area, but here you up again the best people from every area of the country and the world. Everyone here is good, sometimes very good. If you are not, generally, you discover very quickly that you are not and either leave or change your direction. This spreads out to other areas: photography, design, directing, set design, lighting design, advertising, theater management. Everyone in every field expects only the best but there are so many here who are at the highest level that breaking in as a “newbee” is just plain tough. All of these fields have “agents”, “managers” or “representatives” who can help, but they don’t usually have interest in taking on a new client unless an old one has left.

Personally, I think the hardest thing to overcome is the relentless battle of making enough money to be able to live while trying to do whatever it is you really want to do. Only the very wealthy have an advantage in that they do not have to have what are called “job jobs” (things you do to pay the bills that have nothing to do with your particular chosen career). Some people never get out of those job jobs, they just stay there and do their “art” on the side (evenings, weekends and vacations). Others find several roommates of like mind, find the job that pays the bills, and spend the rest of their time and energy on “getting a break”. This is the same as it was nearly 100 years ago.

If your job job doesn’t kill you (and waitressing or tending bar is very hard work), even if you are working long hours in an office (the computer opened up a lot more jobs), even if you spend hours cleaning house, babysitting, walking dogs, tutoring children, or working at Starbuck’s, you still have to find time to go to auditions (or interviews). You have to have the proper clothing, shoes, and materials. You have to take classes or go to the gym or both. You have to have photos (if you are a performer) or a video of your work or a portfolio or several of these. You have to go the the hair salon, or the nail salon or the barber shop and take your clothes to the cleaners, and, oh yes, sleep and eat and pay the rent. And, you have to network. Socializing matters.

It’s amazing that anyone at all survives this rigorous baptism, but people do. Further, a good many make it into the area of “show business” or “entertainment” that they were seeking to enter and begin to build a fledging career. And a few more actually get noticed and began to get into the echelon of people who no longer have to have “job jobs” – a real mark of success. Along the way, however, there are people who just can’t take it any more. They can’t take the hassle, the struggle, the disappointments, the exhaution, the lack of progress. They begin to see, slowly, that no matter how much effort they will continue to make, no matter how much they long to be in the group that has “gotten started” that time is passing them by. Somehow, sooner or later, many of them will have to face that it isn’t going to happen and that, if they do not acknowledge this, they will spend too many years floundering around getting nowhere and being broke, miserable and alone.

I wish I could say that everyone eventually figures this out but, of course, there are always people who go on long after they should, when everyone else is saying “tsk tsk” behind their backs. But for those that face the fact that their heartfelt dream, the sweet blessed goal that they have seen in their minds for many long years, is rapidly becoming a puff of smoke, there is the crushing reality of having to give up. Nowhere else is this decision as painful and as wrenching as it is in show business and as it is in New York City. There is, after all, only one Broadway. There is only one Met Opera, only one “cover of Vogue”. You could succeed elsewhere, but elsewhere isn’t New York.

What is the solace for those who come here, try as hard as they can, and then, in saddest despair, throw in the towel? Sometimes, it is only knowing that you tried with all your might and you went down fighting. It doesn’t stop your heart from breaking but it allows you to know that even with a broken heart, life can go on. And it does.

If you learn a sport, one of the first things you are taught is the rules of the game. Smart.

You learn that there are three bases and home base, that you have a thing called a bat, you use it to hit a ball and so forth. Before you learn to throw and catch, to hit and run, you know what the rules are.

What if that were applied to singing?

What would the parameters be for a well-functioning vocal instrument capable of handling professional demands?