Uncategorized

Did you know that all singing teachers are the same?

To our fellow professions, that’s how we appear.

Think about it. Until you know an MD personally, all you know is that the individual is a doctor. Most of us have an idea of what a doctor is because there are very very few people who have not seen a doctor quite a few times, at least in a first world country. That’s probably also true about a dentist, a teacher, a nurse, a fire fighter, a police officer, and several other professions. However, if you have never sung yourself, and many people have not, or if you have not ever had a singing lesson, and lots of people have not, then you wouldn’t really know much about a teacher of singing except that it was a person who taught other people to sing. Period. If I claim to be a singing teacher then I am.

Is it any wonder, then, that those who are in the medical or clinical professions do not readily distinguish singing teachers one from the other easily? We who teach singing do not even have ourselves organized such that there is a licensing body or a regulating agency to give us “papers”. If you take NYSTA’s PDP course, (which you should), or Dr. Ingo Titze’s Vocology course (which you should if you want to know voice science), or if you take my courses (Somatic Voicework™ – which I would like you to do, of course), then you can put those certifications after your name, alongside whatever degrees you hold, if you do.

If, like me, you are not a college graduate, you have nothing to distinguish you to your medical or clinical colleagues at all except maybe your website, your writings (if they are published), or your visibility (if you have a lot of PR or fame). None of these things will say, sadly, whether or not you are good at what you do.

There are well known and successful teachers of singing here in New York City and all over the world who (a) do not sing at all, (b) sing badly, (c) never sang well in the first place, (d) never really had any kind of performing career, (e) have few professional credentials, (f) sang well at one point but stopped quite some time ago and don’t sing anymore (g), never have had professional singers in their studio (h) will never have professional students in their studio [assuming you would like that population] (i) have never joined a professional teaching organization (j) will never join a professional teaching organization, (k) do not care to keep up their skills in either teaching or singing through any kind of continuing education, (l) do not know that there are teaching skills to have in the first place, (m) don’t know vocal function or vocal health or the difference between them and don’t want to know, (n) do not attend any professional congresses or meetings, (o) do not read professional journals or books on singing (p) do not measure themselves against any other teachers of singing, (q) have poor musicianship skills, (r) do not understand performing skills, (s) have a very limited scope or focus on what they teach and how they teach it, (t) cannot sing what they teach, (u) assume that only the talented can sing, (v) blame the students when they fail, consistently, to make progress, (w) cannot speak intelligently to an otolaryngologist or speech language pathologist, (x) put all singing into one big category, usually “classical”, (y) regard singing as something you learn strictly by singing songs and (z) charge a lot of money for any combination of things on this alphabetical listing.

Still, all singing teachers are the same, especially to the doctors who don’t know the difference. If you hold a PhD or a DMA and you are teaching at a well-known college, and you have some course certifications after your name, they figure you know what you are doing. You may not know how to work with voices effectively, but they can’t know that unless someone tells them, and who would do that? Only a singer who has had a negative experience and that can be a long slow way to gather information, one person at a time.

If you teach singing and write a brochure that blows your own horn, you can be seen as being “suspect”. There is still an aura of “only those who are desperate advertise”. I know a number of teachers who boldly advertise themselves and they are not desperate in any way. If you teach singing and advertise your own method, other people who teach singing who do not have their own “method” can find yours suspect because you advertise it and for that reason only. If you “make a name for yourself” by teaching at conferences and congresses (always for free) you can be resented by others who were not asked to do so themselves. If you are successful as a teacher of singing because many high level professional singers work with you, you can be maligned by those who do not create this kind of success (assuming they want that) because they are jealous.

Still, all singing teachers are the same unless they succeed in bringing themselves to the attention of the outside world and the other voice care professions.

A first order conundrum.

Are there any Voice Police?

I wish there were. They would write tickets for singing violations and make sure that all the singers are obeying the law (of vocal function). Wouldn’t that be good?

No, probably not. We need diversity in this world and we need the messed up, the troubled, the difficult and the truly shoddy in order to appreciate the really beautiful and amazing. This is a world of dualities and we need contrast in order to understand things. We learn often by comparison……what we like, what we don’t.

I am so critical as a person. Those who know me know that I am too talkative, too opinionated, too over-extended, too bossy, and too much most of the time. That’s how it is with people who are Alpha Dogs: driven, passionate, forceful, overbearing……I have been accused of being a bulldozer, but no one has ever described me as being “laid back”. We are the people who shake things up, get them to change, make a difference and we always encounter resistance, difficulty, retribution, and sometimes direct attacks. But if you know you want to be a revolutionary you have to also know that by being a catalyst for change you will also be a target for the wrath of those who don’t want to change, especially those who do not want to be WRONG.

I gripe about a lot of things and I have a clear picture of how they should be, most particularly in relation to singing. I hold my beliefs strongly and am not afraid to say what’s on my mind. I understand, however, that no matter how strongly I feel, the feelings are, in the end, just mine, just emotion, just energy, and not any more “right” or “significant” than what time I had lunch or whether it’s raining outside. I am not my opinions, I have them but they do not have me.

So, even when I write or speak about the things that need to be improved overall in the profession, or of things that are out of line in any particular vocalist or performance, and when I sound like I think I am the “voice police”, I know that the world is the world and that nothing ever stays still or remains balanced. That would not be in keeping with the cycles of life.

My desire is to have our profession, that of singing and of teaching singing, particularly for CCM styles, but for any style, be all that it can be. I want it to serve the needs of singers, of teachers, of the music, of the public who listen, and the larger world where music and singing can be a healing force for good. I want teachers to seek what’s serves the student’s well-being, and I want singers to seek the truth that resides within until it can be expressed in the way that most satisfies them.

I would like to ask, again, for a large-scale, in-the-field study of professionally successful, vocally healthy singers that would examine their vocal patterns and parameters.

The study would look at those in musical styles that generally have loud volume requirements which would be:

1) opera/traditional music theater, 2) rock/pop/contemporary music theater, 3)gospel/R&B

It would include only those vocalists who had been at the top of their profession for not less than 10 years with no injuries caused by performance.

It would look at the following:

Vocal range in pitches, highest to lowest or vice versa

Decibels range, soft to loud, and vice versa

Vocal quality: clear, noisy, nasal, breathy

Vowel sound quality: 1) literal undistorted, 2) literal modified deliberately, 3) distorted, but not deliberately, 4) distorted for artistic purposes as a choice

Length and type of training for singing or speech, if any

Type of practice or vocal warm-up

Physical habits including diet, exercise and rest

Awareness of and use of muscles effecting breathing, both inhalation and exhalation

Knowledge of “vocal function” (what do they know about how human beings make sound?)

The purpose of this research would be to establish norms for professionals. If possible, people who have sung for 25 years or more would be studied in greater detail.

Data evaluation would include looking for similarities anywhere in any category, similarities by men and by women, similarities between singers in any given style, and similarities in approaches to vocal maintenance. Differences would also been noted.

There are have never been any studies like this. Therefore there are no norms for those who teach. Nothing to use as reference. If you have been around as long as I have, you have your own life experience as a resource, but that leaves out a great big bunch of people who are teaching who are just beginning. Where do they go for help? Right now, the only guidance they get is finding someone like me to be a mentor. Not helpful for the majority of teachers. There are studies on opera singers and other elite singers but they were very small and were done for other reasons.

I know the argument against this has always been, “Where do we get these singers? Will they let us study them?” My answer is, you have to go to them, you have to explain why you want them, you have to ask them to participate and you have to give the results of the research and help them see what they have given the world. You must ask them to do the research. Also, if you want money to do the research, you have to first find the singers who will do the study. If you get the top people, there will be money. How could there not be?

Someone out there, this research is just waiting for you. Give it a shot. We need it.

Over the last two decades singing teachers have worked to be able to understand medical terminology, vocal health, medical treatment of singers with illnesses, and of what happens in surgery. We have educated ourselves about ailments like reflux and learned how allergies effect the vocal folds and sinuses. We have looked at photos of throats and vocal folds and we have become familiar with anatomy and physiology of the throat and neck.

In return, some doctors have learned about singing. A few. A little.

Very few doctors, however, come to voice conferences unless they are invited as guest speakers. Even at the Voice Foundation Symposium: Care of the Professional Voice, which was started by a doctor and is currently run by a doctor, almost no doctors attend the sessions presented by teachers of singing or speech.

Why should this be a problem?

I attend medical conferences (I’m an invited guest). The presentations are done by doctors sometimes with the assistance of Speech Language Pathologists. The singing teachers are few and can comment but not too many do.

Here is an example of what I heard at one conference a while back.

The young doctor, from Florida, had a man present to him in his office with the complaint of his voice not being strong enough. He was a minister and he found he could not do his sermons effectively because his voice was too weak. The doctor decided to do some surgery on his throat to “tighten up” (my words) his vocal folds so they could close more firmly. The surgery was successful and the man ended up feeling like his voice was “better”.

Why had the doctor not thought to send the man to a speech teacher or a singing teacher? Why would his only resort have been surgery? Doesn’t that seem like using a shovel to kill a fly?

No other doctor in the room made the suggestion that some kind of training would have done the same, or an even better, job. Not one of the SLPs said a word. I didn’t speak up. (It wasn’t like I could have said anything as a comment when I was just a guest.) Still, I thought it was very interesting to note that the doctor seemed pleased enough with his treatment outcome to present it to his colleagues in New York City. I am sure he was absolutely clueless that any kind of applied intervention would have helped or even that it was in existence.

Medical school doesn’t teach young ENTs about singing or the teaching thereof. It does not inform them what experienced teachers can do for a voice, or even what singing training (based on function) can do to help both speech and song. The ENTs in training do not have an opportunity to develop awareness of what can be done for an injured voice either through non-medical, non-surgical intervention.

Here’s another case, also presented by a young doctor, this time from NY City.

His patient was a young vocalist who was performing R&B but also teaching and working in a non-music job. She had vocal fold problems, reflux and other issues. She had therapy, but because she was paying out of pocket, not a lot of it, and she kept using her voice while she was trying to heal and re-train it, which is never optimal. She had several surgical interventions from this doctor but never really got better. Her problems would go away but then return. He felt there was nothing else he could do for her as a surgeon and was despairing of her ever returning to normal, thinking she would not be able to sing professionally again.

One of the other “senior” (well-known) singing teachers in the room did speak up. He said that expert teachers of singing work often with “ruined” voices (or ones that are badly damaged and not likely to return to normal function) and help the performers do a very decent job working professionally in whatever style they choose to sing. The other teachers in the room seconded that opinion. The MD seemed surprised and doubtful. I felt sorry for the singer. Perhaps if she had had less surgery and more training she would have avoided all the trauma that even simple surgery causes.

Why would it be that an otolaryngologist would not seek out information about singing teachers who work with professional rock singers or gospel singers or any CCM singer and find out what, exactly, they do so they can help their patients get appropriate care? Even if we assume they have the patient’s well-being upper most in their mind, how can the doctors understand what is possible if they don’t go find out? It would take some motivation to do so and, believe me, there is far less motivation on the medical side of the fence to find out about singing teachers and what we have to offer than there is on the pedagogical side of the fence to learn about medicine.

We hold doctors in a place of esteem in our society. We do not necessarily have that same kind of respect for any other profession. While things are different than they were decades ago in that they are slightly less formal than they used to be, we still tend to think of doctors as having a certain kind of power or authority that can be intimidating. There’s nothing wrong with this, necessarily, but if it gives them the impression that they do not have anything to learn from the other related professions, it can be a problem. The evidence is strong that it is this attitude that prevails. If it were not so, then all the voice or singing related conferences would have lots of voice specialists in attendance (as audience, not presenters), and all the medical conferences would have singing teachers presenting information about how they work with all kinds of vocal issues in singers or professional speakers.

I don’t like the imbalance. I would be happier if those of us who teach singing and have decades of experience working with singers of all levels in all areas of the profession would be given a level platform on which to interact with their medical colleagues. I don’t see this happening any time soon. Perhaps it is because the medical profession is still largely dominated by men. (I can think of only four female ENTS in NYC but I know at least a dozen men). Perhaps it is because the motivation just isn’t there without a financial incentive. By that I mean, if not knowing about singing teachers would make a doctor look less skilled or less than knowledgeable about vocal health and therefore make him less competitive in the medical marketplace, then maybe there would be incentive to become informed. This, sadly, is absolutely not the case. Therefore, the only reason an MD might want to learn about singing or the teaching of singing is personal. Some have but most have not. It won’t change until and unless singing teachers can find a way to raise their visibility or one of the teachers is able to write or publish about this particular issue in the journals doctors read.

What do you think? Is this something that can be changed?

If I could make “the rules” I would pass one that said: NO MORE NEW TERMINOLOGY ALLOWED!

The need to name things run deeply in our collective consciousness. Oliver Sacks explained this beautifully in an essay long ago in which he stated that by naming things we make them real to ourselves. We distinguish that one thing is not another thing, or said another way, that this is not that. We name things generically first; man/woman, tree/flower, dog/bird. Then, later, we name them specifically; Al/Alice, pine/rose, terrier/thrush. Maybe after that, we name them further; Albert Anthony/Alice Marie, blue spruce/miniature rose, West Highland terrier/American robin. Each level of naming makes things more specific. It clarifies things for ourselves and others.

It’s said in the Bible that Adam went around the Garden of Eden naming the animals. I take that as a metaphor. We all name the new things we discover. Scientists are often the ones who get to pick names for new species or new stars but people who invent new products or services (laptops, search engines) can do that, too.

What we have in voice, however, is really quite awful in terms of “naming” things. There are so many words, used so many ways by so many people, that it causes great consternation to those of us who are in voice-related fields. We are moving towards more scientific terminology, thankfully, and that is the best thing to happen in a long time, but we are not going there quickly and there are still far more people who do not use scientific terminology than those that do. Further, even in teaching singing, where subjective words have been the mainstay for hundreds of years, those individuals who have created a “method” of teaching have found it necessary to add their own new words or phrases to the already overcrowded stew that we have. Everyone, that is, but me.

I stuck to the words generated by the profession (words that were used primarily on Broadway) and those that were accepted in the pedagogical community going back at least to the time of Garcia. I did not make up or add one word of my own, although I did create the phrase “Contemporary Commercial Music” to cover those styles. [That seems to be working.] I use scientific words as much as possible and plain English words, not “voice teacher jargon”. In other words, if the waitress at the diner wouldn’t understand my words, I don’t use them.

I don’t use: spin, focus, float, project, anchor, compress, resonate (as a verb), release (as a verb), “mask”, or vibrate. I do not tell people to retract the false folds, constrict the aryepiglottic sphincter, or go to Larynx Position No. 3. I do not ask them to make their heads or faces vibrate, or to manipulate anything (except temporarily during an exercise). Except for CCM, I have not added one word or term to the lexicon that didn’t already exist long before I came along.

I recently heard that someone who teaches rock singing in Europe has declared that we no longer use the word belt. Now it’s called “edge”. Says she.

My response is, “Oh, really?” Perhaps she should take out a full page ad in Back Stage or Billboard or Variety so the musical and theatrical communities can know that she has decided the language they have been using and still use is “out of date”.

Guess what, the MARKETPLACE couldn’t care less. Casting directors and producers do not care what we call the sounds. They make up their own terms anyway and they don’t check with us first to see if they are acceptable. The are only interested in the sound themselves, not what they are called or who made up the descriptions.

Further, what’s even worse, as I explained a couple of posts ago, is the misuse of a term that was already in existence and had a history, usurping it and applying it to something else that, also, was already labeled. Calling belting “twang” when belting was already associated with “brassiness” was a disaster and that mess still continues. Country/western singing already had its own credentials that were quite valid. Using “twang” for Broadway instead of the music that comes out of Nashville was a big mistake. It confuses what people should be listening for in music theater and country music both.

The word hamburger is well known. Millions of people know what it is and use it to define a specific food. If I decide the best way for me to distinguish myself as a maker of a new way to cook hamburgers is by calling my food a “fried ground beef pancake”, have I added anything to the world of cuisine? Am I making this phrase up to clarify the way people cook hamburgers or am I just making up something to show how clever I am? Am I making a contribution to the field that benefits everyone (including the people who eat hamburgers no matter how they are cooked) or am I just trying to get you to see me as being better than everyone else?

There are very few options when it comes to making sound. We all have vocal folds and a vocal tract. We all have an air supply in our lungs. We can configure things inside to produce certain kinds of categories of sound within the acoustic spectrum available to us as human beings. You can imagine that you have discovered something that no one else has ever discovered, but that is very unlikely and hubris of the highest sort. The most you can have found is a new way to explain it or communicate it to others. Making up terminology isn’t necessary unless you have a really small vocabulary or a very limited sense of self.

I don’t need to be a “voice-ologist” or a “functional singing educator”, or “sound facilitator”. I am content with being a singing teacher, or, in some circumstances, a singing voice specialist (not a term I invented). If you study singing, and you run into someone who has made up a new vocal term or has decided to call him or herself something that didn’t exist before, but what they are doing is just another version of what has been done for hundreds of years — teach singing — RUN AWAY!

On my travels, I frequently hear “I am classically trained” when I talk to singers or teachers of singing. This is said with some level of emphatic emphasis.

“Classically trained”.

Is this a thing? Can someone find me an unequivocal explanation of what “classical training” is?

All you need to dispel the idea that classical training is one, codified, organized, clearcut, definite thing is to put a group of singing teachers in one room and ask them to agree to an explanation of these two words.

There are all kinds of opinions about what the sound should be, how it should be produced or taught, how it works, and how to apply those sounds to material. There are ideas about how voices should be categorized (weight, size, range, color, etc.) and there are ideas about how to breathe (and where). The people who like everything “forward, in the masque”, don’t generally agree with the folks who like “a lot of space in the back” or a “warm, creamy tone”. The belly out people argue with the belly up and in people. The science crowd is likely to by-pass the emotional expression component but the vocalists who like emotion may not be all that concerned with voice science.

There are some things that almost everyone agrees upon. They are: Do not move your upper body or shoulders during an inhale. Try to get the sound to “vibrate” somewhere in your head and face. Do something with your middle torso while you are singing to help the tone feel solid and steady. Learn to keep your mouth open for long periods of time. Relax, relax, relax whatever is above your collar bone.

There are things that are expected, but can vary a little. They are: keep a consistent and continuous vibrato going, go smoothly from one note to the next (legato), pronounce consonants clearly and crisply but don’t over pronounce them, be pitch accurate, don’t scoop into the notes (although glissando up and down is OK in romantic music if it’s moderate in amount).

As far as I can determine, that’s about it. Everything else is a personal judgement call.

Should the jaw be dropped with the mouth open a lot and the lips narrow and rounded or should it be not too open with the face in a more “smiley” position or should it change all the time? Should the consonants be minimized in order to create a seamless line or should the words be pronounced as clearly as possible no matter whether it sounds optimal or not? Should the abdominal wall go up and in during exhalation or stay down and out as it is on inhalation? Should the ribs be opened or should they be quiet? Is it OK for the vibrato to get very slow and wide? If so, how slow and how wide? Is there an optimal “place” to find resonance in the tone or does it move around from vowel to vowel and pitch to pitch? How do you determine what material is best suited to a voice and/or person? Is it the text? Is it the tessitura? Is it the orchestration? The language? The role? If it is all of these things, how do they interact?

If you have a fantastic voice and good vocal production but are not a good communicator are you still an “excellent vocalist”? If you are not such a good technician but you are an excellent musician and linguist, is that enough to “get you by”?

If you are “classically trained” does that teach you automatically, without any other subsequent training, how to sound appropriate and healthy in rock music? if you are classically trained, does that mean you can automatically sing any role in your voice category (SATB) in a Broadway show? If you are classical trained, does it mean that you have to generate “the singer’s formant cluster” whether you want to or not? If you are classically trained, does that mean you have studied for 4 years, 6 years, 10 years or an entire lifetime? If you are classically trained, does it mean that your training automatically makes you an excellent teacher, and that you also automatically understand all voices, especially those that are least like your own, and allow you to work with them?

If you read the research on “classical training” you will see that the phrase has been used in research for quite a while. “The subjects were classically trained………”. Why hasn’t anyone questioned this?

If I said to you my doctor was “medically trained” wouldn’t you look at me with raised eyebrows? Aren’t all doctors medically trained? Do they get one standard kind of training as pre-meds or medical students or do the colleges vary it from course to course and school to school? Do we make certain assumptions about “doctors” and what they must know or do we think that it’s OK if each doctor knows only certain things? Do the specialists take additional training for a reason or is it just because “medical training” is inadequate if you are REALLY serious? Ridiculous, no? But apply some of these ideas to the profession of teaching singing and then think……how different is it? How different should it be?

There is plenty of confusion about “classical singing” except when you are the person doing it and you know you are or you are the person in the audience listening to it and you know it is the thing you hear. Outside of that, there is no set definition and there isn’t any reason why this dichotomy has never been discussed or written about. Except here.

Why there is so much confusion about belting? Why is everyone so confused?

There are quite a few “research oriented” teachers who either teach belting from a “I don’t do it but the students can” point of view (!), or “I can teach belting even though I could never belt myself” attitude, or a “belting is just shouting and singing in the nose” idea, who are quite willing to “define”or explain belting for others. Some of these teachers do not sound very acceptable as classical singers, so you can only wonder how they have the nerve to explain or teach belting in any form. There are also singers who belt very well but do not know a thing about vocal function or voice science so their ability to describe what they are doing is very limited. It may be that they are very good at doing the sound but have no idea how to explain to others what that “doing” is.

There are other reasons why there is no clear-cut definition of belting. A good many of the people who have tried to “define” or “explain” belting have:

a) only perceived it “from the outside”
b) not looked at registration as being a key ingredient in belting
c) not understood “chest register” as a component in vocal fold response, or a function of vocal fold behavior coupled with a specific (aural) sound quality, but think of it as a kind of “resonance” (or vowel sound) behavior
d) never gone by, or even been interested in, what the marketplace was seeking (as found on Broadway, where the term was originally coined in the 20s or 30s)*
[*I consider this a very important issue on its own.]

In my opinion, so much of what is now “accepted” as research on belting should not have been, but there was no one around “back in the day” to dispute what early research was done, by one person in particular. When I raise this issue at various congresses, I am seen as griping in a “sour grapes” way. I can assure you that that is not the case. If I thought that what had been published was all very reasonable and highly accurate, I would have been just fine with that. However, I, like most of the NYC teachers who were already teaching belting, didn’t go along with the precepts presented because we didn’t think the sound was good or even viable, and certainly it didn’t sound healthy. Unfotunately, what didn’t make sense 30 plus years ago still does not. It added to the confusion about belting, and that confusion continues to grow.

Research done on just one person (including the paper done on me) isn’t particularly representative of a larger population, particularly if the research subjects are primarily teachers and not working singers. Research done on college students or faculty or on those who are emerging professionals without longstanding careers, isn’t representative either.

In research done on one person, in some cases by that same person, you can get a good representative model, as some of the new researchers have, or you can get a very skewed model, as I believe was the case in the original research.

The research that was done on me in Sweden in the late 80s was criticized because I was the only subject and what I did may not have been the same as what others did. I refuted some of these criticisms by establishing that my sounds were representative of the marketplace. In that research, I sang with the same sounds I had made in performances of music theater material. The shows were all done in Connecticut. The qualities were: belting — Ella in “Bells Are Ringing”, legit soprano and mix in Magnolia in “Show Boat” and Marian in “The Music Man”. I also sang these vocal qualities in the shows I did after I came to New York City in 1975. I was in a children’s musical (pop/rock, mix), a choral presentation (folk, mix), and sang at Riverside Church and Marble Collegiate Church as section leader in the soprano section. There were other performances, but it varied in a similar manner. I took my vocal cues from the New York professional productions in which I was cast or from the concert hall or religious liturgy.

I cite these examples to indicate that I was singing in vocal qualities that were accepted by the marketplace as being OK. If they had not been, I would not have worked or been cast in anything. The marketplace determined what it wanted. Since I was self-employed, I was highly motivated to sing in a way that got me work.

Unfortunately, much of the early research done on belting was not accompanied by audio recordings of the examples being studied or evaluated when being submitted for peer review. The author of a large number of these research studies used herself as the subject, deciding that what she was doing was belting. When I heard her sing these examples, I was stunned. It certainly wasn’t belting to me. It was a squeezed shout. It didn’t sound like anyone I had heard on Broadway or anywhere else. Nevertheless, the scientists who accepted her research and allowed it to be published must have taken her word that what she did was representative of belting. They would not have known if they had heard her whether or not it was good or bad, market viable or not. The statistics were given and they were accepted and published but no one talked about the market viability or the health of her vocal examples, or the pertinence of her terminology.

She chose to use the word “twang” to describe the quality she assigned to belting. This word, for years used in Nashville to connote the sound as found in that area of the country in its music, was meant to reflect the sound of a plucked banjo string. The Broadway word (and remember, it was on Broadway that the term belting was first used) was “brassy”, as in a trumpet. Ethel Merman’s voice was “brassy” and she carried like a trumpet…..clearly, and with energy, right to the back of the house. A plucked banjo string does NOT sound like a trumpet, but to this one researcher, it was the same thing. Not good. I consider this a very important issue on its own.

Without basing the research on a large population of professional belters, or even trying to find a small group of these individuals to investigate, a rather large body of “research” was published that was based on a skewed perception of what was being investigated. The work has been around a long time now and has influenced many people all over the world. It isn’t that all of what she looked at was wrong or not useful, it’s just that the “OK” stuff and the “not OK” stuff were lumped together with no one there to clarify what worked and what did not.

There are other issues involved here.

If you have people who do not belt well as subjects, if you have researchers who do not know what the belt sound should be, if you do research without also having experts listen to submitted examples (typically, there are no audio files for singing research evaluation, just written data), and if you do not care whether or not the marketplace where belting is found matters, how can that be good? Can you imagine people studying opera who had no idea what good operatic voices sound like? What if the evaluators couldn’t tell the difference between Renee Fleming and Florence Foster Jenkins? Well, that’s what we’ve had in a lot of the belting research.

There are other factors at work, too, in published belt research. The senior scientists factor into what has been presented about belting, but not always in a way that has been helpful. This matters because their input into this issue has a significant impact.

Belting as it existed in past times can be quite different than it is now. This difference is pretty much ignored by everyone who is looking into research. To them, all belting is the same. I make the analogy of “early music”. In the 50s and 60s, Handel was considered an early music composer and was sung, pretty much, at least here in NYC, by very light voices in a straight tone. That was the expectation about style. After Beverly Sills did her Cleopatra in the 70s at City Opera, the style expectations began to change and now we have Renee Fleming and David Daniels filling the Met with substantial sound, and both have vibrato. Things change. High rock belters do not sound exactly like Al Jolson or Ethel Merman, two of the most well known early American belters.

Some researchers, in Europe, Asia or South America, are using their native singers singing American music in CCM styles, but without regard to their historic American roots or to any accurate, USA-based, professionally accepted, standard performance practices about any one style. Some of these people have published research on belting and, therefore, their work has been accepted by the larger “voice world”, not so much on its own terms but because of who guided the research. In other words, if you use non-native American singers who perform American gospel or R&B songs in Sao Paulo, Tokyo, Amsterdam or Stockholm, and you have no idea how the songs are/were intended to be performed in the USA, you may not actually know that your research subjects are not producing what the world marketplace would consider professionally viable sounds, musically speaking. In many cases, if a young researcher is being guided by someone with a recognized profile in research, that probably counts more than almost anything else in getting published, for political reasons. If the research mentors don’t know the difference, and many do not, and if they do not actually try to find out what the marketplace expectations are, and many do not try because they do not care, everyone involved in the peer review then assumes the research singing excerpts are acceptable, when they may not be. If the paper is then published, then it has just replicated the problem of the original research from decades ago. This does not contribute to the clarity of information being gathered about belting.

As long as academia and science are deciding what [they think] belting is or isn’t, without conducting research “in the field” alongside professional belters of long standing and experienced casting directors or producers who can corroborate for the researchers that the person claiming to be a belter, is, in fact, a belter of high quality, and one who understands whatever style is being performed, we are in still in trouble. I realize that this may be very hard to do, but that doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t have been done in the first place or that it should continue to be not done now. A real researcher will deal with the difficulties somehow or other.

So, confusion continues to reign.

If no one writes about all of this in a significant publication, it will never get addressed and corrected. Maybe 100 years from now someone will dig around and realize, “Hey, this was never right in the first place” like they do presently with assumptions about dinosaurs, (archeologists are changing what they thought they knew about dinosaurs virtually every day), and rectify it with newer knowledge. [I can only hope].

What does it take to produce an old work well?

Is it like being the person who restores great art? The person who scrapes off years of dirt and soot, cleaning and repairing, maybe even re-painting certain areas or restoring the canvas? The restorers do this so that the public can see the great work as the artist intended it to be seen, so that it’s greatness can continue on for generations.

Have you ever wondered why no one has put Venus di Milo’s arms back? They’ve been gone for a long time, right? Why hasn’t someone “fixed up” the Parthenon? We know how it was built and how to make it new again. Why not?

The mentality about what gets “fixed”, what gets left alone and what gets invisibly restored is one that the art world discusses, sometimes with controversy.

We don’t see that so much, however, with music and dance. Somehow, it seems as if certain works can be “redone” with impunity. Perhaps no one has as yet had the gaul to rewrite Mozart’s notes, or Wagner’s, but many people have completely thrown out all of the meaning of the story, it’s characters and it’s power just to be “different”. The idea that this shows creativity or someone sheds new light on the works in question in simply stupid. Would it be helpful to repaint Rembrandt’s “Nightwatch” with the men in modern dress so young people could “relate to it better”!

It takes quite a bit of thought, of insight, of humility, really, to approach a work that has been seen by many people for a long time that it has become “a classic”. It means that you are entering into a rarified atmosphere, one where you are joining with others who have been perceived as being “great”. If you are to align yourself with that which has make a work endure, should you not do so with a feeling of respect, maybe even reverence for the work itself? It takes much more skill and a truly unique approach to do what has been done many times in the same way others have done it, but with a fresh attitude. That’s not the same as changing the work itself to “express yourself”.

How would it be if someone came along to “re-choreograph” the work of George Balanchine? The idea of “upgrading” Mr. B because his work is “out of step with the times” would horrify most ballet fans. Why is it then that no one says boo to “Eurotrash” productions of operas, or of “revisions” of Broadway shows that make the original shows almost unrecognizable?

Audiences for classical music have been dwindling for at least a generation. If you go to a classical concert, there are many grey heads in the audience. The companies, big and small, all struggle to stay afloat financially and many have just disappeared. The lament is that young people do not want to attend these performances and that may indeed be the case. Classical (or any kind) of music education has been partially or totally eliminated from many schools. No one thinks we need to appreciate it, so no one teaches people how to appreciate it. It should come as no surprise then that the audiences who are still in the seats are the folks who are old enough to have gotten that same education in school.

If arts organizations are to flourish, they need to do only a few things. One is to make sure that the works they present are respected by the directors, set designers, costume and lighting designers and the conductors. Two is to make sure that the people who are cast are REALLY REALLY good, either actors or singers, and that THEY are respected. Three is that the audience should be offered before EVERY SINGLE PERFORMANCE of an opera or concert, some kind of educational lecture (optionally), to make sure they can learn to appreciate what is being presented, so that they will want to return.

If the “money people” (the ones who do the hiring, and the boards who do the fund raising) continue to approach the performing arts as if “starting over” is a good thing, they should not be surprised when people stay away in droves. Any fool can start over, doing whatever he or she wants, with the idea that their own ego-tainted brilliance will coat the classic works with their particular “genius”. When the standards are thrown out the window, when there is no one to say “this is awful”, when anyone can do just about anything to an opera, a Broadway musical or any other work of music, things are in terrible decline. The audiences are NOT fools, and the being in charge should be paying to that if they want to stay in business.

We are entitled to some very basic things. Here in the USA we are entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Even these three things can be viewed with some degree of perspective. We can all agree on what it means to be be alive. We used to think we knew what liberty was but post 9/11 I’m not so sure that we have that organized, and the pursuit of happiness is tricky. Some would say that in order to pursue happiness you have to be able to have other things handled first, like food, clothing and shelter. If you don’t have those, it’s hard to pursue anything else, especially happiness, unless you are one of the fortunate few who views happiness as a strictly internal state of affairs. Blessed souls, those.

In times of abundance, when there is a lot to be shared by all, even those at the bottom rung of the ladder can become accustomed to having various things given to them by others. That makes for a bad situation when the abundance stops. The balance here swings back and forth and societies wrestle with the ups and downs through the ages. What does not change, or seems to have thus far not changed, is that somehow there are always people who manage to do better than others at accumulating things that have material value. In a capitalist society, such as ours, the people who manage to make and keep the most money and material goods are generally highly regarded, even if they are not very “nice”. There is no rule that forces them to share their wealth (not even one cent has to be shared with others). Sometimes, due to their wealth, these individuals end up holding important positions in the public fabric of life, perhaps being in a position of power over others. When that occurs, things can be very dangerous indeed. Those that are not so good at playing the game, for whatever reason, are at the behest of those that are. If the folks in charge are hoarders of wealth AND power, then the system becomes out of balance.

How does this apply to singing? If we live in a time when those with abundant vocal gifts are recognized and rewarded with opportunities to share those gifts with the world, everyone can join in the joy of listening to those voices and be lifted up by their grace, beauty, truth and fullness. Everyone in society gains because there are so many great singers, easy to find in affordable performances, making it possible for all to share in their gifts. If, on the other hand, we live in a time when great voices go unrecognized, everyone is diminished. Without such glorious instruments to illuminate music of all kinds, many never know what a fabulous experience it is to sit in the presence of a magnificent singer with an unforgettable voice and listen to a once in a lifetime rendition of a profound song. I refer here to live performance, not recordings, because no matter how good the recording or the equipment on which it is played, it is never the same as a live rendition. I make the analogy of never seeing a sunset, never seeing the ocean, never being able to hear laughter. What a loss it is not to have one or more of these experiences.

Currently, the only kind of singing most people hear is what’s on commercial radio, nighttime TV, MTV, and what is available through the net. Certainly there are some excellent singers and voices that are celebrated at the present time, but there are also many many others that are only barely mediocre. There are also people with careers who are not musical, expressive, or even interesting. They succeed because they get lucky or work hard to be recognized. It’s harder than ever to hear real voices in more or less accurate replication (without electronic manipulation or enhancement), and nearly impossible, in some places, to hear them in person. I am sure there are millions of people who have never, even once, heard a beautiful, well trained, and expressive singer in person, singing something traditional, without any help from electronic amplification (although straight, more or less simple amplification that only helps the voice cover a bigger space wouldn’t be too terrible, as it doesn’t do anything but make the voice louder.)

Over this holiday season while out and about shopping and walking around, I have heard recordings of some of the most dreadfully hideous excuses for singing in shops, malls, and plazas. Truly awful. I have also heard some live singing, but not too much. The recordings feature singers who are out of tune, who lack of expression, have no clue whatsoever about the deeper meaning of the lyrics or ability to share them in a straightforward way with their audiences. I can only assume that neither the “artists” nor the engineers had ears to hear the intonation issues or had the musical values to care one way or the other. It’s certainly not that it’s hard to fix pitches these days, still, no one bothered. Why not? Does singing off pitch qualify as “professional” these days?

I have also had within recent weeks the opportunity to adjudicate a rather important vocal competition. Some of the submissions were not very worthy but quite a few were nothing less than spectacular. It was difficult for me and the other judges to imagine that any of these candidates would not be winners, but because there were so many, we knew this would not be the case and that some would lose. ALL of these remarkable people should have been famous, they should have had world class careers, because they had all the ingredients necessary as singers to have an impact on the world. Quite a few were not young (at least in their forties). It was both exciting to hear them and sad to know that there were still obscure. Surely, these people, if any, were “entitled” to a career, and a very successful one. If only it were so that being worthy was enough.

Those who are in arts education must do all they can to educate people about singers and singing and make sure that the truly great voices are recognized, not buried. We must do all we can to assist those who have worked to develop their natural gifts and who are primed with both experience and training to take what was given out into the world for all to enjoy. Everyone is “entitled” to hear great singers and great singing, in all kinds of music. We must not let this goal be ignored.

Here in New York City many, maybe most, people understand the value of good psychotherapy. In the artistic community it is simply taken for granted that therapy is expected at some point in life. We forget here how much that is not the case elsewhere.

A great many people have the idea that psychology and its partner, psychotherapy, is something for people who are considered by others to be crazy, or maybe, more kindly, mentally ill. They think that deciding to go into therapy is the same as admitting to others that we are crazy. It is not seen as a tool to help grapple with life’s struggles and challenges, it is not seen as a sign that someone is actually human and humble, reaching out for help when help seems warranted and accepting it willingly. It is not seen as a way to know oneself more deeply and consequently be a better person for that knowledge.

Since artists are required to know themselves intimately, inside out, we generally take all the help we can find to deal with our mental and emotional reactions to life’s events. Most of us are at least a little knowledgable about the main trends or kinds of approaches that have been part of mainstream medical and therapeutic circles for over a hundred years. Unfortunately, many people in this country have little to no awareness of Freud, Jung, Horney, Erickson, Perlz, or what was loosely called “The Human Potential Movement” in the late 60s and early 70s. That’s a shame.

The underlying premises of psychotherapy, no matter what approach one discovers or chooses, is that we all have unconscious attitudes, thoughts, beliefs, behavior and reactions to certain kinds of events or people and that these things can get in our way. Patterns that emerge to cause us trouble in coping with life may be completely out of our awareness and, therefore, out of our control, but persistent, even if the details vary from stimulus to stimulus. If you always “get left out”, if you always “get ignored”, there are reasons, and they have to do with YOU, not others.

The idea that someone can become “better” is in itself radical. Most people go through life with the idea that “I am who I am” without ever thinking about what that means. They do not believe they need to improve, they do not have any idea that their behavior can be inappropriate or self-defeating, arrogant and insulting or anything other than “whatever it is”. Dealing with such individuals can be very frustrating because they have no context in which to look at themselves in an evaluative or even critical manner. “I’m right because I am” is usually intractable. If such a person is in charge of a department, division, or (as we have seen), an entire country, it is actually frightening.

Yet, somehow, such behavior is not only tolerated, in many ways it is supported. As long as it is considered “odd” or “weird” to investigate one’s deeply personal reactions to life, especially with professional assistance, instead of it being a way to admit that no one is perfect and that we all have clay feet, we will perpetuate the notion that self-examination is suspect. We will give those who hold their opinions as being “the only way” increased power. We will undermine any possibility that human beings can learn that there are more ways to go through life than the reactions developed as a child, and which continue through into old age, until direct deliberate intervention stops those childish reactions in their tracks.

If you come to NYC to be a professional singer, on Broadway, you will be expected to confront yourself and overcome your inhibitions, your mannerisms, your limitations, and your fears as a part of your job. You will not be allowed to hide behind any kind of cover while performing, but instead will be expected to reveal your soul in your singing, your drama and your work. Not to do that is to lose the respect of your peers. What’s worse, though, is to run away from looking at your own inner world because it is there, and only there, that life reveals itself.

What is true within is also true when projected out. If you hate yourself, you will find it hard to like anyone who likes you. If you are insecure, you will find it hard to believe anyone who tells you that you are confident, thinking they are trying to manipulate you for their own gain. If you think you are easy to ridicule or if you regard yourself as a “joke”, you will find it hard to think that others can regard you with respect, even if they say they do. If you fear that someone will take advantage of you, your very fear will somehow draw you to encounter a person who turns out to do just that.

Artists, who are often more aware and sensitive to life than non-artists, can react strongly to even benign-seeming events. Artists live in their subjective worlds, with strong emotional responses, and with bold passionate opinions about their creativity, their livelihoods, and their daily lives. If you spend most of your time in a corporate office where everyone wears a suit and no one ever raises their voice above a quiet conversational level, you truly have no idea what it’s like to live in a world where the individuals in it are vividly alive, vitally active, and incredibly vulnerable to even the tiniest things. Artists are not crazy because they are sensitive, they are not crazy because they feel things more deeply than many, they are not “unstable” because they know that some events in one’s past can color the present in a negative manner. In fact, most real artists who want to make a significant contribution to life are not unaware of all of these things. They go into psychotherapy because they want to give more to the world, not less. They want to be free to be more authentically true to themselves.

If you think that you are “OK the way you are” you are in the majority; if you think that how you behave, what you do and how you react is “just the way things are”; if you think that nothing can be changed through conscious work, through talking, through new insights, through the skills of someone with training navigating the paths of behavior and thought; then I feel truly sorry for you. It’s a small way to go through life and it can have powerful repercussions, if not for you, then for those who live with you and share your life. If you consider yourself an artist, have the humility to submit your Ego to evaluation by a qualified expert, because your art will only flower and expand when you do.