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In the Christian tradition, one of the qualities of someone who is purported to be wise is discernment. This quality implies that the individual can discern one thing from another without confusion or struggle. The idea is that someone who is wise is someone who is able to tell the good from the bad, the useful from the impractical, the truth from the lie.

Yet, in our profession, so many people seem to lack this quality, or lack what we could think of as common sense. They are out of touch with their senses, which reside only in the physical body, and which, when felt deeply and easily, act as the body’s guide to making the best choice. You can’t have a gut feeling if you are out of touch with your gut. You can’t have a feeling of bliss if your heart is closed. Feelings belong in the body as both sensation and movement. Sounds, smells and tastes, along with sight are the keys to our environment. They matter.

In a society, like ours, which lives primarily in the head (the mind is used more frequently than the body), it is easy to get lost. The mind tries to handle everything, without the body’s physical sensory feedback. That is an easy recipe for disaster. If you make decisions based on thought alone, you are just guessing and can guess wrong. If you make your choices based on how you read your body’s messages, your “sense of things” will help you stick to choices that are more reliable or safe.

Saying that someone should use her “common sense” is saying that she should do what most people would do in any particular circumstance, listen to her senses and follow the one that is most typical. Most people, when faced with a dangerous situation, feel fear. If you are standing on the edge of a cliff of high ledge and you do not feel fear, most people would be surprised. The “common sense” of standing there would be to be frightened. If you stand there and do not feel frightened, some would say that you had no common sense, particularly if you just happened to slip off the edge and meet your end. This is the situation that arises when we see amazingly dumb things on photos or videos and react with the words “what were they thinking”?

If you are going to follow someone’s advice and you cannot discern whether or not that advice is trustworthy, it would seem to be a good idea to take that advice with some good bit of skepticism, until you find that doing what was suggested has allowed things to improve and therefore, trust is actually warranted. If the advice strikes you as being silly or dumb or very hard to follow, it makes sense to be questioning about it. If it seems to you to be downright stupid, and you take it anyway, then you really have to be responsible if it doesn’t work. You have to blame yourself.

Therefore, I say to everyone, if someone tells you that you can learn to sing by moving your larynx to position C, does that make sense? If I say to you that you should squeeze your throat and press on it as hard as you can, and then you will be able to sing rock music, does that make sense? If I tell you to sing in such as way as to make your voice sound greatly distorted? If you are asked to disregard the feedback of your own throat and body, or not listen to yourself as you make sound, or told you that you need to do things that seem to be fatiguing and effortful, shouldn’t you be discerning enough to follow your common sense and see what’s wrong? If you are not in touch enough with yourself to recognize that something is “off” when it is, you will have trouble finding your way. If you are not used to dealing with your voice outside of speaking, as a singing student you are in a position to be easily manipulated by poor teaching.

If it feels bad and sounds bad, it is bad. If it feels confused and sounds ordinary, it is ordinary. If it makes you feel uncomfortable or you are unable to do what is asked, you need to recognize that and ask why. If you do not, you will soon get to be out of touch with your senses, and that will only make things worse.

There are times in life when we do things that don’t seem logical or sensible. It’s not always wrong to go in that direction. If it’s only a once in a while occurrence or if you deliberately choose to do something that is risky because you want to, then no one can tell you no. Just remember that when you are trying to learn something, discernment and common sense are useful tools.

Discernment and common sense are very important, perhaps more important that anything else in the life of an artist.

Some people never question anything, least of all themselves. They assume that they are just fine, thank you very much, and that if things in their life are not quite right they should just ignore them or blame something (or someone) else for what’s wrong.

If you have been taught that strength means that you should “tough it out” and “mind your own Ps and Qs”, you are not likely to ever take a look at anything that shows up in your life as if it were there to teach you something. If you are taught that it is weak to accept help of any kind, or that accepting help makes you obligated to the person who gave it, you are not likely to ever allow yourself to be human enough to realize that everyone in life needs help at some point. Asking for it is a sign of mental health and spiritual humility. Never asking for it is, plainly, unproductive or sometimes, obstructive to yourself and others.

If you find that certain events in your life happen over and over again and you wonder why, don’t look out there in the world to find an answer, look within. Ask yourself what it is in your own behavior and your own attitudes that provokes these things to recur. Act, in fact, as if you had something to do with what shows up in your life, regardless of whether or not you think you are an “innocent victim”. You’re not.

Introspection is about asking WHY? If you do not ask yourself this question, you will never get very far in being an artist or even in being a success in life. And, if your answer consists of “I don’t know” and you stop there, don’t even bother asking the question at all. There is always an explanation. If you do not like what you find in yourself and you would rather just ignore it in the hopes that it might just disappear, you will find that nothing changes.

As a vocalist, you must be able to ask why. Why this sound and not that? Why this feeling and not that? Why this way and not that way? Why is this better and this worse? Why should I do this and why should I not do the other?

The other questions matter, too. What is this going to do for me if I do it and what happens if I do not? When is this going to be pertinent to me and in what way? How will I know that this is working or good or useful? How will I know that I’m wasting my time? Where should I go for advice? Who seems to be successful at what I want to do? How can I follow in their path? Would this person give me advice?

The biggest questions are about your own point of view. If you are the only person who is ever “right”, if you are the one who always has “the best answer”, if you are the one who always does the best job or the one who can never do it right, if you are better than everyone else or never as good, they you need to take a good deep look at your point of view about yourself and life in general. If you are quick to give advice but never take any, if you are willing to jump in and tell others how to behave but don’t ever try to change your own behavior, you need to take a good deep look at your point of view.

Ego, with a capital E, is about you feeling better or worse than someone else. If you can look at everyone else as being the same as you, only different, then you won’t be worried about how others perceive you, or whether or not you are accepted by them. You will not measure yourself by your own perceptions and ideas alone, nor strictly by what others tell you. We need to teach students to work without a capital E ego. They need to learn to serve the work at hand.

What are the needs of this song? How can I meet those needs? What do I need to work on most in order to overcome any weaknesses I might have? Where should I be directing my attention in order to make the song a more meaningful and authentic communication? You can bet that if you never ever ask yourself any of these questions about yourself and your own life, you won’t be very good at answering them about a character or a song either. Self-consciousness is an ego-centric mind state. You become the center of your own universe, as if no one and nothing else was as important as you. We need to teach singers how to overcome self-consciousness through skill and discipline. If you don’t notice that the world does not, in fact, revolve around you (and some people do not notice), you won’t be much use as a teacher or an example to your students.

Generally speaking, in my experience, artists become more used to these kinds of questions than average people do because of the necessity of artistic expression being authentic. That doesn’t mean that there are no successful artists who are NOT introspective but it does mean that they are not the greatest role models for us to have as human beings. Some people act as if they have no psychological history and no emotional patterning in their thinking. Realistically, most people are in that category. If you teach singing or sing, you really have to learn to be deeply, honestly and courageously introspective. An unexamined life truly is not worth living. That can be said about the voice, too.

You can run, but you can never hide (from yourself).

When and if we actually understand vocal function fully (and for the most part, teachers of singing are far away from such a reality), we might be able to establish some kinds of norms for voice types, for CCM styles, for age groups and for vocal health in performers.

If we were to successfully take that path, it would have to be assumed that everyone agreed we are dealing with source and filter (vocal folds and vocal tract), and with postural alignment, rib cage and abdominal control and controlled duration and pressure during sung sound. (That’s all there is, folks). We would have to acknowledge that “resonance” is a kind of acoustic efficiency that has to do with a certain configuration of harmonics and formants and that “carrying power” has to do with decibels generated by a forceful exhalation that can be managed by the resistance of the vocal folds through pitch and vowel.

If we are to get a performer to sing thinking only about what the lyrics mean and to be emotionally connected to the impact of those words, we have to get her to a place where the machine functions, and functions very well, on its own. It has to do the job effortlessly while she is in the midst of it. Professional sports, dance and acting are all like that. You have to practice doing them until you don’t have to think at all about the mechanics of doing them.

Intellectual thought involves the use of language. One word at a time, in a sequence, expressed moment by moment. A physical act, however, does not have to be intellectual. If you burn your finger, you say “ouch” without having to decide to do that. It just happens. You can dissect it after the fact and talk about it all you want, but when it happens by itself, a conscious thought process is not involved.

It is therefore CRUCIAL to understand how the brain is wired to the larynx and to sound making so that the path to changing the basic default of someone’s voice is short but accurate. For example, if you want more volume, you have to firm up the closure of the folds and get a smaller tube in the vocal tract, INDIRECTLY, so that the belly can push harder on the viscera, which pushes against the contracted diaphragm, which pushes on the bottom of the lungs, which pushes the air out harder as it is resisted by the folds. If you do this time and time again, in vocal musical exercises, sooner or later, the body will be able to take over most of this behavior and not be managed moment to moment by anything done deliberately. In other words, muscle memory and conditioning set up optimal responses to maximize singing efficiency and effectiveness.

I do believe that some people never understand this at all and some people never actually get there. They don’t sing without some kind of “doing-ness” and it means that something is in between the feelings and the voice, between the music and the expression of sound. Unfortunately, some of these folks get jobs and they also teach. They assume that what they have learned and how they experience singing are universally applicable to all vocalists. They further assume that their approach is both valid and practical. This can be completely unfounded, based on nothing objectively measured but it unfortunately doesn’t stop people from teaching it.

So, I say yet again, if what I have written here over the years does not make sense to you, ask yourself why. If you cannot do some of the things I have discussed not just here but elsewhere in this blog, ask yourself why. If your body isn’t making “good” sounds but you are trying your best to “sound good”, ASK YOURSELF WHY. Is it because you are not trying hard enough, not thinking the correct thoughts, have a “bad voice” or are just untalented? ASK WHY. Maybe what you think about what you are doing is more of a problem than what you get.

It’s not unusual to hear a soprano sing a classic music theater song or an American Songbook jazz piece in a key that is simply too high. Not for her voice, not for her comfort, but for the song.

The key of a song makes a big difference to the way it feels when it’s being sung, and how audiences hear it. The mentality of classically trained singers who must learn operas in set keys often gets carried over into other music mindlessly. Songs are meant to be transposed unless you are auditioning for a show and you are singing a specific piece to indicate that you are able to manage it. Many times the feeling for the style is there, but the artist doesn’t seem to know how to find the right “home” for the song. In that case, the whole thing suffers. The vocalist looks and sounds only so-so, the song isn’t really represented at its best, and the audience is cheated of a satisfying experience.

During a master class or when judging a competition, listening to classically trained singer after classically trained singer, it is so very clear that the earmarks of what we call classical training can easily be picked out like cans of Campbell’s soup at the supermarket. You can see and hear the poor vocalists who have been taught to sing with a “low larynx” that never moves because they tend to sing heavily in low and mid-range and go flat or constrict on top. You can tell the females who have been taught not to use “chest register” because their voices are limp, sometimes insipid and are frequently wobbly. You can tell the people who have been taught to sing exactly what’s on the page and do so diligently, regardless of the effect that has on musical expression and personal communication. You can tell who has been taught to “breathe in the diaphragm” because the belly is busy, but there is little connection of the rib and abs to the postural muscles during exhalation. You can tell the ones who have been taught to bring the sound forward at all costs, because the brightness is sometimes overwhelming, causing a warm voice to lose it’s attractiveness and a brighter voice to become thin and shrill. And one finds over and over the folks who sing with wet spaghetti arms and frozen bodies. Sometimes these singers sound just fine, so if one were listening to a recording, there would be no issue. In a live performance, however, singing with a lot of emotional conviction and no movement at all flies in the face of what we know the body does. Have you ever seen anyone get out and argue about a fender bender with limp arms and a frozen body? But you can see vocalists who passionately expressing something without any congruence with their own body language. This is either taught or ignored. The job of the teacher is to see that things are connected, so you can assume that if the vocalist has studied and gotten away with this behavior, either the teacher encourages it or just pretends that it doesn’t matter.

If you sing CCM styles and you are classically trained, and most particularly if you are a high voice, please consider lowering the keys of your songs. Chirping away on “Someone To Watch Over Me”, trying to do an “arrangement” of it is not a great way to present yourself. And, if you can’t belt but think that you can talk or yell your way through a belt song, you are not doing yourself any favors. You actually have to know what you are doing and why and practice it.

And, if you do not really know and live a style, just singing it thinking you do is really a mistake. Like anything else, all styles deserve to be respected if you take them seriously. Guessing how a style should sound only makes your performance fall short of the mark. Performers should seek out experts in a style in order to get some feedback when attempting more than one style, especially if the singer is primarily a classically trained person, else they run the risk of sounding and looking foolish. You, too, may not know what you do not know.

We all encounter “needy” students.

A needy student is one who brings more than interest in singing to a lesson. A needy student is going to spend lesson time talking about things that do not have to do with singing. A needy student is going to want you to “take care of” things that you aren’t trained to take care of, without even asking for such out loud. Some people refer to needy students as being “high maintenance”.

It’s a tricky situation. Needy students ought to have psychological help and most of us are not trained counselors. But, if we are caring people, and most of us are, and we sense that the student has a serious issue (or issues) and seems not to have someone else to confide in, should we just turn our backs?

This is a situation in which the profession itself fails both the student and the teacher. We have no guidelines or even expectations about what to do in such situations. Each teacher has to decide for him or herself how to proceed and what’s right. That shouldn’t be the case. What is the purpose of an organization of teachers of singing if the organization does not itself make guidelines about appropriate behavior particularly in those situations where teachers may be encountering difficult or unusual situations?

It has long been my contention that we, singing teachers and voice professionals, argue about small unimportant things instead of what’s significant and useful. Should the belly go in or out during “breath support” or the exhalation? Should we open the back ribs or should we lift the sternum? Should the jaw be down with the lips narrow or the jaw slightly closed with the face in a smile, retracting the lips towards the earlobes?

Really, people, read the research. So much of it says, “it depends” and arguing about these things as if there was a right and a wrong is just a waste of everyone’s time. It prevents us from addressing things like what standards should be for qualified teachers of singing with or without advanced degrees. Why can’t we make specific guidelines for interaction between teacher and student in any kind of lesson, in a special session such as a master class, and in a difficult session, such as when working with a student who has issues that impinge upon, but are not directly a part of, learning to sing?

As long as we hide behind small technical issues that are not grounded in mechanical reality, as a profession we spin our wheels. We’ve done that for a very very long time.

If we know that there are students with needs that go beyond those of a normal singing lesson, and if we also know that addressing the entire person is part of training an artist, and part of helping a developing artist to open and grow, how can we morally ignore these needs, but how can we address them appropriately with no guidelines at all to help us? Should we take the attitude that “these things have to work out on their own, it’s none of our business” or should we face the fact that some of our most talented and successful vocal artists were also our most troubled individuals?

Should we discuss other things like students who are talented, motivated and desperately poor? Some people teach them for free. Some people refuse to teach them. Others work out a barter. Is there a better way? Could our professional organization find a way to give grants to deserving students (not just for a handful who attend special programs?) We don’t know because we do not even approach these topics. Too big. Too hard. Easier to argue about resonance.

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving. It is a day to remember to be grateful for all the wonderful things we have in our lives. It is a very good day to appreciate your vocal folds, what they do for you all day every day. It is a good day to appreciate your body and how it breathes for you thousands of times a day, and it’s willingness to let you take over and make it breathe on purpose when you are singing. It is also a time to look at those who have more than typical needs, because our world and our profession is full of them, and see if we can find a way to help them. It is a time to see if we can be generous, expansive, compassionate and creative about going beyond the finite boundaries that have held us captive for hundreds of years.

Thanksgiving is a day of gratitude. I am grateful that I have taught singing for 40 years and that I am still learning about singing from my students, my colleagues and my professional colleagues in other professions. I am grateful that I can still sing as a classical soprano and as a CCM vocalist at 62. (I have a performance of a Handel aria and a CCM holiday song in two weeks). I am grateful that I can be of service to my students and my community.

My hope for the future is that singing teachers expand our group consciousness to recognize things like “neediness” as being valid and that we address it and other human needs directly for the sake of the students but also for the sake of the teachers. There are many important human encounters that singing teachers have and will continue to face in lessons. I challenge us all to find ways to help not just the “needy”, but all those others who are asking for our broad care and support, in the most human and humane manner.

Happy Thanksgiving.

What, in a voice, is manipulation?

It’s moving things around in your throat deliberately. It’s doing things with your throat on purpose that don’t normally occur.

Why would that be bad? Isn’t that, in fact, what most voice teachers are seeking? After all, how can you create a different kind of sound if you don’t move your throat muscles in some kind of straight-forward manner?

And what about the people who used to say “don’t ever think about your throat”, “never do anything in your throat that you can feel” or “forget you have a throat and just make the bones in your head vibrate”, were they all wrong or crazy?

How can you “leave your throat alone” and get any kind of long lasting difference in the sound? Aren’t these two things the opposite of each other? If so, which one is correct, which one is wrong?

The only way to get things in the throat (vocal production) to change is to change them indirectly and gently over a long period of time, with the idea that all movements done in a deliberate fashion are temporary tools that will be discarded as soon as the effects they are designed to promote take hold and become habitual. The throat should, in essence, take care of itself. The singer should be able to “just sing” leaving the throat alone enough to not think much about it while in a song. If the exercises done by the vocalist during a lesson or practice session are doing their job, the muscles will respond in a new and better way and that response will become the replacement for previous vocal behavior.

That this be understood is crucial because not understanding it makes it easy to encourage manipulation as an end product and to tie a throat and a vocalist in knots that are difficult to eliminate, especially after a long period of time. A student can push on something to make it “go further” in terms of range or volume, but that doesn’t make the result better. Sometimes it is considerably worse, in terms of response.

A free throat is responsive. It allows for movement, change, adjustment, and flexibility. It is also consistent, dependable, steady and easy to control. There is never any need to “do anything” in the throat but the vocalist can be very aware of what’s going on inside as it takes care of itself.

Holding the larynx down or in a “low position” is a manipulation, usually of the back of the tongue, pressing it down. It is a bad idea and will cause a vocalist to loose the ability to sing high notes easily or to sing softly easily. Pulling the larynx up deliberately is a bad idea, too, as it will make the sound tight and shallow and make movement difficult as well. Either response (different laryngeal height positions) is fine as long as it is indirect and takes place as a natural response to changes in pitch, vowel quality and volume, and not ends in themselves. The people who teach “retract the false folds”, “constrict the ari-epiglottic sphincter”, or “Larynx Position 1, 2, 3, and 4” are not helping anyone. These kinds of ideas cause as many problems as do phrases like “lift your soft palate”, “open your throat” and “release the sound into your masque”. They have nothing to do with the way the vocal apparatus is wired into the brain. Maybe the ideas or experiences were meaningful to the people who found them, but that does not mean that they are valid approaches to teach other human beings as if they were “real”, directly doable vocal behaviors.

Language is very important here. It is the primary reason why in Somatic Voicework™ we are very careful in how we speak about vocal technique. We always use the third person(“The voice is heavy today”, not “You are pushing your tongue down in the back”), and we ask the student to do something to see what it does. We do not tell the student to make something happen. No.

It is the teacher’s job to get the desired sound, not the student’s. It is the teacher who must uncover new vocal behaviors through exercises and then, when they arise, point them out and label them so the student can track the experience. I often hear, “My student can’t find mix,” or “doesn’t know how to use mix”. No, again. You, the teacher, have not taught the student to discover mix, therefore, the student correctly has no clue how to use what he or she doesn’t yet experience.

If you feel “stuck” when you sing, or you feel like your sound isn’t easy and you just put up with it, you need to know that this isn’t good. You can learn to sing freely but you have to know how. Just generally, if anyone asks you to do something with your tongue, face, mouth, jaw or head, and it’s not explained as being functionally necessary, be suspicious. Anything done deliberately, as an exercise, can be very helpful, but when it becomes an end in itself, and therefore a way to sing, it has become a trap. The idea of “changing the default” (meaning changing the place that one sings from with no conscious thought or effort) comes only after a good deal of time and practice.

If you are a student, and you struggle to make sense of what is being asked of you in a lesson, either you don’t understand what it is or you are being asked to do something that you should not do. You do not have to be confused just because you cannot yet accomplish the task you seek to master. Don’t be afraid to ask about it.

“Relaxation” is a big word in training singers. This is so because it is typically too much muscle activity that causes vocal problems. Squeezing, tightening, pressing, holding, swallowing, choking, and generally constricting the sound is problematic because the vocal folds don’t do well this way. It also restricts airflow making it harder to breathe fully and connect to the body in a useful and direct way. Frequently the singing itself causes the problems but it can also be caused by using the speaking voice poorly or a combination of both things. This is called “hyper-function” meaning too much is going on.

There is, however, “hypo-function” which means that too little is happening. If all the muscles involved in producing voiced sound are barely responding — if they are atrophied, or underdeveloped — you can have just as much trouble, maybe even more. Who ever talks about “too little” happening? Instead, what gets attention is the counter tension that is caused by the lack of “tonicity” in the appropriate vocal and breathing muscles. If one group of muscles that should be working does not work the counter muscle groups will be tighter than they should be as a compensation. Asking for “relaxation”, however, in the case of someone who is hypo-functional is usually a waste of time.

A normal, viable voice is capable of getting a little louder and a little softer, going a little higher and lower and making a few different kinds of sounds without much fuss. This has nothing to do with musical function. It may be that the individual can’t stay on a specific pitch or make a nice resonant vowel sound consistently, but beyond that, the voice is neither particularly wonderful nor particularly bad. A hypo-functional voice, however, will have trouble being loud, being heard in a noisy environment. It will not be able to go up very high or down very low in pitch nor will it be able to sustain if used for a long period of time. Generally, it will be under-energized, dull, fuzzy and “flat-sounding” (not in pitch but in quality). This kind of voice needs to be encouraged to MOVE, not to relax.

It is, in many ways, much easier to help a hyper-functional voice because relaxation for this kind of speaker or singer is the best prescription. Any kind of “yawn-sigh”, “cooing”, soft easy sound making will help as long as it isn’t too high or too loud. Massage of external muscles, balance of posture and released easy breathing will be productive, as will small movements of the jaw, tongue and face. Of course, register balance is always in order, as it will help release deep laryngeal tensions, but working from the outside in is an easy way to begin and, in due time, this can assist finding a better balance of chest and head.

Hypo-function is much less direct. Movements have to be stimulated but not too quickly or too severely because doing so will cause vocal and physical fatigue. Further, those who are not used to making a normal amount of volume or doing extended movements of the muscles that are involved in voiced sound, don’t usually feel comfortable with either, which is likely part of what may have lead to the problem in the first place. I have also found in years of personal experience that such individuals may be shy or may just have grown up in an environment where “being loud” was considered rude and unacceptable. Sometimes hypo-function is caused indirectly because the person may have been ill while younger or perhaps was in a home where someone else was not well and had to be quiet for their sake. Finally, as various exercises begin to generate enough response in the muscles so as to create genuine movement and change in the system, the vocalist and the teacher will also encounter the tight muscles that have not been able to do their job because they were restricted by the muscles nearby being immobilized or collapsed.

Good vigorous vocal use is athletic. What does that mean, really? How can a voice be athletic? It can be athletic if it is making a high level of volume over a wide range of pitches with sustained duration because this will require vigorous breathing (use of the ribs and abdominal muscles) as well as muscle tone in the vocal folds, the pharyngeal space, the jaw, the lips, the tip of the tongue, the face, and muscles inside the back of the mouth. Relaxation in such a state is really “dynamic poise” meaning that everything is capable of moving freely without loss of stability and power but can function well in a simple and small way as well. Since most of the inner muscles are not directly controllable, getting to this kind of vocal equilibrium takes a while to accomplish.

Relaxation is a good thing but having a vital, energized voice is not just about being vocally “relaxed”. When the voice is balanced and comfortable, relaxation becomes responsiveness and expressiveness, and these behaviors help foster vocal health and stamina.

This isn’t a topic that most people address, let alone understand how to approach. If you need assistance, come to one of the Level I Somatic Voicework™ trainings. You can find the info on my website: www.thevoiceworkshop.com

There is much confusion over the word “mix”. This makes sense, since most people do not know the difference between chest register and head register except in terms of range. Chest is low and head is high.

This is the most simplistic way to view registration and, in a skilled singer, it is no longer true that registration is dependent upon pitch range. In fact, head register as a quality, can be taken low in pitch, chest register can be taken up in pitch, and both registers should respond to volume change. Louder sounds will be chestier and softer ones headier, if all other factors are equal. If, however, you have been taught to focus only on “resonance” or “placement” and “breath support” you will not understand register independence, because your sound could be an amalgamation of whatever was there, maneuvered into whatever resonance you could find or manage. This is not necessarily a recipe for bad vocal function but it is likely not a way to sing in a variety of styles, colors or qualities for expressive or musical purposes.

If you can find a strong, chesty belt that is easy to produce and costs you nothing in terms of vocal effort, and you can also sing a light, easy free head register sound that is sweet and clear, you will have no trouble determining what mix is. You will find mix when the middle pitches, on their own, without extra help of any kind, combine into a nice round solid sound that you can easily control in terms of volume and quality. Mix, generally, is therefore anything that is not absolutely chesty chest or belt, or heady head (or falsetto in men).

Determining if something is “chest mix” or “head mix” is of no consequence unless the music is such that it requires a particular default to one of these. In most people who have a mix and can use it, it will be chestier on the louder, lower pitches and headier on the higher softer pitches all by itself. The quality is determined by the content of the lyrics and the pitch patterns that are being sung. Worrying about whether something is head/mix or chest/mix is usually a waste of time in terms of performance. It is not, however, a waste of time if you are stuck in one and need the other and can’t tell the difference. Then, you need to know and know well what’s going on. Of course, this is one of the points of training: to develop a balanced vocal mechanism that is not too much anything but rather an combination of many things. Resonance is not the driving factor, registration is.

What is musicality? The dictionary says it means “fond of or skilled in music”. That doesn’t make it, really. Most people who are musical use the word musicality to mean something much more than that. Musicianship is the skill of being a good musician, one who understands how to read and play music. You can be a skilled musician but not be very musical by nature and really not have much musicality at all.

Someone who possesses musicality is one who has a deep, visceral connection to music that has a 3-D effect on her existence. A person who is deeply musical doesn’t need someone to explain or teach what the music is “about”, they just seem to know, feel, understand and freely express what they perceive. This is probably a gift or some kind of special DNA encoding. Maybe there is a “musicality” gene. It certainly would seem that whatever this mysterious “musicality” thing is, it is a vital part of being able to communicate what’s there in the music to others.

Perhaps this goes along with being emotional or very expressive or very sensitive in a specific way. Perhaps it has to do with the ability to be demonstrative, or dramatic, or vivid. Perhaps it has to do with a keen sense of imagination or the ability to visualize music in connection with other senses, like someone with synesthesia.

There is some remarkable film footage of Glenn Gould, working with Leonard Bernstein, both of whom we can readily agree were highly musical musicians. Lenny Bernstein, someone with very definite ideas about music, deferred to Gould on the specific project they did together because Gould’s idea was that the music “didn’t go” the way Bernstein thought. It was a rare surrender on Bernstein’s part. Quite a meeting of minds, I thought. Each was clear that the music had a “way to be expressed” but it wasn’t the same thing for the two masters. This isn’t surprising to others who are themselves innately musical and also good musicians, but it might seem paradoxical to unskilled observers. How could both men be so responsive to the music and not agree on what the music contained?

This brings up the question of how a skilled musician can sometimes miss entirely what’s there in the music. Doesn’t the music itself cause emotions to flow, images to appear in the mind, movements to surge through the body? Doesn’t it seem to have a magic and a power all to itself that weaves a spell over the mind of the vocalist or instrumentalist who is performing the piece? How is it that the obvious shapes and colors inherent in the phrases or the patterns don’t jump out and make themselves dynamically clear to someone who is creating the sounds? Truly, how can you be a good musician and miss being musical? How can you be completely lacking in musicality? Unfortunately, it is all too common an experience to find someone who is a recognized musician (and this includes vocalists who are trained musicians of singing) who doesn’t have a clue as to what any of this is about and, in fact, thinks it is just so much nonsense.

I have no answers but I do know quite a few highly skilled musicians who are not in the least musical in the sense I am discussing here. They have little musicality, and they do not find it easy to swim in the responses of music that are an essential ingredient of expressiveness. They have to wonder what the music is about, and ponder how it can be evocative. They must strive to respond in a deep, authentic or meaningful way to music, so that something beyond mere notes can be communicated in a performance. They can gawk in amazement at their colleagues whose own immediacy of contact with the core of the music’s soul is effortless, true, clear and energized. And, those who are the other side of the fence, in the world of ecstatic musical bliss, can also only stare back at their compatriots wondering how they can miss what seems so obvious, so lovely and so simple. If someone is very musical, it is all so easy. If they are not, it is all so elusive or even unreal.

What inspires you?

What makes you feel better, lifts you up, gets you to expand and think positively about yourself and life? What is it that gives you courage to go forward towards your heart’s desire, your highest dream, your greatest goal?

The word inspire means both to stimulate to activity and to inhale. Why would that be? Because, as I have previously discussed, the ability to breathe is also the ability to be alive. It allows us to fully feel, to be fully present, to know we are in a body that moves all the time and that we are both recipients of life and participants in life. The breath moves in and out on its own but it is possible to learn to bring it under your conscious control (up to a point) if you work at it. It symbolizes the fact that life is given to us (by however you wish to think of “the higher power”) but we are also in charge of what we do with it, which could be anything from nothing to a whole lot.

This is true, of course, of other things one of which is also the voice itself. You can live with the voice you have and leave it alone. As long as nothing goes wrong with you or it, it will serve you well enough for most purposes. If, however, you need to place demand on it, particularly a lot of demand, it is well to develop some deliberate control over it, so that it is not only more responsive but has more stamina under stress. Somehow, working with the voice, which requires working at the same time with the breath, puts it all together. If we are to be vocally expressive, we must also breathe deeply and fully and learn to ride on the exhale while making sound with just the right balance of the two.

This activity, taken seriously and worked on diligently is, in itself, inspirational. Learning to inspire on purpose, for a purpose (vocal communication) is inspiring. I like that idea. It can give you fuel for other things, both creative and necessary. It can teach you about your body and your mind. It can challenge you deeply, as all physical activities do if we push our own limits. It can fill you up with satisfaction and peace, and with contentment just being involved in the activity of breathing and sounding for its own sake. One of the nicest things about this is that it’s free and you can do it whenever you chose. It’s completely portable and will always be yours. Barring something unusual, it will last as long as you do.

Inspire yourself. Be inspirational. Be fully of breath, life and sound. It’s a joyful way to spend your time.