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The vocal folds must resist the airflow. To do this, they must close firmly and vibrate easily while closed. They cannot be so pressed together that they become irritated, but they must learn to “firm up” enough to prevent a loud sound from being breathy or sharp.

When the larynx can “hold” its position, the sound feels firm or “grounded”. The tone is neither breathy nor strident and the larynx can adjust slightly as needed in order for the sound to be free to adjust as well. When this is possible, and it takes time for it to be strong in most people, the airflow will also balance, so that there is a feeling of correspondence between the sound and the body that most singing teachers call “support” or “being connected”.

Laryngeal strength is a crucial ingredient in classical singing or in belting, loud rock or other styles, but it can be very tricky to isolate interior muscles such that they do their work without dragging all sorts of other muscles along for the ride. The key to this behavior is isolation of the various muscles involved in controlling phonatory response, but not generating phonation itself. There is a difference.

Huh?

What does this mean in English?

It means that it is possible to get a good solid sound without tightening the base of the tongue, the neck muscles, the jaw muscles or the swallowing muscles. It is possible to do that when the posture is good, the ribs and abs are strong and available and the soft palate has been coaxed into responding.

How do you get to this kind of response?

Through exercises. That’s all we have. Pitches, vowels, volume and later consonants. The sound tells you everything you need to know and the exercises get you to the sound, sooner or later.

The idea is that the exercises produce a result and, if they are done properly, over time the responses  will get better, perception will get better, and in the end, the sound will also get better. Just because you understand an exercise doesn’t mean that it automatically does its job. It’s not like instant coffee….you add hot water, milk or sugar, and away you go. It’s more like watching your tomato plants grow. You plant the seed, water it, and maybe give it some fertilizer every now and then. After that, you wait.

These principles have been written about by both Cornelius Reid and William Vennard. Reid called the position one is which the larynx “holds” against the breath. Vennard calls it a “dynamic” larynx. Others have described it, too. If you are a CCM singer, you may or may not ever find this particular adjustment, as it isn’t a requisite for all CCM styles, so don’t worry if you don’t have this experience. You may not need it. A great deal depends on the overall condition of your voice, the music you perform and the training you have had. If you are a classical singer, however, and this means little to you, I suggest you give it further thought.

In the hands of a really skilled musician, one who has long ago mastered the art of playing his or her instrument, music just happens. In the case of someone who is emotionally open and sensitive to music in a way that cannot be captured in words, what emerges from such an individual is simply thrilling to hear. Again and again, living here in New York City, as I do, I am struck by the wealth of talent there is in all fields of music, no matter which style you want to hear.

The level of players here is so high that we get used to this as a standard. We forget that this kind of playing doesn’t happen in a lot of places. We forget that not everyone has a chance to go out for a night of live music to hear the best in the world down a few blocks from home. We forget how special such experiences are and how memorable.

I’ve had so many opportunities in my life to hear great artists of all kinds. There really isn’t any substitute for this (as I say here quite often). No recording, no DVD, no film, is ever going to capture the real deal, live, in the artistry of a master player. If you do not have these experiences carved into your mind then you don’t have a library of memories to draw upon, and if you are in the profession yourself, that is a real detriment to your own resources. Of course, I realize that not everyone can live here, and not everyone can even get to a big city on a regular basis, but if you are in the profession in any way, you absolutely must MUST go to the nearest big city with enough money to stay there for a few days every year and attend as many different kinds of concerts as you can afford.

This evening we attended a performance at Lincoln Center of a jazz quartet. The quartet was Eli Yamin’s and we were at Dizzy’s Club Coca Cola. The two women and two men were just fabulous and there were several times when the packed house literally went crazy because of the intensity of the performances. In this case there were no vocalists but the instruments were singing through their players and it was impossible not to get caught up in the depth of feeling the artists had for the music and for each other. It was impossible not to be moved, maybe even to tears as I was, by what I was happening.

I wish I had a magic wand and could take everyone out there who can’t get to performances like these with me. I wish I could share with you the satisfaction I get sitting in the audience, listening in rapture, while this glorious music swirls around me. I wish I could somehow carry these moments to the whole world because I seriously doubt there would be time for war if people could just sit down and listen to music of this calibre.

Since I can’t do this, I say to you, do it for yourself. Every minute will be worth so much more than the actual time you are in the audience and every dime you spend will be paid back in dividends that cannot be measured in money at all, but are richer by far than whatever you spend. The music is the message and the message is the music.

When you come right down to it, what do we really know about making vocal sound? We have gathered a lot of information over the last few decades about vocal function but very very little of it has made its way into the hands of singers or even of singing teachers.

Of the many thousands of people who teach singing in the USA alone, only a handful belong to an organization of singing teachers. The main one, NATS, has about 7,000 members from all areas of teaching, but it is now very easy to join the organization, so there is no screening process. Just about anyone who wants to join, can join. The decision was made to go this way, I think, because having more members brings in more dues and pays for the few staff members who run things. As an organization, it has problems but it is the only one we have, so it is a good thing to join if you teach. The activities they do are useful and the conferences can be, too, depending on who is organizing them and what they feature. No one knows if these teachers have vocal function information or if they even want it. Those that have gotten it through formal vocal pedagogy programs in colleges have received information aimed directly at classical singing, and no other styles.

We could hope that the people who are the “leaders” of NATS are particularly dedicated to the profession and to its betterment, and we might assume that they are all on the same page about what that means, but we would probably find that is not true. I haven’t interviewed them, so it’s just my opinion here, but I do read the Journal of Singing. Most of the articles are for a very limited audience even with NATS. Are we all very interested in the art songs of an obscure composer we have never heard about? Hm. Should we argue about the finer points of French diction when most Americans in the audience who listen to classical music do not understand French well enough to notice? I don’t have the answer, but I know this kind of article doesn’t interest me because it doesn’t serve my professional needs. One column, and only one, addresses CCM styles, and that is the one edited by Robert Edwin, my colleague in the American Academy of Teachers of Singing. He has been holding the fort for almost 30 years. You would think by now that there would be room for more than this one column, good as it is, but no, that wouldn’t be the case.

Functional information is CRUCIAL for singing teachers but you still have to be very personally motivated to go out and find it and understand it well enough to make use of it. For the most part, the organizations of teachers of singing don’t do much to help with that task. The New York Singing Teachers’ Association’s Professional Development Program is very good and the Vocology courses at the National Center for Voice and Speech are excellent. The Symposium: Care of the Professional Voice is very valuable, and the other conferences held outside the USA are very good too.

Now while these courses are very helpful you have to exert some considerable effort to find them and take them. All of them cost money to attend and, if they are not local to you, must include travel costs and hotel/meals as well. They do provide basic vocal function information that helps people understand what the voice does and how it does it, but it should be very easily available, not just something you have to attend a conference to get. Instead, what is easily available is all those videos sold online by everybody and his grandmother, many of which are less than useless. (see the post from a few days ago). It makes you shudder to think that there are still lots of people out there teaching that singers have to “sing from the diaphragm” and “open up the back of the head”, or “make a sound like a big creamy chocolate pudding”, but that kind of teaching is far from gone.

The real weakness in a profession that wants to take itself seriously as a profession is the lack of ability to put good solid, scientifically grounded vocal function information into as many young vocalists hands and minds as possible. The absolute lack of outreach into the community of CCM singers, particularly, leaves them stranded. They are at the mercy of the internet snake oil salesmen who ply their wares with great marketing spin. Perhaps not all of them are bad teachers but learning to sing from a CD or tape, without anyone monitoring the process personally, is just a bad idea. As a young vocalist, if I am looking for help, the first place I would go would be to the internet, but the profession’s presence there is the size of a pin. There is little vocal function information for various CCM styles, so the vocalist is left to sort out what will be useful on his or her own.

What do we really know about making vocal sound? A lot more than we used to know, but who actually knows it and how did those people get the information? Anyone’s guess.

We still have a very long way to go.

I once went to a classical master class in which Elly Ameling told the audience, “If you don’t like detailed work, you won’t like this session and you should leave now”. What followed what utterly amazing. A young man was singing Straus’ “Morgen” and she made him sing the word “wogenblauen” about 30 times, maybe more. She spent at least 15 minutes on this one word. The vocalist was fine with that, and he finally got where she wanted him to go, or perhaps where she was willing to end her pursuit. She was kind throughout and patient but persistent. The audience barely moved the entire time.

Did you know that the most famous, the most successful and the most guaranteed way to learn to be a great singer is to purchase videos about singing through the web?

It seems sensible to think that learning to sing alone, without anyone to guide you, or let you know whether what you are doing has anything whatsoever to do with what is on the videos, is a great way to become an expert vocalist. Why, following the instructions on a video will make you better than anyone else, even the people who have bought another video by another teacher who also claims to make you the best ever. Thousands of people have become international stars by learning to sing strictly through the videos they have purchased on the web.

Of course, there are a few individuals who think that maybe someone who is an expert listener still needs to hear you sing live and in person to help you in your development of vocal skills. I suppose that’s a quaint and old-fashioned notion, and it seems that more and more the idea is that a living breathing teacher is just old hat. You don’t really need personal guidance, since all good popular singers sound exactly the same anyway. What you need is to be able to believe in yourself. If you really understand the method of the teacher on the video, what else is necessary?

Of course, you have to know which method to buy. There are so many out there. The ones that offer you the shortest course of training are probably the best purchase for your money. Why spend lots on extras when you can get the quicky cheaper version? However, maybe the longer ones are better, as they have more ways to present things. If one segment escapes you, there will be so many others that might work better for you. If the person who developed the method tells you how many fantastic people he or she has trained, and then shows you all of them endorsing his approarch, or has a “teaser” lesson of his or her method, then you can really decide if that approach seems to suit you or not. And, if they provide “scientific” information like “breathe from your diaphragm” or “there’s no such thing as vocal registers”, you can absolutely rely on their technique, because they can prove that what they know is correct.

Some of these folks have actually done real research with a real scientist. That can be a good thing. If the scientist, however, doesn’t know himself (or herself) whether the vocalist is good or bad, and many of them do not know, then the “scientific research” might be of no great use. You would have to know about voice science yourself in order to determine that, so when you go shopping, keep that in mind. Check with your local voice scientist first, to be clear about what you need to know.

Finally, if the person selling you her method on line has many different kinds of degrees from various college programs, that could be a real determining factor. It seems that if you have a degree in an applied skill/art like singing, that means you know how to sing yourself, you sound good when you sing and you know how to convey the specifics about singing to anyone else, even if you don’t ever meet them in person. Unfortunately, you rarely get to hear the teacher sing a whole song on the videos they sell. Perhaps they don’t want to intimidate the buyers with their great vocal gifts? Try to find a YouTube of the teacher singing anything. Try.

It is a wonderment that we have so many good resources on the internet. “How To Sing” videos are absolutely the way to go if you need training. In fact, trying lots of different videos from many different instructors could be even more helpful, particularly if you have lots of extra money to invest.

One more thing. If you do end up singing well enough to go out into the world and sing in front of an audience but you don’t end up with a lot of fans or a big career, be sure to ask for your money back.

How do you know if you are singing from your heart?

Seems like a simple question, no?

How does one determine what heart-felt singing is? Do you really know that you are singing from your heart when you are? What does that mean?

Of course, you can’t define this experience. You can write about it. You can talk about it. You can contemplate it. What you can’t do is capture it. Nevertheless, if you sing from your heart, and you are seeking to sing from your heart, the experience is unique and unmistakable.

These days there is a lot of singing out there that is anything but heart-felt. It is all kinds of other things: loud, aggressive, insipid, boring, harsh, overblown, mechanical, stilted….it goes on. Rarely do you hear someone singing in a way that is moving because it is transparently honest. The words or tune seems to arise effortlessly and the emotion behind the singing is present and palpable.

How do you know if you are singing this way? If you are singing in front of a live audience, they will let you know. You might even make some of them cry. I cried at lot at various performances. You could count on me to cry when I heard Leontyne Price or Luciano Pavarotti live. I have cried at performances of other styles of music, too, but not as often. Sometimes live Gospel singing will do that to me. It depends on the singer.

I don’t think you can get to this experience by deciding to get to it. I think it happens unselfconsciously when the vocalist is completely immersed in the music and is “carried away” by it. I think that the vocalist almost forgets that she is singing and is in some way just riding on the music as music. It is as if the song sings itself. It tells the throat what to do and the throat responds. It’s like riding on the perfect wave.

Would that there was more singing like this in the world at large! It would so help us to transform the planet. There is so little of our society that focuses on deep, lasting beauty — not the kind that’s only on the outside. The kind that shines out from within as that which is best in humanity and in life. Real  beauty is timeless and placeless. It is truthful and simple. It is humble and present but lasting and great in the sense of profound.

This kind of singing has nothing directly to do with fame, success or wealth. It does not have to have anything to do with popularity but sometimes it does interact with all of these things. This kind of singing carries its own power and although it has to be nurtured, even protected, it isn’t static or precious. It is sturdy and contained. That’s what allows it to be shared with generosity and joy.

If you do not know what I’m writing about here, reading this won’t help you much. What could help would be going to live performances, or perhaps listening to records that haven’t been too doctored up electronically, as you might just bump into it that way. If you do know what I’m writing about, congratulate yourself. It is a rare enough experience these days and one to cherish.

Let us all always seek music from the heart wherever and whenever it can be found.

Who talks about the throat muscles? Who bothers to think about them as if they mattered? Who even knows there are muscles in the throat?

Of course the vocal folds are ligaments, not really muscles, but they are pulled by muscles and they are certainly effected by muscle movements of whatever is in or near the larynx. The 35 muscles of the tongue have a great deal to do with how the larynx “hangs”, suspended in a released and free position or “held” in a tight and rigid position. It is very hard to sing a connected legato phrase if the larynx is unable to hang freely by the suspensory muscles of the tongue and the side walls of the inside of the throat (the constrictors) are tight.

Since we don’t really feel these muscles in the same way we feel a finger or toe, and we don’t really want to be controlling them deliberately while singing, why talk about them at all? They do whatever it is they do and that’s that. You either get “resonance” from breath support and placement or you don’t, right? Not right.

In all my four decades of work, I can say that the vast majority of progress that can be made when helping a student learn to sing and sing well is about eliciting a response from the muscles in the throat. When the larynx is free to hang the vocal folds are free to do their job, whatever it may be. Yes, the jaw muscles and the muscles inside the cheeks matter. Yes, the face muscles matter. Yes, the soft palate matters, but if you do not get the tongue to unwind itself what’s going on with these other muscles is going to be much harder to change or adjust, especially if things are not working well while singing in the first place. Additionally, as I have written here before, the muscles of the tongue must not only relax and let go, they must move a great deal and do so easily. The excursion of the tongue must increase as the mouth opens and the jaw drops and it needs to make that longer journey by going more rapidly through any changes, because the distance between movements is greater.

Another way to say this is to state that constriction of the inside muscles of the throat, squeezing the sides of the tongue in the back, makes it very hard to sing with maximum freedom. Not impossible, just very hard. It can be that the tension is construed in such a way as to be severe but limited to a relatively small portion of the muscles, hence the singer can manage decently enough, albeit with limitations. If it were impossible, then only absolutely free voices would be able to sing and, clearly, that is not the case. In fact, some garbled voices have had big careers. I would put Joe Cocker in this category, and also Tom Waits and Janice Joplin. Maria Callas at the end of her active career was also in this category. In extreme cases this becomes a case of Muscle Tension Dysphonia and can end a career.

The issue then becomes, how do you deal with interior muscles of the throat when you can’t really feel them and, worse, you are supposed to avoid manipulating them directly anyway?

The answer, of course, is through exercise, starting as always on the outside of the body with what can be seen and touched with the hands. It isn’t unlike working to get at the deep core muscles of the torso. If you are out of shape, you don’t start with contracting those muscles. You likely won’t be able to feel them at all, let alone move them deliberately. You start by doing whatever it is you can manage….sit up? Crunches? If you do them for a while, every day, after a while the work will go deeper and at some point you will be able to find and contract the muscles all the way down into the core. The same is true in singing. You start with the outside (the mouth, face and jaw) and the front of the tongue (the tip) and you make those areas do things. Particularly if you suggest to the singer that in the end the muscles inside will also being to respond, the exercises will gradually deepen and expand to include the entire system. For singing, that includes the back of the mouth, the throat, the back of the tongue and the larynx and vocal folds. They all come along for the ride, over time. Over TIME. Indirectly, through exercise. Slowly.

The idea is that movement stimulates more movement and movement stimulates circulation and circulation feeds the nerves and cells and the increased blood flow allows the nerves to be “energized” (remember, the electricity running through the system can be felt in a lie-detector test or in a brain wave scan). Then, there is more to feel. Feeling the movement of the muscles allows them to move more deliberately and then the cycle deepens and grows. More movement, more feeling, more feeling, more response, more response, more control. Eventually, you get a highly responsive system that is ready to express very subtle and complex expressions of thought and emotion.

All this from the muscles of the throat. Who knew?

If you are a singer and you know yourself as one, singing is part of your identity. This is true if you are a dancer, an actor, a painter or, in fact, in our society where work is a crucial part of one’s adult persona, if you are any type of professional in the arts. What you do and who you are, are one and the same. If you lose the ability to do what you have done, you also lose a part of yourself and that can be devastating.

Many famous singers have had episodes where they have lost their voices or become incapacitated. Sometimes, as with the recent case of Adele, the problem is acute, is addressed, and the singer recovers to go on, hopefully as good or better than new. Sometimes, as with Anna Moffo, a great voice and artist who lost her ability to sing never to have it return, the story doesn’t end so happily. While Ms. Moffo went on to become a patroness of the arts and do a world of good in other ways, her attempt at a vocal “come-back”, after years of not singing, was a dismal failure and she never again attempted to sing in public after it was over.

Voices can change a lot over time. They always darken and usually go down. Sometimes they get husky and frequently they lose range, both at the top and at the bottom. A few lucky souls like Tony Bennett and Barbara Cook, Sheila Jordan (and even Mick Jagger, who never sounded good in the first place) haven’t changed a whole lot since they were in their prime even though now they are considered “senior citizens”. Other people choose to give up singing because they can hear and feel that what was once there is no longer and they don’t want to be remembered for being less than they once were. This is a hard choice to make but sometimes it is the one that makes the most sense.

Because opera is the most vocally demanding style that also has the most exacting musical criteria, it is often so that opera singers retire from the stage while they can still sing but before they lose their ability to do repertoire at a high standard. Sometimes they can go on to have decades more life singing in other styles (quite a few have gone to Broadway successfully). It isn’t usually so, however, that a “retired” pop singer is going to move over to another vocal style, but some have been able to continue performing as actors who don’t sing. Julie Andrews is certainly in that category.

The famous people have more to lose in terms of their reputation, of course, but those that are not famous have a lot invested in their singing, too. It can be just as awful for someone who has sung for their entire life to lose that ability, for whatever reason, because of the deeply personal connection they have to the experience of making vocal music. Hearing yourself sing, feeling your voice make sound through music is a very unique experience and not having access to that joy, to that energy, is a big loss. For some, singing is the very fuel of life itself. It is the juice that makes everything “go” and the motivating force that drives life on a day to day basis. It isn’t easy to put into words what the loss of singing can be for those who call themselves “singer” but is can be a source of deep sorrow and mourning, not unlike the experience of losing a loved one. After all, for true singers, the voice and the song is the loved one, and it is a significant absence when it is gone, never to return again.

For those of us who are in the support professions, helping vocalists sing with freedom, ease and joy, it is imperative that singers who are experiencing any kind of voice loss be handled with the utmost respect, care, compassion and solid psychological support. If it turns out to be the case that the voice will never return to normal, surrounding the singer with loving understanding might be the only solace that can be offered. While we may not be able to make the problem disappear or even help it significantly diminish, it is within our capacities to ease the burden by acknowledging the singer’s suffering. The courage to go on might just come from the words we choose to speak to someone who can no longer say, “I am a singer”, and that could end up being the reason that life, even without singing, can still go on.

I am going to way out on a limb tonight (who, me?) and say some things that I absolutely cannot verify at all. They are 100% from my own perceptions and you can take or leave what I am going to write. If you don’t believe it, that’s fine. If you are willing to take what I say here as being “the truth” understand that this is based on my own perceptions and only on that.

It is my experience that we can, after a period of time, when we have developed sufficient mechanical skills, begin to isolate the various muscles in the throat and tongue through exercise. How I know this is because I can feel the individual muscles as clearly as I can feel my finger wiggling. For those of you who follow this blog, you will remember that last year about this time I went to Dr. Peak Woo telling him “something is wrong with my left vocal fold. It’s not responding”. I was correct. He confirmed that this was so. How did I know that? I could feel it.

In working to restore some of the function on the left side I have had to pay quite a bit of attention to the interior musculature and the feedback I get is quite clear. I know what I am feeling. I back this up by saying that in 1988, when I was in Stockholm, doing research on my throat with Dr. Johan Sundberg, he told me then (and that was a long time ago) that I had more control over the muscles in my throat than anyone he had ever encountered up until that time. The tracings of separate examples were exact duplications. That means that in two different examples, the lines showing the acoustic behavior were exactly on top of each other, making it look like just one example. In a human being this kind of accuracy is almost unheard of…..and I have learned a great deal more since then.

These perceptions allow me to coax very specific behaviors from a student, using the exercises as a catalyst. It is always true that one basic pattern of vowel and pitches can call forth a wide variety of responses, depending on where in the pitch range it is done, and at what volume. It can also be the case that the exercise is done in various ways on the same vowel and that, too, will draw forth slightly different responses. If you do the exercise properly and then repeat it enough times it will produce a result, even if the student doesn’t know what the result will be. I have to know where to go, even when the student does not. After the student has done the exercise successfully for quite some time it is possible to ask, “What happens when you do that? What do you experience”? Sometimes the student can’t answer as he has not been able to track anything specific, but often, if you go back and do it again, the feedback will be quite good. It is only in this way that the perception of what the exercise is doing to the sound and the actual singing/doing of the exercise can be unified and therefore become useful.

Lest you become confused here, I am not an advocate of having a student sing while trying to feel or move the muscles of the throat or interior muscles of the tongue deliberately nor do I ask them to think about this. Rather, I guide them to do an exercise (on a pitch pattern and a vowel sound, in a particular part of the vocal range, at a specific volume) and then wait for the response I am seeking to show up as an auditory shift. At that point, the exercise is beginning to do its job. Over time, sometimes over a lot of time, depending on how foreign this behavior is to the student, the exercises will condition the response so the student can completely forget about it and the result will still be there.

If you have weak stomach muscles, and I ask you to “hold them in” you might not be able to do that, or perhaps only do it a little and for a short period of time. If you do sit-ups every day, however, it would get easier to hold them in and keep them in for longer at each attempt. If you did a lot of them for weeks, months or even years, your stomach would hold itself it, even when you were not thinking about it. Vocal exercises should work in exactly the same way. When they do not either they are not understood by the student and the student cannot execute them accurately because of that, or they are not being configured properly by the teacher who does not understand what to ask for or in what way to adjust the exercise. In the first case, the teacher should adjust the exercise until the student can do it successfully, and not all teachers know how to do that. In the second case, the teacher needs to study more about what exercises do what, functionally. Come to my Level II at Shenandoah. We will teach you.

All of the words that voice teachers have conjured up over the decades have been to call forth these responses in some mysterious manner. Sometimes they work and sometimes they don’t. Mostly, it is hit or miss and it depends on how fixed a teacher’s ideas are about what they think they want to hear as to what kind of exercise she chooses. If you are looking for a shift in functional behavior, it isn’t so much about what you want to hear as it is about what you are looking to change. There is a different intention for each of these situations and that is a key distinction.

When the voice is working properly, the majority of the functional response is inside. The idea that you can make a good deal of sound without widely opening the mouth or dropping the jaw a lot is in many classical approaches and is aligned with the behavior of a ventriloquist. If the work travels into the external muscles the larynx will have a harder time doing its job freely and the sound will suffer accordingly. Everything from the strap muscles on the side of the neck, which are secondary laryngeal stabilizers, to the muscles in the base of the tongue, the jaw, or the back of the neck (a typical place for tension) should be involved in vocal production as little as possible.

It is paradoxical that you can have tension and freedom at the same time but this is true of all muscular activity that requires strength and flexbility in balance. In order to move quickly the muscular movements must be small. If you make large lumbering movements it is nearly impossible to go quickly and lightly, no matter what the task. Flexibility exercises for the muscles of the face, mouth/lips and tongue help counter exercises in which the mouth remains open for long periods of time, sustaining open vowels at moderate to loud volumes.

Flexbility in the back or base of the tongue is another matter altogether, however, and is much harder to access, because we don’t move those muscles deliberately. We do not much need them to do more than the minimum necessary for articulating normal colloquial speech. The larynx is suspended in the front from the muscles at the base of the tongue, so its flexibility is a key ingredient in rapidly moving phrases. Rapid melismatic phrases ask a great deal more of the tongue and it takes great patience to develop pitch accuracy and speed in a voice that is also easily full and loud because these movements in the tongue, that are not automatic, must be deliberately cultivated. Callas wrote about how much she worked on articulatory exercises with her teacher, Elvira de Hildago, who was a coloratura. Those drills served Callas well in her career, particularly in the Bel Canto repertoire.

In a beginning student with no previous singing training a great deal of time has to be spent on getting the person to allow the jaw to drop and the mouth to remain comfortably open (about the width of a thumb) without forcefully pulling the jaw down and holding it there rigidly. The muscles of the face, inside and out, have to lengthen through stretching, over time. As this work takes hold, if the student is also encouraged to sing with an enlivened facial expression, the muscles of the soft palate, which stretch across the back of the mouth, will also respond, lifting and stretching. The inside of a trained singer’s mouth looks very different than that of someone who has had little training. The musculature becomes defined rather than gelatinous and can be quite taut when activated. The muscles of the side walls of the throat that constrict it in order to swallow should be, as much as possible, at rest while singing. The problem, of course, is that thinking about this won’t help much, as the swallowing muscles operate largely below the level of conscious awareness unless we swallow on purpose. Most people who “swallow their sound” don’t do so deliberately and often have no idea that this behavior even exists.

As a vocalist gains more skill, it is possible to close the mouth (bring the jaw up) to a smaller opening while having the back of the throat (velopharyngeal port) remain lifted and open. The closing of the jaw releases it, releases the back of the tongue and allows the facial muscles more ease in changing position.  Asking a beginning student to do this, however, is usually counter productive.

This discussion leads us next to habituation versus conditioned response. Human beings can become accustomed to almost anything, even things that are very unpleasant and uncomfortable. Some people even find things that are painful to be rewarding. We call those people masochists. Behaviors we become accustomed to become habits, things we do without paying attention. Many people sing quite decently around chronic tension in any and all muscles that effect vocal output but that doesn’t mean that their vocal production is optimal. The best vocal production occurs when the larynx is operating efficiently, the rest of the muscles are free to move and adjust, the airflow is controlled by a balance of activity in the ribs and abdominal muscles and the lips, tongue and jaw are free to form vowels and consonants.

The training process is supposed to isolate habits that are useful from ones that are not. It is supposed to counter unproductive behaviors by developing opposite ones that are corrective or developmental. It is supposed to strengthen good habits without having them become predominant. Working from a functional place, the teacher has to know good function from bad. The teacher has to understand how to work one group of muscles until it is free from another and when to stop going in one direction to go in the opposite direction. The teacher has to understand what is manipulation and what is exaggerated behavior done for exercise purposes only. The teacher has to know. The  T E A C H E R.