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Each week millions of people watch American Idol, The Voice, Glee, The X Factor and MTV. That means that millions of people watch others sing. In fact, there is a lot of singing on TV right now, but it doesn’t cover very much ground. You don’t hear Broadway songs, you don’t hear much folk music, you don’t hear a lot of country music, you don’t hear too much jazz. You do hear lots of pop/rock, R&B, and maybe some rap music (now and then), but you never ever hear classical singing (at least not in the USA), unless you watch a PBS station. The narrowness of the styles chosen by the people who run these shows is based on what sells the most –what brings in the most money from the marketplace. That’s how they sell the advertising time to sponsors. It’s a double bind, of course, in that the audience might start buying the other styles of music if they had a chance to hear them, but we’ll never know because no one wants to take a chance.

The problem with a lot of pop songs is that they are relatively simple, musically speaking. They rely on few chord changes or simple melodies with lots of repetitions. They have a “hook” that usually is considered “catchy” so you remember it, and sometimes there are key changes for the sake of “excitement”. Because the music listening public is so completely uneducated musically speaking, their tastes seem to reside in music that does not take a lot of “figuring out”. What happens is that a lot of pop songs end up sounding like a lot of other pop songs and pop singers end up sounding a lot like other pop singers. It is really unusual when someone who is truly different comes along and changes things. It happens once in a while, but less frequently than it did decades ago.

The way pop music works is that the song usually has a “high part” which is usually sung very loudly in a belt sound. This is supposed to convey emotion, but often it isn’t clear what emotion. The vocalist is supposed to sound good, but this can now be done through electronic/acoustic enhancement. Most people who listen don’t know who has been enhanced and who has not but they probably wouldn’t care even if they did know.

In this atmosphere, someone with a truly great voice (a unique distinctive instrument) who is emotionally open and musical, hasn’t got much chance unless he or she learns to do a good job in R&B or pop/rock music. If that’s not what the person wants to sing, they might (like Susan Boyle) break through with Broadway songs, but that would be the one in a million person (as she was) and not the norm. Mostly, the good singers are invisible, and are placed alongside the not so good singers as equals and hardly anyone knows the difference. They’re in plain sight but no one sees them for what they really are.

Since we have no easy way to educate the general public about what good singing is or isn’t, from the standpoint of a general or overall understanding of what makes a great voice great, of what’s makes a great voice in a great song great, this situation isn’t likely to change any time soon. Nevertheless, it is a worthy goal for those of us who teach singing to do our best to educate anyone whom we may encounter because having the information out there is better than not. Yes, things change, and yes, everyone has their own take on what they like, but some of the things that have allowed singers to be recognized for at least 100 years are the same as they ever were and those things should not be ignored. Those of us in singing have to keep trying to pass on what we know to those who don’t know so that we can keep the art of singing, in all its styles, going in the best possible way.

These days there is increased awareness about how the body functions in both sports and dance. Many approaches to both work with body mechanics in order to increase efficiency and lessen the possibility of injury. There are also sports psychologists who work to make the mental attitude of those who compete at the highest levels ready for the stress of the battle and the aftermath of failure. There are people in dance that help professional dancers ease out of dance and into other careers.

So, do we do this any of these things with singers? As Ralph Cramden used to say, “Hardee har har.”

Singing is mostly still in the 19th century, hardly acknowledging the 21st, mostly stuck in mystery-land where teachers are arguing about belly in or belly out breath support or back muscles or expanded ribs, and lots of various “resonance strategies” be they in the forehead, eyebrows, hard palate, nasal passages, or some other spot in the head (never anywhere else). The idea that the voice (or the muscles involved in making sound) can be trained to do several different kinds of sounds on purpose, or that those tasks involve different responses in the mechanism is still, believe it or not, heresy in some places. This is analogous to the idea that runners should run in patent leather shoes or that swimmers should be competing with bloomers on, meaning it makes no sense but people do think it helps in spite of that.

How would it be if we did high speed photography of world class singers who have had careers for 20, 30, 40 or even 50 years, in any style, just to study the outside of their bodies while they sing? Maybe we would see similarities, in terms of styles, or voice types, or genders? How would it be if we asked a few people to have short video X-rays of their upper torso while singing, to see what is moving inside? How about having professional singers of all ages and backgrounds make recordings of the same two or three short songs, in several specific keys, just to compare whatever could be compared in a computer analysis? Why are we not looking at really efficient vocalists to see what we can learn from them about how they sing?

Because.

Most of the money available for research is aimed at vocal fold health. It goes to the university medical schools where the MDs study unhealthy throats. The money for acoustic research on healthy singers is next to nil, but what little there is also goes to schools that have research labs. In those cases, you get research done on college students or maybe college faculty, not on high level, long-term-career professional singers. There is money for speech pathology research because they do that work on unhealthy speakers, and for research on children with speaking issues. Is there money for research on a large group of professional singers who have been highly successful singing in any style for a long time? You can hear Ralph again with his mocking laugher……”Hardee har har”.

So, is it any wonder that we stay stuck in the 19th century? Is it any wonder that when we talk about singing voice function most singers and teachers of singing are in a kind of “huh” mentality?

Will it change? We can hope so, but I have no great idea of how unless some really wealthy singer decides to create a big lab and give it lots of money for the research I’m talking about. Hardee Har Har.

The primary and most significant instrument is the human voice. It costs nothing. It is always available. It is capable of making a very wide range of pitches, vowels and sound qualities and volumes and carries within it all the emotions that human beings experience.

A person is known by her character. This is the sum of her actions, her words and her expressions and the day to day events of how her life is lived. When we speak of someone with a “strong character” we might mean someone who is influential through their personal integrity or through their example of overcoming adversity. We speak of someone who can be counted on when the going is rough, someone who is responsible even when that responsibility is difficult, someone who is able to think not just of herself but of others, sometimes more of others than of herself.

A person who tells the truth, even when doing so is hard; a person who stands up for what is fair and unbiased; a person who understands what it is to suffer and experience pain, a person who knows great joy just from seeing the sunset or hearing a child laugh; such a person is a treasure to others — a person like this leaves the world a better place just by being alive.

There is much now in the world that is not good. Lying, cheating, stealing, hatred, anger, great amounts of fear, all manner of suffering, illness, pain and struggle. There are those who feed on these dark emotions, making other’s lives more unsteady, all the while claiming to be the people with “the truth”. Arrogance, ignorance, hubris, self-aggrandizement, self-centeredness, greed, betrayal — the list is long. Sometimes people get so confused they can no longer tell true from false. That is a dire situation indeed.

What has this to do with a fully connected voice you may ask? Everything. Someone who has developed the human voice to its fullest, which takes years of diligent work and practice, brings forth in it every aspect of sound. It is then and only then when it can reflect fully the wide scope of human experience. It is then that it is strong, powerful, clear and moving.

When words are spoken by such a person, while that person feels deeply what it being said, the effect is always commanding. The words ring out with a special kind of energy, one that is hard to describe in words. When the sounds are sung, this effect is magnified many times over. The sound of an open, alive, vibrant voice singing words that are connected to deeply felt emotion and communication leave an impression like none other on earth. It is not for nothing that many really famous singers have been able to transcend nations, languages, politics, ages, and styles. When Luciano sang in NYC’s Central Park, half a million people would come, and for Streisand as well. Pavarotti mostly did not sing in English. People didn’t care. He mostly sang opera. Also, people didn’t care. They came for that SOUND and the emotion it always carried in it.

If you work on your voice, you must also always work on your body, and if you work on both, you must also work on who you are. It’s a package. The vocal development becomes a spiritual path. And, eventually, you discover your voice. You discover what it is you want to say, what you HAVE to say, in this life that is your message and yours alone. You uncover the vibration not just of your voice, but of your deepest soul desires.

And if you succeed in this, you find a place that cannot be any of the small, closed things I wrote about above. It becomes nearly impossible to be greedy, mean, narcissistic, arrogant, or anything else dark and horrible. You find that you fall in love with the human race and the planet on which we dwell and that your voice blends with the sound of the wind, the ocean, the birds and the laughter of children just as surely as it sends out messages of music and mind.

The power of a fully connected voice is the same power as that which called life into existence. It is that nameless something that is in everything and of everything which we know as life. It is one of the most powerful forces in the world.

If I had a dollar for all the referrals I’ve made in my life, I could retire. I have sent countless students to other teachers for all kinds of reasons. I don’t get any money or publicity for doing this. I do it because it is the right thing to do. Sometimes the student wants a teacher who is close to home, sometimes they are looking for a teacher with a certain type of expertise, sometimes they are trying to find a teacher who is available on a certain day or at a specific time, sometimes they want a teacher who is male or female. There are all kinds of reasons.

Since I made it my business to meet as many of my colleagues as I could a long time ago, I often have a good selection of teachers to recommend and do not hesitate to give several names. These people are known to me to be long-time teachers with good reputations amongst their peers and with a solid group of students who have gone on to work. Here in New York City where a private practice teacher has to be good in order to survive, you have a lot of competition. Only those who are dedicated and reliable continue for years and years. There are a good number of people and we mostly know each other. Yes, some are “competitors” but there are always more than enough students to go around, so why worry?

Of course, I have had lots of referrals, too, from all kinds of people, not just my students. Word of mouth is strong once you have demonstrated both your expertise and your attitude. Isolated teachers may still have lots of students, but that’s just not the same as being part of a community of experts who all want to do something altruistic. They want to help their students learn to sing well.

I have been around the vocal medical community long enough to know that even the highest level specialists disagree. They have different points of view about what is best for a patient and what is the most effective treatment option. They do seem to be willing, at least from an outsider’s point of view, to discuss these differences in an open forum such as a meeting, conference or panel discussion. I wish the same could be said for singing teachers, but this has not much been my experience, although I do think it is better now than it was 30 or 35 years ago. Because more teaching is based on science and function there is less “personal mystery” involved in teaching and this levels the field. That has to be a good thing. One’s approach to teaching, however, is more than a way of explaining the process of singing, it is also about how the information is presented and how it is taken in by the student. We have all known very bright people who could not communicate or relate socially to others.

If you are teaching, particularly if you are just starting out, make every effort to be a participant in your community of teachers, musicians and performers. Get to know them, appreciate them and let them know you. In time, if you are consistent and patient, many good things can come from these associations. Do not be afraid to give your time to a common cause. In the end, you may get many referrals and one day, like me, you may also be able to refer students to other teachers because it is the right thing to do.

Muscle Tension Dysphonia or MTD is a rather newly labeled diagnosis of vocal function aberrant behavior. It is common in those who are professional level singers, sometimes very high level singers with long successful careers.

The symptoms of MTD are wide ranging. It can be hard to get this diagnosis if you are seeing an ENT who is not familiar with professional voice users or the demands and requirements of professional level singing. A typical issue is the loss of the ability of the voice to match pitch. Sometimes the singer can be a full half step flat. This can be very unsettling, in that the person is clearly hearing the pitch and striving to reproduce it, but it just won’t come out accurately. Further, sometimes the voice just “shuts off” at a specific pitch, meaning that it no longer goes above or below certain notes, no matter how much effort the vocalist exerts. This can cause all kinds of compensatory behavior including pushing, forcing and ensuing vocal fatigue.

If the problem causes other issues like instability of vibrato, inability to sustain pitches, loss of control over volume, or loss of range, it could incorrectly be assumed that the singer is experiencing vocal technique problems. In the case of a very experienced singer, however, with lots of career success and life experience, the likelihood that the person will somehow “forget” how to breathe or “match pitch” or “create resonance” is small.

Because this condition was recognized by the medical profession not that long ago, it can go undiagnosed and that can cause the vocalist to believe that he or she is a hypochondriac or that he has experienced some kind of mental/emotional breakdown. The lack of ability to sing, when one’s identity has been intricately wrapped up in singing, is highly distressing. The complete lack of explanation for this situation having biological or neurological roots is even worse. Further, because the vocal folds generally look normal in MTD, if the ENT does not have the instruments to examine microscopic vocal fold irregularities, which requires expensive equipment and a very skilled eye, just visiting just any ENT may be no help. They must also examine the pharyngeal behavior for squeezing and compensation, and that means they must look not just at the folds but at the entire vocal tract. We have a growing number of throat specialists who understand these vocal function syndromes but they are not necessarily to be found just anywhere. Further, if the vocalist with the problem does not explain it well or understand that MTD could be a possible diagnosis, he or she might not ask useful questions of the MD or provide vital information that could lead to a correct evaluation of the problem. Medical tests pinpointing what’s wrong and where it shows up can be very helpful, but it might take a while to find someone who can provide this kind of diagnosis.

And, if you are given the diagnosis of MTD, you should be sent to a qualified Speech Language Pathologist who has experience dealing with professional singers with this problem. Not all SLPs have that kind of training and experience and without it, things could be very difficult indeed, in that many times singers can speak well enough, but they cannot sing. It’s not really clear why this would be so but my guess is that singing requires a much higher level of function than does conversational speech. In a sense, you can walk, but you can’t run. If you do not have assistance with speaking you really do not know if the way you are using your speaking voice is having a negative impact on how you are attempting to sing. If the SLPs is not familiar with singing, however, the sessions could be limited only to speech and that may not ultimately get the person back to singing again.

Therefore, if you or anyone you know has any kind of similar symptoms and they do not seem to respond to normal vocal technique training, and the person was functioning at a relatively high level for quite some time before the problem existed, you should yourself or they should be diligent in getting the right kind of help. It is very possible to encourage the vocal folds to return to normal function, as long as you know what you are doing, but it takes time, patience and perseverance. Looking for a Singing Voice Specialist who has successful experience helping to resolve MTD is very important.

I have had great success with some very recalcitrant vocal fold issues in singers at a high level who “just lost” their ability to sing and were totally distraught at this development. (Who wouldn’t be?) How I learned to be helpful was through trial and error, observation of SLPs, work with medical doctors and lots of years of life experience singing and teaching. I also have a good deal of “intuition” that helps me and that was cultivated deliberately as well, although I had some strong natural tendencies at the outset. Please help spread the word that MTD is real and that is can be addressed by a team of skilled and experienced voice care professionals.

When tackling a tough vocal technique problem you cannot go in a straight line. It is very much like sailing into the wind — first you sail to the right, then you make a sharp turn and sail to the left, but always on the diagonal. It takes longer, but you get there.

If you attempt to get rid of deeply buried tension straightforwardly, you will likely make the tension you want to release worse. Since the remedies you use (from Somatic Voicework™, of course) work well on most people with simple problems, you will wonder, what’s wrong here? You might even start to blame the student/singer for not trying hard enough, for not being motivated, for not wanting to “let go” and a dozen other things. You could get frustrated and confused, and that would surely not help the vocalist.

It isn’t easy, as a singing teacher, to address such issues, but it can be done. The idea is to take your time, progressing slowly through several stages. If you are going to dismantle a building, you start with the things that do not support the weight of the structure. You don’t take down the support structure until the very end.

With vocal problems of this nature, you must first relax whatever you can see on the outside of the body and get a free response of movement there as well. That means that the torso, the neck and shoulders, and the head over the shoulders, should not only be free of visible tension but free of “holding” or “striving” as well, especially during the exercises. You need movements to be small, simple and gentle, for a long time (say several weeks, not several minutes), but you must vary them gently so neither you nor the student gets bored. You must work to create a wider arc of movement, using exaggeration and “tools” like the straw and the cork, and you can also have the student do gentle self-massage and other maneuvers.

In between each exercise, you must go back (at least in your mind) to the auditory balance between chest on the low pitches and head on the upper pitches and the kind of vowels you are getting. An unconstricted, open and balanced throat will produce an undistorted set of vowels, particularly if the singer has been encouraged to learn what undistorted vowels are along the way. Vowel distortion that shows up consistently when you are asking for a specific sound in someone who understands what is being requested occurs because the throat shape is distorted through tension. That is true of pitch as well, especially in someone who can hear the difference between being flat or sharp versus someone who does not. Those who have poor pitch sense will learn to hear better as they go along, because function will get better. Getting them to the ball park of the pitch, as you get the throat to be in the ballpark of openness and freedom can be tedious, unless you love humanity and you love singing and want to give another human being the opportunity to do something spectacular, like singing, by sharing patiently what you know. Then, it could never be tedious. It can in fact, be wondrous.

If you want the high notes to be “warmer” and “more open” and have a “fuller sound”, you have to create more space in the vocal tract. The way to do that is by going to the bottom of the range (low pitches) by singing in a relaxed “foghorn” sound on /o/ or /a/ for a while at moderate volume until the tongue and jaw are very relaxed and the larynx can rest low in the throat without manipulation. If you are working with a female, and then gently carried this sound up across E/F just above middle C, and back down again, over and over, gently and slowly, and gradually allowed it to get louder, that would be next. Then you would have to slowly increase the volume. The pitch range would vary with males and females but not the activity.

At just about the time this is all working, you would have to STOP and do something opposite. Why? Because if you do not, then you make the alternate behavior a destination not just a resting place and that’s not a good thing. Using the above example, you would then have to shake things up, going to tongue/jaw activities, because all constriction of the interior muscles of the throat causes tongue issues. It is your job, NOT THE JOB OF THE STUDENT to shake those tensions lose. There are a whole bunch of exercises that would be appropriate and work, but you would have to understand what to do with them and be patient while they had an effect.

Then, you would go to a small vowel, like /i/, but much higher and lighter, striving for head, but NOT open — closed — as this should be slightly easier. Staccati or rapid scales would be useful. Other exercises in this vein might be necessary, in succession, and there would also always have to be, in the back of your mind, the idea that you are listening to both register balance and vowel sound accuracy. You have to play with vowel sound shapes, with volume and with both slow sustained exercises and well as fast ones. Then you could go back to “foghorns” for a while. Zig zagging back and forth until you are close to the opposite shore in your sailboat.

Finally, you could do open octave slides on /a/ at about mezzo forte, rising slowly from mid range. If the breathing is good (and that would have to be addressed along the way, too), then there would be a very good chance that your student’s high notes would suddenly “pop open”. Ta-da – you are at the dock!

This entire process can take A YEAR if the person is an older person who has been singing for a while, and that’s with lessons not less than twice a month and consistent practice in between. During that time, the student/singer would be more or less “discombobulated” or go through a period of vocal “limbo” where the old habits were not always apparent, but not necessarily gone yet, and the new ones were not yet stable and taking over automatically. This is a scary and upsetting time for the singer and the teacher has to support this with explanation and encouragement.

If you want to read more about this get “Psyche and Soma” by Cornelius Reid. It’s out of print, but you might find it on line somewhere. He talks about functional vocal training at length. Just remember that he wrote for classical singers only and I took his work and stood it on its head, so to speak, to make it work for CCM vocalists. Somatic Voicework™, my method, is functional training but it includes the body as being part of the process, and the heart and mind as vital ingredients in making a vocal artist.

Most singing teachers are alone in their studios with their students. Most singers are alone when they practice. This isn’t a particularly good situation for either.

If you are in a big city, you can do what I am doing now, which is renting a studio in a public studio rental location. I am in mid-town Manhattan, in the theater district, at a place that has auditions, rehearsals, and lessons going on all day every day. It is similar to being in a university conservatory where all the practice rooms are right next to each other and some of the sounds being made in each studio bleed through into the studios alongside. I am renting space, instead of teaching in my apartment, because I am in the midst of changing some things at home. I haven’t done this in three years, and it’s always a good experience because it startles me into being more in touch with the real world of teaching singing.

It’s hard not to be totally distracted by what I hear through the walls. Yesterday I heard a young soprano running through some classical piece I didn’t recognize. The sound was disconnected from any semblance of emotion or communication and had a fairly wide and uneven vibrato. Even through the walls it wasn’t something you would ever want to have to pay to hear. Down the hall, there was a man singing one of the Verdi arias. He was a baritone but he was singing in a wooden heavy sound that wasn’t too bad at full volume in mid range but his high notes were belted, without modified vowels. I could hear a faint voice, (no words) mumbling something in between, (I assumed this was the teacher or coach) and then he would begin again in the same way. Today, I heard a young woman with a female speaking in between. She had a boy soprano sound, thin and high and started out well enough, although the sound would only have been useful if she had, indeed, been a boy soprano. It gradually gave out on her, tightening more each time she repeated the vocal exercise she was doing, until finally the high notes were off pitch and then just cut off as she attempted them. This was followed by her working on “On My Own” from Les Miz. A worse song you could not possibly find for someone with this voice to attempt to sing.

I assume that these vocalists are paying for teaching/coaching and maybe also for the room. I can’t help but think that none of this has to be happening. Things would be quite different if we had a world in which truthful information about creating new vocal behavior was as easily available as information obtained on the web on all kinds of other topics. Of course, it’s true that there is “information” about singing available in cyberspace, much of it is less than useless.

Exercises for the voice are stimuli. They are meant to elicit a response and therefore lead to new or different vocal function. The exercises have to be used correctly and the teacher has to know what response he or she wishes to prompt in the student’s throat or body in order to choose the appropriate pattern of pitch, vowel and volume. Most teachers just guess. Others assume they know what the student should be doing, so they attempt to go there directly. This usually causes manipulated change, not genuine freely produced vocal adjustment.

If you live in a city, see if you can rent space where you might sit in the middle of a bunch of singing teachers and just listen for a while. If you live in an area near a college or school, ask if you can observe some teachers. If you can go to a conference where you will watch people teach, attend as many teaching sessions as you can. You will see and hear all kinds of things that purport to be singing instruction and you will realize that much of what passes for teaching is just guessing. Sometimes, if the student is intelligent and musical, motivated and creative, guessing can work. Trial and error is valid in certain circumstances. You will also encounter lots of things that are nonsensical, useless, confusing, convoluted, unnecessarily complex, and just plain stupid that are perpetrated on unsuspecting singing students. You will find hapless students who are paying to struggle with instruction that is not illuminating their path (educate comes from “educare” which in Latin means to draw out or point the way), and in fact makes things obscure and mystifying. Do this so that you will remember how important it is for you who teach to know what you are doing.

Lest We Forget: Above All DO NO HARM.

Breathing is the most significant activity of the human body. No one has ever committed suicide by holding her breath.

Your limbic brain is programmed to get the oxygen in and the carbon dioxide out no matter what obstacle it has to overcome to do so. It is the reason people drown, because sooner or later, you will inhale. People have trained themselves over years and years to go as long at 15 minutes without breathing, but they are very rare. Most people can barely hold their breath for a minute.

Breathing shuts down when you are frightened. It is part of the “flight-fright” programming in the limbic brain. It works the same for the animals. When they are frightened, they freeze. For us, our breathing gets very shallow, the blood flows into the core of the body leaving the external areas cold and the forehead also gets cold and clammy. You cannot override this response. If it is strong enough, you will go into shock. The whole system shuts down.

Deep breathing is often a response to relief. We let out a big sigh. Sometimes it is a result of deep relaxation and contentment. In all cases, it is the fuel which allows the body to best do its job of being alive.

Aliveness is the capacity to experience life through the body through the five physical senses. We experience the physical world through what we see, hear, smell, taste and touch. The phrase “being spirited” usually connotes the idea that an individual is full of life, exuberant, and spontaneous. Having “high spirits” would mean being optimistic, energized and happy. In some traditions breath is equivalent to spirit. In the Catholic Church, receiving the “Holy Spirit” is evinced by a feeling of grace, humility and inspiration. The word inspire means to “fill someone with the urge or ability to do something”. [Oxford English Dictionary, 2006]

The lungs are the vehicle for the breath to enter and leave the body. Oxygen is converted there to energy which goes into the blood stream. It is used as fuel to run the other organs, including the heart, until the blood returns depleted of oxygen and full of carbon dioxide, where it is released into the air, and the cycle begins again, thousands of times a day. For the most part, this breathing process happens on its own, without any conscious direction or effort. We can, however, learn to breathe very deliberately. Singing is an activity that asks us to do just that.

Inhalation is largely related to postural stance. The rib cage needs to be strongly open and expanded and it takes quite a few muscles in the body to accomplish this effectively. A “deep breath” is one in which the air goes all the way down into the lungs, filling them up to the bottom, where they are widest. A comfortably lifted, open rib cage, without shoulder tension and without tightening or shortening the pectoral muscles, allows for the fullest, deepest inhalation; one in which the lungs are fully expanded to maximum capacity. Since the body doesn’t do this on its own without being stressed (like running in a race), learning to elicit this behavior deliberately, while standing still, takes time. And, doing it repetitively is also not something the body does without vigorous physical activity, so one must learn this as well. Controlling the exhalation requires that the ribs remain stabile, and not collapse, (this is a very weird behavior to teach the body) and that the abdominal muscles simultaneously engage during exhalation to keep the pressure level consistent even though it is dropping inside as the lung volume decreases. All of this is learned behavior as well.

If you do not fully inhale and exhale, you will inhibit your ability to feel and experience deep, free emotions, and to release them. If you doubt this, watch any young child. Emotions flow through them all the time. Happy one minute and sad the next. They make no effort to “control” their feelings. Since emotions are meant to move (like waves) through the body, as physical sensation, any attempt to suppress emotion will suppress feeling. Suppression is done through shallow breathing, so if you don’t feel you don’t breathe and if you don’t breathe you don’t feel. They are equal partners. Since singing is about being expressive (unless you want to sing like a robot), you need to learn to ride on the exhalation, as sound, guiding it, but not holding it back. The deep equilibrium that one acquires after training the voice for a while allows the larynx to stabilize the vocal fold response such that the folds allow just enough air to pass through them for an appropriate sung sound to emerge. The final effect is to blend emotional expression, musical expression and vocal sound into a seamless whole.

We are in an epidemic of emotionless singing. Jazz is filled with insipid, breathy singers who don’t really feel much of anything. A great deal of what ones hears is effect. It is, unfortunately, all too rare to hear a full throated, emotionally passionate jazz vocalist because the trend of singing only softly (which is wrongly read as being “sexy”) is so popular at the moment. The other thing that’s popular in other styles of music is various kinds of screaming. Pop, rock, gospel, country, R&B, all kinds of styles equate loud screamy singing with emotional passion. It is, in fact, the exact opposite. The brain eventually rejects the continuous onslaught of sound as being “too much” and just registers it as all being “intense”. Intense what? You can’t tell. Loud for loud’s sake is not being expressive. And, believe it or not, the continuous vocal response to this screaming is to tighten and close the throat making it less and less possible to take in air easily. Over time, the capacity to inhale deeply becomes increasingly difficult. As a consequence, it is less and less possible to really deeply feel anything, especially subtle differences like melancholy rather than full blown despair, or frustration rather than high intensity anger. The larynx rides high in the throat, the breathing becomes shallow, the rib cage collapses and the genuine deeply felt aliveness that should be part of singing just slowly diminishes. It is insidious, but it is reliably so.

The way to be expressive is to be fully alive. The way to be fully alive is to fully breathe in and out. The way to sing authentically and uniquely is to be in touch with your body and your feelings while you sing. Nothing else can substitute.

You can compare Mercedes Benz to Kia Motors, or the Ritz-Carlton to Motel 8, or Payless shoes to Jimmy Choo’s, or Tiffany jewelry to that from K-Mart’s. The list of similar comparisons in this world is endless.

You have mass market products and you have those that are tailored to a different, more elite customer. Designer brands exist for the wealthy or those who aspire to seem wealthy. If you need a ride to the store and it’s raining, you aren’t going to care if you get the ride in a brand new Mercedes or an old jalopy Ford, as long as you get there and stay dry. If you are interested in function, that’s different than if you are interested in elegance, or exclusivity, or uniqueness. A custom hand made violin is going to cost a lot more than one made partially by machine manufacturing, but not everyone wants or can afford custom hand made instruments. But, there are some brands that are so exclusive, most people never hear about them. The people who know about them don’t want them to be known.

So, too, is it with singing lessons. It is a world of “let the buyer beware”, all the time, everywhere. There are no licensing bodies for teachers of singing, there are no “voice police”, there is no New Yorker magazine list of the Ten Best Singing Teachers in New York. You are on your own.

Therefore, if you are a novice, or if you have little experience, you are an easy mark. You wouldn’t know you were being sold a bill of bogus goods until you had bought those goods for a very long time. I have had people come to me who have been studying singing for 6, 9, even 12 years with one person, who had learned little or nothing about vocal production or basic singing technique. Seems crazy, I know, but absolutely true, and also very sad.

It’s like buying anything you do not know about……cars, insurance, appliances, electronics, vacations. You either jump in and take a chance for a while and see what you get or you don’t do it. Now, of course, there’s the internet, a great resource, but it also gives you oceans more information that you have to plough through, and not much help about knowing what, if anything, in that information is truthful or useful.

We come then to rely on the pieces of paper that put letters after someone’s name. If you have those letters (MFA, MA, PhD, CCC-SLP, etc.) we can assume that you went through some kind of training process involving others who had to pass judgment on your various skill sets. If nothing else, it at least means that you went to the trouble of trying to become a bonafide expert
at something. It does not mean, however, that you actually are an expert, or even very good.

Right now, there are dozens, maybe even hundreds of courses, DVDs, videos on YouTube and who knows what else on line that promise to teach you to sing. Some of them say “immediately”, other’s claim that they have discovered “THE way” to be a great vocalist, still others use famous people who endorse their approach to “prove” how good the teacher and the methods are. These “products” serve primarily one purpose and that is to make money for the seller. There’s nothing wrong with having something to sell. We live in a free market economy. It does mean, though, that you might spend the money on someone who has lots of famous clients who doesn’t know that much but has a “big footprint” in the media.

People tend to equate cost with quality. If you had a fantastic meal at the local diner that cost $12.00 and then had the exact same meal at a fancy up-scale restaurant for four times the price, the meal might seem like it was “better” at the more expensive place. There are studies that prove such. That’s how people are, they usually think– expensive is better.

We do that about popularity, too. If something is popular, it must be because it is “better”. Without evidence, there might be no reason to make that assumption, but we do.

If you are interested in quality singing teaching, don’t spend too much time on line. Don’t invest a lot of money in courses that you accidentally find on-line unless you know someone personally who has used the course and gotten good results from doing so. If you don’t know how to be “an educated consumer”, spend some time with singers you like and ask questions until you get answers.

Somatic Voicework™ may someday have “products” to sell to the general public. Right now, however, there are none and that has been the case for FORTY years. If you want to find me, you can now do it through this site, but you won’t find me through any advertising. If you are looking to learn to sing in 4 DVDs, I’m sure you can find that on-line somewhere and good luck to you. I can tell you that the most well-respected, most well known singing teachers here in NYC do not advertise, do not put out publicity using their famous students as a draw, and do not walk around claiming to have found “THE WAY”.

But if you are looking to be an artist, to use your voice with deep conviction, emotional truth and personal uniqueness; if you are looking to investigate the depths of the human condition through the discipline of becoming a great singer; you will not find any map on line. If you want to find a Mercedes Benz of singing teachers, you will not find him or her hanging out with the masses on the internet with the Kias. Never.

Let the buyer beware. The most expensive isn’t always the best. The most popular isn’t always the most useful. The most famous isn’t famous because he or she has re-discovered the vocal “wheel”. If a singer is not telling the truth in his or her singing, then the words will not ring true nor move the audience. You can’t learn that from some DVDs you bought on line. You can’t even try.

Be careful. THINK. Ask questions.

What, exactly, is a master class?

A class taught my a master, no? Seems to make sense.

I have seen my share of master classes, unfortunately, by people who have not, themselves, mastered anything.

One memorable one was taught at Juilliard by a very very famous accompanist who had worked with all sorts of important opera singers. This gentlemen was truly a master at accompanying but his style of doing the class was to bounce around all over the stage, waving his hands and making remarks that were sometimes clear and sometimes not, sometimes helpful and sometimes not and spending a lot of time talking about his own experiences as an accompanist. There is nothing wrong with any of this, of course, but only some of it seemed useful to the students.

Then, at the end, out came a counter tenor. I don’t remember what he sang (this was probably over 20 years ago) but it was an early music piece full of ornamentation and the young vocalist was very secure in what he did and how he did it. The master teacher was clearly not tremendously familiar with this material, but instead of admitting it out loud, he boldly rushed in, (and the angels are right in that they fear to tread in such circumstances) and asked the young man to do something with a phrase. The singer said as politely as possible, “but that would be wrong to the style of the music and to the way period embellishments are performed”. The master teacher quickly brought the session to an end. It wasn’t the student who looked bad.

I have countless other stories like this but I also have seen master classes that were truly brilliant. Classes in which the master teacher was able to find something vital, something special and important, and in the flash of an eye make the moment seem like a miracle. The audience could tell, the singer could tell and the master teacher quietly knew as well.

There is no specific way to learn to be a master teacher. You are asked, eventually, by others who perceive that you are a successful artist who might have something to teach rising young singers (or instrumentalists, if you play). There is no guarantee, however, that you will be able in 15 or 20 minutes, to say something that is profound, or even useful and specific. If you do enough of them, you will likely improve but I think some people will always be better at it than others.

In a recent “belting” master class I witnessed, the teacher said things to the student that the student tried hard to understand and use. You could see and feel his earnestness. I wrote a few of the teacher’s comments down. Here they are:

You see the G and you get tight. It’s totally mental.

You have to breathe into your cheekbones.

You are hooking into the low space.

Make more space in legit.

Connect to the sound.

The jaw should never be active. It’s useless. It should always be out of the way.

You are closing.

Feel the burn in your solar plexis.

Connect through the middle.

Think “droopy gooey” more.

Get rid of the jaw. You “hook” into the jaw.

Belt is an upside down triangle.

The jaw should not be part of the equation.

Use your “superbelt”.

If you activate the jaw you will be in trouble.

Move into a mix.

Use more resonance up there.

Don’t disconnect the chest.

Don’t disconnect from the support from the solar plexis.

By and large, most of these phrases are meaningless, in that, if you were to present them to an untrained but good belter, he or she would have no idea how to interpret them. Without precise language, coupled with an understanding of the vocal function of the mechanism, you might as well go back to the old ideas of vibrating your sinuses and supporting from the diaphragm.

This teacher also considered “mix” a “resonance strategy” (many men think this way) because he, himself, doesn’t really change vocal quality to get into a mix. (I didn’t think his belting was very belty. He was obviously a classical tenor). To this man, belting is just changing vowels. Sometimes, in the male voice, this is enough. In a classical female, one who is head register dominant, however, it is not. If the student can’t “move into a mix” how do you get them to? How do you even convey what a mix is?

And, unless you are in some kind of accident or have jaw cancer, you have a jaw. Without it, you wouldn’t be able to swallow or eat, and it would be very hard to talk. You can’t help but use it when you sing and if you want to “make more space” one of the most accessible ways to do that is to open your mouth by dropping your jaw straight down. The jaw is interconnected underneath the mandible to the muscles of the tongue and the larynx is hanging off those muscles in the front of the throat. Therefore, if you do not move your jaw, you can’t move much of anything else. Instructing someone to act as if a vital part of their vocal production machinery was not there is crippling instruction.

Sophisticated classical singers can keep the back of the mouth (velo-pharyngeal port) open with the mouth closed, like a ventriloquist, and this can be very effective. Belters, however, never sing with a closed mouth. NEVER.

Fear, of course, is a factor in singing. No one wants to sing something that is unstable and unreliable, lest the voice go off on its own and do something you don’t want. That does cause fear. In most beginners, it is always present and it is the teachers job to make it go away by improving the skill set of the student. If you are taking a baritone into higher pitches (a G is a very high note to a baritone) and you are a tenor, who can sail easily through a G, you do not understand pitch in relation to range and tessitura. Yes, you can make a person yell, that usually works, but it doesn’t sustain as a viable method of actually singing the pitch, in a mixier manner, because that is something that has to be achieved gradually, through training. If the student knows beforehand that he is going to crack, yes, he will be afraid of the “high note” but blaming him for that fear is as useless as blaming him for having a jaw. If I took you to the edge of a cliff and you were afraid of falling and then I stood very close behind you and leaned over your shoulder, unless you were very unusual, I would frighten you. It would be an appropriate response and I would be the reason you had it, not you and not the cliff.

I could go on, but you get the point.

Master teachers are few and far between. If you go to a master class, ask yourself if what you see and hear was actually useful to the student. If it was not, blame the teacher.