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Do you think that a Wagnarian sorpano is an expert at teaching or singing in a belt vocal quality? Do you think that being a vocal coach at the Met automatically gives you great skill at describing and teaching belting? Do you think that a tenor who is an expert at voice science but has no high notes and terrible vocal production is someone who possesses the ability to teach belting, a vocal experience he has never had?

I hope not. Unfortunately, I can tell you, that each of the individuals described above do think so. YEP. Promise.

Why not? After all, it’s just belting. You know, that loud, yelly sound that they do on Broadway and in rock songs. You know, that ugly sound that real singers hate. You know, the sound that uneducated unsophisticated singers have to use now and then.

Of course, if I, on the other hand, were to teach Wagnerian sopranos, because, it’s “just Wagner”, after all, even though I know very little about that literature, what harm would be done? I realize that the sounds have to be big and loud to carry over Wagner’s heavy orchestrations. I understand that you have to convey the music dramatically so the audience doesn’t fall asleep. I know enough about pronouncing German to realize if the words are sung appropriately. That’s enough. I’d be just fine. In fact, I assume I would be terrific or better than that, even.

Recently someone sent me a link to a “master teacher” who was clearly American, teaching in Switzerland, about “bel canto”. She had a bowl full of raw and hard boiled eggs. She actually put a hard boiled egg inside some poor singer’s mouth (after telling her that the inside of her mouth was “very small”) and then proceeded to talk and talk, while the unfortunate woman held the egg in her mouth, about “loosening the plates in your skull”. She did this in a New York nasal speaking voice and when one of the other participants commented about using her chest voice, the teacher said, “oh no, there is no such thing”, except in the teacher’s speech, which, obviously didn’t count since she didn’t realize she herself was using it.

How about being told that belting happens when “the column stands as witness, but doesn’t participate in the sound” (from the Met coach, I think). How about “dropping the diaphragm” to “clip the consonants”? How about “opening the lower chamber in the back” as ways to be a better belter?

What about the people that write biographies that actually think they know more about the singer than the singer herself? What about the idea that Ethel Merman and Barbra Steisand were not belters (although THEY thought they were and said so)? Do the biographers suppose the vocalists, with major careers, were so stupid as to not recognize what kind of singers they were? YEP. Promise.

What about the idea that people singing R&B material, in Germany, in front of German agents, were told they could not sustain a vocal line, and were, therefore, poor vocalists. How about the German agents didn’t realize that melismas are part of R&B style and that not having them indicates you can’t sing the style? How about they never bothered to find out what the style was or how it works? YEP. Promise.

For every person who has the integrity to tell the truth and say, “I don’t know about this topic, therefore, I won’t teach it or talk about it until I do”, there are a dozen who go ahead and teach or write about what they think they know with impunity, since, either they need the job and the money, or they could care less about whether or not the singer actually learns something healthy and useful, or they don’t know there is something to know. I can’t say which is worse but I know that all three attitudes are alive and well out there and that they will be until people who know better stand up, speak out, and stop the nonsense.

Are you one of them?

Teaching in any kind of school system requires standardization. Standardization requires that things be put in a box, labeled, measured, codified, and remain fixed.

Art is about uniqueness. An artist is someone who sees the world uniquely and expresses his or her point of view about it in some new fashion. Art should illuminate life, shedding light on the human condition, making us shift our awareness and discover something about living that we would not on our own encounter.

These two things do not go together easily or well.

The easy way to make things coalesce is to make the art stop being about uniqueness and make it be about sameness. That solves all the problems except it kills the art.

You do not have to think hard about the consequences of such actions nor of the commonality of them. We live with them every day.

If you go to a performance of an opera, a new opera, written by a living composer, I defy you to come away with any sense at all of the music. It is never there. No traditional harmony, no cadences, and certainly no repetitive themes or melodies. No tunes, no actual identifiable characteristics except that, of course, it’s not atonal, exactly. It’s just that, well, it’s not really recognizable as anything that’s tonal, either. It certainly might impress other composers. It might impress the people who give money who work in finance, or real estate, or maybe who have nothing else to do but give money to arts organizations to get a tax write-off. What it does not do is go to the heart. It does not move you. It does not make you want to ever hear it again. Even if, really, you had hoped you would like it and that you would find in it something of lasting value.

The people who criticize this non-music music are disregarded by the arts world in spite of the fact that opera as we know it has been dying as an art form for decades. The average age of the audiences at an opera sits in the middle of the baby boomers who are now in their late 50s and early 60s. There are all kinds of reasons why the arts people think this is so. There are all kinds of ways they hope to increase the audiences again. You have to “entice them in” by making the operas “relevant”. Dress up the old operas in present moment situations? Sure! Go ahead. Put Rembrandt in leather pants, give those Night Watch dudes clothes by Ralph Lauren and make one of them a drug dealer. Young people don’t have to scratch their heads…..they get it! Wrong. They stay away. How about — write new pieces that young people can claim as their own? That’s cool! Except the music, when they finally get around to going, puts you to sleep or makes you itchy in your seat.

That’s a good combination, sleepy and itchy. You really want to come back to have another go at that experience. Or, if you are very sophisticated, and can relate to the “interesting” musical elements (guitar and Chinese gong, South American bamboo flute and tin whistle, conga drums and tomato cans on a string), perhaps you would experience a performance more in the “deep intellectual investigation” mode. You listen to complex density and unusual overtones of all the music banging into itself….to see if you can find something you like. To see if you can find something. Anything.

And, of course, there’s the singing. The calling card of the professional opera singer who is “rising” or, perhaps, has gone about as far as he or she can go, is BE LOUD. BE VERY VERY LOUD. Loud shows you are emotionally communicative. Loud shows how good your technique is. Loud is about commitment. Loud says you have a big, strong voice. Loud is good. Loud.

No one is supposed to notice, however, that your face turns blue, your jaw is down so far your entire face looks like you are on the rack only standing up, your lips look like some kind of large fish going for the bait on a hook, your neck muscles are bulging and your pronunciation of the words is so distorted as to be completely unrelated to anything recognizable as communication. The vibrato is wide enough to contain at least three semi-tones, and the vocal line, if the music had one, is like a snake winding its way across the mud, leaving behind it a wake of significant proportions. If you are a man and can sing softly, you do so in a kind of weak falsetto whether or not that vocal production has anything to do with the emotion or communication of the lyrics. It at least lets you sing the notes that the composer gave you that are entirely out of your normal range.

On the other hand, however, if you have a nice, even vocal production with none of the above problems, you leave it alone, lest by disturbing it, it would go away. You sing every single word with the same nice, not too anything vocal approach, although you know that loud on the high notes is effective when you can sustain it for a bunch of measures. You do not change the quality of the vowels, the color of the tone, the pronunciation of the consonants, or the use of your physical anatomy, because, well, why would you anyway? Don’t we all stay the same in what we do all day every day no matter what? Might as well reflect life as it is, since that’s the point of the singing, right?

There is a remarkable availability of such experiences if you, as an audience member, would like to have one. You don’t have to look very far. Just go to something new or something old that is being “re-interpreted”. I’m sure you can find one in your own town, wherever you are. And, if, like me, you wonder how it is that we are in such a place, I will share with you what I came to after I asked myself this question for the 9,000th time.

Schools. Every year you have a bumper crop of people who graduate with degrees in performing, or orchestration, or composing, or conducting. They put in the time, they get the piece of paper. They may have no talent, no inspiration and no actual insight as to what, uniquely, they feel about life or art, but by golly, they went to school and they are READY. You might also have a degree in voice, maybe a masters’ or even a doctorate. But, if you are a regular reader of this blog, you already well know that does not mean you can sing. It does not mean you can sing in any way at all. Your singing might be just dreadful, but you did the required work, you studied with the chairperson of the voice department, and no one was willing to be the person to say “This person can’t sing”, because, well, they all have to keep their jobs and feed their families.

So you get an opera written by someone who writes by formula. You get an opera that has singers who scream or can’t change anything. You get an opera that is directed by someone who thinks that both of these things have something to do with music and/or communication. You get an opera that is orchestrated for some odd hodge-podge of instruments in a score with abrupt, haphazard, multiple meter changes and two or maybe even three simultaneous keys. You get an opera that, perhaps, tells an interesting story, but maybe not so interesting as the version that came out first as the newspaper article or the book.

You get standardized art, you get an oxymoron. You get MEDIOCRITY. You can find it every day at your local 7-11 or concert hall.

There is a point of view that says you should use songs to teach vocal technique. I do not agree with this.

Vocal exercises are the correct means of developing vocal technique. It is the exercises that allow you to develop all the capacities of vocal skills that are necessary to creating vocal mastery. The list of things that a well developed voice does is specific and rather long. I have written about it here in the past and won’t repeat it now.

Most teachers of singing choose songs to help the student master singing problems. This is bound to cause problems. Generally, songs lag behind vocal exercises by quite a bit, weeks or months. Therefore, teachers of singing should make sure that the song is easier than the exercises, well within the scope of the vocalists “cruising” ability. This is the only way to teach performance. If you can’t get through the phrase because it is too loud, too long, too high or low, or because it is musically very hard or has lots of words sung quickly, working on the song will only cause you frustration. It will also interfere with your ability to feel and express the meaning of the lyrics or poetry. You will not be able to concentrate on what the songs means to you if you have to concentrate very hard on making your throat do something it does not yet, on its own, do. This is sad, a very typical situation, and it causes great confusion because, inevitably, the student is blamed.

If you want a student to “learn” mix and you choose a song that is mostly mid-range in terms of pitch you MIGHT get the student to be better at mix but you might also wonder why the student just keeps flipping from chest to head, over and over, and never seems to get any better. It would be because you have not yet gotten the student’s vocal mechanism to be established strongly enough in mix for mix to do its job automatically. If you pick a belty song with the idea that this is somehow likely to help the student develop mix, asking the student to sing in a vocal quality that he or she will not find in a professional recording (as an aural reference), you will simply confuse the student. Of course, if you do not even know the song is meant to be belty because you didn’t bother to listen to it first yourself, you should be boiled in oil, but you already know that if you read my posts.

Teach technique to develop technique. Use exercises to develop vocal and breathing coordination and skills. Teach performance in songs (acting, movement, stance, etc.). Do not confuse the two.

There is a point of view that says you should use songs to teach vocal technique. I do not agree with this.

Vocal exercises are the correct means of developing vocal technique. It is the exercises that allow you to develop all the capacities of vocal skills that are necessary to creating vocal mastery. The list of things that a well developed voice does is specific and rather long. I have written about it here in the past and won’t repeat it now.

Most teachers of singing choose songs to help the student master singing problems. This is bound to cause problems. Generally, songs lag behind vocal exercises by quite a bit, weeks or months. Therefore, teachers of singing should make sure that the song is easier than the exercises, well within the scope of the vocalists “cruising” ability. This is the only way to teach performance. If you can’t get through the phrase because it is too loud, too long, too high or low, or because it is musically very hard or has lots of words sung quickly, working on the song will only cause you frustration. It will also interfere with your ability to feel and express the meaning of the lyrics or poetry. You will not be able to concentrate on what the songs means to you if you have to concentrate very hard on making your throat do something it does not yet, on its own, do. This is sad, a very typical situation, and it causes great confusion because, inevitably, the student is blamed.

If you want a student to “learn” mix and you choose a song that is mostly mid-range in terms of pitch you MIGHT get the student to be better at mix but you might also wonder why the student just keeps flipping from chest to head, over and over, and never seems to get any better. It would be because you have not yet gotten the student’s vocal mechanism to be established strongly enough in mix for mix to do its job automatically. If you pick a belty song with the idea that this is somehow likely to help the student develop mix, asking the student to sing in a vocal quality that he or she will not find in a professional recording (as an aural reference), you will simply confuse the student. Of course, if you do not even know the song is meant to be belty because you didn’t bother to listen to it first yourself, you should be boiled in oil, but you already know that if you read my posts.

Teach technique to develop technique. Use exercises to develop vocal and breathing coordination and skills. Teach performance in songs (acting, movement, stance, etc.). Do not confuse the two.

There is a point of view that says you should use songs to teach vocal technique. I do not agree with this.

Vocal exercises are the correct means of developing vocal technique. It is the exercises that allow you to develop all the capacities of vocal skills that are necessary to creating vocal mastery. The list of things that a well developed voice does is specific and rather long. I have written about it here in the past and won’t repeat it now.

Most teachers of singing choose songs to help the student master various vocal behaviors. This is bound to cause problems. Generally, songs lag behind vocal exercises by quite a bit, weeks or months. Therefore, teachers of singing should make sure that the song is easier than the exercises, well within the scope of the vocalists “cruising” ability. This is the only way to teach performance. If you can’t get through the phrase because it is too loud, too long, too high or low, or because it is musically very hard or has lots of words sung quickly, working on the song will only cause you frustration. It will also interfere with your ability to feel and express the meaning of the lyrics or poetry. You will not be able to concentrate on what the songs means to you if you have to concentrate very hard on making your throat do something it does not yet, on its own, do. This is sad, and is a very typical situation which causes great confusion because, inevitably, the student is blamed.

If you want a student to “learn” mix and you choose a song that is mostly mid-range in terms of pitch you MIGHT get the student to be better at mix but you might also wonder why the student just keeps flipping from chest to head, over and over, and never seems to get any better. It would be because you have not yet gotten the student’s vocal mechanism to be established strongly enough in mix for mix to do its job automatically. If you pick a belty song with the idea that this is somehow likely to help the student develop mix, asking the student to sing in a vocal quality that he or she will not find in a professional recording (as an aural reference), you will simply confuse the student. Of course, if you do not even know the song is meant to be belty because you didn’t bother to listen to it first yourself, you should be boiled in oil, but you already know that if you read my posts.

Teach technique to develop technique. Use exercises to develop vocal and breathing coordination and skills. Teach performance in songs (acting, movement, stance, etc.). Do not confuse the two.

I recently encountered both some truly wonderful and some truly awful singing. Neither of the people singing (a man, a woman) were my students. I have no idea how they came to be in the circumstances they were in. The wonderful singing in the man, who was probably in his early 40s, and the awful singing in the woman, who was probably just barely in her 20s, were in two different classifications (music theater/jazz and classical) and two very different locations, thousands of miles apart.

It is particularly disturbing to hear a young person sing so terribly when she clearly has no idea that things are as bad as they are and no way to fix them. It is particularly satisfying to hear someone sing so well that the voice is totally at the disposal of the man as an artist, expressing text and music with great skill and expressiveness.

If reactions from others count, I would say that those around me agreed, as the one performance was greeted with a standing ovation and the other with polite subdued applause.

After nearly 40 years of teaching singing, I should think that nothing would bother me, but it is never the case. I am still deeply in love with singing and with singers and all singing, whenever I hear it, goes directly into my body via my ears and my heart. I am often so moved, (plus and minus), that it takes me days to get over a specific performance, shaking it loose from my mind. This is, perhaps, a virtue and a curse — a blessing and an obstacle. I am inspired and I am chagrined.

Two opposing things are always true when things are in balance.

You need flexibility in order to sing well but you need strength and stability, too.

You need to be able to have firm control over your vocal technique in order to let it go and sing freely.

When you can take a deep breath easily, it will look like you are hardly breathing.

You need to be able to concentrate on the singing for its own sake until you can forget about it and concentrate on the communication.

I could go on and on. Most things in life that are “true” (little “t”) can be found to be oppositional. If you do not investigate something thoroughly, you may not know the edges and be unable to establish an appropriate boundary. I can’t say how many times I got hoarse while trying to explore the boundaries of belting, or the times I caused myself some kind of (temporary) technical issue, but this is the reason I know how far to go not only with myself but with my students. It gives me great courage, because I understand why singers are afraid. People who have never experienced fear do not know what it is to go through the fear. They do not develop courage, because they never take up the gauntlet of challenging that which frightens them.

You need “evil” to understand “good”. You need up to understand down, and out to understand in. This is a world built on duality. If you cannot label something, you do not know that it exists, and yet to label it is not to actually capture the thing being labeled. We are always in the present moment, but we would only be able to be there if our perception of time didn’t also include a past and a future.

Voice, vocal expression, sound and singing are all concrete and ephemeral. Making sound is something we do and something that “just happens” as we live. Nailing any aspect of it down is very difficult but not nailing it down is also.

Do not let your mind trap you into having “the answer”. Be open. See what you can discover. Listen to your body and your heart. Sometimes the thing you most seek, that which most eludes you, is very quietly under your nose, hiding in the silence out of which sound is born. If you encounter something that seems both real and miraculous, you will know what the title of this entry means.

In order to create mix you have to have two equally strong registers that automatically cross in the middle. AUTOMATICALLY.

If you do not develop head register, it will not be strong in the bottom pitches. It takes time to make it strong and clear in a lower pitch range because of the vocal fold behavior. An easy way to get it to be clear is simply to squeeze the throat. That can work on a short term basis, but eventually, it’s not a productive functional behavior. You cannot get head register to be strong as long as the sound is breathy. A tricky situation.

Chest register is the normal mode of speech (modal) in most people, but not in everyone. And even in people who have a strong chest dominant speech, as the pitch range goes down, it will also get weaker, as the folds shorter and loosen to get those pitches. Therefore, you must develop strength in chest for most singers as well and the vowels must remain undistorted and natural.

The way to measure strength is through volume. When it is easy to get louder without doing anything else but get louder, the sound can be considered strong. WITHOUT DOING ANYTHING ELSE other than creating more contraction in the belly muscles underneath an firmly open rib cage.

If you do not work to make the low notes strong in chest register, without vowel distortion or laryngeal manipulation, you will not do well in mix. If you do not work to make head register strong and clear on upper pitches, without distortion, you will also not do well in mix. Head register strength takes about twice as much time to develop as does that of chest. You cannot skip this development. It needs to be about twice as strong as chest in the middle notes to counter the “down and back” pull of chest register.

Mix is only possible when you can control the volume of the registration without manipulating any other parameters except the volume. The vowel sound /ae/can access register balance but relying on the vowel sound as a destination makes for a distorted and skewed result. Volume alone will measure how balanced the registration is. When it is possible for the larynx to handle a solid exhale without being breathy and to ascend and descend in pitch without any obvious breaks, the vowel sound shapes should be easy to adjust without distortion or change in any other parameter.

People who sing only in mix have undifferentiated registration. That means they have an undeveloped chest register in low range, an undeveloped head register in high range and an indistinct and usually immoveable amount of both registers in middle pitches. While this generally does not create vocal health issues it is nearly impossible to change anything in this default except possibly, pitch and volume. It might be possible to open the mouth more and it might be possible to change the volume, but “resonance” or vowel sound shape will not, NOT, move. Chest, in this mess of mix, is often loudest at A, Bb, B and C above middle C (approximately), after which the sound either thins out considerably and dies off or just stops, as if it was “shut off”.

I continue to hear “my student doesn’t understand how to sing in mix”. No, you, the teacher, do not yet understand how to develop mix. You need to know how to use the exercises such that the student does not have to understand anything but will discover, in the lesson, that the sound emerges all by itself because you have created the correct conditions for it to do so. When the sound shows up, you say, “There. Now, this is mix. This is the sound we have been seeking.” The student’s eyes will grow wide and she will be surprised and delighted that this new sound has somehow come from her own body without struggle. Because you have asked her to do specific exercises over a period of time and THEY have developed a conditioned response in her vocal mechanism that would not have been there had she not sung them. Mix is not something you “do”, it is something that happens.

I have heard the comment “I think too much” many many times, coming from the mouths of singers, usually young.

This comment makes no sense. It goes along with so many others that are also nonsensical like “I like to squeeze my throat”, “I like to hold on to my jaw”, “I’m not usually on top of the pitch” and the killer-diller, “I listen to myself too much”.

I suppose you could say that a few people do like to squeeze their throats and hold onto their jaws. These people maybe get a weird pleasure from the squeezing……like someone who enjoys repeatedly clenching their fists. Or perhaps there are some singers who like to keep their mouths as closed as possible at all times lest a fly enter or someone put a few unwanted fingers into their mouth. And, then, of course, there are those odd individuals who refuse to climb up to those pitches, preferring instead to hold them high over their heads somewhere, forcing the vocal production to remain “beneath the note”. And there might also be folks who cup their hands to their own ears for hours at a time longing to hear their own dulcet tones as some kind of remedy for their ills.

Oh please.

You have to think when you are learning something new. You think about it or you don’t learn it. People who do not think, do not analyze or assimilate what they are doing well enough to comprehend it. So, if you don’t think, you won’t learn. AND, self-consciousness is not necessarily about “thinking” at all. It is about lack of thinking. Lack of something specific to focus on which counteracts self-consciousness. It is about lack of concentration on a particular set of thoughts.

You cannot skip steps when learning a physical skill but sometimes you have to learn two things at the same time that are both crucially important and they are quite oppositional to each other. All highly skilled motor activities take time to develop and singing is certainly that. You must cultivate strength and stability at the same time you develop flexibility and agility. Guess what? Those things are opposites. You must learn to “let go” but you CANNOT DO THAT if you do not have strength and flexibility in equal measure and that can take at least two years to emerge. In the meanwhile, as you study, you will be uncoordinated, uncomfortable, disorganized and quite often frustrated, but you will also occasionally be coordinated, comfortable, organized and satisfied, and occasionally completely frightened and absolutely ecstatic. If you skip these stages while training, lucky for you, but don’t count on the idea that they will never arise, as you may find that the career you end up with provokes the very vocal things you were able to avoid at the beginning of the journey.

The unwanted behaviors that arise during training are normal. Sometimes, in stimulating changes and growth, a side effect of the development is that some things get better but some things, unfortunately and temporarily, also get worse. You have to learn to live with that until you have been at the process for quite some time (years).

Quite often, students do not know any of this. Quite often, the teachers tell them “you are…………” in an effort to “help” the student find out what it is they do that is “wrong”. And, quite often, it is the teachers themselves who are at fault, as they may have asked the student to do an exercise that was so hard, so much out of their range of execution, that the student is left struggling and straining just to make an attempt.

Deaf people do not sing. Deaf people who learn to speak through vibration never sound like hearing people. If you do not listen to yourself, you don’t know what you sound like. If you are on a plane, in a loud restaurant, or in a noisy crowd, you will raise your voice because it is harder to hear yourself. These are facts. If you do not learn to hear yourself consistently and objectively, you cannot possibly sing well. You cannot sing “on top of the pitch” (with solid intonation). If you do not think about how you sound, you will not know what to listen for or why it is important. And if you sing things that are too hard for your throat and body to manage, you will collapse in your throat (squeeze) and that will cause your larynx to rise and your jaw to be unable to drop. Indirect responses that indicate physical imbalance. Some of it may be neurotic, but most of it is probably functional.

You can become narcissistic about your own voice, thinking you sound better than everyone else. In that sense, you can “listen to yourself too much” but mostly, if you want to learn to be a good singer, you had better listen and listen and listen until you hear something that you like and want to share. The same can be said for thinking, feeling, and singing.

Recently, I had occasion to listen to students being taught behind the closed doors of a studio in a building where there were many studios and many people singing and playing music.

I have had this experience numerous times. Whenever I hear someone singing nicely I enjoy walking by, listening and taking in the great sound and music that I hear. When I hear something dreadful, however, it feels as if I am listening to someone being tortured and it makes my blood race and my stomach knot-up.

If a student is screeching some thin, pinched high notes, or yelling some terrible pseudo belt, or trying to maneuver her way through an exercise that is agonizingly slow, all the while struggling over and over and over in the same horrible pattern, it is hard to stop myself from pounding on the door of the studio and yelling “STOP!!! What are you doing?? Don’t you realize the damage that is being done here?”

Of course, I DON’T do that, because I know what would ensue if I did, but I surely want to say, “Don’t you understand that repeating these sounds and these patterns continuously, as if they will somehow magically just go away in good time, is insane?” I want to say “Who hired you?” I want to say “What kind of an approach to teaching singing do you have, to allow a student to sing like this in a lesson? Aren’t you supposed to be giving instruction here on what is CORRECT?”

Really, that people are being paid to conduct such “singing lessons” is shameful. Nevertheless, it happens every day, in lots of places, all over the world. It will continue until we have enough people trained in vocal function who are willing to speak up and speak out and protest. That, unfortunately, will take a very long time, because the amount of ignorance in regard to singing is still enormous.

You cannot overcome darkness with anything but light.

Folks — repeating something that sounds bad over and over does not make it suddenly get better.

If it’s bad, fix it. If you can’t fix it, change what you are doing. If you don’t know how to change it, DON’T TEACH. Do not teach.