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The basic principles of vocal function in The LoVetri Method, Somatic Voicework™ are very simple. They are: isolation, development and combination of chest and head registers to create a balanced mix, undistorted vowels, and strong, aligned posture which facilitates deep and easy inhalation and exhalation. If you learned and understood only this about vocal production, and you applied these principles to a wide range of pitches and volumes, and added consonants, you wouldn’t need anything else to become a good vocal technician.

If you do not understand register function as an auditory phenomenon, and you do not understand that this is a vocal fold behavior as well, you can waste a lot of time on “resonance” (something you can’t control until you have a good deal of skill and power), and you can confuse vocal quality with vowel sound quality (a very bad mistake) which will make you spin your heels. If you believe that everything comes from the breathing, then you can waste a lot of time, years or maybe even decades, developing your ability to breath, but if you do not also work on your sound, all you will get from doing this is to be a really excellent breather. I have some of those folks show up in my studio. One man had worked on breathing for 12 years with his previous teacher and had made little progress. He got better working with me in about 4 sessions by strengthening his chest register, something he had never heard of.

If you have been taught that everything is “placement” and “breath support” and that breathing has something to do with inhaling into the diaphragm, (and who hasn’t been taught those things?) you can spend much much too long trying to get a person’s sound to improve, develop, grow, adjust or change to no avail.

If you can get a good strong undistorted unmanipulated free open /a/ (as in Father) on a low note at a loud vowel, you can assume that you have a healthy chest register response. If you can get a clear, light, easy undistorted /u/ (true) on a high pitch at a moderate to loud volume, you can assume that you have access to a healthy head register function (doesn’t mean you can sing a whole song there, however). If you can sing an /e/ or an /ae/ on a middle pitch at moderate volume, you probably have some kind of balance or mix. Probably is the operating word.

You have to know what kind of sound is good in order to get it. You have to know what you want before you open your mouth and you have to know that you are going to get that sound before you try to make it. Being able to do that, on demand, every time, is having “secure vocal technique”. If you do not know what “good” sounds like, especially in yourself, you have to learn. If you do not know what comfortable is, you have to learn that too. If you do not have control over all the dimensions of your voice (pitch, vowel, volume, consonants, duration, pressure (volume) and vibrato (some/none)), you don’t really have “vocal technique” at all, you just sing however you do.

The purpose of training the voice is to give you skills you wouldn’t have if you didn’t seek them. That includes expanding your range both up and down, expanding your dynamic expression (both louder and softer), being able to lengthen the time you can easily exhale during a sustained phrase, and being able to control the volume while you extend it, up to and including getting louder at the end or when you go up or both. You need to feel that you are singing easily and freely and that the sound responds well and that you can feel emotional while singing and that the emotion is reflected in the sound without you having to “make it emotional”. You need to be able to go very quickly or very slowly without issue. You need to be able to sing in a variety of tone qualities and colors in order to be effective in various contrasting styles. You need to look and feel congruent with the words and music while you sing. Trying to control your diaphragm isn’t going to help you do any of these things.

Somatic Voicework™ is functional training based on practical application, one person at a time. Everyone is the same and everyone is different. All voices are unique and all people are distinctively themselves but everyone has two vocal folds and a larynx, a pair of lungs, ribs and abdominal muscles. Vocal function is the same for any human being but vocal output is unique to the person, the age, the background, the training, the music, the interests and many other things.

There are a lot of people out there calling themselves singers who have no clue about the above. Some of these people also teach. (Unfortunately.) If you do not understand what I have written here, and you either sing or teach, you have, in my opinion, a moral obligation to learn about these things.

What if you like to play piano or sing? What if you aren’t particularly good at other things, are shy and don’t really know what to do with yourself? What if you are from a middle class family of people who “have money” and are all college graduates? What if they expect you to go to school and get a job when you are done with college? What if, basically, you don’t have much in the way of direction or motivation, but you understand you don’t really want to be a bum and you don’t have a trust fund to support you for the rest of your life? What if you just keep taking music or voice lessons because they can afford it and you end up being “OK” in one or both of those skills?

What if, indeed.

Many many people are in such circumstances. Many people with a modicum of talent take lessons of various kinds and develop enough skill to be “pretty good”. If the skills are artistic ones, like playing an instrument, acting, dancing, painting, or singing, you can probably find a school that offers you a college degree in your favorite discipline. There are many kinds of programs and many kinds of colleges. Some of them are very competitive, large, located in cities and aimed at those who have a clear shot at having a professional career in their chosen discipline. Others are middle sized with programs or degrees that are respected and have students of moderate to excellent ability who may or may not go on to performance or activity as a professional. Some schools are small, have students who are not likely to be accepted by other schools but who offer decent general education in various artistic areas. These graduates are not the ones who will go on to become famous, but they may have professional engagements in small venues, smaller cities or rural locations. There is nothing wrong with any of this, in theory at least.

If you know that you are only modestly talented and that you are not competitive and that you would like to avoid being a “starving artist” for 10 years, and you also know that you like stability and would like to have a “nice middle class” life with all its various trimmings (two or three TVs, a new car now and then, clothes, travel, etc.) you might also confront early on that you are better off not entering the marketplace and, in fact, staying home and building whatever you can there. That’s fine. It’s better to know who you are and what you want then flail around being miserable. There is nothing wrong with going through school to get a doctorate, finding a job at some college you like, and making your life there for 30, 40 or even 50 years. In fact, I imagine that is what the majority of people in “the arts” end up doing or trying to do because, obviously, there are more people who want to perform (or create) than there are jobs that pay a decent amount of money upon which to build a life.

The problems arise when someone in such a situation can’t stay at a school because the department gets phased out, or the head of the department wants to hire a friend who will take your job, or because your partner or spouse gets a better job in another place and you want to stay together so you move, or your partner or spouse gets sick and you have to move for health reasons. Really, the list, as we all know, is endless. Rarely does life work out that smoothly. It could even be that after 15 years you are just bored and want a change. Anything can happen.

If you have not done anything to “keep up your skills” or stay on top of the latest developments in your field, as would be required if you were in a licensed profession like medical doctor, speech language pathologist, lawyer or any of a dozen other fields, you might only know what you learned while still in school. If you haven’t done due diligence, you could have no awareness whatsoever of the standards of your profession as they are held at the highest levels (even in the colleges) of the any part of the profession.

What does a classical vocalist need to know and be able to do in order to have a career in opera (as really, there is no possibility of having a career doing recitals unless you are already famous), or oratorios, orchestral works or recordings? What does a music theater performer need to be able to do in order to have a chance at a career in New York, LA, London, Toronto, Sydney or any other major venue or in a national tour? What does a dancer need to be able to do to get into a dance company, whether it be a ballet company, a modern dance troupe, or some other kind of dance (Latin, tango, African, etc.), or to be able to get into a music theater show?

What kind of life experience and exposure do you have to any of the arts at the highest professional levels if you have not yourself been in them, seen them, worked with those artists, dealt with that aspect of the business or had contact with the marketplace in any way? There are some things you just cannot learn in school.

There is one more possibility.

You don’t have much talent yourself but you come from a talented, famous or wealthy family that has “connections”. You maybe learned to play piano or an instrument, or dance, or have done some acting, but, because of your station in life, you “hang out” with other people who are successful at a very high level. Eventually, for the same reasons as I discussed at the beginning of this post, you can kinda sorta do some stuff with one of your skills and you get invited to do something with it with one of your friends who just happens to be the daughter, son or protege of “Mr. Big” or “Ms. Famous”. Low and behold, you get noticed, you have some success, and you begin to get offers from other people who either (1) don’t know the difference between good and bad or (2) don’t care or (3) are themselves equally clueless as to their own lack of ability. [Of course this is true everywhere. Could be that dad is a big lawyer and you get to be a partner even though your own legal skills are dreadful. You could be the son of a President in a family from the highest part of society and you find yourself running for office and…..oops, sorry.] Next thing you know, you (the mediocre one) is now touted as being “successful” or “important” and your career begins to grow. Sooner or later someone is going to ask you to TEACH.

You know the rest. If you don’t, just read some of my old posts.

I talk a lot about “classical” vocal training. Singing teachers generally talk about classical vocal training, with the implied understanding that this is “one thing”, that it is in some way a known entity, an organized commodity that is readily available consistently if you seek it out.

That is simply not true. “Classical” vocal training can mean almost anything. There is no consensus about what it is, how it works, who should teach it, what it should cover, or how long it will take. There is no organizing body that agrees what classical vocal training allows one to do while singing and no clear direction regarding the singing as it combines with other things like acting, “performing”, musicianship, language or anything else.

If you study “classical” vocal training in a university or college, someone will be in charge of your school’s particular curriculum and its particular criteria for students and perhaps also criteria for teachers. Regulating bodies will provide guidelines that schools must follow in order to become or remain accredited, but they do not establish which individual teachers can help students do what things or which departments can accomplish specific vocal goals. That, typically, is left to each department or school. There are educational organizations, locally and nationally, but they do not provide specific vocal training requirements.

Classical vocal training is many different things. Recognizing that is a first step to organizing it into a coherent philosophy that has defined ingredients. If you are singing early music (Pre-Baroque), the current consensus about what is correct vocal production for those styles is different than it was 35 years ago. If you are singing contemporary classical music, written by living or recently deceased composers, almost anything could be part of making the sounds required in the various works. If you sing mainstream music from “standard” repertoire (Mozart, Schubert, Faure, Verdi, Puccini, Britten), the sounds you need to make might vary by vocal category (fach), or by venue (concert hall, opera house, church, recital stage) or by accompaniment (piano, small ensemble, orchestra, electronic amplification). Thoughts about vibrato, mouth shape, vowel sound colors, linguistic considerations (separate from but related to spoken languages), legato, accuracy of melismatic lines, and control over volume for expressive purposes, depend on the most prevalent or predominant ideas about style as accepted in the general classical musical marketplace. What the Met does makes a difference everywhere. What the Philharmonic does, ditto. What is done in venues like Carnegie and Philharmonic Hall by other groups matters. What has received attention in the media and acceptance from the music buying public matters. What agents and managers think impresarios want to hire matters. What college voice departments want does not, except within each department at each school.

What ought to be part of the discussion in classical performance would be technical problems that are audible. If a person sounds squawky, swallowed, wobbly, muffled, shrill, or just generally like they are struggling, it would good if the industry at large realized that something mechanical is off and should be adjusted. If your car has a knock in it, you know to take it to the garage because if you don’t the car might break down completely. If it applies to a car, it should also apply to a voice. But, since we still do not recognize technical problems as things that just happen, even to very highly skilled, excellent singers, and since there is “embarrassment” about such things (Stupid, really. Should you be embarrassed if your car has a knock?) many times such problems are ignored, lest it negatively effect a career. (Which it will anyway, when it gets really bad.) If functional training was the norm, instead of still being the exception, things that were “not quite right” could simply be addressed and fixed.

Before I can tolerate anyone criticizing CCM styles, I would have to know that all of the above was being addressed by my classical colleagues and worked out to the satisfaction of MOST teachers of singing and singers. I would need to know that all of these issues had been addressed and it was clear what standards applied to what vocal behavior in which music at what venue. If you think this is going to happen in our lifetime, I know a great bridge in Brooklyn that would great in your backyard and I can get it for you cheap.

I am not a big fan of being different because you can. I always want reasons and I want them to make sense. Consequently, it took me a long time to appreciate abstract art, although I finally did decide that I enjoy some of it very much, however I am still someone who loves an artist who can reach out through simple, even mundane, means and create something that is more than its parts. I am very found of folk art, things made from found objects and hand made crafts.

Yes, I know, John Cage once came out to do a piano recital and sat at the bench in total silence for 30 minutes and called his performance “Silence” (this may not be accurate, but it was something like that). Then he got up and left. It was his idea that music was anything you defined it to be. The same argument has been running around the art world for decades. A completely blank canvas, framed and hung in a gallery or museum entitled “Openness” is the same kind of thing.

I am the person to suggest that people are only interested in things that they react to emotionally. If a blob of dried dog poop sitting in the middle of a big white room with a child’s toy bike in the corner is at a museum and the artist calls this “installation” “Eternal Red”, some people will be very impressed and maybe even spend $50,000 to purchase the poop, the bike and some paint, to take it home, especially if the artist provides his or her “inner reflections”. The art shows that the purchasers have good taste, that they are “with it”, that they are open to being adventurous, to being collectors of the new and innovative. It speaks to them, they relate to its message, they are incredibly impressed by the genius artist’s great vision.

I am not one of those people. I imagine in my mind the discussion that goes on in the mind of the artist.

“I think the dog poop will be a grounding influence, something that represents the smelly grungy side of life. The bike, of course, represents the light heartedness of childhood and the freedom that kids feel when they play. The bike is in the corner because it is on the sidelines in life. You walk and run more than you ride. The room is white because white represents terror at the level of the soul — the blinding light that overwhelms you in life and ends up making you feel like you live in a box. This is the Eternal Redness of being alive. I think that will be very powerful.”

Take a look at this: http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/15/a-mountain-of-ai-wei-weis-sunflower-seeds-sells-for-560000/?ref=arts. Half a million dollars is a lot of money. Wonder what it would have meant to starving children or people who need clean water.

My general reaction to this kind of stuff is always the same: Oh PULEEZE.

When someone comes out on a stage in front of the public who has paid money to be in the seats and who is offering the performer their time (something for which there is no value), I expect the person out there to have something of import to say or do. I am not interested in people wearing weird outfits because they can, because it will be “outrageous”, because it is over the top. I am interested in whether or not the person who is up there singing, can. I do not think it takes any talent to put on an ugly costume, stand up and make unremarkable sounds over four chords with loud amplification. Even if you have great musicians, if all you can do is stand up there and squawk in some outfit, why bother? The answer is because you can as long as you have enough money to do what you want. If you have convinced others of your “incredible talent” and your “vision” because you look weird and sound bad, but you have the nerve to stand up there oblivious to your own complete lack of capacity, I guess that makes you at the very least a good con. Some people would say that’s an art, perhaps even the greater one.

If the art consuming public is too ignorant to know when they are being played, then they are.

As you can imagine from all this, last night I was at a performance in which two people who should have stayed home and watched TV had the unbelievable gaul to get up in front of a large audience and try to sing. The music they were attempting to make was banal and their appearance was, in the case of the female, clown-ish, and in the case of the male, straight off the run-down farm. They were surrounded by more talented people who partially camouflaged this paltry lack of actual ability but it was still insulting to have to sit there, knowing how many individuals who have oodles of actual talent never get the opportunity to do something of scale or importance, such as this venue provided.

I saw Blythe Danner last week on a talk show discussing how her daughter, Gwyneth Paltrow, went into show business on her own because she wanted to. She said the fact that she and her husband were both huge stars in show business had nothing what so ever to do with Gwyneth’s rise as a star. I’ve heard that argument so many times. The sons and daughters of the rich and famous also becoming rich and famous and yet the parents have nothing to do with it. Especially at the start of their careers. If you believe that, there’s this bridge in Brooklyn that I could sell you. It has lots of artistic value and will look great in your backyard.

In college, you can get a degree in music education or music performance. If the degree is in performance, it is an “applied” degree. This means that your school is giving you job preparation, that is, training to get a job as a singer. Theoretically, you are going to be given the skills that you would need in order to do a good professional job in whatever kind of music you want to do.

If you are a classical singer, you will get courses in music theory, sight-singing, dictation, music analysis, music history and possibly basic composition. You will learn at least the basics of languages such as Italian, French and German, and you will have vocal training to develop control over your sound. You might also get movement or dance, acting or stage “deportment” and probably will be asked to do some kind of performance, such as juries, recitals or roles in a music, oratorio or opera.

If you are looking to be in music theater you might get some of the above courses and perhaps also be asked to perform in a musical or review. You might get much more acting training, more dance training, and less languages, less music theory and fewer or shorter voice lessons. But you might still get the same kind of training as a classical singer at your lessons. It varies a lot.

If you are looking to be in rock music and you are at a school that considers that a viable path for academic training then you might be asked to study jazz and jazz related topics such as jazz history, jazz theory (scales, chords, rhythms) and perhaps also be asked to perform in ensembles or in solo recitals.

If you wish to do anything else in a school (country, gospel, R&B, rap, folk) you would either have to go to a jazz program and hope the other style was included or just get some other kind of a degree (composition, theory, music history, ethnomusicology, etc.) and study your vocal music on the side.

In an applied program, outsiders from the world in which you wish to perform might be brought to your school to work with students. This could be through lectures with Q & A from the students at the end, in workshops, clinics, courses or master classes. It could involve singing for these individuals to be guided or critiqued, but the idea is that you would be singing for professionals to get support and advice because you would theoretically be attempting to follow in their footsteps when you graduate.

People who teach in the applied program would be those who knew what was needed in order to be able to perform in any given style. They would have life experience in that style themselves and understand how they and their colleagues’ careers functioned. They would know the rough realities of being a working singing, with all that that entails, and be able to speak from personal knowledge about what that life is like for the average person (not a superstar) who works, is successful, but is not famous to the general public.

If you have been a regular reader of this blog, you will know that this is often not what I encounter as I travel all over the USA and the world, doing master classes, dealing with both students and teachers. You will know that I see all manner of things that do not line up with the espoused values of various colleges, programs and degrees, and that frequently what you see is not what you get.

I work with individuals on Broadway, in jazz, in pop/rock and folk, in experimental music, classical music, cabaret performance, and who are entertainers for children. I work with adult beginners once in a while, with people recovering from vocal injury, and with those who teach. I work with instrumentalists, with choral conductors, with dancers and actors. I work with old and young and all ages in between. When I go to a university or college, I bring with me a first-hand view of what it takes to work here in NYC as a vocalist and what each style of music has as its criteria in order for a vocalist to be good enough to get started at a basic level and succeed (although no one can guarantee that anyone WILL succeed). I have no vested in interest in any given program so when I observe how it runs, it really is just that, an observation. Sometimes those involved in the program can’t see it from outside and inside at the same time.

If you are seeking to go to college to get an applied degree in voice, you will have to look into all the facets I’ve mentioned here, and others as well. Be sure to ask questions and be prepared to deal with required courses that have no direct impact upon the music you wish to sing, on your voice, or on you. You could even be told that your applied degree program “does not teach to the marketplace” even though the department brings in outside experts from the marketplace to talk to you about the marketplace. No kidding.

Gook luck.

If you are a pro, on Broadway, doing a lead in a Broadway show, and if you have also done other shows as a lead, and been a professional for a long time, and you retire and decide to go back to school, to enter into academia, do you somehow become the equivalent of a 21 year old?

The sad answer is YUP. Why should this be?

Because in order to educate, you have to have criteria. You have to create guidelines, requirements, measurement, and parameters. You have to put whatever subject you are teaching into some kind of a codified box that can be conveyed in a linear manner. You have to be able to organize your topic into certain kinds of accepted ingredients so that it can be evaluated and measured. In other words, in order to study the frog, you have to kill the frog. You might find out what is inside it, but you won’t know what a frog is until you realize that you have to go observe it in the environment in which it lives with other creatures.

By definition, an artist is someone who sees the world uniquely and redefines reality, first for him or herself, and ultimately for the rest of us. When an artist expresses something about the human condition that illuminates it in a new way, and when that artist seems to transcend what has gone before, we can all learn and experience something about life that we might otherwise have missed. Artists, then, are the opposite of academics. They are ineffable, indefinable, and cannot be put into a rigid category. When you tie an artist down, you lose what it is that makes the art itself.

Language is linear. We are stuck with expressing through words, one at a time, in a line, that takes time to verbalize or write. We cannot express the three dimensional sensorial life that we all experience using words, although we try. Living art, that which is not on a printed page, cannot be captured as a moment in time, although the fine arts, which create painting, sculpture and other forms of concrete expression come close to that. Writing, too, when it is brilliant, can create a mental picture just as vivid as one that is painted. Music, of course, can be written down and replicated, but the performance of music is a “moment by moment” event that is never the same twice, except after it is made into a recording.

If we are to evaluate singing, it should be done by working only with professional singers in professional venues, in front of audiences that have paid to see and hear the singers. If we are to evaluate the singers, we should ascertain whether they have been able to sing for not less than 5 years, have been relatively healthy from a vocal production point of view, and have a credibility in the professional world amongst their peers for being able to consistently do their job of being professional singers. Then, and only then, should we award degrees to the singers, most especially at the level of master’s degrees, because we would then have actual evidence that the singers are, indeed, masters of their craft. If there were to be “doctorates” for vocalists, then that award would be given to those who are 30, 40, 50 or even 60 years singing (like Tony Bennett, Barbara Cook, Barbra Streisand, Elton John, Placido Domingo and many others who have really been around the block and still sing well) because they have earned the right to be considered true experts in the school of life called singing. Do we do any of this?

And, if we really wanted to study singing, we would only do our research in the field. We would bring the machinery to the backstages of theaters, arenas, clubs, stages and opera houses, and put the tubes into the throats of the singers in between performances. We would study them closely on cameras from various angles and we would evaluate the vocal production using whatever means are currently available as acoustic measurement. Has this been done? Once, maybe.

But, if you have all the experience in the world and you are very skilled and you do the process as well as anyone in your field could ask you to do it, and you go into an academic institution, you will still be judged by people who maybe couldn’t do what you’ve done in a million years. You will still have people who have never performed in the same way decide if you are “good enough” or not. You will still be judged by individuals who maybe didn’t perform anywhere at all but have spent decades teaching, sometimes only college students who could sing decently in the first place, and they will decide if you “qualify” to be given a specific piece of paper. And that paper will say that you are a singer of distinction, a singer recognized by your academic peers (who maybe wouldn’t really know if you were a good country singer or rock singer in any way), and that you have passed their tests. Your life experience may be seen as nothing of import and your ability of no consequence. Your grades, however, would count as being “important” even if they were 40 years old.

Forgive me if I find this situation ridiculous. It is the truth of the moment, however, and it isn’t going to change any time soon.

Did you know that at the voice conferences there is a pecking order?

The MDs are at the top, the voice scientists are right there at the top, too, depending on whether the conference is medical or scientific, but if it is both, it could be either profession who is “King of the Road”. This is followed by the Speech Language Pathologists, especially those who do research, then by the teachers of classical singing, then by the teachers of professional speech for actors, then by the performers, then, maybe, by various students. Teachers of CCM might be in there somewhere, too, but maybe not.

The MDs don’t often appear at the voice conferences (NATS/NYSTA) and hardly ever sit through a singing teacher’s presentation of terms that singing teachers or performers use as part of the “professional jargon”. They may or may not understand professional criteria in terms of expectations for any given style or why one singing teacher might be very different than another, assuming that both are competent. The MDs who mostly treat professional voice users know much more about all this than their counterparts, but they are absolutely in the minority, and even they don’t know all that much about the other disciplines’ worlds.

One of the most important interdisciplinary voice conferences has a “pre-conference” tutorial for those not familiar with voice science or medicine, to help participants understand the presentations that are to follow. I thought it would be nice if the singing teachers were allowed to present what the doctors and scientists need to know about Broadway, recordings, club dates, rock bands, jazz clubs, etc. just in terms of the language used and the professional parameters that the singers must meet. I thought that would put all the professions on equal footing, stating, by example, that the MDs should take in some information from the teachers of singing and that the scientists should do the same. Didn’t happen. Not surprised.

Singing teachers are still learning from scientists like Dr. Ingo Titze and Dr. Robert Sataloff, both of whom write regular columns for the Journal of Singing. I wonder, though, how many singing teachers write articles for medical journals or the scientific publications like the Journal of Acoustics (probably none is a good guess). So, if we are “equal” to the other professions, it is often so that the actual behavior of the other disciplines does not back that up. It’s changing, and I think it is getting better, but teachers of singing could help their own cause by making a little bit more noise in the direction of MDs and SLPs, urging them to participate in our conferences and events.

When everyone presents equally in any of the disciplines at any of the conferences and when all of us are familiar with the basics of the other professions, then we will really be professional equals. We aren’t there yet.

The jury is out about whether or not it is so that only “big, impressive” voices can have successful careers in opera in the USA. Do those with “lighter” voices have to sing “early music” or go to various concert or recital venues if they want to have a crack at viable work as classical singers? Or, as some have it, do lighter voices have a better chance now than in the past?

Some artists who have major careers, like Cecilia Bartoli, have very small and delicate voices. Ms. Bartoli wiggles and jiggles while she sings, which is hard to watch. Yes, she is very vocally agile, she can be very animated and she is musically very secure, but having seen Marilyn Horne do many of the same pieces standing stock still, lampooning those runs with a big fat tone, and expressing every bit of the music’s color and communication, I have to say Ms. Bartoli did not impress me much, yet, there she is, in a place as large as Carnegie (although the acoustics there are very good). She has sung at the Met, too, although I don’t know how she would ever have carried well enough to be heard without electronic help.

Singers like Bidu Sayao and Lili Pons, John McCormack, a young Gigli, and others including Roberta Peters might find it difficult to be famous if there were starting out now. On the other hand, Juan Diego Florez has done just fine and his voice isn’t big.

One reason why “heroic voices” might be so popular here might be that our opera houses are so big. Another might be that conductors let orchestras play as loudly as possible a good deal of the time. Another could be that we are so used to amplification that normal-sized voices don’t make it. After all, we can turn up the sound on the iPod as loudly as we want. And, the very popular emphasis on the “lowered larynx” style of vocal production does make for a heavier, darker sound, even though it makes high notes harder to do and takes out a good deal of the brilliance that used to be associated with opera singing, making those who can sing easily at the loudest volumes (rather than with the brightest tone) most able to survive an evening-long performance.

If you listen to Corelli or Pavarotti and then to Licitra you will hear the absence of this ringy brilliance. Without it, it is hard for a voice to carry over an orchestra unless that voice is really loud in terms of decibels (over 100 dB probably). Sopranos could maybe be heard above the staff just because of the pitch but lower pitches would get lost and lower voices in general would sound “woofy”, a quality that is unfortunately easy to find these days, even in very good singers. It shows up less often in those trained outside the USA, but even in people trained in Italy (such as Licitra) you can hear it. Big, but not brilliant.

Since we don’t ever hear CCM voices unamplified, it’s also a matter of comparison. We don’t have other kinds of styles to compare classical singing to in terms of vocal output. Perhaps years ago when everyone was unamplified, because there were no microphones, the contrast of being “just a little louder” as an opera singer was enough. We will probably never know.

There is a lot of distortion out there in the music marketplace now, in all styles. Between electronic manipulation and vocal production that can be very extreme, plain simple singing connected to actual human emotion can be hard to find. It’s not gone, but when it shows up and the voice is good, it can be startling.

Has there always been a lag between education and the real world? Has it always been so that higher education in particular is insulated from the day to day pulse of life? And at what point, if someone is getting an “applied” degree, does the education of the student relate to the world where that “application” takes place?

I wonder all the time why it is that the world of vocal music education doesn’t RUN and EMBRACE new ideas and approaches, particularly when there are ever expanding music theater degrees being offered in music departments that were previously only classical. If the students are being wooed to come to these colleges by promises of “Agents’ Showcases”, “Meetings with Casting Directors”, and “Contact With Industry Professionals”, but the people teaching the courses in the department have no intention of “training to the marketplace”, how is that dichotomy being addressed? (Hint: it’s not).

I wonder, too, why it is that people who don’t sing well can tell other people how to sing. Is this because there is magic in the pieces of paper they hang on their wall? Is this because it doesn’t matter if you can’t do something as long as you can get someone else to do it? It is because they don’t know what to look for when they put up job notices? (Hint: all of these).

One of the oddest things about the human race is how quickly people want to blame the victim. It is also so that the teachers who do not have adequate means to educate a student to sing rock or pop music are very quick to say it is the student who is at fault. It is the student who is dense, doesn’t try, “likes to squeeze his throat”, “holds on to his jaw”, etc.

I read recently about an activist in coal country who went to battle with the coal mining company that owned the same mine in which over 20 people perished last year. The woman was fighting to stop mountain top mining, which leaves the mountain ruined, the water polluted and the ground contaminated. In some of the most beautiful rural areas of the USA, where people have been on the same land for 5 or 6 generations, the mining companies come in to lay waste to the entire area to get coal, one of the dirtiest fuels to mine, to process and to use. Did the neighbors join her? Did the people around her rally around her and help her fight the mining company? No, they threatened to kill her. They threatened to harm her family. She passed away last week from cancer (which is how I read about her), leaving as her legacy a new school far away from the noxious fumes that blew through the last school. Why attack her? Why not attack the bad guys? Because they saw her campaign as something that might cost them their jobs. Jobs that basically kill them. Every miner eventually dies from mining.

College teachers have to eat. They need a job. They don’t want anyone to know they don’t know. They are not going to speak up on behalf of the students if that might open up a debate they could possibly lose.

Students who intend to go to college to study music theater should be aware. Where you go and what you learn depends quite a bit on luck in terms of what you will get. You could get lucky and learn a lot, but you could also have much trouble and learn stuff that is not useful, or even harmful.

Most schools are behind the times. Remember that.

If you are an opera singer and have no experience and/or training in music theater, but you teach it, how could you possibly approach it without using classical tools? Would you even know that you don’t know? There are a lot of teachers in this category, as we discovered this in our research (2006 and 2008, JoV).

I noticed today in “Classical Singer Magazine” that the summer opera programs are offering all varieties of classical training……early music, Wagner, Italian opera, lieder, operetta……and, in some of them, oh yeah, there’s music theater (stuck on the end, like dessert). What, I wonder, are they teaching? Rodgers and Hammerstein? Lerner and Lowe? Sigmund Romberg? GREASE???? RENT??????? SPRING AWAKENING????????? ROCK OF AGES??????????????????????????

Cheez, Louise!

Why not hire people who are on Broadway NOW to teach music theater? Why not hire people from Broadway who have been teaching professionals on the Great White Way for decades? (There are quite a few of us here.) What good is it to stick “music theater” in with all the other disciplines, as if it were just something you could toss off or doodle around with, if all you have to offer is teachers from the world of opera?

Perhaps I’m wrong. I don’t know. Maybe they make it work. I have never been to one of these summer opera festivals and I have no knowledge of what actually happens in them. Still. It makes me wonder.

And.

That’s not the only thing that makes me wonder.

There is an INTERNATIONAL CABARET CONFERENCE at Yale that offers training that costs about $3,000 every year. People come there to work with professionals (who often ARE from Broadway) on how to do cabaret. The brochures says, “Learning how to touch the heart may be the main goal of the conference. But the students also learn how to dress and do their hair and makeup. And they learn about sound, lighting and marketing.” MARKETING????????

You have to know, folks, that there are NO, and I mean NO professional venues for cabaret performers who are unknown. Here in NYC we have a few places like the Oak Room at the Algonquin Hotel, Feinstein’s at the Regency, and The Café Carlyle where NAME performers do acts but please realize that only those who are famous or have a large loyal following can work in these places. There is also a separate Cabaret Convention every year in NYC, and the people who are performers in that Convention are only known to the other performers and to the small group of people who come every year to the Convention. You don’t know them and neither does anyone who doesn’t go to there. Philip Officer? Karen Akers? Not household names. Yet, the International Cabaret Conference program charges THREE THOUSAND DOLLARS for a short summer course…….guess who benefits from that? I think they should offer a course called “How to lose your shirt by attempting to perform cabaret in a dead market.” I consider this entire enterprise borderline un-ethical, as teaching people to do something that has no outlet, and hasn’t had one since the 1950s is outrageous but every year they advertise and every year people go. OK, you want to do it for fun, as a hobby, but WHERE? In your church basement? You can RENT “Don’t Tell Mama’s” on 46th Street here in NYC, which is a bonafide cabaret space, but it will cost you a bundle and then, when all your family and friends have come to see you, that’s it. No career to launch, as there is no marketplace in which to land. The person who thought up this “training” is raking in the dough, people, and no one can stop him. Hokey Smoke, Bullwinkle!

Makes my head spin.