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I wish a had a dime for every person I have had to “untrain”. They come to NYC, graduates of some program in some school, singing like Wagnerians, badly, and can barely manage a music theater song written after 1965. The voices are HEAVY, thick, immbolized and very ponderous and they struggle with high notes. The breathing is often confused and imprecise but they are working hard to “support”.

After we get the voice re-organized, it’s not uncommon to hear, “Gee, this is so much easier.”

Then, when I listen to a piece of rep, it’s also not uncommon for me to ask, “Why are you making this sound and not some other sound?” Often, they don’t know. I have to remind them the reason they are making a certain kind of sound is because the person singing is expressing his or her feelings or intention and THAT is what guides the choice of sound. That runs counter to what they have been taught. Making sound for sound’s sake is the name of the game.

The same goes for standing still. I’ve written about this before. These students sing from the head up. Arms hanging limp like wet spaghetti, bodies drooping, feet planted as if stuck in a mudslide. “This is what I was told to do,” is the reply I get if i ask about why this should be the case.

The idea that the human voice can make all kinds of sounds in a free and healthy manner can come as quite a surprise to someone who has never been told and who has never had that particular experience while singing. The idea that the color of the sound, its texture and quality, comes from inside, reflecting the communication of the piece of music being sung is often a surprising one. Even classical singing is supposed to connect to real life, however exaggerated the vocal production might be. Stanislavsky worked with opera singers not Broadway performers.

Where does this dis-connect begin? Great artists somehow avoid it. Surely our great singers have been great communicators, in whatever style they sang. The artists who touch the hearts of the audience draw people of all ages and backgrounds, regardless of whether or not the listeners understand the language of the music being sung. There was a reason why half a million people would come to a concert in Central Park when Luciano Pavarotti sang……his voice was always totally filled with emotional communication, and of course, the sound itself was magnificent. On the other hand, Willie Nelson fills stadiums, too. He has almost no “voice” in a traditional classical sense, and no one cares. He communicates.

You cannot lose track of real life in art. Art is supposed to reflect life. There are all kinds of people, unfortunately, who are in the performing arts who should have kept their day job. If they end up in a powerful position, woe to everyone, and of course, there are many of these people in all kinds of places, unfortunately. People like Robert Wilson fit in this category. He is very famous opera director with a big international reputation. Wilson has stated publicly that he feels no obligation to honor either text or music and that his personal “stamp” on anything is enough. Nevermind that his productions regularly get booed loudly by the audiences. Nevermind, that he makes a bajillion dollars directing operas all over the world because opera companies think he is “cool” and “different”. If you have ever seen a Robert Wilson opera, you will know how dis-connected this man is from anything except his own ego, which is alive and well and the size of Chicago. But his presence makes for a good argument, to some people, that art can be anything, regardless, and that there is no such thing as “values” except those that the artist chooses to have in the moment. Well, OK, but then do we teach that — do we teach that art has no inherent value? That isn’t particularly teachable, if you ask me. And, if that’s so, why is it that the stuff that has LASTED, sometimes for hundreds of years, is that which is beyond the personal? Something which has universal relevance, beyond the present moment, beyond one person’s narrow perspective of his or her own importance.

It seems to me that what audiences want, what human beings want, is to see, hear and feel the human condition, their condition, reflected back to them. They want to know that what they are experiencing, others have also experienced. They want to know that there is hope, they want to be reminded that we all struggle, suffer and can triumph, or not. If we do not teach our students to sing in a way that allows them to delve into their own depths, and to express all that lies there, perhaps unknown to them, then we are not giving them legitimate tools. We are not preparing them to make the world a better, more illuminated place. We are not giving them a doorway to shed some light on the human condition so that we can all learn and grow.

If all we do is train students to make big fat sounds that are “impressive”, we aren’t teaching them anything at all. What they will learn is that they will have to undo this training in order to return to being in touch with the ordinary, plain, simple condition of being human.

Integrity is defined in the Oxford dictionary as being “honest, fair and good”. We all hope that those who teach singing are that, and that they put the welfare of their students above their own. We hope.

Of course, teachers would have to actually monitor themselves on a somewhat regular basis, asking “what’s the best thing for the student here?” Sometimes, of course, isn’t clear cut or easy to know how to answer that.

Many of the teachers who are teaching Somatic Voicework™ are people who care about integrity, they care about what the student needs and they care about being honest, fair and good. In practical terms, however, doing that in a vacuum would be quite difficult, so we have a chat room where we can discuss difficult issues or questions and be honest with each other. Sometimes there is disagreement, sometimes not, but the exchanges are fair and that makes them good.

Deep work requires integrity. Without integrity, it is very hard to be a teacher that does what teachers ought to do — light the way. You cannot create trust if you don’t tell the truth in a kind manner. You cannot ask someone to risk doing something vulnerable (a feeling that arises frequently when we try something new and difficult), and you cannot ask someone to open to their own inner workings, if they know ahead of time they will be judged or condemned for doing so. You cannot ask someone to look at their weaknesses or failings, even if they understand that is what is necessary in order to grow, if they don’t know for sure that you are also willing to look at your own. Having integrity means that you wouldn’t ask the student to do something you yourself wouldn’t do. It means seeing yourself as part of the equation and owning up to what you really do not know just as much as what you do.

I have never heard any of these issues discussed at The New York Singing Teachers’ Association meetings, and I have been a member since 1978. I’ve never heard them discussed anywhere by any organization of teachers of singing. The only place these issues are raised is in the CCM Vocal Pedagogy Institute at Shenandoah Conservatory in Winchester, Virginia, in Level III of Somatic Voicework℠ The LoVetri Method. I take the word integrity very seriously and want the people who are certified in Somatic Voicework℠ to take it seriously, too. The functional vocal work we do ultimately recreates the default position of the mechanism all the way down to the responses in the vocal folds, and as that takes place, it changes the mindset of the singer at the same time. This is work that will last because it is done slowly, and it is work that is profound, because it honors the sacredness of each voice and person. This is work that is always unique even though we do the same thing all the time. The integrity of the teachers, and the safe environment they create for their students in their studios is paramount. We live the values of honesty and fairness and we work always to be good, as teachers, as guides, and as vocalists on the path of self-discovery. We encourage everyone to think about integrity. It’s a good thing.

Integrity is something that everyone needs. You don’t get a textbook

When I was a child, my father used to tell me stories. I liked the ones he made up that were about “Jack and Orey” (Daddy, tell me a story about Jack and Orey). He concocted some characters named Oompha-Oompha and Itchy-Scratchy who were always doing funny, silly or tricky things. I don’t remember the details but I remember his stories made me laugh. He made up a bird, too, called the “Pithacanthrope Directus” who flew backwards so he wouldn’t forget where he has been. Sometimes the three ended up in one place. That was fun.

When I started singing lessons, I was 15 years old. My teacher at the time was a local person. She taught me to open my mouth on high notes and tighten my belly, to keep my ribs up and still and to roll my tongue forward and out on an /i/ vowel. That’s about all she taught me. The rest was pretty much me, since I sang decently on my own. She was my teacher until I went to college where I seemed to have entered the world of Oompha Oompha.

I attended Manhattan School of Music when it was still in East Harlem on 103rd Street off Lexington Avenue. I had never set foot in Harlem except to audition there until the first day of school when I was left to deal with the subway and bus system and the streets of that funky New York neighborhood and my first day of college all at the same time. Next, I got to meet my voice teacher, a week into things. She was a German Wagnerian soprano, who taught me in her apartment on West 86th Street, off West End Avenue. She scared me to death. She had no use for my little bird voice and I was so frightened that whatever I had learned simply departed my poor quaking brain. She concluded, and was quick to tell me, that I had little talent, whatever I had learned was completely wrong, that I couldn’t breath and that I couldn’t count, either. Nevertheless, she said she would “see what she could do with me”. We spent the next three lessons with me on her couch pushing the phone book on my belly up and down with inhales and exhales. Oompha Oompha had never been in such a wild jungle as I and she had Itchy-Scratchy to help her around whatever exotic places they were in while I was absolutely alone. I was very very lost.

By the end of that year, I could barely sing. My throat seemed frozen or piled up with heavy bolders. I was decidedly unsuccessful in “placing the tone into my forehead” or “vibrating the bones in my face” (I still can’t do that). I was unable to “release my breastbone” and “keep my ribs wide” (I could barely find my ribs, let alone make them do something on purpose). I had been convinced (without much resistance) that I was an untalented wretch with a little insignicant voice. I was not thrilled with Spanish Harlem as a place to hang out after school, either, and the thing that put me over the top was spending the night in a tenement with a fellow student who had taken an apartment nearby the school. We could hear the rats in the walls, we slept with a big knife under the bed, for protection, and the entire tiny place smelled like stale cooking grease. I turned myself into a Pithacanthrope Directus, and flew myself backwards back to Connecticut to reconsider my future.

Once home, I recovered and decided to venture out again. This time I returned to the Big Apple which now felt to me as I had imagined Oompha’s home to be…..big, strange, wild and dangerous. The denizens of this turbulent noisy place seemed to want to trample me into the ground, eat me up and spit me out and laugh all the while. Still, I percevered and found another singing teacher. She was on 39th or so, off Park. Her apartment was quite fancy. I found that I didn’t need to bring Itchy-Scratchy with me, as she told me in every lesson how remarkable I was, how talented and expressive. It caused me to wonder if it wouldn’t be better to feel a little more like Itchy-Scratchy and a little bit less like Little Mary Sunshine. Surely, being told I was good was a definite step up from what I had been told previously, but being told I was always only terrific, when I was barely 19 years old, was just suspicious. TIme to be a Pithacanthrope again. Flying backwards to the land of safety and home.

Adults who want to learn to cross over, or go from singing primarily in one style to another, have special challenges. They have more life experience, which is useful, and that can make it easier for them to understand what is needed in their “cross over” training. The musculature, however, can take more time to change, the old vocal patterns not only are deeply ingrained but there are psychological things to deal with in changing technique that can be daunting.

You cannot proceed too slowly. Both the body and the mind need time to assimilate changes, especially those that effect the deep muscles in the throat, and the vocal folds themselves. Sound is very personal. We are all used to hearing ourselves a certain way and changes made to a singer’s sound can be very traumatic if they are not done gently. Nevertheless, the vocalist has to go out of his or her comfort zone sooner or later or no change will take place.

The spiritual aspects of voice training are real. The spirit, or the innate essence of what makes each of us who we are, are inseparable from the physical aspects of breathing, moving and making sound. It is very hard to remain silent, and it is very hard to be completely still, and it is impossible to stop breathing (on purpose). Any sound we utter arises from the larynx. The command comes down from the brain’s central nervous system passing through the spinal cord to the nerves that cause the vocal folds to close and vibrate. There is no other way to make voiced sound except through the larynx, by the vibration of the vocal folds. Sometimes we forget that because we feel the result of that process, not usually the cause, except indirectly.

If the spirit of a human being is part of her character, then all the qualities one would want to see in a human being will be needed in exploring, training and developing the voice. There will be a need to have curiosity, patience, courage, perseverence. There will be a time for probing, exploring, and calmness. There will be elation in times of success (a perfect high note) and despair in times of frustration (why can’t I sound better?) There will be a need for critical evaluation of intellectually chosen goals and a need to abandon rules and regulations. In fact, finding and expressing vocal sound, especially vocal music, is challenging in every way. In the end, singing stands to make us each better human beings, with more that is good to contribute to the world. It matters not how any individual voice sounds, there is room in the world for all kinds of voices. It matters that the vocalist makes the journey and keeps being challenged by it, all through life.

Learning to cross from one kind of singing to another as an adult takes spiritual courage, intelligence, dedication, desire, patience and diligence, not to mention a lot of hard work. Even though many of us were told it was “not possible” or “dangerous” to sing more than one way, that is simply an old wives’ tale. Every day adults stick their vocal toes in the water and see what it’s like for themselves to learn to sing with new sounds, in new styles, with new patterns and learn, too, what it takes to go back to the more familiar old ways, the old friends, and thank them for being patient while we looked at new territory.

A very common occurance: Kid grows up singing with the radio/TV/internet, all the popular songs of the day (Top 40s). Kid decides he or she likes singing and wants to learn more. Kid gets ready for college, has to go either for classical or music theater training (done by classical teachers) or jazz (also done by classical teachers). Kid gets into a school and gets assigned a singing teacher.

Singing teacher has to teach “art songs”, in English and Italian, maybe German, French, Spanish or some other language, and maybe also music theater songs. Singing teacher imparts whatever knowledge he or she has to the student. Student does not “get better”. Student gets blamed. Student tries harder, manages to force the voice to do something along the lines of “resonance” (pick a place in the face/head) and “breath support”, that the teacher accepts. Student learns rep, manages to graduate (or quits school) and tries to go out and get a job singing (see previous post). Singer has “problems” and maybe manages anyway, but can’t quite get his or her voice to do what is required, or what she wants. Hmmmmmmmmm.

This is a COMMON scenario, not a rare occurance. Why?

Because you cannot layer a classical vocal technique over a voice that has grown up singing pop music without making it worse. You cannot get the proper resonance, range, power and flexibility out of a voice that is solidly locked into a “chest dominant” mid-range (which is easily camoflaged unless you know how to recognize its characteristic behaviors), no matter what kind of classical training you might have or teach. You can tell the student to “bring the sound forward”, or “resonate in the masque” (whatever that means), or your can tell her to “vibrate the bones in her face”, or you can tell her to pull her belly in (or up, or push it out or down, or all of those) to “support” the tone, and she could still “not improve”. You could tell her to “make the sound seem to go out from your eyebrows” (that’s a doozey) or “lift the tone over the back and spin it out” (even more of a doozey), or you could ask her to support from her public bone (do bones contract?), and she could still “sound wrong”.

You can ask and ask and ask and the student might finally, if she is musical and determined, sound “better” but she won’t feel free, she won’t really know how the mechanism can work if it is properly balanced and she will never experience the sheer unmitigated joy of singing a completely free sound, and for that, you can thank her instructor.

You cannot layer a classical technique over a CCM mechanism. It can never work.

You can take the CCM sound apart, rebalance the instrument, and put into place coordinated muscular responses that could not possibly arise on their own. This takes patience and time but it also takes a keen ear, good solid information about function, and lots of skill. After the sound (and the physical responses that create and effect it) is correctly organized, the student will not only be able to generate appropriate resonances and manage breath support easily, but she will also be able to go back and sing the CCM stuff (whatever style it may be), with authenticity and ease as well. It just won’t be with the same behaviors that she uses in the classical repertoire.

I have worked with many highly skilled professionals who have never been able to sing the way they knew they could because of this very real problem. Some of them have had good careers lasting for decades. All of them, however, kept seeking “the way out”, as their deep intuition knew that something wasn’t happening that should have been happening, or vice versa. If you are one of these people, there is hope, don’t give up! You need Somatic Voicework™. If you are a teacher and you have a student who “won’t improve” but seems to work hard, you need SVW™, too. Barring a vocal pathology or a deliberately passive/agressive personality disorder, if your students do not improve in a classical training program, question what you do, how you do it and why. Question yourself, not the student.

Those who can do, and those who can’t, teach.

How about those who can do and those who can’t, could have.

There are many people in the world of the arts who had “the goods”. They had talent, training, and the discipline to do something with their particular art. They may even have had a burning desire to be an artist — dancer, actor, photographer, writer, painter, or singer — and understood they the had to make the backend, the business element, also work.

But, a lot of these people never got to do what their heart really wanted to do. They tried as hard as they could, they used every resource available to them, they persevered and fought discouragment, but they did not succeed. It might have taken a long time, but sooner or later, a decision had to be made. Continue indefinitely, no matter what (some do), or call it quits, regroup, and find something else to do, like teach?

I know people here in New York who kept going with their attempts to become professional singers well into their 50s, not being successful, but not giving up, either. These people were unwilling or unable to accept that the world wasn’t going to allow them to make a living doing what they had most wanted (in this case, sing) and that if they were going to be able to earn a living, they were going to have to do that by doing something else. I also know people who “got” rather quickly “this isn’t working” and who then either got good “job jobs” or went back to school to study another subject, and made peace with making music at night, on weekends and during vacations. I also know a few people who backed into teaching, more or less because they felt it was “better than nothing”, and managed to come to some kind of balance with it, after the fact. Some of those who became teachers actually discovered that they liked teaching, and made an effort to learn more about it, to improve their skills, and, eventually, went on to be more successful as teachers than they had ever been as singers.

I know others, much less talented, who were able to carve out careers as singers simply because they had a lot of money and spent it on vocal training, excellent top-drawer musicians, on PR, on marketing, and were able, mostly due to sheer dollars spent, to “purchase” a career of sorts. This is galling, but I have to tell you, I have seen it more than once. And, after the person gets “launched” there are audiences for them. The key here is having lots of money. LOTS. Another key is being so ignorant or numb as to not know or care that you are not talented in the first place.

And then, of course, we have the folks in the category, “those who can’t, teach”. I have written about them here very frequently. The people who went to school, got a master’s degree, then a doctorate, then stayed at the same school to teach, and NEVER ever set foot on a professional stage of any kind. Some of these people have never been to New York to the Met or Broadway, or to a top jazz club, or a rock concert. Some of these people haven’t actually done anything much but study and then teach others what they have studied. I have a problem with that. Yes, I know, they have decided they are better off teaching than trying to be in “the marketplace”, but singing is NOT an academic subject, it is an applied subject.

If school is supposed to prepare you for life and if training at a school is for an applied music degree (playing or singing after school in a professional manner), then training at a school (at any level) is job preparation. If you have never actually HAD a job, then how are you going to prepare someone else to have that same job? And, if you do not understand the difference between actually dealing with singing “in the marketplace” from a first-hand direct experience platform, you cannot possibly prepare a student to go straight into being a professional.

And, if we have reached a place in our society where life experience is not better than, or at least equal to, book learning, particularly in the applied arts, then we are indeed in a sorry state of affairs. When a college or an accreditation board is willing to put someone with a brand new doctorate and no life experience above someone with decades of life experience who does not have a doctorate (and that happens every day), when dealing with an APPLIED profession, such as singing, then everyone is in trouble. The POINT of training is prepare a singer to go out into the world and earn a living singing. They may not succeed, but they should have a chance to try, and that chance can be enhanced or stiffled at the hands of the people who do the training. The person might not succeed at becoming a full-time professional singer, but at least it would not be because of lack of proper training, or lack of talent, or lack of desire, of lack of discipline, or lack of perseverence, or lack of realistic expectations, it would be because the world simply said “no”. There is nothing to do about that except come to terms with it.
The halls of academia have to answer to the profession of SINGING, not the profession of training for singing. There is a big difference.

Those who can do, and those who can’t, teach.

How about those who can do and those who can’t, could have.

There are many people in the world of the arts who had “the goods”. They had talent, training, and the discipline to do something with their particular art. They may even have had a burning desire to be an artist — dancer, actor, photographer, writer, painter, or singer — and understood they the had to make the backend, the business element, also work.

But, a lot of these people never got to do what their heart really wanted to do. They tried as hard as they could, they used every resource available to them, they persevered and fought discouragment, but they did not succeed. It might have taken a long time, but sooner or later, a decision had to be made. Continue indefinitely, no matter what (some do), or call it quits, regroup, and find something else to do, like teach?

I know people here in New York who kept going well with their attempts to become professional singers well into their 50s, not being successful, but not giving up, either. These people were unwilling or unable to accept that the world wasn’t going to allow them to make a living doing what they had most wanted (in this case, sing) and that if they were going to be able to earn a living, they were going to have to do that by doing something else. I also know people who “got” rather quickly “this isn’t working” and who then either got good “job jobs” or went back to school to study another subject, and made peace with making music at night, on weekends and during vacations. I also know a few people who backed into teaching, more or less because they felt it was “better than nothing”, and managed to come to some kind of balance with it, after the fact. Some of those who became teachers actually discovered that they liked teaching, and made an effort to learn more about it, to improve their skills, and, eventually, went on to be more successful as teachers than they had ever been as singers.

I know others, much less talented, who were able to carve out careers as singers simply because they had a lot of money and spent it on vocal training, excellent top-drawer musicians, on PR, on marketing, and were able, mostly due to sheer dollars spent, to “purchase” a career of sorts. This is galling, but I have to tell you, I have seen it more than once. And, after the person gets “launched” there are audiences for them. The key here is having lots of money. LOTS. Another key is being so ignorant or numb as to not know or care that you are not talented in the first place.

And then, of course, we have the folks in the category, “those who can’t, teach”. I have written about them here very frequently. The people who went to school, got a master’s degree, then a doctorate, then stayed at the same school to teach, and NEVER ever set foot on a professional stage of any kind. Some of these people have never been to New York to the Met or Broadway, or to a top jazz club, or a rock concert. Some of these people haven’t actually done anything much but study and then teach others what they have studied. I have a problem with that. Yes, I know, they have decided they are better off teaching than trying to be in “the marketplace”, but singing is NOT an academic subject, it is an applied subject.

If school is supposed to prepare you for life and if training at a school is for an applied music degree (playing or singing after school in a professional manner), then training at a school (at any level) is job preparation. If you have never actually HAD a job, then how are you going to prepare someone else to have that same job? And, if you do not understand the difference between actually dealing with singing “in the marketplace” from a first-hand direct experience platform, you cannot possibly prepare a student to go straight into being a professional.

And, if we have reached a place in our society where life experience is not better than, or at least equal to, book learning, particularly in the applied arts, then we are indeed in a sorry state of affairs. When a college or an accreditation board is willing to put someone with a brand new doctorate and no life experience above someone with decades of life experience who does not have a doctorate (and that happens every day), when dealing with an APPLIED profession, such as singing, then everyone is in trouble. The POINT of training is prepare a singer to go out into the world and earn a living singing. They may not succeed, but they should have a chance to try, and that chance can be enhanced or stiffled at the hands of the people who do the training. The person might not succeed at becoming a full-time professional singer, but at least it would not be because of lack of proper training, or lack of talent, or lack of desire, of lack of discipline, or lack of perseverence, or lack of realistic expectations, it would be because the world simply said “no”. There is nothing to do about that except come to terms with it.
The halls of academia have to answer to the profession of SINGING, not the profession of training for singing. There is a big difference.

If you have ever taken a yoga class you know that after it is over, you feel better. The stretching you do makes the muscles feel looser and freer and the strengthening also invigorates the body. Overall you feel freer and stronger, and if you continue to do this over time, you can feel better and better.

If you are a dancer, and you train every day for years and years, eventually every single muscle in your body gets stretched and toned and becomes exquisitely responsive to your mental intention. If you watch world class dancers in any style, you will see how expressively they move, how they can get their bodies to do things that are far beyond what someone who is in relatively good shape can do but who doesn’t dance. If you watch a professional athlete, you would see much of the same, albeit perhaps in not as refined a manner. Sports like football and boxing do not require delicacy, and things like basketball and hockey are not exactly examples of refinement. Nevertheless, the bodies of the athletes must respond quickly and accurately to the demands of the mind and deal with various other conditions that can only be met through serious long term training. No one would suggest that an Olympic swimmer should learn to swim by just kicking his legs as hard as possible or flapping his arms while his legs remained quiet. Every single movement of an elite level swimmer is scrutinized down to the micro level. Every movement of the fingers and toes, the head, the arms, the torso and the goggles, swimsuit and noseclip have been analyzed to make sure that no extra effort is made and no movement is overdone, even though the swimmer is working full out all the time. There are massage therapists who work on the swimmer as soon as each meet is over and between each round of competition. There are medical specialists to treat any pulled muscles or aches and pains. There are high speed videos to examine after each event, to study and refine anything that wasn’t up to par.

So, if we singers have almost none of that to assist us, and, in fact, if we don’t even have “experts” who know what goes on, let alone how to improve it, that does not bode well for any of us.

I saw today in the “Learning Annex” brochure someone teaching an on-course for them (an “expert”, of course), who offers to teach how to “sing from your diaphragm – the source of your power” and who teaches you how to make your vocal “chords” work better. No kidding. You pay money for this, people.

The muscles involved with singing can be trained, even if you do not understand well what that entails. If you keep your mouth open all the time, which singing frequently involves, you will be stretching the muscles in your jaw, your cheeks, and your mouth, front to back. You will also have to stretch the tongue, as it is attached to the jaw. If you want the tongue to learn to move independently of the jaw, which it has to do in order to be able to change the shape of the vowels without changing the position of the larynx, you have to do tongue flexibility exercises (what are those?). By isolating the movement of the tongue from the jaw and the movement of the front of the tongue from the back (how do you do that?) you gain greater freedom and control at the same time. You can learn to change the shape of the mouth/lips deliberately because doing so has an effect upon the muscles of the back of the mouth, and the way those muscles behave. It is possible to make a very open shape in the mouth and throat (vocal tract) without undue pressure on either, but that takes time and happens generally indirectly in response to attempting to change some aspect of the sound itself.

Most muscles that effect vocal sound do not move very far in conversational speech, therefore they must be deliberately stretched over time in order to facilitate good singing. If you stretch them too much all at once, you just get tightness and resistance. If you stretch them gently over time, they get used to the stretch and end up looser and more flexible. If you do not stretch them, things like high notes sound awful and expressiveness remains very limited. If you do them, the entire mechanism learns to move more freely and to be more responsive to the intention of the singer. You could call it “making the voice dance”.

How many people think this way? How many understand what to do even if they think this way? Why is our profession so very far behind the times? Will it ever catch up to dance or even to sports?

Somatic Voicework™ incorporates exercises that stretch the jaw, move the face, articulate the tongue, front and back (separately from the jaw) and integrate all those movements into one’s conscious awareness, where it can do some good. Come join us in July at Shenandoah Conservatory and learn how to make use of this information. Contact me at: www.thevoiceworkshop.com

We have discussed functional training here previously. It’s a new subject in the world of voice, however, so it deserves a bit more time.

In functional training for singing we are isolating behaviors that occur in the larynx from those that occur in the pharynx. We are distinguishing behaviors that have to do with the muscles of the tongue versus those that have to do with the muscles of the pharynx. We are discussing sound for its own sake, separate from musical values as found in any particular style.

If we cannot get the vocal folds to do their job (making a pitch, resisting air from below, make a clear sound) then we wouldn’t be able to do much else, either, if we wanted to. We can’t make “resonance” and it’s hard to do “breath support”, and, for most of us, that’s all we think we have. There are still lots of people who “breathe from the diaphragm” and “resonate the masque” by “focusing the tone” in the “front” and allowing the “air” to “go up and over the back”. That certainly has not gone away but its usefulness as explanation is more and more suspect. I am SOOOOOOOOO thrilled.

Functional training rests on the idea that we are dealing with coordination of a system that is largely muscular. It implies that the person doing the functional training understands what does what. Breathiness has to do with what is going on in the vocal folds, not the breathing mechansim. Nasality has to do with the positioning of the soft palate. Tension has to do with some kind of squeezing of the side wall of the inside of the throat and the effect that the squeeze has on other structures like the tongue and the jaw. Freedom implies that you can get the muscles involved in sound-making to move easily and a lot, and this is something hardly anyone understands. Not too much of any of this has to do with “breath support” or “the diaphragm”.

Yes, some people get that the vocal folds are either vibrating in chest (thyro-arytenoid) or head (crico-thyroid) and giving you a pitch or frequency and a quality, and they understand that what we hear as a vowel has to do with the shape of the vocal tract (throat and mouth coupled together as a bent tube) and the position within that tube of the tongue, and the amount of open space in the mouth based upon where the jaw is vertically and what the soft palate is doing, and that volume has to do with air pressure. Yes, they get all that. What they do not get is how all the muscles involved can be stiff, unmoveable, stuck together, restricted, unresponsive, and under-developed, and how all of that has an effect on what a person who wants to sing can do, will feel, can move, will change and will ultimately become the new normal.

If you get the process right, if you make it more and more efficient, stronger, more moveable, more responsive, and more homogenized, then the result will come, as long as you know what kind of a result you want. The process of getting someone’s vocal function to change involves understanding what the person is doing, what they ought to be doing and knowing a path between the two.

Think about it.