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We were taught the lines of the treble staff by remembering the first letters of the phrase Every Good Boy Deserves Fun. Sometimes I think we need the phrase Every Good Singing Teacher Does Fine.

A good singing teacher does much more than teach singing. A good teacher is going to address many different things that go into being an excellent singer  and those things will vary depending on the student. If the teacher is knowledgeable, caring, dedicated and open-minded, the training has a very good chance of succeeding, particularly if the student is willing, curious, hard-working and also dedicated.

If the student works with the teacher for a number of years, it is almost inevitable that they develop a relationship that is deep and important to both of them. The process of learning requires that the student come to trust the teacher and the process of teaching requires that the teacher hopes that what is imparted in lessons is valued by the student. Both can be disappointed. As with any other kind of relationship, risk is involved.

It’s hard, however, to invest time, effort and energy in another human being only to have the person throw all that was exchanged out the window. It’s hard to be supportive, encouraging, willing, caring and dedicated to the process of teaching someone only to have that person disappear without so much as one word to the teacher, even after many years of training and intereaction. It’s hard when the student decides to give up singing and go back to school to become a dentist!

I was always determined to teach people, not throats. I wanted to work with human beings, not robots. I wished to get to know my students’ artistic vision for their singing and not lay upon them my ideas as being more important than theirs. In order to do that, I have to be open with them about who I am, what I do, where I go and how I approach teaching and life. I want to include the important ingredients of their life so that their singing is a part of it, not some “outside activity” like going to the movies.

Many times when I was a young teacher, I was bitterly disappointed when someone whom I had come to think of as a “special student” just disappeared. This was most difficult when I had been working with the person for quite some time, even years, and had seen the person grow both vocally and artistically. Often, in those days when there was no internet and no cell phones, I would call and leave messages only to have them ignored. It left me mystified.

The problem is magnified by the protocols typical of the profession. If the student is dissatisfied with the lesson process, it is often difficult to say why or how. It can be uncomfortable for the students to let the teacher know that they are not happy with the way things are going in lessons or in their singing. The teacher might have an easier time telling the student that she is not making progress or that her singing isn’t really moving along in a good direction, but sometimes this, too, can be hard. And, if the person has a separate, personal reason for stopping, sometimes it’s just too painful to confront the situation. I have heard from others long after a student stopped coming that a spouse was ill or a grandparent died and they had to leave the area. Making an effort to let the singing teacher know was just too much, given the circumstances, and I could understand that. It didn’t make it easier, though, to lose the person as a person in my life.

I realize that some teachers regard students as “clients” and don’t want to have a close relationship to them. They aren’t interested in knowing anything more about a student than what they have to know to get through a lesson. They don’t remember them much from session to session and don’t care if they come back or not, since they are very busy. I’m not one of those people, however.

If you are a student of singing, studying with someone who is meeting your needs and giving you what you want, please try to remember that not everyone will be able to do that. Please be kind and remember that when you are gone from your teacher’s studio, you will still be missed and your teacher will still be curious to know what you are doing. If your teacher has extended him or herself to you, above and beyond the “cause of duty” by allowing you to owe for lessons, or giving you an opportunity to perform somewhere, or loaned you music or helped you get an audition, and has not been paid for any of that, remember to be grateful.

Long ago, I allowed students to trade for lessons when they couldn’t pay for them easily. That stopped when I was burned. A “trade” student let it slip that she had no money because she had spend her trust fund payment on grass and a trip to the Caribbean. I felt like a fool. I also extended myself twice to young men who did work for me in return for lessons. When they both became very successful in the business (at the highest levels) they thanked me by going to study with other people. One of them made a point of letting me know he was working with someone else and I could say nothing. It never occurred to either of them that I had extended myself to them in order to help them succeed and that when they were finally successful, it would have been a nice gesture to return for lessons when they could actually pay for them. Such is life.

If you have a good singing teacher who is doing just fine by you, don’t take it for granted. We are human beings with feelings, same as you. If you are a teacher of singing, remember that you are teaching a person with feelings, too, and that the person is more than the voice. If the exchange of mutual respect between both parties is balanced, only that which is fine can emerge.

It’s not uncommon for me to have a new student come into my studio and tell me they have studied singing previously with one or more teachers. I always ask how long they studied and what that study entailed. Sometimes I get reasonably good answers, but often I don’t get much more than general answers with flimsy information. Sometimes I get answers that are scarily wrong.

If you know you know, then you can say what you know. If you think you know, you might make things up to explain. If you are guessing, you have no choice but to make up explanations and if you are clueless, you don’t know that you don’t know. Singers come in all these flavors and singing training does, too.

You cannot learn a physical process generally. You cannot “sort of” sing with good technique. You cannot expect to get better at something because someone has pointed out that you do it poorly, incorrectly or without skill. (Happens all the time). You cannot “fix” something that you don’t know is broken unless someone who is knowledgeable tells you what about it is broken and how it got that way and what, exactly, you have to do to fix it and how you will know when it is back to normal or meets certain criteria. And all that has to make sense in plain English, not voice teacher jargon.

There is a difference between knowing that something could be better or done in a more efficient manner and saying that it is WRONG. And, if the person has acquired a skill that has worked professionally for quite a while, saying that the skill set is automatically faulty is simply ignorant.

I recently spoke to someone who had sung successfully in the CCM community for 20 years. He decided to go back to school to pursue a doctoral degree. Right now, the only doctoral degrees available to someone who sings are found in classical singing, so he immersed himself in that repertoire. During his 5 years of study, he was told that his previous training was “all wrong” and that the new way, the classical way, was correct. This pronouncement was made by his teachers. In order to draw this conclusion you would have to discount 20 years of professional success in CCM yet the likelihood that this young man could have maintained a professional career with really faulty vocal or musical skills flies in the face of common sense (see recent blog post here). It did not occur to the teacher(s) that the skill set of a CCM singer, doing R&B, Latin, and other styles, might need to be different because, to the singing teachers, that possibility simply does not exist. I was able to explain to the singer that his style, prior to his doctoral studies, was probably based on decent vocal function and that his classical chops were no better, and maybe not even as good, as his previously accessible technical capacities.

Most teachers of classical singing have been brainwashed. They were told that classical training was “one size fits all” and that being “classically trained” would allow them to sing anything well. As I have said here many times, that is ridiculous. Since classical training is hardly organized and no one could agree on what, exactly, it has to contain or teach, assuming that it will give you skills to sing styles of music that weren’t even in the realm of science fiction 200 plus years ago is just preposterous. Yet that belief is perpetuated every day.

At one time we believed that African Americans were inferior people. We thought that women’s bodies were not capable of doing vigorous sports. We believed the world was flat. We believed the sun rotated around the earth. We (that is, most of the human race) believed these things were “true” and we had arguments to back them up, sometimes even “scientific” arguments. In good time, all of these strongly held beliefs were shown to be false. Yet, there was resistance, sometimes very strong resistance, to the truth, even when it should have been obvious. The idea that “classical training” (whatever that might be) is not going to help you sing rock, pop, gospel or anything else unless you are a very talented person who can morph the training process into something that fits your particular needs is widespread. That people manage to learn to use classical training to help them sing any style is real, but that is a testament to the genius of the singers, not to the applicability or usefulness of their training method.

I have seen people in my studio who claim to have “studied singing” with a “very good” teacher for 5, 7, 9 and even 12 years, who show no evidence whatsoever of training. They are often devastated to be told they have few skills, and some are angry (at me), even though I say this as gently and carefully as I possibly can. They don’t believe me. It’s tough to watch.

Singing training should produce specific results. If you don’t know what they are, you can find out, but you might have to do a little digging. If you want to train your voice to sing repertoire that is not “classical” you do not need to “study classically” to gain skills, but if that is the only training available to you, it can help as long as you understand that it can only go so far and it has to stick to certain functional parameters. If you don’t know what those are, be very careful. You could end up being one of those people who has wasted a lot of time studying singing for X years and learning zip.

Being aware isn’t something you purchase in a store. You can’t acquire awareness unless you want to acquire it.

Basically, awareness is what you pay attention to by choice. It’s what you notice.

Some people don’t notice much of anything. They are asleep. They walk through life as in a trance, eating, sleeping, talking, watching TV, and never notice anything beyond what is immediately in front of them or what falls into the realm of a task like getting dressed or taking a shower. Other people notice the world and what goes on in it but never notice anything about themselves. Some people only notice themselves and pay no attention to the world.

You can find out what kind of awareness a person has by listening to the way they speak. If you want to know what they pay attention to, notice what they talk about most of the time. That will tell you.

Some people are very visual. They will remember the color of a room in someone’s home, they will remember the outside of a specific house on a street full of houses that look pretty much the same. Some people remember feelings and sensations. They can recall a certain reaction to a person or event in great detail or describe the emotions they had while reading a book or watching a movie years prior. Some people remember sounds. They associate certain sounds with specific places, people or times. Of course, we all do this now and then, but some people are very obviously in a particular category when it comes to awareness of this kind.

I remember voices and vocal sound. Whenever my ex-husband and I went to a vocal recital at Carnegie Hall, years later he would inevitably remember the songs performed (which I promptly forgot) and I would remember how the person sang (which he barely noticed). Sometimes, it was like we were at two different events. I remember how a student sounds from lesson to lesson, sometimes from year to year or over the course of a very long period of time. I don’t try to do this, I just do. I can’t remember, however, where I put my purse most days.

Some people notice a person’s characteristics or behavior. They notice how someone moves, how they speak and what they are interested in. They know what they notice and why.

A performer has to notice everything. In order to portray life in all its myriad glory you have to pay attention to the people in it. You have to pay attention to the human condition and how human beings behave in various circumstances. If the training process takes you away from noticing specific things and forces you to go into a kind of dead space in your mind, something is wrong. All good performers are excellent at observing life and absorbing that awareness into their artistic personality.

If you do not create a rich environment in your own mind when you are creating something, if you do not know why you are doing what you do, or why you are striving to do something, the flatness of that inner landscape will pervade your creative product, whether or not you notice or even care. Unfortunately, if your creative endeavor is singing, it can easily be so that during the training process, no one even asks you to be aware of anything at all. No one asks, “Why are you making that sound?” (as opposed to any other sound) and, “Under what circumstances would you (or any other living being) make a sound like that?” No one says, “What does this sound have to do with real life?” And, sadly, students don’t ask themselves those questions either.

In the world where singing equals resonance (placement, formant tuning), if you only sing with a certain kind of resonance (bone vibration, position) because someone told you to do that or because you believe that this sound is the only one that will “project” (carry, ring), and you cannot find a reason why the sound you are making is a reflection (at least) of a situation in real life, DON’T SING IT. Of course, in a world where singing equals honest communication, you don’t have to struggle to find out what the sound reflects because what it reflects is the communication. They cannot be separated. You don’t have to reflect the human condition because you are living the human condition while you sing.

Many performers get into a rut. They do what they do because they get used to it and it feels good. Eventually they don’t have to pay much attention to anything while they are performing. They get lulled into a state of self-satisfaction. If you are an artist, you have to walk a careful line between being pleased with your artistic output and being self-indulgent. You have to be confident in what you are doing and relaxed enough to do it without a lot of angst, but you should always have some kind of awareness of what your intention is and how you are doing in expressing that intention. Remember  there is an audience and that the audience matters.

If you don’t have a teacher, you don’t go to class, you don’t have a coach, you don’t allow others to give you feedback about your art, be even more careful. You may not have any awareness of what has slipped away or you may have drifted into a situation you don’t even know exists.

Awareness is very very important. Without it, life can simply pass you by. It isn’t a magic bullet, but it can make an enormous difference. If you don’t know what kind of awareness you have, ask someone who knows you well. You might be surprised.

Many times I have written here about what I encounter out in the world as I travel and teach. Each time I bump into disaster, it is just as unnerving as the first experience.

I recently had a master class for high school students singing music theater material. Three of the young women did traditional songs but were completely unable to sing with anything that resembled normal sound. They were stuck, vocally and physically, in a stiff, pressured, hooty, unpleasant tone that had nothing whatsoever to do with musical expression or even with being human. They looked and sounded like robots trying to sing like owls.

These were bright eager young women and were easy to work with when it came time for me to do so. They made significant changes in less than 15 minutes, so it was impossible to assume they were at fault. Since at least two of the three had the same weird vocal production, I had to conclude they were studying with the same teacher. I didn’t ask, but the coincidence would be unlikely. The other students mostly sang well and were ready to take performance direction, although at least one of the students who sang well could not make even the simplest change in her delivery of the song from a physical standpoint. She couldn’t even move one arm in a deliberate manner.

While I was watching these high schoolers struggle, I thought about the time spent (anywhere from one to two years by their own reckoning) and the money. In just one or two years from now they could be auditioning to enter college music programs, but surely would not be getting admitted, and would perhaps be wondering why.

If you are not musical and your child wants to take singing lessons with the local teacher in your town, go find someone who sings to listen to your child’s lessons and get an opinion. If they tell you the kid doesn’t “sound right”, stop the lessons right away! If you can’t find someone who sings and is experienced in public performance, look on line until you find the largest music school near you or the most well known performance venue and try to get your child to sing for anyone associated with either group. If it looks bad and sounds bad, it IS bad. Don’t let some singing teacher convince you or your child that sounding bad is necessary in order to learn “correct singing technique”.

The teachers of these students were free to attend the master class I did, but they did not. I find this is typically the case. The people who think they are just fine and don’t want to hear what someone from New York has to say are legion. Even if I am wrong, why they aren’t at least curious to see what I am teaching is a mystery. When I lived in Connecticut as a student, if someone from New York came to my town to talk about singing or perform for us in school, I was there no matter what it took. It amazes me that I am brought to a university, a conservatory, a music school, a professional organization as an expert in CCM repertoire from New York City, with life experience working with professionals at the highest level of the business, but people boycott what I am doing on purpose. Why? To prove they don’t need to be there?

I have attended many master classes of the great artists. I have been to lectures, interviews, workshops and classes, throughout my career as a teacher, simply to learn from the great artists, scholars and teachers. I want to continue to learn, so I continue to go. I just saw the great Marilyn Horne last weekend.

The teachers who know nothing, charge money for teaching that nothing, and end up making sweet young vocalists (or even older vocalists who want to learn for fun) sounding and looking like beings from another planet are just awful. I can’t make them go away or make them stop what they are doing but I can surely write about them and protest what they do and I intend to keep on doing just that, every chance I get.

It is never true that you need to make a sound that takes you away from sounding like yourself and being who you are. If you sing any style of music, including classical repertoire, and people who know you don’t recognize your voice in less than three seconds, something is drastically wrong with your vocal production. If all you do is make some kind of sound because a teacher told you to, and then you teach that same thing to another person, STOP! Do the vocal world a favor and just
S T O P !

Most people do not readily admit to feeling jealous of another. They don’t typically acknowledge envy either.

In a highly competitive profession like singing, there is bound to be both jealousy and envy in all its various forms. It’s tricky to handle it when you are the recipient of nasty behavior on the part of someone who envies you or is jealous of what you have or have done.

In a way, we are taught to conform from our earliest days, since we need to live within our society’s expectations. We teach children while they are still quite young what is and is not acceptable behavior. In families where there is some kind of moral grounding, children are taught to be grateful and appreciative for what they have, generous and patient and to be happy for the success of others. That’s not always what happens, however. Some people don’t teach any special values and some even teach that wanting what others have and trying to take it and make it your own is a good idea. Nasty.

I have seen many vocal artists up close and personal over the years and I can vouch for the fact that it doesn’t take much for someone who is already successful to face undermining behavior from others. Being successful automatically sets one up to be on the receiving end of “who does she think she is anyway” and “she’s not so great”, and for a lot of negative judgment to accompany the successes coming along the career pike.

People who have “made it to the top” have lots of fans and followers but quite a few detractors as well. If the person is famous enough, they maybe have a full time buffer zone of individuals whose job it is to take the edge off comments of others and make sure the artist is protected from all sorts of disagreeable things. If they are not famous they are left to their own devices to fend off the barbs of critics or colleagues, and that’s not always an easy job.

If you are working with a lot of average people and you are someone who shines, you will not be well liked by your co-workers, since you make them look bad. If you are auditoning with a lot of average performers and you come in and knock the socks off the other candidates, you are not going to be their darling. It is a sad testament to our society that people who are talented, motivated and eager are often on the receiving end of jealousy and envy, the green-eyed monsters.

If you can’t hold up to the jealousy and envy of others, or even to their direct attacks, threats and ability to tear you down, you won’t do well when you succeed, because it comes with the territory that the people who can’t be successful will resent your accomplishments. The profession of singing is one of the most competitive and you must have a very secure sense of yourself if you are to go out into the world and stand up to all manner of criticism as a student, a young performer, a more seasoned professional and then, maybe, even a star. The NY Times doesn’t care if you’ve had a 30 year career, the reviewers still wait for their first opportunity to say that you have started to “decline”. These days no one is so “beloved” that the media will leave them alone if there is something, anything, to pick on.

Be careful if you are someone who envies or resents another’s success. There is no limit on how many people can be successful, even if you think there is. Rather, rejoice that someone else is doing well because that means that you, too, can do well, and that “doing well”, in fact, actually is possible in the first place. Be careful that you are not sending out barbs, or do things that are undermining, because the community of professionals who sing is rather small in each style and sooner or later that kind of behavior will come back to haunt you. Instead, celebrate other singers whose abilities you admire. Learn to appreciate those who are doing what you want also to do. Then, when you finally do “make it”and the barbs come your way (and they will), you will be more much able to let them go, to let them not make a dent in your sense of self. The green-eyed monster may be out there, but you don’t have to look at it.

Western thought is geared towards getting results, frequently at any cost. There’s something to be said for that, of course. Eastern thought, however, teaches us that getting the process right produces the result anyway, sometimes in a much better manner than “going for the goal”.

It’s quite hard for Americans, in particular, to wrap their heads around waiting for something. We always want everything right now. A physical skill, however, takes time to develop and singing is a physical skill before it is an art. You simply cannot rush the process, however much you would like it to go fast.

This can be an obstacle in the young because the tech world does operate at a fast clip and they are used to one second or less visual stimulus on the computer and in other media. They understand getting things done in a hurry. They often have trouble with going slow and being patient.

Learning to sing is a complex process when done well. It requires all manner of coordination and awareness, knowledge and information and even talented people need to find things out for themselves over time. Rushing to get to a certain kind of sound before you even have a chance to see if that sound is right or good for your voice is a mistake, but it is typical of the training process here in the USA.

Observation of results is a typical method of study. What result did we get in this process? If we get this result, then we will be OK. Or not. If I observe that classical singers seem to sing with the position of the larynx slightly dropped in the throat, particularly on softer higher notes, then this must be the best position and, if I make my larynx go to and stay in this position, then I will be ahead of the game by doing so. Right? Not right.

If I notice that certain singers are able to go up very high and loud and really wail away and I see that they sound shouty and piercing and maybe their necks bulge out, then it stands to reason that if I can get may own throat to look like that and my sound to be like that too, then I will be doing the right thing and get the best result, the one I want. Nope.

And if I know that I have to make a lot of sound in order to carry over a big fat orchestra conducted by someone who doesn’t much like singers so he lets the musicians play as loud as they want all the time, then the best way for me to get my voice to do a good job would be to push like crazy on my belly muscles while singing and drive the sound towards my nose. That way, I wouldn’t have to worry about them drowning me out. Well, kinda.

If I gave you more examples, they would be the same. Just because we observe something doesn’t mean it’s right or true or best. It doesn’t really mean anything because the context in which the activity takes place matters. Maybe the person singing has a different voice than you do or a different kind of body. Maybe the person grew up singing the sounds you like but you’ve never made them, or anything like them, before. Maybe the behavior that you observe in the singing is second nature to that person but it is far away from second nature to you.

If you understand the mechanics of singing, that is, how we make sound in the first place, you can learn to observe yourself as you study and see what works and what doesn’t. If you have a good teacher, she will acknowledge what gifts you have (the easy things) and point out the work you have to do on the things that don’t come just naturally. It might be that those things are really different than what they were for her when she was studying and if she had a broad knowledge of singing, then she would know what you need and not just teach you what she had needed whether it applied to you or not.

Process oriented training takes longer and maybe isn’t as glamorous in the moments when it seems like you aren’t really “getting there” but if you don’t rush, if you take time to absorb, experiment, listen, explore, examine, question, try and maybe even fail a bit here and there, what you learn will stick. It will be yours forever and it will be appropriate. You do need to know what the goal is and you have to want to get to it, but you don’t need to put the goal over the process of getting there. If you do that, in the end you will pay a much dearer price than you need to reach your desired end, and take it from me, it’s never worth it.

Did you know the music business is shrinking? You wouldn’t think so from watching the Grammy’s, Glee, Smash, American Idol, X Factor, The Voice, and the Ted Mack’s Amateur Hour, would you?

The truth is, the music business is not what it was for all sorts of reasons. People don’t need to buy CDs anymore, so they don’t. The people who would buy them (old folks) can’t, because the stores that sell them are, for all intensive purposes, gone. The machines that you play CDs on are also no longer available. What you have has to last because when it goes, good luck trying to replace it. It is soon to go the way of the cassette player. (Dad, what’s a cassette?)

If you want music you can go to Amazon or iTunes and purchase it for a price much cheaper than the CDs had gotten to be in their heyday. The artists don’t get much money (unless they produce their own music, in which case they are pretty much unknowns and don’t have many sales), even though the big fuss a decade ago was how Napster was “robbing” all the artists of their “livelihoods”. Sony, break my heart! Even touring is getting very costly, except for the dozen or so megastars who can sell out huge houses at high prices. Mostly, folks don’t tour because it doesn’t make much money.

Young people are exposed to very little by way of music if all they listen to is the top 40 stations and the internet. Without musically literate parents who have some influence over their children’s exposure to and interest in the kind of music they hear (how likely is that?) the only music the kids hear is pop, R&B, rock, rap and maybe some alternative stuff. No folk music, certainly not of the protest variety, no show tunes, no jazz, no classical, no comedy songs (if you are old enough to remember “Purple People Eater” you will know what I mean).

Classical music is struggling. Opera stays alive because of the deep pockets of the few people who donate money to keep it going. The idea that you can pull in young people by featuring modern works and modern approaches isn’t doing very well. The idea that you pull in directors from TV, Hollywood and theater, whether they know opera or not, and you commission all manner of composers, even if they have never written a classical song in their lives, to “freshen up” opera, has been a failure, for the most part. The people at the top do not want to hear that people DON’T LIKE this stuff. They keep waiting for the magic bullet of “newness” that never comes. This problem, after all, is 30 years old and counting. Hello, Met Opera? Are you listening? Get people who sing really well, with emotional conviction, and keep the productions in the realm of SANITY. Spend oodles of money on audience education and get into the schools. Hello, NY Phil? Find some WOMEN composers, find some people who like to write using MELODIES and HARMONIES, like, you know, in the old days. How bad would that be, really? If it filled all your subscription seats? Tunes, Mr. Gilbert. Hummable tunes.

How does all this effect the number of students turned out every year with bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral programs in music or voice in the colleges each year? Not at all. They don’t do a “market watch”. A lot of the time the kids are interested in fame, not in skill, and in glamour, not in artistry. There are enough of them out there that at least a few of them get hired and succeed. Over time, it pulls whatever expectations there may have been about quality down. Sadly, there’s hardly anyone in the audience to notice!

The further away we get from singing in day to day life, for fun, for personal enjoyment, for communion with others, the more we forget what it’s like to sing from a natural, spontaneous, joyful place. In return for this loss, we look outside to others in the world to do our singing for us. We want singing to be special, exciting, different, amazing, stupendous, spectacular. In order for it to live there, it has to be enhanced, manufactured, produced, manipulated, stretched, squeezed and doctored up and the  people who sing it have to do the same things to their own voices in order to have “star quality”. Doesn’t have much to do with being human or with the human condition? Doesn’t have much to do with the power of music to heal us when we make it with our own bodies.

All this is killing the music business, whether we admit it or not. It’s also killing us.

The people who believe that “it’s all the same”, you just sing however you do in whatever style you are in are still out there. The people who say that it doesn’t matter if you have ever sung, good or bad, you can still teach are out there as well. The folks who say that singing is all about breathing or all about placement/resonance  are around as well. Those who would simplify everything are not new to this world.

We also have the people who teach who make singing so complicated that you can barely manage it. They have so many “things to do” and so many “ways to make sound” that it can take decades just to figure out their approach. To some, there is a glamour in learning a method that is extremely complicated, even if it doesn’t always make sense.

Of course, there are people who give the entire process no thought at all. There are people who relegate singing to the back burner. If they sing professionally (and they do) they only think about singing when they are in trouble and then only long enough for someone to give them help enough to get back to what they were doing. Hopefully, they don’t teach.

There are the people who have a very fixed idea of what’s right and good and what kind of sounds are “allowed” versus those that are not. There are people who only like a certain kind of voice category or only want to listen to one kind of style. They base these categories on their personal taste and nothing else.

There are the folks with lots of “merchandize” who will sell you their tapes, CDs, books, exercises, T-shirts, coffee cups and pens. They will give you “the keys to vocal success” in six, eight, or maybe 10 sessions. They will teach you to sing via osmosis, since they never hear you or watch you sing. That’s really magic.

If you wish to be in one of the groups described above, you probably don’t want to read this blog. The purpose of this blog is to write for those who love singing and who respect it. It is for those who understand it and who want to dig into it deeply. It is for people who are interested in all kinds of music and a wide range of vocal behaviors. It is written to provoke thought about the entire process from every aspect from mechanics to spiritual implications.

In relationship to singing, there are many roads to Rome but the roads need to get you there, not keep you wandering around. This is not, actually, an idea that everyone shares.

Young people are still in a situation where they must gather information about singing slowly, since there are no guidebooks or maps that give you a good overview. Each singer is still pretty much on his or her own in finding a way to be with singing that works for him or her in life.

It’s only through open discussion of ideas and exchange of information that singing will become more available in a viable and practical manner to those who seek it and who wish to remain comfortable with it for all of their lives.

In a perfect world, we would all care about each other and the earth. We would all help each other and live in peace. In a perfect world, no one would be mean or selfish, greedy or arrogant, stupid or cowardly.

Guess we don’t live in a perfect world yet.

It takes an enormous amount of energy to think of others before you think of yourself, but many people are taught to do that and spend some considerable amount of time trying to make it happen. The rest of the world, however, may never have had even an inkling of that philosophy, and is quite happy to take care of number one first last and always. In fact, they often come to rule the world, those folks.

Mohammed Ali, the boxer, used to say, “I’m the greatest. I’m the greatest.” Initially, it turned a lot of people off, as in those days, people didn’t dare say things like that about themselves, at least in public. In the end, he was voted “Athlete of the Century” by the sports editors of the world in 2000. After so  many years, he convinced people he was correct all along. Unfortunately, he is now suffering from decades of being beaten in the head, and is limited in his ability to function normally.

Maybe if Mr. Ali had known all those years ago that being the greatest was going to cost him in the end, he might have thought differently about it. Sometimes not knowing the price you will have to pay down the road is a burden in hiding. It jumps out and bites you when you think you have finally gotten to a place of safety and rest.

The people in this world who strive to be “great”, who strive to do things as excellently as they can, who seek out the pinnacle rather than accept the ordinary, often pay a high price for their success or even their attempts at it. Singers who work hard to develop excellent technique, to keep it up, to choose repertoire and gigs carefully, to maintain their physical and vocal health and pace themselves for decades might still end up with vocal health problems, simply because of all the attention their voice has  demanded and received. Teachers who work within the professional associations for free, who dedicate a portion of their time to conferences and congresses, who take positions on Boards of Directors or as officers of the associations, are trying to do things that benefit the professional at large. They do this for free, on their own free time, and often get no recognition for it at all. Why bother, we could wonder. Is it for the good of the group or just a way to spend time? Hard to say.

It can be very tiring to take care of a career or of the fruits of a career. It can be draining just to keep on keeping on. Office workers can retire. Artists just keep going and going and going until they drop. It gets even more wearying if there are outside obstacles that intefere with other aspects of your life. That there are singers who have been able to keep singing for 25, 30, 40 or even 50 years, at a high level, is utterly amazing.

That’s why it’s a good thing to rest along the way. It’s a good thing to stop once in a while and take time out to smell the flowers. It is a beneficial thing to say “no” to gigs now and then and to stop performing or practicing and just be a person. Remember that your singing and your art are supposed to fill you up and give you energy not drain it all away. If that happens, you are not taking good care of yourself or of your voice and sooner or later that will catch up with you. You don’t have to strive to be “the greatest”, or even the “greatest you”. You can rest, you can wait, you can take it easy, you can be ordinary.

Just because we don’t live in a perfect world doesn’t mean you have to let it beat you down. Don’t worry about being “the greatest”. Wonder instead what will happen if you get there and it turns out not  to be at all what it was supposed to be.

I want to ask the folks who read this blog, how often do you get out to see and hear live vocalists? If you are in a small town, are there performances that you can attend of different kinds of singing? Do you ever hear anyone sing who is not amplified? Have you ever been to the Metropolitan Opera or a major Broadway show in New York?

I think sometimes that people who teach singing and people who sing or aspire to have only heard music from the Top 40 radio stations for most of their lives. They listen to music through headphones or in the car. If they go to church they might hear a good soloist, but not necessarily, and these days all church music is amplified, so that’s a specific kind of sound.

A few years ago a young woman came to me for lessons. She said she had a degree in music theater from a local college. She said she was thinking of applying to Juilliard for her master’s degree.

Her vocal technique was a mess. She had no real idea of how to sing traditional music theater songs nor the contemporary pop/rock ones. She did have a very nice voice and had a sort of “legit-ish” head register on her high notes. What she knew about vocal production and breathing you could write on the proverbial head of a pin.

When I asked her what classical music she had studied in college she said “Ave Maria” and that she had also once sung “My Favorite Things” from Sound of Music. She had never sung an art song and did not know what an art song was. She had no language skills and was not able to execute a consistent classical sound in any pitch range on any vowel at any volume. Nevertheless, she was going to apply to Juilliard.

I had to wonder what she did in her four years at college working on “music theater”. Was there anyone on faculty who even had a clue? The entire event reminded me of how little actual music education most people have and how the consequences of that are a complete lack of musical sophistication. The bar falls lower and lower as fewer people are taught music education in schools and as teachers are further and further away from any grounding in classical vocal repertoire. This is true also of music theater, particularly American music theater. Except for doing a “school musical” my guess is that no musicals are studied in any curriculum of K-12 school, unless it is a special one with unique programs. It makes sense then that no one really knows what’s good or bad, what should be there and what should not, what makes up certain kinds of musical and vocal criteria and what does not.

We live in a time when there are greater resources available to audiences than at any other time in history. One no longer has to go to a live performance to hear singing or to the library to borrow an LP or to the record store to purchase one. We can find any kind of singing or music on the internet and purchase most of it within minutes. We can see and hear just about anything if we look hard enough. The one thing that we can’t do is create more opportunities to attend live performances of high quality. If you almost never see a high level vocalist in live performance you can’t substitute a recorded version and think that it is the same.

It’s up to us to be sure we not only attend live performances of vocal music but that we keep up the pressure on communities to make sure that venues for live singing are available. It’s up to us to be sure that our schools have music education and that the teachers in our school have something valid to teach.  If we do not do this then we must bear some responsbility for universities allowing young people to graduate with a degree in something without having any credible information to back up the piece of paper.