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I just spent Saturday afternoon teaching for The New York Singing Teachers’ Association’s Professional Development Program, and had to acknowledge to the participants (about 25 people) how different things are now than they were in 1983, the first year NYSTA held a symposium at Donnell Library in midtown Manhattan. That Symposium, modeled on the one in Philadelphia held by the Voice Foundation, had called for singing teachers who taught “Broadway and Pop” music to discuss their various ideas, approaches, and other thoughts. We had about four participants as I recall, Lucille Rubin, Oren Brown and Jo Estill, someone else, and the Committee itself, of which I was Chair. The idea to hold a Symposium was mine, but Bob Marks, Larry Chelsi, Elisabeth Howell and others were part of the Committee, so it was definitely a joint venture. The day was a rousing success, with standing room only, and we broke some significant ground, in that nothing like that had ever been done before.

Shortly thereafter, there was a meeting of the Board of Directors of NYSTA. At that meeting, fully half of the Board resigned in protest. How dare we drag the organization down into the gutter!!! This was an organization of serious musicians and artists, who were not concerned with that noise, that screaming. It was an outrage! Who did we think we were?

What followed was a great deal of cajoling of those Board members, until finally, they agreed to stay on, but only “under protest”.

Now, 24 years later, I stood before a room of my colleagues, of all ages, who were eager to learn about American Musical Theater and about the important points of its history, so that they would be better singing teachers. We went over the early days, when the songs of Friml and Romberg were presented on Broadway right alongside those of Irving Berlin and the young Cole Porter and Richard Rodgers. Most people don’t realize that Gershwin wrote “Swanee”, which Al Jolson made famous, about the same time that Puccini was composing “Turandot” which was also “on Broadway” at the Hammerstein Theater (don’t know if there is a relationship of that theater to the famous Oscar who partnered Rodgers). The popular music of the day was always alongside the classical, and may always have been enjoyed by at least some of the same people. Only the attitudes and the venues separated them, and as I just said, sometimes, it might have been by only a few blocks and a few bucks.

There were no arguments on Saturday. No one was offended, or resistant. No one disagreed with my position that all styles of CCM are worthwhile and deserving of serious study and research. We all partook of the questions, the discussion, and many of the participants answered questions that I could only partially answer, so there was much give and take and a true feeling of collegiality. It was, to me, given the history of how hard I have fought for this music, and how long, a miracle. It was uplifting in the most profound manner, and I took the occasion to say so.

It may indeed be true that some people would like to continue to act as if no vocal music had been written after 1968, when “Hair” appeared on Broadway, and it may be the case that those same people will continue to get angry when someone points out that a Beatles song can’t be done with the same kind of vocal quality as a Schubert song, but that can’t go on forever. Time will catch up with those folks. Let the rest of us go forward to look more into issues which need attention, such as the affects of amplification and of over the counter drugs on singers’ vocal production. There is finally some light on the horizon.

Restlessness isn’t a virtue. Ask anyone who has a restless nature and they will tell you that this drive from within exacts a price. On the other hand, complacency (what I call the “chew your cud factor”) isn’t so great either.

Constantly looking at how things work, at how they can be made to work better, takes a certain kind of disposition. A mind that is always probing, always seeking the next new or better thing is also one that doesn’t rest easily, doesn’t sit kindly with “status quo” and isn’t ever going to take things at face value for long. I think of Thomas Edison, with the proverbial story of his 10,000 tries to get the light bulb to work. Talk about dogged determination! Talk about changing things when he finally succeeded!!!

I don’t quite understand why it is that some people don’t peer into the future to see where things are going to go, or where they at least might be, but I have discovered that it is a rather rare attitude. I don’t mean just generally, “where will my portfolio be in five years?”, but specifically, “where will my own life be in five years?” and “where would I like it to go”? How about “where is my profession going in 5 years, or 10, or more?” How about “what is going on now in the world that might have an effect on me, my profession, or life down the road?” (Think how different things would be globally if we had listened to the folks who warned about the warming trend 20 years ago! Yes, they were there, but no one took them seriously).

I’m also surprised that most people either don’t care much or don’t believe that caring matters except about what is absolutely necessary to survive. Certainly that is an easy attitude to have in a society that often seems to run itself any which way, but it is a sad and sorry way to live. Caring about things, caring about people is what makes life worth living. Passionate caring about things is what causes them to manifest and to change. No person in history who every accomplished anything did so because he or she was complacent. The people who just want to get by are not the movers and shakers of the world. Maybe that’s why things do seem to be stuck. Not enough people care to be movers and shakers (although there seems to be an endless supply of people who would like to kill each other) out there in the world.

Of course, if you come along and start moving and shaking a bunch of cows chewing their cud, they will moo loudly at you and maybe even send a bull to chase you away. This may not have been what you had in mind when you thought that those bossies could find better grass in the next pasture (naive you). You found out, though. The moo-ers could be pretty unwilling.

What is all this about? Am I planning to become a dairy farmer? No. I just returned from the Voice Foundation Symposium: Care of the Professional Voice #37, where people from all over the USA and many foreign countries get together to see what the next new thing is about the voice. It’s so much fun. All that research and all those restless minds. I am with my tribe. This year, particularly, was a great one, with many friends presenting and lots of meetings happening to plan for the immediate future and the distant future, too. Oh how I love probing those great minds that are in the forefront of science and medicine. Oh how I wish the singing teachers could be the same. Presenting papers on how effectively or not their teaching was.

I keep hoping the profession, my profession, might change its national conferences (not called conventions any more (?)). I want to see “Customer Service” panels. I want to attend “working as a singer in the real world” panels. I want to go to a workshop that is called “how to teach without using one single word of voice teacher jargon”. HA! Fat-so chance-o.

The Voice Foundation makes the doctors talk in panels about surgeries, plus and minus. It makes the scientists explain what they were looking for. It makes the speech pathologists look at the efficacy of their treatment protocols. The singing teachers pull up the rear once in a while, but not too often. This year, though, our CCM papers gained ground, and most of them were the real deal with hard core data. YES!

If you are reading this, and you don’t attend The Symposium every year for several days, you must do so! Care enough to come, hang out, learn from other disciplines, and other people in other places. Care enough to find the money and the time. Care enough to travel. CARE. We have a great time. There are no cud chewers there.

Just came back from a performance of a quintet with special guests at “Birdland”, one of our premier jazz clubs. This was an instrumental group, no singers, but the musicians were amazing. There was the band leader, Paquito D’Rivera, originally from Cuba, who played clarinet and sax, and two percussionists, a trombone player, a bass guitar, and a pianist. The guests were a bandoneon player (a kind of accordion) and a second pianist. All extraordinary.

Since I have been working with professional jazz vocalists for about 15 years now, I have come to appreciate jazz of all kinds in a much deeper manner. I still wouldn’t presume, however, to tell my jazz artists how to work with jazz style, except perhaps in the most general way, as it affects their singing.

I was struck by how much I have learned from these wonderful artists who study with me, and how much I learn from other students every day. Sometimes the youngsters are the ones who wake me up.

I have a 12 year old in the children’s chorus who has a great voice and is very musical. She has been experiencing “lots of fear” and her parents have asked me about her in concern. From speaking to her, I attributed it to “her age” and “sensitivity” and more or less dismissed it, thinking she will grow out of these behaviors in good time. When I worked with her briefly this week, however, I put a few things together and began to re-think my conclusions. Her voice seems to have exploded and is altogether out of her control. THAT would produce some kind of fear, let me tell you. She is doing all the things she has been taught to do but her voice is clearly singing on its own and there isn’t much she can do to corral it. Maybe these issues of “fear” are based on something very concrete after all. She has a teacher, but either the teacher doesn’t understand what’s going on, or as I did, she thinks that the student will outgrow the problem, or perhaps this doesn’t show up in her lessons. Perhaps the student, herself, thinks that this is “how it is” and all singers have these problems and that she should keep trying. Really, any one of these, or even something else, could be at play here. I will be investigating this further as soon as I have time to see this young vocalist. This situation, though, has made me pay attention, and caused me to be willing to be guided as I explore, not with “THE ANSWERS” but with a desire to investigate and find whatever might help solve these problems for her.

Sitting and listening to great artists make magic by making music is a privilege, one to be grateful for. Music, or any kind of performance, is so ephemeral. To be in the midst of a creation which only exists moment to moment is inexplicably miraculous. How lucky to be in the presence of musicians at the very top of their game tonight and just 48 hours before have guided a aspiring vocal musician, who is discovering what it means to [try to] control the sounds that come from her own body. What could be better than that?

How does this strike you……

I don’t really do the Argentine tango, but I have seen quite a bit of it, and I have taken a few lessons here and there. I went to see Forever Tango on Broadway, and I have some really nice tango CDs and DVDs. I consider myself an expert on Tango, because I like it so much and because I have been around it off and on for 12 years. I think I should tell the professional tango dancers and the tango teachers how tango works and what it’s all about, don’t you? I think I should write about it and make up words to describe the tango steps and moves. After all, I know as much about it as they do, since I am basing my opinion on my own eyes and impressions, which are informed by all that “hanging around”. I believe that some of these tango pros don’t actually realize what they are doing, as they just dance, whereas I, who am on the outside, can observe the details better than they can. I can decide how it is supposed to look and what kinds of moves are best, because I have seen so much of it, and because my liking it a lot gives me a certain edge that they don’t have time to develop. Besides, the famous tango dancers are from Argentina, and they don’t even really speak English there.

You think I’m kidding.

I have encountered, over the years, this same attitude more times than I care to count. It came up again, this week in fact, as I got an answer in response to my letter to Opera News about their recent sorry article on belting. I don’t want to go into all the details here, but it didn’t surprise me that the editor in charge wasn’t thrilled with my critique of what was written. (He surely wasn’t going to congratulate me).

This same scenario happened last year at the Minnesota NATS Convention when I got up to say that we don’t sing gospel, rock, country and pop songs in head register, exactly as written, note for note in over-pronounced English — and was pretty much tarred and feathered by the other singing teachers running the presentation and the audience of the same folks.

People who do not belt themselves, have never belted, do not know how it feels or what is involved, people whose expertise about belting and belters is based entirely on their own subjective observations, are quite happy to tell me that what I know, as a life-time singer who has always been able to belt, is wrong. These people, who have not been scoped over and over while singing, watching the throat and larynx in the process of belting; who have no idea how the sound and the acoustics of the sound reflect the physiologic behavior of the mechanism itself, no matter who is singing; who have read no articles by any scientific authority on belting; and who based their philosophy of what happens during belting upon their own blithe and frequently unsubstantiated opinions; are happy to tell me, with my 36 years of teaching experience and 44 years of singing experience, that I don’t know what I am talking about.

This makes me arrogant I want you to know. That I have the audacity to think that I know something only because I do it, I teach others to do it, I have studied the science of it, I have checked it with other authorities, I have validated it numerous other objective ways, and I have never had any trouble doing it, is awful. What kind of “know-it-all” do I think I am, anyway? I’m just arrogant, because I want everyone to do it my way.

Oh please.

Where else, except in singing, can people who have no personal expertise as singers (pianists, writers, conductors, composers), no training to do what they do (teach belt or CCM), and no intellectual background in vocal function or voice science get away with telling the actual experts that they are wrong? Isn’t there something very distorted in that picture?

The proof is not only in the doing, it is in the other stuff, too. SO, why take my word for it? Why take anyone’s word for what they say, until and unless you can either do it yourself and thus test out the information they have? Why believe anyone until and unless you have gone to outside, objective sources, NUMEROUS times, and done appropriate research to see if your own experience and experiment can produce similar results which can be replicated and verified?

But if you won’t, or can’t or don’t bother to do any of that, then keep your mouth shut. Don’t talk glibly about what you don’t know. Don’t tell the people who do it that they don’t have any idea what they are doing. Don’t make opinions about it based upon your own belly button. Let the tango professionals decide what tango is or should be. Just sit there and let the Argentinians do their national dance, watch and stay out of the way.

In this month’s issue of Opera News there is an article about belting and the Sweetlands, (it’s called “The Family That Belts Together”) voice teacher and accompanist aged 90 and 95 respectively, and their son, middle aged. I have heard from more than one person over the past years, as I lead various workshops and master classes, conducted research and published articles, that Mr. Sweetland, (his first name is Lee) invented belting. Invented belted. Invented. Belting. !*!?$#*@!?@^$!!

This article really pushed my buttons. (What? Little calm, quiet old me?) It was absolutely full of nonsense and I was truly dismayed that the publication of record for classical singing would print such a dismal mess. I wrote to them the next day, but it is for naught, as what’s done is done.

For those of you who have access to it, I encourage you to read it on your own. For those who don’t, here are some of the pithier points.

First, Ethel Merman was not a belter. Nope. We don’t know what she was, but she wasn’t a belter. Too bad nobody told HER. When she knocked out Irving Berlin and Cole Porter singing their songs to the back of the theater with crystal clear diction, she actually had this little digital mike implanted in her collarbone and there was a speaker in her corset that broadcast through her dress…….oh, sorry, that’s the sci fi channel. Anyway, because La Merman could sing lightly and softly when she was young, she WASN’T a belter, except maybe when she was.

AND

Did you know that the belters to emulate are Betty Buckley (who went hoarse every single night in Sunset Boulevard), Patti Lupone who had vocal problems in Anything Goes, Idina Menzel who was in vocal trouble a couple of times while on Broadway and Alix Korey who says she belts (yells) with a low larynx……right. Not the vocal role models I want my students to hear.

And, did you know that opera singers use belt on their low notes? And that virtually everything is some form of speech, no matter what it is. Tell that to David Daniels. He is just using his speaking voice when he sings in his countertenor wonderfulness.

These poor folks are typical of older singers who were operatically trained and think there are two kinds of sounds, belt and “legit”/opera. If it ain’t opera, it must be belt. Anything that isn’t “bel canto” has to be CAN BELTO. They confuse chest register quality or speech with belting, they confuse screaming with belting, they can’t hear the difference between normal speech, screamed screechy yelling and head voice? Is there no difference between the G at the end of Defying Gravity in Wicked and the same G (top of the staff) in a classical soprano? They are both speech?

AAAARRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGG!

And, Mr. Sweetland once “rescued” Barbra Streisand long ago when she wasn’t doing too well during a recording session. We don’t know how, exactly, and we don’t know if she thinks he rescued her, or if he actually did, because she didn’t have a chance to respond in this article…..which would have been nice because I have heard of a whole bunch of folks who claim to have “taught” La Streisand and I have also heard that she claims she didn’t study with anyone…..so what does one believe?

So, for the record, let me say it again.

Belting is chest register carried up across the tradition break at E/F/G above Middle C at a LOUD volume. Speaking voice quality, otherwise known as modal voice, is chest register (Thyro-arytenoid or vocalis function) and can be carried above the break with much less effort than belting requires and is the basis for most singing styles that do not require powerhouse volume. Classical music is head register(Crico-thryoid)dominant production, although very high sopranos and countertenors use almost no chest register, very low basses use very little head register, and baritones and tenors carry a certain amount of chest register into their high tones, depending upon the type of instrument they have. The vowel sound quality that can be sung in a chest register dominant position is just as variable as that of the vowels that can be produced in head register dominant singing, provided the system is free and relatively unstressed. If someone is singing primarily in chest register, they are not belting, they are just singing in chest register. Why is his hard to understand? A belter who is good doesn’t HAVE to belt, he or she can sing softly, too. That’s what makes it good singing, for pity sake!!! (And, yes, men belt. Think of Al Jolson, think of the men in Jesus Christ Superstar.)

As to who invented belting….well let’s see. There are the Mexican Mariachi singers and the Spanish Flamenco singers, and the Bulgarian women and the Africans of many nations and the Gospel singers in the South, and there are the Moslem Muezzins calling people to worship, to name few. There were Judy Garland and Betty Hutton and Carol Burnett, and Joe E. Brown and some people might even include Bruce Springsteen. There’s Patti LaBelle and Tina Turner and James Brown and Christina Aquilera. The list goes on. Do you think they all somehow met Mr. Sweetland, or one of the other people who claim to have invented belting? How about one of the people who claims to have THE method to teach it. You think maybe these singers have found those people to tell them that they were belting? Maybe they have all studied with Seth Riggs!

The Sweetlands may well be very nice people and good teachers. I wish them well in their ninth decade. BUT, in this profession, we can no longer afford nonsense put forth as fact. We cannot get anywhere if we let people who do not understand vocal function make up ideas about what they think is happening, without regard to some kind of objective information to back up what they say. We can’t get anywhere if every teacher feels free to make up any and all terminology and label things the way they see fit, regardless. Someone has to say, “wait a minute……let’s take a look at that and see if it makes sense with other things with know”. Maybe it shouldn’t be me, but I don’t see a whole lot of other people standing in line to take my place….unless maybe it might be one of you reading this. What about it?

Are the songs of Gershwin, Berlin, Porter, Rodgers, Kern, Arlen, and all the others who have given us our “standards” as good as the songs of Schubert, Schumann (both of them),Brahms, Faure, Ravel and the other classical composers? How does one judge? What makes a song “good”? Is it that is is written well for the voice? Is it that the music itself is complex and unique? Is it that it is simple and elegant? It is the blend of music with words? Is it that a lot of people relate to it and perhaps remember it?

Are all the songs by all these different composers alike or different? The truth is, we don’t have answers to these questions.

Classical vocalists will sing Berlin, Porter and Gershwin in recitals as if they were the same as Wolf and Scarlatti. Does that make the songs “art songs” or does it just make the classical singer wrong about understanding the song? Aren’t they “art songs” on their own, sung as they were intended to be sung?

I personally feel that American songs deserve to be respected for what they are and sung the way they were intended to be sung. I don’t care for the “classicalization” of our songs, as they not only don’t need it, it gets in the way. I don’t think it’s creative to do that, I think it lacks creativity. If you take the sound you always make and bring it over into other styles of material unchanged, how creative is that? There is PLENTY of room to arrange them in any kind of personal expression, but if you sing them with classical vocal production, what good is that?

I have the same feeling about most “modernization” of opera. I don’t think most “modern” productions of traditional operas add anything. Mozart doesn’t need “enhancement” the likes of turning “Don Giovanni” into a production about the Mafia in the 1950s. Puccini is not better off when “La Boheme” takes place in a diner in Queens. I think it takes much more creativity and depth to stick with something in the same way that it has been presented for two hundred years and find, within that same old traditional presentation, a new perspective, slant or interpretation. THAT’S creative.

I long for someone to make an entire album or do a major concert performance of classical material that has been turned into jazz, rock, pop, country and other styles, just to see how the classical world would react. We did “An Die Musik” last year at the Voice Foundation Symposium and the version, sung by my friend Gabriele Tranchina, and arranged by her pianist husband, Joe, raised some eyebrows but was warmly received. Could this become a trend?

Karen Hall, who recently got her Doctorate at Columbia Teachers’ College, has just published an article in the current issue of the Journal of Singing (published by NATS) in which she sites the problems of trying to sing Music Theater styles with classical vocal education. She has developed a Music Theater Vocal Pedagogy text that addresses MT training but has also had to confront the enormous resistance that is still out there (true true) that says people who want to stand up for CCM styles and the training they require are ruining voices. How about the people who get up to perform the great standards and ruin them?

A lyric voice is one that is light, supple, and usually, pretty. Lyric voices have never been as impressive as the “bigger” voices…..the lyrico spinto, the dramatic …..the voices that make so much sheer sound that one wonders how human beings can do that in the first place.

The lyric soprano, the most common female voice, is not a desirable entity here in New York. If you go into an audition for a classical job being a plain vanilla lyric soprano it will likely get you a stifled yawn, or maybe even a sort of camouflaged eye-roll as a response from whomever is auditioning you. If you are a lyric coloratura (a bird chirp, I call it), with a very high range and spectacular agility, you are in a better category, especially if you can hold your own in the music written to show off this unique combination. You must, however, stay in this repertoire, as not to stay there puts you in competition with the bigger voices. You will not win.

There is something else though, that lyric voices have to contend with — chaos. A lyric voice is by definition flexible. A flexible voice is easy to manipulate. A flexible voice can easily be distorted. A flexible voice can do all kinds of things but get lost or confused sorting them out. A flexible voice isn’t usually good at sustained loud singing of any kind. It is very easy to get into trouble, both vocal and psychological, with a lyric voice. And it is very easy to lose the beauty that is the calling card of being lyric. Without it, you haven’t got anything else as good to use as a substitute.

Youngsters have to be regarded as lyric singers, even the ones with robust sturdy voices. If a young voice is too soon taken into powerful material, trouble will surely follow. It can take 7, 8 or 10 years to develop staying power in both the throat and body, and although the tone and the range are present, the long-term stamina needed to do a big, long operatic role, or a big powerful Broadway belt role, doesn’t just come in a few years of training or singing. There’s a difference in being able to sing something once and sing it over and over again.

The lyric voice is out of fashion and has been for quite some time. John McCormack and Lily Pons would not have mainstream careers in opera today. Gigli would have trouble, and “Irish Tenor” (as a vocal type) would never have been around at all if it had been up to today’s taste makers. Perry Como’s voice was beautiful, but he surely wasn’t a powerhouse. Sweet gentle singing (not the soft breathy mushy singing that can be found in some of our hot jazz and pop divas) is not part of mainstream music anywhere, and that isn’t just the fault of American Idle [sic].

I am a lyric voice. When I was out there auditioning I was told repeatedly “your voice is so small” as a criticism. It was, but that’s because it was constricted, not because of its inherent capacity. Once I got it to work correctly I stopped getting that feedback, even though it is still very light. What happened to me was typical in that I was pushed. I could go all over the place and do lots of things, and that only made it worse. I could do “through the forehead” and “through the cheekbones” and “out the back of the head” and “in the belly”, and “from the diaphragm” (OK, stop laughing now), “across the room”, “through the elephant’s trunk”, “with more resonance” and “with less vibrato”, “without so many disturbing consonants” and “with clearer pronunciation of the words”, and, and, and, and. What I couldn’t do was put Humptette Dumptette back together again, vocally speaking. (It isn’t great to be “Gumby of the Throat”). Singing teachers who mean well may not realize that what is easy for them isn’t always easy, or even possible, for their students.

If teachers with large frames and strong bodies, teachers with wide rib cages and long torsos, teachers with thick necks and big larynges, get a hold of some thin, small, unathletic lyric tenor or soprano at the age of 18, unless they are experienced teachers, I shudder to think what will happen in their voice studios. It doesn’t matter if we are talking about CCM or classical music, as the same kinds of consequences are possible. You can push a belter just as easily as you can push someone singing classical repertoire. The saddest thing is, the student doesn’t know or understand that he or she is being pushed, because they have nothing to use as a means of measurement, unless, of course, the training ends up in pathology. In this case, though, that is not the kind of pushing I mean. The onus is on the teacher to be an advocate for the “lyricness” of the singer, as not to be cautious and slow during the training process is risky and often irresponsible.

If you are a singer with a lyric voice, don’t be surprised if vocal boundaries are difficult for you to find and maintain. Be patient, and develop as quickly as possible at the outset a guide for yourself about your best “vocal balance”…those things that make your voice pretty, comfortable and happy. Don’t stray too far away for too long until you have done a good deal of training and singing. Once you get lost, it is very hard to find your way out of the woods.

We all know that singing teachers make up things, images (mostly), but ideas and concepts, too. Some actually base what they come up with on reality, but many do not. “If I create it, it must be good” is a point of view that singing teachers often have, even if sometimes they don’t recognize that they do.

Terminology that is not based on function or on clear pedagogically accepted concepts that are universally used and understood, without argument, by a large majority of teachers, is not helpful. New terms for things that have already been defined are also not only not helpful, they muddy the waters and make the confusion that has always been there worse. No matter how much the individual teachers understand themselves what they are doing and why their labels “explain” things, it is an act of Ego (with a capital E) to expect others to regard these labels objectively, as if they meant something to the world at large.

More harm has been done by the use of vague, imprecise, incorrect, or patently dumb descriptions of vocal production than by any other single precept. Until and unless singing teachers learn to ask for things that students who have never had a singing lesson can replicate without fuss, the process of learning to sing will be fraught with frustration and angst.

If for no other reason than this, it is to voice science that we turn to for our “rescue” from insipid terminology and “creative” descriptions of voiced musical sound. If, however, the singing teacher has read two articles and one chapter of one book and thinks from this that he or she has “got it” and then uses words cheaply, without regard to whether or not a specific concept has been correctly assimilated (something one cannot determine without outside feedback from an expert in the field), then this is worse than the person who says, “I don’t know about this voice science stuff, but just think of an elephant’s trunk while you sing and you will be able to make a nice legato phrase”, who is at least being honest.

If you teach singing, ask yourself, “If I said this to someone who was a carpenter, a nurse or a bus driver, would they understand me, immediately, without further explanation?” If the answer is “No”, you are not part of the solution you are part of the problem. Even people without any knowledge of voice or music understand “open your mouth”, “relax your jaw”, “take a deeper breath while keeping your shoulders quiet”, “please hum this” etc., but who would understand “inhale the shape of the tone”, “release into the upper resonance chambers”, “vibrate your sinuses more”, or “lift the sound into the dome”?

I remember the time I saw a teacher who was purporting to teach belting (the same person who said it was invented in the 60s to sing over rock music)at a national conference tell the student to “open the lower chamber” in order to be able to belt. When I asked if that was all that was necessary, to “open the lower chamber”, whatever that means, the answer I got was yes. This was at a university at a national conference, mind you. Did you know that we have a “lower chamber” somewhere? I haven’t found mine yet, but I keep looking just in case it shows up one day.

How about the “spin the high notes” or “increase the support” phrases? They sound like they should work, right? They sound like they make sense, but do they? Notes do not spin, they are not on wheels or gyroscopes, they are not round or pear shaped or global, and throats are not, and mouths are not, and faces are not, so what can this mean? How about “sing the high notes as gently and sweetly as you can, putting as little pressure on your throat as possible, but using enough effort in your belly muscles to keep the exhalation steady”? Lengthy, but more accurate. And what about “please contract your abs more deliberately while you are singing that note/phrase/word/tone”. (Of course, that might not be what would be necessary to make the sound better).

THINK, folks. WHAT DO I WANT TO HAVE HAPPEN HERE? WHAT IS THE SIMPLE PLAIN ENGLISH WAY TO ASK FOR THAT OR SOMETHING CLOSE? USE WORDS THAT ALREADY EXIST IN THE DICTIONARY. Do Not Make Up New Terms For Anything. Use What We Have.

And now I must go to place my voice into my forehead while releasing the breath through the vowels and consonants as I gaze into the eyes of the “other”. [I have to go talk to my friend face to face].

For the past 30 years, at least, the music education system of the public schools of this country have gradually been reduced or eliminated. Children who used to hear classical music, at least at school, were exposed to something important. Children were taught to sing in groups, not just in choruses, but in classrooms. All through grade school we started the morning with the Pledge of allegiance and either “God Bless American” or “America” (My Country ‘Tis of Thee), which we did unaccompanied. Think of it — who would do that today?

If you have two entire generations that have no exposure to music other than what they hear on commercial TV and radio, is it any wonder that most Americans don’t know good from bad, quality from drekk, when it comes to singing and singers?

I can’t say what effect this might have on the state

https://somaticvoicework.com/3095/