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When it gets to be 2:00 am and I’m still up, my mind gets very busy discussing all kinds of things. One of the recurring themes is this — how does one account for all the truly talented people who never get seen or heard and the many not very talented people who end up having careers, even very big careers?

There will never be an answer to this. Life isn’t fair (although I will always hate that).

Yesterday we went to “Legally Blonde”, the musical about to open on Broadway based upon the movie (which I didn’t see and didn’t want to see). The show is loud, frantic, and silly, but the theater was filled to the brim with young girls and their parents who obviously thought it was terrific. I think it will run a hundred years and I appreciated the enthusiasm of the performers (they were all good), but I kept wondering what it was like to sit there in the famous PALACE THEATER and see George Burns and Gracie Allen or maybe even Al Jolson back when there was no amplification and you had to use your lungs and your chops to reach the audience.

If I were a billionaire, I would buy the PALACE (which sits alongside and underneath the who-knows-how-many stories – 50? 60?- Doubletree Hotel) and start Vaudeville again. Bob Marks, who is my friend and Broadway’s coach extraordinaire, was our host, along with his wife, Elayne. He said I would have an empty theater, and I think he’s right, but I wouldn’t care. Live people doing what live people do with an unamplified orchestra…..now THAT would be really new and different. What if all there was to rely on was the voice? Would people pay to hear someone who was inaudible? What was it like when you sat in the last row and the sound of someone’s voice still reached out to touch your ears and mind, not because it came from a speaker, but because it came from their body? What was it like?

Tomorrow we are taking our granddaughter, Ondraya, age 3, to see Laurie Berkner and her band in Central Park as a part of Earth Day. Laurie is my student, and a “rock star” with the toddlers. I could see Laurie, Susie and Adam at the PALACE. I think they would do a great job and I think you would hear them just fine if they played their instruments without amplification (guitars and piano).

Not a bad dream. Guess it’s time to see if it shows up when I am actually asleep.

I saw two Broadway musicals today, “Jersey Boys” and “110 In The Shade”. Both of them were terrific. They have all the ingredients that musicals on Broadway are supposed to have…talented performers with great voices, good stories, wonderful direction and excellent sets, lighting and costumes. The audience at both performances jumped to its feet to salute the casts and rightly so.

For those who don’t know, “Jersey Boys” is the tale of Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons and “110” is based upon the play “The Rainmaker”. This revival of 110 stars Audra MacDonald and John McCullum, two true giants. This multi-racial cast is terrific in every way and I loved the effective and realistic ending (a surprise). Audra MacDonald is a magnificent actress and her voice is radiant. She has matured much past her stunning debut in Carousel, and her roles in the other shows for which she received her four Tonies. Mr. MuCullum is a seasoned Broadway veteran who exudes confidence and authenticity and can still sing, act and move on a raked stage just fine, although he must be well into his 70s. The rest of the cast is solid, too. In Jersey Boys, aside from the excellent quartet who make up the “Seasons”, there are amazing Ensemble members paying a multitude of parts in most believable ways. The audience of mostly Baby Boomers glows as it relives the music of its youth, song by song. The women, especially, get carried away, just like when they were 16, but the men seem transported, too. I loved the original Four Seasons as a teenager and young adult, and love those songs (I know every word). I am proud that one of the men in the “Seasons” is my student, but I would love it even if he weren’t there.

This is why those of us who live here live here. We put up with a lot, sometimes, to be in the Big Apple, but you cannot have another Broadway. There is only one and it is here. When you get to see the best of the best, not once but twice in one day, you can only be grateful.

Theater people inhabit a world that everyone who has not been in theater doesn’t know or understand. It takes a special kind of person to get up in front of a large group of complete strangers every day and pour out honest emotion over and over again. It takes a lot of strength to put that kind of demand on the voice and body, and those without personal discipline cannot sustain their equilibrium for 8 shows a week, weeks and months running. It is a thrill to be Broadway performer, but it is a very difficult life, let no one be fooled.

Wherever you may be, you owe it to yourself to come to Broadway or go to London’s West End at least once in your life. Although other places have theaters and shows, these two cities are the source of much of what goes out into the world as musicals, and they each have more theaters in them than do any other cities anywhere, and in both places, the mainstage theaters are concentrated in small geographic areas.

That is where only the good shows remain, as it is just too costly to keep a flop up and running. You may not like something, but it will never be because it “isn’t good”, as this is where you come to see and hear what the standards are. Sometimes, it’s just as good as it gets.

Is American music as good as European music? Do the Chinese sound good singing rock songs? Is classical music better than rock and roll? Is country music better than rap? Are these questions ridiculous?

The history of many of the styles of CCM are rooted in America. While every country has folk music of some kind, jazz, rock and roll, country/western, rap/hip hop, soul, R&B, gospel and the “book” musical began here. Certainly other countries have made contributions over the years to every style, but the emergence of what we used to call “pop” music (it’s now CCM) can be traced to various locations and times in the US of A.

Do the music schools honor this? Is our American music regarded as a topic worthy of scholarly study and investigation? Only jazz has achieved some of that status in schools, with music theater now catching up, largely because the students are pressing to study it. There are true masters of instrumental jazz, but there are no masters of vocal jazz pedagogy. If you study singing in a jazz college, you are going to study it with a classical teacher. Did you know that 34% of the people teaching music theater in colleges and universities have NEITHER professional experience nor training in music theater but teach it anyway? That is from our study in 2003 published in the Journal of Voice. Can you think of any other subject wherein institutions of higher learning could get away with hiring people with no experience and no training as teachers?

I attended the International Association of Jazz Educators conference in January. I went to the exhibitors area where there were several schools offering programs and queried the directors of those programs about vocal training for their jazz singers. NYU’s chair was honest enough to tell me that he had no interest in singers unless they came in to train as pianists. That is true at Manhattan School of Music, too, where they accept masters students into the program, but only if they are good instrumental musicians in the first place. At Long Island University they told me that only classical vocal training was given because that was all that was necessary. For jazz. Oh really.

When I went to the NATS Belt Workshop #1 in Miami, held at the University of Miami, which has a music theater training program run entirely by opera singers who have never set foot on an music theater stage anywhere, no one, and I mean NO ONE knew where the term belting originated. One of the teachers there (with a PhD) said it was created in the 60s to sing “over rock bands”. I was choking in my seat. Just ask the other people who were there, as they will confirm that I was sitting there turning blue. What is one to do when an organization that is nationally based presents a workshop on a topic where the “experts” have no expertise and the audience doesn’t know that they don’t know. Isn’t that about as low as standards can get? That wasn’t in 1985, it was in 2000.

I remember teaching in Stockholm in a school where all the kids studied “popular” singing (CCM). One of the young women was singing “God Bless The Child” by Billie Holliday. This beautiful blonde Swede with a sweet voice was singing with true sincerity but she didn’t know a thing about the song, the composer, the idea behind the song, the style, the phrasing or anything other than the words and the melody. When I was in Sydney kids were singing American songs, as they were in Sao Paulo, and in Denmark and Amsterdam. What they did, they had taught themselves, as they had no one to ask. That is understandable. The music didn’t arise there. What’s sad is that WE have no one to ask. We, all of us, every single American vocalist, should know everything about these styles like the backs of our hands, and what do we know instead? Schubert, Scarlatti, and Debussy.

Sweet Land of Liberty, of THEE I sing.

How does one approach working with a skilled singer with years of professional experience who cannot sing on pitch? Is it just that the person has somehow forgotten how to breath correctly, or has lost their resonances or ideas about correct resonance? Is it because the person has somehow forgotten how to hear the notes? What could cause someone who has normal vocal folds and normal hearing and normal speech to be unable to sing well? How in the world could this be?

Truth is, we don’t know. We do know, however, that the problem is not caused by breathing, resonance or pitch issues. Yet each of the people who has come to me for assistance has been told by other well-meaning teachers that the problems were just those. How does that make any sense? I am flummoxed!

Further, I have many young singers working with me who have come because their voices are a mess, technically speaking. Yes, the vocal folds are normal and yes, they can speak, but the singing is all over the place. Wild, erratic vibratos, overdone breathing, poor posture, tension in the neck and/or shoulders, uncontrolled tone that is often unpleasant and sometimes also pitch problems, legato problems, and stamina problems. How is it that the teachers they are working with do not see and hear that things are askew? I’m not talking about beginning teachers, with little experience. I’m talking about people who have been teaching for years. I am, unfortunately, talking about people teaching in university programs in lots of places.

In working with voices that don’t do what they should, one must assume that there is always a reason why this is so. If the person is sincerely doing their best to sing (and they are or they wouldn’t be studying anywhere), why are their best efforts so unsuccessful? When one is supposed to be listening and watching for function, not noticing basic things like the ones described above, seems amazing to me. Every tiny little thing matters in a flawed voice when it belongs to a skilled singer, especially one with a good voice who could sing at one time — with the students, well enough to get into a school and with the adults, well enough to work professionally. The teacher cannot afford to miss one small glitsch in the sung sound or in the way the person attempts to produce it.

Sometimes fixing such problems takes a long time. The muscles responsible for the issues mentioned here are always the internal muscles, which in turn cause problems in the neck, shoulders, jaw, tongue and face. They are not easily accessible and do not respond quickly to stimulus. Care must be taken to work in various ways, slowly, repetitively, and with patience. A great deal of moral and emotional support must come along with this work, as it is arduous for the singers involved and fraught with upset, fear or anxiety, distress, worry and vulnerability.

I am exasperated that vocal function issues are yet so unknown to most people who work with the voice, regardless of what style of singing they teach. This is changing, now more rapidly than ever, but for those who are caught in the sticky mess of vocal distress, right now, the lack of available experts to turn to for assistance can only be one more frustration added to the burdens they already bear. If you know someone who has “lost their voice” but can still talk normally, or someone who has “given up singing” because of severe vocal issues like these, please tell them that help exists. They just need to find someone who knows what’s wrong and how to appropriately address the problems (read that as NOT with exercises for breathing, resonance or pitch matching).

Perhaps someday some of the folks who have worked with me will write their own stories so that others can benefit from their personal experiences. The path of recovering one’s voice is personal, but anyone who has ever had to unlearn something and try again to find a better way would relate to the journey. If you know that I am talking to you and also understand what I have written, I urge you to put pen to paper and express what you have been through. Don’t let the writing intimidate you. We all need to know about what you have experienced, plus and minus. It is very important that the fog be lifted.

Why are some people “hard” to teach? What is it about them that makes them difficult?

Fortunately, I no longer have much of a problem with this, as I teach mostly professional singers who are out working and come to me by choice to willingly take my guidance. In the past, however, I have had some students who have left me drained after every lesson, and I came to dread seeing their names in my appointment book from week to week. Don’t get me wrong, these people might have been good singers — people of genuine talent –but they didn’t know how or didn’t want to change.

You can’t learn something new if you are not willing to change the old. You have to risk letting go of what you have to gain something new. Some people can’t do that. Assuming the student came to study to gain new skills means that the student recognizes that the skills he or she has are not adequate, else they wouldn’t be students. If a singer doesn’t admit this to himself, he is never going to grow.

Young singers often do not understand what a “professional attitude” is, since they have had no opportunity to be professional. They do not understand what it means to work on something in order to get the absolute most out of it. That work could be on the voice, the body, the music, the lyrics, and the underlying implication of the communication of each song or piece or all of those. As long as someone thinks there is only one way to do a sound, a movement, a word or a phrase, they are not really being an artist, they are living in a pink bubble. Art is never static. It is true that something can “settle” into a grounded whole once it has been properly absorbed, but that doesn’t mean it will never ever change. In fact, what something is like once shouldn’t mean that it can never evolve or shift on the second or third or 85th time. If it is really alive it has to grow and continuing growing in order to remain authentic as communication.

An insecure person creates all kinds of defenses. Some students think the teacher is “out to hurt them”. Others think the teacher is “being too hard”. Some students want to sound a certain way because “that’s the only sound they like”. Others think that their talent rests upon their neuroses (that’s common, actually) which is a totally wrong assumption. Some think they can get by on their talent alone. (That one is really awful). Ego gets in the way when the singer’s feelings matter more than getting the job done. If the singer is constantly “upset” in a lesson, it gets in the way. The person who thinks she is never going to be right or “good” enough has just as much ego to manage as the person who thinks that she is always right or always “very good”. If the teacher spends all the time in the lesson building up the student’s ego, or trying to get the singer to recognize that more work needs to be done in order for the person to be as “good” as they already think they are, there is no time to learn anything, to explore or grow. There is no safe place to risk being open, risk exploring what you have never explored, risk discovering something you didn’t know.

Being with a student in a lesson like that is absolutely difficult. It is uninspiring, unrewarding and frustrating. It can make the teacher lose interest in the student, and make the student lose interest in studying.

The psychological issues of dealing with people who have these behaviors are complex and singing teachers get no training to address them adequately or professionally. Each teacher is on his or her own in how these issues get resolved, if they do. The profession offers no guidelines, although it could. The profession behaves as if issues such as these rarely occur when in point of fact they are commonplace in most voice studios.

Teachers have feelings, emotions, psychological issues and behaviors from the past, that have an impact on students and on the lesson process, but these, too, are not considered in a formal manner in the profession. Teachers have to work out for themselves how to leave their own “history” outside the door once they enter into the voice studio. When the behavior or attitude of the student conflicts with the outlook of the teacher, or vice versa, things will be “difficult”.

I am not speaking here of outright collapses, explosions, or other extreme situations, as they are of a different nature and belong in a category of their own. I am talking about the steady “tick tick tick” of the lessons as they progress and the psychological or attitudinal atmosphere in which growth is stiffled or enhanced during those sessions. There really are students who are “difficult”.

How can we best approach them? Any thoughts?

We have a new video clip for you to see. It’s an edited version of the interview I did with Theo Bleckmann. The entire video was 40 minutes long so this is just a little tidbit but it contains both vocal exercises and shots of Theo’s vocal folds during some outrageous sound-making. It’s cool, so please take a look.

For every Renee Fleming, Bryn Terfel, Thomas Hampson, Anna Netrebko, Stephanie Blythe or Juan Diego Flores, there are hundreds, no, probably thousands of wanabee opera singers who don’t make it. There is also a group of people who work constantly in opera, sometimes in leading roles, who are not stars. Some of these people can really sing. They may be equal to their famous counterparts in terms of sheer talent, but lacking in some key ingredient that makes a career take off big time……vocal prowess, personal charisma, lack of drive and ambition, lack of money to sustain themselves, or lack of the ability to keep going in spite of success without fame. It takes all of these ingredients, plus luck, of course, to put fire under a career and make it “world class”, even if you are a very good singer.

There is yet another group. Those folks are the ones who manage to have careers, big and small, in spite of the fact that their singing isn’t really very good. These people manage to show up in major houses, and in major roles, all over the world, and when you hear them, you wonder, “how did THAT person get to sing at X?”

Of course, one can say that about any and all of the other places where people sing, and of all the CCM styles. There are plenty of people who don’t sound good (have “good” voices) with singing careers, perhaps because the sound for its own sake isn’t so important in CCM. A good voice is helpful, but it may not be enough, especially in certain styles. Sometimes a style doesn’t want a good voice…..what good would it do someone singing heavy metal?

But opera is supposed to be about “bel canto” if you read the articles, even if the people singing are in a “verismo” production, or singing Monteverdi. No one who is just bellowing or wobbling or woofing is singing in a beautiful manner, but you can hear voices like that in just about any operatic production. Go to any major house and really listen. You will hear for yourself.

I have a theory about why this might be so and it is that many people are taught to deliberately manipulate their sound for the sake of resonance. They believe that the only way to sing is to make the voice go where they want it to go, and consequently have no idea that it can be freed, emancipated and released. They do not understand that the muscles involved in vocal production should not be held still or squeezed while singing but rather think that this is what a singer is supposed to do. Classical singers can be very diligent about producing a certain kind of “ringy” resonance at the cost of other things, up to and including not actually noticing that the sounds they end up with are down right ugly. (Heaven forbid that they actually be encouraged to listen to themselves).

Another reason is that people can start out sounding good but think they no longer need to work on their instrument and its technical capacities once they are working. If that happens, over time, habits creep in, and before you know it, what was once a great voice is a not-so-hot voice and the person singing doesn’t even notice.

I remember once attending a debut recital here in NYC of someone I knew who had coached with some very high power people — experts in art song and opera that were recognized world wide. She was herself a fine linguist and pianist and had worked long to get her mezzo soprano ready for this big event. I was eager to hear her and was hopeful that this would “put her on the map”, but from the moment she opened her mouth all I could do was think “gee whiz and oh dear”. The voice was caught, cloudy, merky, and unpleasant sounding. She had clearly been taught to get those vocal muscles to go to that “resonant spot” without the requisite adjustments to make the voice lovely and beautiful. The recital was nice, all the songs properly sung, but nothing came of it, as without a radiant voice, frankly, who cares? The saddest thing was that it didn’t need to be the case. All voices can become beautiful, if the teacher knows how to guide the student there and the singer is willing to go and is patient.

Some of the people who don’t sound very good and manipulate thinking “that’s the way it’s done” do not have careers on the stages of the world. They go instead, to teach. They go to faculties large and small where they pass on what they do not really know or understand to their students. Because they have studied, have pieces of paper to prove it, and because there isn’t any standard about hiring teachers who actually sound good as teachers, this mis-information gets perpetuated. It ain’t the real thing, but the poor students don’t know that.

I think that is very sad.

Now that Peter Gelb is at the helm of the Met, we can expect that opera is going to go in new directions, whether people like it or not. Expect electronics to invade the Met, and all opera, and by that I don’t mean just amplification of the voices. I mean composers from the worlds of rock and contemporary music are going to be asked to write operas and the operatic voices are going to sing them, and what in the world will we call THAT? Operock? Popera? (No, that’s saved for the likes of Il Divo). How about Rockera?

Don’t laugh. Thirty years ago I was asking the voice scientists “Why don’t you research other styles of music?” THIRTY YEARS AGO. Now, it’s happening all over the world. The scientists are finally entering into the 21st century. It won’t take long for the rest of the musical world to catch up and then, when the singers are asked to do whatever we call it…….operapop?……who is going to train them and how will that training look? Won’t we need both our classical roots and our CCM Pedagogy?

Thirty years from now I will either be dead or too old to care, but I hope that this statement rings in the ears of those who are threatened by change. I hope that it will be seen by then that the arts must stay alive to be meaningful and that the human voice is never EVER limited in what it can do or express. Technology can help us or hurt us, but that decision is up to us.

In 1977 when I wrote in my journal that I wanted voice science to understand what happens when someone sings “pop” music, I was 28 years old. I was viewed as an upstart, I suppose, by the scientists, but they treated me nicely, anyway, in that I was at least interested in their work. The voice teachers who came to the Symposium in those days used to stand up and say to these researchers that they were “way off base” in thinking they could try to figure out the “art of singing” by making those “funny charts and graphs”. They were wrong. The scientists were much more tolerant of the teachers than vice versa. Now, when there is so much partnership between the various voice disciplines, the people squawking about science not being “in touch” with singers are the ones who are looked at as being “weird”. Time passes, things and attitudes change.

To those young people who are reading this, remember, the future is unimagined, and you never know where your vocal folds will fly. Never say no to what comes your way. Find a healthy, happy and truthful way to sing it, and grow into that creative experience. You never know what you will end up being able to teach to the NEXT generation!

Classical students at colleges and conservatories are still giving graduate recitals as a pre-requisite to getting their degrees, both as undergrads and graduate students. They still do recitals in traditional forms. Perhaps some of them are allowed to put in a music theater piece or two, most likely in a “legit” or “mixy” vein, but that is certainly not a requirement. In some programs, no music theater is expected and may even be prohibited.

Doctoral students MUST sing classical recitals. There are no doctoral degrees available in any kind of vocal study except classical.

The music theater students, however, are frequently required to sing classical songs as a part of their recitals, regardless of whether or not they will be singing in any classical repertoire after graduation. This is to prove that the students have been “properly trained” and learned to sing classically, because not to have been trained in this manner is to imply that their training would have been insufficient or incorrect.

Raising the question, “why should this assumption be made?” is not a simple thing. It challenges long and deeply held premises and asks that the entire idea of voice training for singers be re-examined.

If all classical students were required to sing in at least one other style in a recital, not with “classical” vocal production, but with something else, then asking the music theater students to sing “classically” would be fair. Since this is not the case, there continues to be a double standard in the schools, which makes the music theater students (and maybe jazz students, too) have to learn two kinds of vocal skills in the same time frame that the classical students have to learn only one.

AND

If someone graduates with a degree in a language, say French, we would expect that the majority of the student’s study would have been in the French language and culture. If, however, you graduate with a degree in any kind of vocal performance, what your emphasis was on is unknown. Some schools rely heavily on acting training, some insist the singers study musicianship skills, others give dance instruction, some require piano studies, some train the speaking voice, and some require various things from this list, but not all of them. Nonetheless, pretty much across the board, the student is going to get a one-hour voice lesson once a week –sometimes less. Yes, there may be other singing going on in classes or choirs, in rehearsals or in performances, but lessons all over the world in schools of all levels are most often given once a week for an hour. That means they get less individual voice training than anything else. Is this reasonable?

Wouldn’t it make sense for the student to get a lesson every day? That way, practice is supervised daily and there is much more chance that the student will progress consistently and safely. (Luciana Pavarotti studied every day with his teacher for seven years before he sang his first performance. I wonder if that’s why he sounded so amazing when he first began his career). Perhaps it would make sense for students to study in class as well….two or three hours in a voice/rep class every day. The acting students at NYU/Tisch spend 8 hours a day three days a week in acting class, so it’s not a crazy to think that the vocalists could get more time than they do.

Why don’t we do that? Why don’t we want to look at a variety of ways that might be better than the one we have universally accepted as being “the standard approach”? I know there are both economic and time constraints that press upon the schools, but nothing HAS to stay the same. It takes agreement on the part of many people for these kinds of standards to remain intact.

I don’t have an answer here, I am just making an observation. I do think, however, that until and unless these issues get discussed at Singing Congresses and meetings, things will plod along as they are. Those who suffer most from our inability to address the inequities of the “system” are the students. Just because it’s what we got when we were studying doesn’t mean it has to go on, and just because the only way to have been trained for the past couple of hundred years was called “classical”, it doesn’t mean that we can’t have recently developed new methods that are appropriate for today’s music that are just as effective but different. We aren’t saying that classical training is bad, or even that it shouldn’t be the basis for vocal study if it is thought of more as functional training rather than training aimed at specific repertoire. We are saying that it’s time for some adjustments in all sorts of places. It’s up to us to be the changers.

Little Christina Aguilera, with her Blonde-blonde locks, in her rail thin body, sang the “you-know-what” out of “It’s A Man’s World”, made famous by the Godfather of Soul, James Brown, at the 2007 Grammy’s. You can see it on YouTube if you want.

She sang very well, and she didn’t hold anything back. I wouldn’t imagine that her rendition of the song would stand up to 8 shows a week on Broadway, but for a once-in-a-lifetime performance, she used everything she had. I would like to ask the teachers of singing who think that the 24/26 Italian Arts Songs are necessary to developing a strong vocal technique how those songs would have applied to what she was doing or helped Christina be OK. I would actually like to ask her, too.

I wouldn’t have thought that this song could bring an audience to its feet when sung by a caucasian female, and I would have been wrong. I want to know if she could sing “Nessun Dorma” (like Aretha Franklin did) and get the same reaction. Probably not, as those who know the song would still be disturbed by this kind of rendition and those who don’t wouldn’t know the difference……

I write this, yet again, because we had another discussion the other night with some colleagues about classical training being all you need, and classical training being different than any commercial sound because of a style, or the singer’s talent, or the formant frequencies shifting (by themselves, I guess). No amount of arguing changes their minds. Even aural examples are heard as being “almost the same” (when they were totally not the same). My head spins.

If you have the “talent” to sing like a pop singer while training to be an opera singer, good for you. That’s like learning golf so you can be better at tennis. It might work, in that they both require good eye/hand coordination. But if you are like most people who want to learn to be good at tennis, and you approach a tennis teacher who takes you out to a tennis court and puts a tennis ball and raquet in your hands, you would feel better, no?