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Here in New York we have quite a few places to see and hear live performers, beyond Broadway, Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall. We have Off-Broadway, off-off Broadway, jazz clubs large and small, a few cabaret places, a few rock clubs, conservatories and school recital halls and “the fringe” — small theaters in private lofts or other odd places. On any given night (and some days) there are literally dozens of possibilities to hear someone sing live (miked or unamplified). And that doesn’t count the boroughs or the burbs, if we want to travel just a little bit.

We who live here forget how unusual this is. In many places attending a performance to hear singers live might be a very hard thing to accomplish. Large churches and synagogues usually have good music programs with skilled vocalists, and large towns and cities also have concerts of all kinds, as do the bigger schools. That still means, though, that a lot of people have the opportunity to see and hear live vocalists of professional caliber only rarely.

If it weren’t for TV, radio, film and now the internet, there are millions of people who might never hear singing at all. And there are probably a few people who will hear only “canned” singing in their lives. Those of us who sing know only too well that you can mess around with a recording in all kinds of ways, especially now, and that what one hears on a recording doesn’t always reflect the live sound well. If you have never had the opportunity to hear Renee Fleming live you wouldn’t know that her voice in person is much more radiant and “present” than it is on any of her recordings. In my opinion, it just doesn’t record well. You might also lose entirely the complete lack of power in Cecilia Bartoli’s voice. Expressive though it may be on recordings, at Carnegie Hall you notice how she performs and what she does with the music but not much the voice itself, as it is just plain unimpressive.

It is difficult to teach singing without live aural models. As I have said many times before, you can’t sing what you can’t hear. There have been many excellent blind singers but none that were deaf. If you grow up listening to voices that have been altered in the recording studio (and most are tweaked at least a little during the mastering of the raw sessions) you never know what the person would sound like in the room standing next to you.

A well trained classical voice of a mature adult who has a dramatic instrument is a “thing of nature and a wonder to behold”. A well trained belter can have a similar effect but not for the same reasons. Other voices may or may not have enough presence to be heard acoustically, but that would depend quite a bit on the place the singer is in while performing. If might be fine in a resonant hall but not even audible in a “dead space”.

In addition to listening to recordings, it is important that singers and teachers of singing listen to live singing of the highest quality available. It is also important that singers and teachers of singing have good models on which to base their own sounds. Just as I advocate making the sounds, I also advocate having someone who sounds good in those sounds as a guide. If you try to sing like Satchmo without understanding that his voice is not one to imitate, you would get in trouble in a few flaps of your false folds.

If you do not have such live singing available in your town, and you are teaching singing, of any kind, you MUST go to the nearest big city at least once or twice a year and hear professional vocalists of all styles live. There is no substitute for this. If you are serious in your teaching, you must come to New York at least every five years and go to a Broadway musical, a concert at Carnegie Hall, an opera at NY City Opera or the Met, and a jazz gig at one of the famous clubs — minimum! You ought to also be singing live at least once a year (if you are not doing this as a matter of course) so you don’t forget what that experience is like, for as long as you teach.

What is all of our training of singers for if not to perpetuate the vocal arts? If we don’t support live performance and study it as well, and if we rely only on recorded music to give us our criteria, we are living in a false world. Remember, the art of singing is about communication and what kind of communication goes on between you and an iPod or a boombox?

A number of years ago, I heard the great operatic baritone, Håken Hagegård, speak and remember well his topic, as it was startling. He described how he operates during a performance. Having heard him at Lincoln Center sing the famous Schubert song cycle “Winterreise”, which was gorgeous but truly chilling, I could only say that he ranks amongst the finest singer/actors I have ever witnessed, and I was eager to hear his talk.

I can’t quote him exactly but the gist of his message was that he sings to the audience. He said that if someone falls asleep in the 7th row, he sings to the people next to that person, looking directly at them, until they wake up the guilty party. (Which he said they always do!) He wants to bring the song to each and every person in the audience. At his school in Stockholm, “HåkeGården”, they train young singers an actors in all kinds of approaches to performance so that they can capture an audience. The ability to do that is a GIFT.

WELL

If you are in New York and you want to study acting, sooner or later you will encounter the version of Stanislavski’s training for actors called The Method, as all of the great acting schools here were started by one of his disciples (Uta Hagen and Herbert Berghof, Sanford Meisner, Stella Adler, Lee Strasberg, and others) and that’s pretty much all there is here to study, (unless you bump into someone teaching Shakespeare). In any one of these training programs, you find out in short order that there is no audience. There are the three walls of the stage and the fourth wall separating the performers from the audience — the fourth wall that would be there in a room in real life.

There are other things you learn. Actors “practice the craft of acting”. They must be “organic”. They do not “act” or “portray” emotions. They must always be specific, and they must NEVER EVER play to the audience or try to entertain.

Singers are encouraged in these schools to sing with their arms hanging limply at their sides and move only when the “movement arises from within”. In the act of standng there like a wet noodle, waiting for some overwhelming urge to move to overtake you like a Tsunami, you are taught to disconnect from the very impulse that would help you get where you need to go. The body becomes a mast and the arms become the unfurled, empty sails. Stanislavski never intended that.

The incongruity of singing an animated song with a droopy body doesn’t seem to bother anyone at these schools but it surely bothers me. Singing as if all emotion was experienced from the neck up is unnatural, but that is often what I see in students. In an effort to get these young people to be calm and believable, the fact that they are standing up in front of an audience, who came to be moved and entertained, is deliberately thrown out. Theatricality is considered a sin.

Irving Berlin and his contemporaries wrote lots of songs for Vaudeville. The songs were done by great performers like Al Jolson, Eddie Cantor, Phil Harris, George Burns, and Beatrice Lillie, Fanny Brice, and May West….entertainers all. Most of them went on to have successful careers in film and on TV and my guess is that NONE of them had any interest in a fourth wall. Look at old shows of Ethel Merman singing to a full house. She knew how to “put a song over”. No fourth wall there.

When I sing I know who, what, where, when and why I am singing any particular song, but I also know I am singing to an audience, and I want to bring the song to them, just like Hågen Hagegård. There is a time and a place for the “fourth wall” but it isn’t in a vaudeville tune from Tin Pan Alley. I don’t want to stand there waiting for my arms to move, and I don’t want to sing to my mental image of something that is so personal that I cause the person in the fifth row to wonder who I’m staring at in the distance. I don’t want my students to do that either, but when I guide them to perform, I meet resistance. It isn’t what they are trained to do, or to respect.

I have great admiration for the actors of our time who have been trained in “the method” and who have left an indelible mark on theater, film and TV, and there are many. If, however, I was sending my son or daughter to a school to learn how to sing well enough to go out after school was over and work in Show Business, I would want that child to know how to sing to and for the audience. If they can’t do that, they won’t get a job. That’s reality, not academia. If you remember any singer in your life whose performance was compelling it wasn’t because they stood and sang with their arms hanging limply at their sides while they hid behind an imaginary fourth wall.

Just came back from a truly glorious quasi-staged version of “My Fair Lady” at Avery Fisher Hall in Lincoln Center. Stars were Kelsey Grammer, Brian Dennehy, Kelli O’Hara, Marni Nixon, Meg Bussart and Philippe Castgner. There were minimal sets, but nice costumes, great choreography, a great chorus, and, of course, the Philharmonic was the Philharmonic. Everything was wonderful and they got a well deserved standing ovation.

I kept thinking, “This is where the classical training belongs. This is the music that was written for operatically trained voices and it works when the singers are good, when they sing with clear diction and natural vowels.” Yes, it was amplified, but not too much, and it was just fine that way — the system is similar to the amplification that has been put in place at NY City Opera. It’s not intrusive at all.

I don’t think for a minute, however, that any of the principles, or even the members of the ensemble could jump in and sing “Jekyl and Hyde” or “Wicked”. There wasn’t one voice that would have been right in that music, unless the singers can sing in very different vocal qualities than were used in tonight’s production.

Classical singing teachers responded in our 2003 research that the biggest difference between classical and “non-classical” singing is the style of the music itself. No, I don’t think so. If you take opera singers and have them sing “in the style of” rock, gospel, or jazz, and they take their operatic vocal production with them when they do, they will sound silly in the music, no matter how well they understand the style, or how good the arrangement may be. It may be true that the vocal differences are slightly less obvious for males than females, in that men generally sing more in chest register, but you can’t generalize. Many females sing in a chest dominant quality and there are certainly men who have light, heady voices, and counter tenors who sing in head dominant falsetto. If you took David Daniels (one of our most well known counter tenors who is having a major classical career) and asked him to sing Val Jean (as a counter tenor) in Les Miserables, would that work? That’s a contemporary show that is mostly “legit”. He would be singing “in the style of” with the wrong vocal production and it wouldn’t work. He wouldn’t keep his job. Why is this hard to understand?

Yes, we still need good classical voices for all kinds of music, and we need people who can act and dance and we need singers to have good solid technical resources in all of those art forms if they are going to have viable careers. We do not, however, want to continue the notion that classical vocal training will prepare the voice to sing any kind of music, UNLESS the training is geared more to varied vocal production and vocal health than to one kind of music or one “resonance strategy”.

It is painful to hear someone struggling to sing music in a way that isn’t suitable, but it’s wonderful to enjoy beautiful voices and music that are matched up perfectly, as that’s the best situation one could ask for — having the sound live where it belongs.

Every voice teacher with a private studio has had a call that starts out with the following statement: “I just want a few lessons to help me with…….” If you have been teaching for a while, you have probably also gotten a call that begins with “could you tell me how much you charge?” And, of course, there is the inspiring “I’d like to find a teacher in my neighborhood” person who starts with “where are you located?”

You know before you get to the second sentence that these conversations are doomed, as you are dealing with someone who has no idea what learning to sing entails. You have to decide if you are going to take the time to educate the person about how the process works and, if you do, you know you still risk having the person tell you something like “Oh, I didn’t realize. I guess that’s not what I want after all”.

While people absolutely have a right to search for teachers they can afford and who are located in a place that is accessible to them, neither of these criteria is the best for making a choice in terms of choosing a singing teacher. One would hope that the potential student would be interested in the teacher’s background, approach, philosophy, and experience teaching. It might also be hoped that the person would be looking for someone who was willing to work with a student who had their qualifications — such as beginners, professionals, people with vocal health issues, people singing only specific styles, etc.

If I had a quarter for all of the phone conversations I’ve had with people who started out with the above sentences, I would be set for retirement. I use my “educated guess” barometer when deciding the type of response to make (long, short, simple, detailed). A lot depends upon my mood and the amount of time I have. I try to be open, polite and helpful whenever possible. I might end up referring the caller to a colleague or giving other kinds of advice. I do this because the person calling can’t help that they don’t know and because we want all aspiring singers to get whatever help they need, and if facilitating that happens to fall to me, then I have to be responsible. On the other hand, it isn’t really my job to elaborate, and it is well within ethical standards to simply be respectful and brief. This is a judgment call to be made by each individual teacher.

If we had a society that promoted study of music in general these questions might come up less frequently. Perhaps in our work, especially through those teachers who can and do write about training singers, we can help educate the public about what goes into learning our wonderful vocal art. In the meantime, when you get one of those calls, remember, you aren’t alone!

Why can’t we just think our way into the right sounds? If you just get everything lined up perfectly, isn’t the sound you are looking for “right there”, and won’t it be there every time, because your mind has it worked out precisely?

Nope. You can think until you are blue but if you don’t put the work into the system, the system isn’t going to give you what you want.

If you are a dancer and you don’t spend hours and years stretching your body, your legs aren’t going to extend to the sky, no matter what mantra you repeat, or what lovely image you think. If you are a pianist, your hands aren’t going to fly across those keys playing a gazillion notes if you haven’t sat there playing for days and weeks and months and years in preparation. If you are a golfer and you want to hit a hole in one but you only play golf once a month, you can picture yourself playing below 70, but you will have to be very lucky, indeed, to get there and stay there just by visualization.

Why, then, is singing any different? How is it that we think that we can find the one right way to sing and stop there? How many of us have a perfect “place” for the tone, a perfect target for the sound, the sweet spot where we always aim the voice? What kind of singing does that create?

Nothing complex, which singing certainly is, can be learned in a few quick lessons. Real singing requires just as much work as any art, or any physical skill, and it requires a lot of thinking, too, but not just looking for the one piece that will complete the puzzle. That is limited thinking, and not useful in learning to be a great vocalist.

We must all learn to look at how we think and what we think about, and why, and what we expect those thoughts to do. We must learn to digest, review, discuss, examine, probe, explore and experiment in order to understand our thinking process and evaluate what, exactly, we are seeking. What do voice teachers think about and why? What should a singer think about? These questions are not simple and they cannot be answered with simplistic responses.

When we discuss CCM, we are discussing something that has never been seriously examined in a scholarly manner before. When we look to enter upon a research project in any CCM style, we are setting up exploration that is very new. When we ask that CCM be taken as an equal to classical music, we are posing a new paradigm. It is important to recognize that old answers, stock answers, will not do.

Formulate dynamic questions about the process of learning to sing in any style. Give yourself permission to linger before coming to an answer, to be adventuresome and curious as to what the possible responses to the query might be. Before you decide that you have “arrived”, wonder a bit longer about whether or not the journey need have an “end”. Enjoy the pondering. Questioning is good. Be willing not to have an answer, just a map. See where you might take a new route.

Your mind doesn’t know as much about singing as your body does. You can only discover that by allowing your body, your breath and your throat to be your teachers. Questions are teachers, answers can be dead ends.

You cannot think your way into the “right” sound, but you can use your mind to find sounds you never knew existed.

Many times I have encountered young singers who come into a first lesson with a list of things “they do”. The things they are “guilty” of fall into several broad categories…faulty breath support, manipulating or squeezing their throats, thinking too much, trying too hard. The list goes on.

I know before they open their mouths to sing one single note that all of this has been put into their head by some voice teacher or teachers. In every case, the student’s problems were not what they had been told.

Since most classical teachers have only three things to work with (breath support, resonance [placement], and legato) as direct technical tools, anything that’s wrong has to be handled by changing one of these dynamics.

Breath support is usually the first thing to get attention. There are all manner of procedures to address in breathing. Where and how to inhale or exhale, how to move the ribs, the belly, the back muscles, or the sternum, pulling in, pushing out, or pushing down on the abs, etc. When these changes don’t work, the student is told that they are “trying too hard” or “thinking too much” or some such thing. Then, perhaps, the student is told to “bring the sound forward” (or up, or up and forward, or toward the mask, the eyebrows, the nose, the sinuses, the cheekbones, etc.) and when this doesn’t work, the student is told “you are listening to yourself”, you are “holding the sound back” or some such thing. Finally, if the sound doesn’t just change the way it is supposed to, and the “vocal line isn’t flowing”, the poor student is told that they have to learn to “let go” and “stay centered” or what have you.

The amount of confusion in those who teach singing about what is cause and what is effect, or what can be done deliberately and what is a by-product of a specific stimulus, is huge.

Here are ten important points to remember:

If we remember that the entire system in always indirect and that the only thing one can do deliberately is sing a pitch, on a vowel, at a specific loudness, then we are at least at step one. If we remember that the vowel sound is shaped in the space between the vocal folds and the lips (in the vocal tract) and that the tongue is a big bunch of tissue in the middle of that tube (affecting the vowel), and that the entire thing is flexible, that is step two. If we understand that the larynx can move up, it can move down, it can tilt and it can change shape (it is cartilage, after all, not bone), that’s step three. If we remember the jaw can open a little, a lot or not at all, then we are at step four. If we know that the vocal folds are a reed in that tube, and that they, too, can change length and thickness, that is step five. If we know that you can only breathe into the lungs, (not the diaphragm, the back, the belly or the abs) and that the lungs are located in the chest or ribs, then we are at step six. And if we remember that the whole process hinges on what we hear, we are at step seven. You CAN’T sing what you CAN’T HEAR. If we don’t educate the ears of students, we haven’t taught them anything useful. And if we understand that all of this has to be coordinated, slowly, over time, then we are at step eight. The other two steps are: the sounds have to be connected to music (9) and the music has specific stylistic and technical criteria that must be addressed (10).

If you are a singing teacher who says “you are……..” to a student in a lesson, think before you utter those words. Do not make a verbal judgment about the student!!!! In an effort to make a correction you are issuing a criticism and labeling the person. It is better to discuss the sound, and the response the throat and body are making to the exercises you have been using. Then, the student can observe something objectively that allows him or her to target a specific element in the sound and make a change in that one aspect.

I have mentioned elsewhere that “mix” isn’t something to understand or do, it is something to be created and then discovered. What is also true is that voices don’t come under control right away. Even talented people struggle with some parts of the process of learning to coordinate the musical tones they sing when they seek to go beyond their comfort zone. Please don’t list for your students all they things they “do” that are “wrong”. Find ways to help your students sing better in each lesson and emphasize those successes.

I have a student who is struggling to rid her singing voice of nasality. This issue is difficult for several reasons. One, she doesn’t speak with nasality. Two, she isn’t being nasal on purpose and three the nasality is long term, going back a number of years. Four, she is otherwise a skilled singer and performer and the voice itself is of very high quality.

After trying a for a few months to address the soft palate more or less directly, and having little success, I decided to work strictly through register balance. This voice has a developed head and a chest register, and I had hoped not to juggle it around too much, but after the other exercises failed, I had no choice other than to attempt to get through to the deeper musculature through register balancing.

In the most recent lesson, the “default” position began to shift, to a “chest on the lower pitches and head on the higher pitches” adjustment. This is a radical change since the “mix” she has is strong and comfortable. (If it ain’t broke why fix it?) I am, in effect, promoting a “break” between the two registers so that we can get a lighter sound so that the tongue can relax, so the larynx can descend, so the soft palate can rise. All of these changes must happen without manipulation, on their own. Then the nasality will disappear. We had good success with that.

The side effects of getting the internal muscles to make a different response is that the singer has a chance to discover a new sound and a new way of experiencing sound-making. You wouldn’t necessarily think that changing the register balance would be a way to get nasality to diminish, but it works well for many problems, not just that one.

Something to think about.

How can you teach what you don’t do? I have never understood that. If you are teaching a physical skill, and you personally do not possess that skill, how can you teach it? On what basis do you monitor what is happening? If you have never felt the same sensations, don’t know what the experience feels like as movement and as feedback, how can you know what is happening when someone else does it?

Confidence comes from knowing. Been there, done that. It comes from sense memory, and from personal experience. The “tough love” people who go around talking to young people about what it’s like to be in jail, have all been in jail. They know what they are talking about. They speak in an effort to get the young people to avoid the mistakes they’ve made. They are tough because they know that is what they have to be if they expect to be effective.

Do you think they would have the same impact if they hadn’t been in jail themselves?

How about an Army drill sargeant who had not been in the Army? A football coach who didn’t play football?

In order to teach a physical skill, one has to have that skill, or at least some limited amount of it. The singing teachers who refuse to learn how to make CCM sounds but teach them anyway should take a good look at what they are doing. Even if each teacher is “thrown into” this situation at a school or university, it behooves them to seek some kind of experiential and auditory training before taking responsibility for other people’s voices and vocal development or health.

Relying solely upon ones ears is dangerous when those ears are not also relying upon the feedback of the physical body. There is NO SUBSTITUTE for physicality. Sensation in the body is sensation in the body. It isn’t mental acuity, it isn’t intellectual perception, it isn’t visual observation.

It isn’t surprising then, that the people who don’t know what CCM sounds feel like, can’t decipher what they are hearing. The ears don’t operate in isolation. How can one tell if the sound is healthy or appropriate? Some classical singers put all CCM vocal production into the “ugly” category, believing all chest-register dominant sounds are harmful, and leave it at that. Others may think that CCM sounds are OK, just different, but can’t tell what constriction or forcing sounds like, as they lack proper discernment. Neither situation is good.

What is possibly worse is relying upon the student to assess whether or not the sound is healthy. Unless the student is a skilled professional with years of experience singing, how can he or she possibly make such an assessment? Just because something feels comfortable in the moment, doesn’t mean it is correct, or that it will not cause long term problems. It is important to know if the student is comfortable and what the student understands and experiences, but that knowledge is not a substitute for the wisdom that the teacher is responsible for carrying as the expert. The teacher who is just guessing should at least tell the student the truth….that the instruction is based upon guesswork. Better humble and honest than not.

In order to take reasonable risks in teaching, you have to be able to assess what a reasonable risk is. To do that, you need boundaries. You acquire boundaries through life experience which includes study and experimentation, exploration outside of study, and applications of knowledge gained through past experiences to new ones. That is why it is a requirement of anyone who is certified in Somatic Voicework™ to actually make the sounds we are expecting to teach. Certified teachers have at least begun to sing CCM sounds.

The most frequent comment I hear while working with classical singers new to CCM is “this is weird” or “this is strange”. Yes, it isn’t like classical singing and it isn’t harmful. A good beginning, and in my opinion, the only valid place to start.

I am lucky enough to have many experienced professional singers as students. The singers are all excellent vocalists, and I certainly take no credit for their artistry. I realize that not all singing teachers have the opportunity to work with such elite artists, and that those who teach in schools or who are in small towns may not ever have a chance to work with top vocalists and that you might wonder why someone who is a successful working singer with a career going needs a singing teacher? That would be a good question. Why, indeed?

Young singers need to be taught how to sing. They need to understand why we don’t sing everything in the same way, with the same sound. They need parameters. High school and college students who don’t have that kind of information and look to me to supply it, and I do. Skilled singers don’t usually need anything but support to do the job they want to do. I would never presume to tell someone working with me how to sing something unless I was asked. Often these elite artists bring me tricky or difficult music they must perform and I endeavor to make it easier for them and/or shorten the time it takes to smooth out any wrinkles.

Actually, all working singers need a good singing teacher because the demands of performing pull on the voice and body and can take it out of balance. Even the most experienced singers have to deal with stress — from traveling, from rehearsing, from various venues, and with various health issues that arise but also affect the voice, like a really bad cold. It’s not so easy to put your own voice back on track even if you know it well.

One of the reasons why more working singers don’t seek out a teacher is because some singing teachers are only interested in dispensing information about a specific style. (“This is how you sing Mozart”.) That is certainly nice to know but not if you are singing some style of CCM. Another reason is because some teachers are interested in telling the singer how to sing (“You shouldn’t make those sounds, as they are ugly” OR “You should do a big crescendo here, and pronounce that word more clearly”.) This may be done without regard to whether or not the singer is satisfied with the sounds or music he or she is already making.

It is an honor and a privilege to work with highly skilled singers. I respect them and regard my work with them as an opportunity to facilitate their goals for their work. I am blessed when I attend a performance of someone who has worked hard on a song only to see and hear that the issues are no longer there. How wonderful that is! It isn’t that it’s less wonderful in a youngster or a beginner, but it is a particularly rich experience when that vocalist is singing in front of a thousand people!

I hope that anyone teaching will take heart from my circumstances. If even the most advanced singers can benefit from lessons, we should realize how hard professional singing is — especially if you have a full-blown busy career. We can take what is learned from the elite singers and use it with the “baby beginners”, as each group needs small adjustments to improve, although for completely opposite reasons. The purpose of our CCM Vocal Pedagogy Institute at Shenandoah is to share with the participants the techniques and approaches that have worked with elite vocalists. If you are someone who works with beginners or dedicated amateur singers in a small town school musical or church program, you deserve a chance to use the very same exercises and approaches with your students as I do when I work with someone who makes thousands of dollars singing all over the world.

I would like to invite you to compare James Brown to Joan Sutherland as singers. I also invite you to compare Bruce Springsteen to Renee Fleming. I think one could look at the similarities and differences between Usher and Kristen Chenoweth, don’t you? What about Luciano Pavarotti and Faith Hill?

As to the similarities, we can start with the fact that they are all professional singers, all are well-known and have or have had a large fan base, and all have distinct vocal styles and sounds. All of them have sold lots of recordings and appeared to large audiences in live and televised performances.

Let’s decide which of them is a “serious” artist. Do you suppose we could determine which ones rely upon their vocal folds to be strong, and responsive to their artistic goals? Perhaps we could investigate which one of these singers has the most respect amongst their peers, or is more dedicated to being really excellent at what they do? Perhaps we should try to determine which ones have sung material that will have the most profound effect upon society? Maybe we could discuss the lasting value of each vocalist’s career as we imagine it as being remembered 50 or 100 years from now?

I think it might be possible to sort out which ones understand the need for a strong “singers’ formant” from the ones who don’t give a hoot. Could we say that the ones that care are smarter? Maybe just better? I bet they are richer!!!

I hope you get my point (not that I am known for being subtle). I write about the obvious because I am yet again confronting the fact that classical training is supposed to help you sing whatever you sing. We all know that opera singing sounds and works just like hip hop, R&B, country, rock and music theater singing, right?

I am currently involved in the writing of a “paper” that is supposed to be giving validity to “functional training” for singers regardless of style. This paper will come from a very august, conservative organization, if it is ever written, and will be a landmark of sorts. There is a good chance that, after three years of attempts which have included some pretty ugly arguments, the paper might actually get composed, but it also might end up being watered down so much as to be empty as a professional statement.

I continue to hear from CCM singing teachers from all over the country who are facing hostility in music/voice departments every day. These departments insist that classical vocal music is the be all and end all of voice training, and that classical vocal repertoire is the only way a young singer can learn to develop vocal skills. The questions I began with, then, are hardly irrelevant, unfortunately. Until and unless the students are allowed to learn all kinds of vocal technique, for all kinds of music, and are taught to sing all of these styles in a healthful manner, we are waging an uphill battle. Until and unless the music theater students (most of what is CCM at schools is music theater) don’t have to do classical songs as a part of juries or graduation recitals, or that classical vocal majors have to sing a few CCM songs do, things will continue to be unfair. “And I’m Telling You I’m Not Going” from “Dreamgirls” is a very difficult song, but in a different way than “Adelaide” by Beethoven, which is also extremely hard to sing well. Which is better? Which singer is more of a skilled pro when executing either song well?

Which is better — a New Balance sneaker or a Native American wicker basket?