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I’ve been thinking that it would be good to take on the position of those whose attitudes I dislike.

SO…

I believe that singing opera can be helpful to anyone who wants to learn to sing. In order to sing opera, one must learn to breath efficiently and deeply, using the diaphragm and the abdominal muscles to help support the tone one is producing. In a talented singer, who can stay on pitch and has a naturally good voice, developing resonance is best approached by suggesting that the student produce a tone that vibrates in the bones of the face and head at all times. The vowels should remain in the most forward position in order to help increase these vibrations, and the resonance should be uninterrupted by noisy or drawn-out consonants, although an effort should be made to pronounce all words intelligibly. The student should be encouraged to sing in Italian, as the vowels in Italian are musical and pure and this will help the English, German and French vowels follow that same path. The tone should have a vibrato which is not too fast, too slow or irregular, and it should not be artificially manufactured.

It is appropriate for the student to begin with Italian Art Songs or other similar art songs in order to learn how to sing a flowing musical line (legato) and to spend time on vocal exercises of various kinds to strength breathing and resonance.

When doing material that is not classical, students should be encouraged to carry over as much as possible all of the above skills that have been developed by doing classical music. All music in any style should be sung with as much consistent resonance as possible, with legato, vibrato, and clear, undistorted vowels. Consonents should be used minimally so as not to effect the vocal line, but they should be audible and crisp. Students should work to create a beautiful sound in whatever style of music is being performed, and use the sound itself as the main vehicle of communication.

Problems which arise in the music should be addressed through breath support work, correction of resonance positions (placement), and through changes in the concepts of the sound and the images that accompany those sounds. Students should be encouraged to stay within material that is comfortable and easily done until the voice and body are very secure in those behaviors.

Anyone who has mastered the above skills will have drawn out the best of their singing voice, and can go on to develop as an artist while learning more about music history, style, interpretation, performance practice and stage deportment.

OK, what do you think of that?

I continue to receive personal reports, one at a time, from various teachers of singing who are at university, that there is a “war” between the departments of music and drama, and that within the departments of music, there are many problems between those that are “strictly classical” teachers of singing and those who teach music theater, jazz, or other CCM styles. Since this is something I have had to face for more than 31 years here in New York, as well as a master teacher all over the planet, I am not surprised, but I am sad to know that not much has changed except that the number of confrontations is increasing. (We all remember that I was strongly verbally attacked in Minneapolis at the NATS Convention in July for pointing out that we don’t sing gospel, rock, and belt songs with the same sounds used in Schubert and Fauré).

Since the CCM teachers are often in the minority, sometimes isolated, and frequently need to work within the guidelines of a school in order to keep their jobs, the resistance they are forced to face is all the more troublesome. ( I am exempt from that particular worry, since no one can fire me, having always been in private practice). CCM teachers end up having to defend themselves and CCM repertoire, something which should be unnecessary, if things were fair, and which is, in point of fact, offensive. The drama departments often want their students to sing well, but find that the singing training, being almost exclusively classical, does not always support the needs or parameters of music theater material. This is true in jazz schools, too. Even there, the vocal training is classical, which strikes me as being even more paradoxical. How does learning “Caro Mio Ben” help you sing music “Mood Indigo”, written by Duke Ellington? (It doesn’t, as I sing both, and anyone else who does both also knows that is true).

I have heard from quite a few people that their “Bel Canto” training has helped them sing in whatever CCM style they do. Surely, good breathing, easy production and resonant vowels are helpful things for any singer to understatnd, but true Bel Canto style (florrid singing as written by Rossini, Donizetti and Bellini) must carry with it far more than that in order to be correctly executed. The inability to separate what is style from what is vocal production fuels the silly notion that singing an aria from “Lucia di Lammamoor” would somehow be a good stepping stone to singing “And I’m Telling You I’m Not Going” from “Dreamgirls”. Cheech!

Speaking out and speaking up to dispell such nonsensical notions ought to be a good thing, but it is often most unwelcome, and even controversial. Martin Luther King, whom we remembered yesterday, said something like “not speaking out is the beginning of death” and he knew whereof he spoke. We must remember Dr. King’s courage and steadfastness and know that, although singing CCM isn’t at all in the same league as an issue as is racial discrimination, it has its own kinds of arrogance and ignorance to confront.

The value of this blog, and of the chatroom, is that we have each other, and that we are not alone. Please know that this is a “battle” that is necessary and that each person, teaching wherever and however he or she may be, adds to the changes in teaching singing that will someday be standard behavior everywhere. The balance of the scale will tip when there are more of us. That this will happen is certain. Each of you contributes to that global shift. Don’t forget.

What does it mean to respect a piece of music? Does respect mean treating it the way one treats a person? Do the same kinds of values matter when one is in relationship to an artistic creation as to a human being?

A good deal of what would constitute respect is connected to knowledge. You have to have some kind of information before you can be respectful. Without it, you might be disrespectful and not even know it. That could be a problem. The knowledge would probably be some kind of context for the piece of music — where did it come from? Who wrote it? When? Why? What else was going on at the same time, both musically and in the world at large. What is known about the composer and/or lyricist? What is known about the style of music in which the piece is written, and the style as it was or is represented by other composers of the same era? What is known about the composer’s intentions, based upon how it was done originally, or anything that has been written about the piece?

Artistic license says that anything is possible, but we do have to get permission from a composer and author of a published piece of music before we change any of its written notes or words, unless the changes are very small. If the piece is changed so much as to become unrecognizable, it can be considered to have been destroyed. This isn’t artistic license, it is criminal, and can be prosecuted in a court of law by the copyright holders.

Therefore, when someone is arranging a song for a jazz artist, for example, the arrangement can be creative and unique but the arranger cannot re-write the song. Knowing how far to go is a judgment, usuallly made by someone wise enough to have been around the music world long enough to know by exposure what appropriate musical and artistic boundaries are acceptable.

Taking a song completely out of context can certainly constitute disrespect. Not liking certain styles of music but performing them anyway, is disrespectful. Squeezing certain songs to fit one’s own limited ability to sing is also an abuse. (That’s why taking a gospel song and singing it with an operatic or classical sound is repugnant. No matter how schooled the singer, any music is not “improved” by changing it’s character because the vocalist has only one way to sing it).

One of the most amazing attitudes to encounter amongst voice teachers is that of profound ignorance. Teachers of CCM who don’t even have the minimum amount of information about any style of CCM to know that they are being disrespectful to these styles abound. This only matters because the music deserves to be respected. We’re still a long way off from having this be the gold standard in terms of training and performance.

Over the holidays I got sick with a head cold (not unusual). I sang at the holiday concert I mentioned a while ago, with 90% voice, the Handel piece, “Let The Bright Seraphim” with trumpet and organ, as well as two other songs (one a capella). Although it was not one of my best performances (understandment), I received very complementary feedback from several people, so I think it was a decent, professional job in spite of my vocal problems. After that, I thought I was over the hump, on my way back to health, when I received surprising bad news and found myself instead with a developing chest cold. Not good. The coughing is very bad for my vocal folds. I can manage a head cold but it doesn’t take much coughing to give me laryngitis. So… I take cough syrup which suppresses the coughing well enough but makes me sleepy. I drink caffeinated tea to stay away, and this makes for a balancing act, and not a good one at that. After three days, just one day before I took my holiday break from teaching, at the end of the day, I had a really bad coughing attack and I went from functional to completely hoarse in about 5 minutes.

I knew immediately that my voice was “blown out” and that I was in trouble, as this has happened to me twice before, when I had bronchitis, and once before, when I was recovering from a normal cold. I thought I had either broken a blood vessel on one fold or that I had severe swelling. I cancelled teaching the next day and went to my throat specialist. He looked at my folds with a strange expression and it made me nervous. He has been my doctor for 20 years so I know his reactions.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

He said, “I think you have a dislocated arytenoid.” I was stunned.

For those of you reading this who do not know what that means, let me explain. The arytenoids are the moveable cartileges to which the vocal folds are attached and which assist in moving them apart so we can breath and together so we can make vocal sound. If one of them gets dislocated, the folds don’t move properly and the sound can be very bad (as mine was). This is about as serious an injury as one could have. I could see for myself, on the video monitor, that one fold wasn’t moving and that when the folds came together one fold seemed to be slipping under the other, rather than meeting together in the same plane. There is no remedy for this situation. Either Mother Nature moves the arytenoid back to its correct place or not. Sometimes surgery is done to help get better closure, but you can imagine that this doesn’t work in terms of producing the kind of quality necessary for a professional singer.

In truth, I saw my life flashing before me. I thought, “Well, wouldn’t this be an ignominius end to my life as a teacher of singing! I coughed myself out of a job and a life!” I ran through possible other things that I could do…..type (I go at about 100 words per minute), cook, clean, dance…..not a lot of options. My doctor suggested that I go to Dr. Peak Woo for a second opinion. As fate would have it, I was on my way there anyway, to deliver my holiday gifts to his family, as they are personal friends. In the cab I prayed. “OK, Lord, I don’t think I am supposed to have this karma, losing my voice. If there is anything you could do to fix me up, I would be very grateful.” I had been given a shot of prednesone, a steriod to reduce swelling. My doctor said that sometimes that allows the artyenoid to go back on its own. I kept my fingers crossed.

I arrived at Mt. Sinai about 20 minutes later in my Santa hat (which I had been wearing all week) and the receptionist looked at me very dubiously when I croaked to her that I was a personal friend of Dr. Woo’s. Fortunately, he greet me warmly and welcomed me into his office where I scratchily said that I had just been given a diagnosis of a dislocated arytenoid. “What?” he said. “Let me see.”

He palpated my throat in several places, asking as he did, “Does this hurt?”

“No.” “No.” “Uh-uh.”

“Sit down and wait,” he stated, so I did. Two hours later he examined me and I could again see for myself on the video monitor that both arytenoids were moving uniformly and that my vocal folds were swollen. I was quite surprised.

“You just have bad laryngitis. You have hot dog vocal folds. Go home, take the prednesone and be quiet.”

I was never so grateful to have a diagnosis of laryngitis in my entire life.

This was four days before Christmas. I couldn’t possibly be quiet over the holidays, I knew, as I can never keep my mouth shut under any circumstances, but I was very very careful. My voice came back slowly and by Christmas day I sounded almost normal, although I still felt weak and didn’t try to speak loudly. I absolutely could not sing.

I attempted to sing for the first time the day before New Year’s Eve. I knew it wouldn’t be pretty, but I had to try. This is where words don’t do any good. My voice was just awful. Sustained tones were impossible. The sound stuttered like an old car with a bad carburator. I had no volume, no vibrato, little control and a hole at both the break and the top. The middle was stuck. Even my husband said “Gee, sweetheart, your voice sounds bad.” He didn’t mean it as a criticism, but as a sign concern, that it was so far away from normal.

I wish I could tell you then I just did a few warm-ups and then all was fine. Fortunately for me, I have not only taken myself through this sorry situation three times, but I have walked countless others through it over the years. It is a very scary experience and I think that I would have been hysterical had it not been for my previous experiences. The first time it happened, I had to return to teaching while in rather bad shape, and teaching slowly coaxed my throat into its normal function. I couldn’t pay too much attention to my own troubles (just as well) and the constant quiet examples I sang throughout the day allowed my poor folds to heal themselves until I began to sound normal. It took more than three weeks for me to feel that I could sing vigorously, but I learned a lot in the process.

It was four days before I could do any kind of crescendo. In the meantime, every scale and exercise was “sticky”. The pitches were unstable, the top was a squeak, when it came out at all, the middle was not a middle but a hole, and everything made a lot of noise. I couldn’t practice for more than 15 minutes at a time, but I pushed through, as not to do so was not an option.

At some point my husband suggested that I write about this on this blog.

My husband asked, “How could anyone go through this alone? Wouldn’t they be frightened and worried? How would they know that this was a normal phase? Even the doctors might not know.”

I thought he was right. It is important to know that my voice came back. I can sing now with little problem, although I have lost all the “being in great shape” that I had before I got sick. I will get it back again as I start teaching next week, and then practicing full out, but I might not have been able to make that statement if I had let the way I sounded the first few times I tried to sing have a more significant impact than it did. I can’t help but wonder if that’s what happened to Julie Andrews that caused her to think she couldn’t sing after her surgery. Too quick a judgement caused by lack of experience. I will never know.

The point is, I am 57 years old. I am no spring chicken whose vocal folds just pop back into shape because they have nothing else better to do. They get there because I have a lifetime’s worth of keeping them healthy and because I understood how to guide myself back into a good place. Perhaps this knowledge isn’t so unique. Maybe other singers understand this, too. I don’t know. Perhaps the doctors like Peak Woo can tell them that the return of the singing voice takes time.

I just wanted all of you who read these pages to know that something as unspectacular as a cough could be the “end of everything” if not handled wisely, and that normal singing can and does lag behind the return of normal speech even in a veteran.

I am still grateful that things are OK now. I absolutely did have moments when I was practicing in those first few attempts, where I was worried that perhaps this time, it wouldn’t be OK. That’s the way the mind works, I suppose, trying to find the worst case scenario. I hope this event in my life might be a roadmap for you and for your students. If ever you find yourself or your students in a similar situation, be patient, “wait for the bus”, do the work, and trust that the results will show up. In the meantime, appreciate your voice when it is healthy, as really, we never know what could happen, do we?

As I see it, my job is to get someone to make a sound that he or she has never made, and therefore has no concept of. It’s my job to trick the person’s throat into some new behavior that has never occurred so she can say, “Gosh, I never made that sound before”. I consider that kind of comment a mark of success.

This does not involve the idea of remembering anything…..a common practice in teaching someone to sing. Make an [i] and then remember that feeling and make an [a]. That idea never helped me, I couldn’t really do it. It worked better for me to just bring my tongue up and forward in the [a] while I was singing the [a] and let go of the [i] when I wasn’t singing it any longer. If I can get a student’s tongue to be able to come up and forward, that’s helpful. Some people have trouble with that, so you have to work at it in stages. When it is finally an accomplishable task, this gesture alone is sufficient to affect the sung [a], so no “remembering” of anything else is necessary.

Register change, the primary adjustment in vocal quality that is available to humans, is a response, or a reaction. For instance, a light lyric soprano can’t just decide to sing in chest register if she doesn’t have one, or much of one. Chest register has to be cultivated, slowly, if it is going to become active, through various stimuli, such as the “fog horn” or the “Santa Clause” exercises. “Thinking” chest register would just be silly. You can’t think yourself into a sound, no matter how clearly you imagine it. (I can imagine singing C above high C, but I can’t sing it, and I never will). Singers must be guided to make sounds, in shapes and patterns that are different from their normal “default” patterns (usually based upon their speech), so they can discover these sounds, and the sensations attached to them, in order to gain awareness of both processes. Only then can the new sounds be replicated through practice until they become part of the individual’s permanent lexicon of vocal gestures.

The teacher’s job is to provoke the responses from the singer through exercises, used effectively. The singing student’s job is to attempt the exercises until they are done correctly and repeatedly so that the response can surface. Patience is required on both the part of the teacher and the student, as the throat and/or body doesn’t always respond immediately. Even if the stimulus is doing its job, the amount of time that it will take for it to create the desired result in the sound will depend upon the length of time the patterns being changed have been in place, and the amount of change that needs to take place between the situation at hand and the one being sought in the person’s singing behavior.

It’s fun to get someone to sing in a brand new way. It’s a thrill to watch someone’s face when they hear something they have never heard before. It’s also exciting to see if such sounds can be discovered along the way. It makes teaching an adventure, rather than a chore.

We all have all kinds of sound within us. Never stop looking for new ones, as you never know what you will find.

I was teaching for a long time — years — before it occurred to me that I was in a service profession. I knew I was a singing teacher but that was as far as I thought. When it finally dawned upon me that I was providing a service, I was somewhat surprised. “Imagine that,” I said to myself, “I am a business woman providing a service, not just an artist sharing her art”. Da Dum.

I then took it upon myself to investigate what “being of service” was about, as clearly it was part of my own spiritual goals to be of service somehow or other. I understood serving, as my first job (at 16) was as a “busgirl” in my uncle’s Italian restaurant, where I was “at the service” of the entire place: my uncle and his son, who ran the place; the bartenders, the waitresses, the kitchen staff, and the customers. I was the bottom of the heap (for minimum wage and no tips, thank you very much), and took orders from everyone. That was some learning curve! After that I had all sorts of other part and full time time jobs while still in school, all of them insignificant. After I got married I learned to take dictation and got a job as an “executive secretary” (that’s what we now call an “administrative assistant”). In all of these situations I had no instruction in how to be useful, I just did the best job I could and hoped I was succeeding. I admit that it was hard for me to draw a line from those jobs to teaching singing, as typing a financial report didn’t seem to relate much to teaching “Caro Mio Ben”, but I did understand that I wanted to help my students sing and also to help them find joy in music and in their own voices.

Slowly, after a lot of reading of various spiritually oriented books, and some considerable amount of reflection, I concluded that what I wanted to be most of all was useful. I wanted to be of practical, down-to-earth use to the people who came to me to learn how to sing. I wanted my instructions to be simple and clear. I wanted people to be able to grasp what I was talking about without feeling confused or stupid. I wanted singing to seem accessible and rewarding and not just something that was so special that only certain people could do it well.

As I realized over time, each person came to singing lessons for their own reasons, with their own ideas about singing and about his or her individual voice. Each person came with a history, both personal and vocal, and with various tendencies and abilities, limitations and talents. I began to see that I had to accept and work with all this as the ground or fabric into which I fit the training, or it didn’t work. Either I lost the student’s interest or I just lost the student. It became clear that the student’s goals had to become my goals for the student, unless I thought the goals were harmful, in which case I had to find a way to say that (didn’t happen often). I realized that I had to convey to the student that he or she was doing the teaching, and that I could only comment from the outside, offering suggestions that I thought might save time or effort. It came to me that sometimes the student was looking for something through singing that had little to do with singing.

Some people came hoping to find their voice in life. They wanted to be heard as people. They wanted to have something worth while to say and a way to say it.

Some people came looking for a path into their own heart. They wanted to learn how to fall in love with music and let that love heal them and open them.

Some people came searching for a way into their bodies. They were seeking a way to become one with the breath, and with sensations that were powerful and potent, so that they could feel more vividly alive.

Some people came to let go of a secret. These people were the most difficult yet the most compelling to teach. It was only if they stayed that this motivation showed up, and sometimes when it did, they left, as the realization was too overwhelming to be faced straight on. Perhaps it was also, in the beginning, because I was too young and inexperienced to create a safe place for the secret to be revealed.

Some people came because they had been told not to come. (Don’t sing. You sound awful!) They were rebelling against the restrictions that had been placed upon them in some way, and they wanted another human being to challenge them to let go of the bindings that they no longer wished to accept.

There were a million reasons while someone wanted to learn to sing, beyond wanting to learn to sing. In order to be of service, I discovered I had to find a way to honor all of these reasons, and use scales, exercises and songs as the tools to reach into each singer’s mind, heart and body.

Later, I also realized that I had to create a sense of “professionalism” because I wanted to honor my work and myself. I had heard and seen singing teachers opening mail during lessons, talking endlessly on the phone in a lesson while the student tried to keep singing. I had heard of teachers talking in lessons about other students whom were better than the one singing, for less than great reasons. I knew of singing teachers who took money from students whom they felt were untalented and boring, but the teachers needed the money so they “tolerated” the student anyway. I created a “Singing Student’s Bill of Rights” in my head (I will tell you what it is, but not here). I wanted to avoid all of these attitudes and behaviors and others of similar ilk, if at all possible.

As I got this worked out, and it took over a decade to do so, I realized that living in an atmosphere of “being of service” freed me of trying to prove anything. It allowed me to be vulnerable, spontaneous, and human — to stumble, to be stuck, to “not know” and to be a student of the entire process even while being the “person in charge”. It became clear that I was a guide, and that was all, but it was more than enough.

In all the years I have attended singing teacher events, conferences, seminars, courses, and gatherings, I have not ever seen or participated in even one on “Being of Service” or even “Being Effective in a Service Profession”. Things like “customer satisfaction”, “customer service”, “quality control”, “delivery of services” can and should apply to us as singing teachers, no matter how lofty our artistic lives may be. Running a successful private practice or school program involves just these things, even if at first glance they may seem irrelevant.

Since Somatic Voicework® The LoVetri Method is a body-based method of vocal training, with a service-based approach, was generated by me and therefore has inherent in it my point of view, I thought I should share these thoughts with you. I look forward to your comments.

In order to have standards, you have to have some kind of structure. You have to make up some guidelines and stick to them. Some people won’t like it, as they will balk at what they perceive to be restriction, others may find that the guidelines are too weak, and do not set a course that is stiff enough. If, however, there are no standards, no guidelines, no criteria at all, how does anyone make an assessment about what’s going on?

Singing teachers are not licensed. They are not monitored, they are not required to do or be anything special. Being a “professional singing teacher” is like being a professional ice cream taster, a nice job but who decides if you are any good? In a profession which has steadfastly refused for more than 200 years to organize or police its own practices in any significant manner, is it any wonder that there is so much chaos in the field? Under the guise of “the mystery of singing” so many looneys with ideas that came from places that Freud would have feared to tread, have plied their trade as “masters of singing” that is it a wonder, really, that the profession survived at all, or that any teacher of singing was ever taken seriously. I sometimes marvel that the really wonderful singers of our present time have learned to sing so well, given what a minefield learning to sing can easily be.

This week I encountered someone who was told by a teacher that she was singing in “a false voice”. Since the sound came from the woman’s throat, how could that be possible? Any sound you make is your sound, whether it sounds like your speaking voice or not. This comment goes into the Voice Teacher Jargon Phrasebook with other such pithy gems as “you are listening to yourself!!!”, “you must sing so that the sound goes beyond your cheekbones” and my all-time favorite, “spin the tone so it floats out of the back of your head”.

What if singing teachers actually agreed on some basics like: this is what chest register sounds like, this is what head register sounds like, this is what a bright vowel sounds like, this is what a dark vowel sounds like (sound familiar, my graduates?) These things can be heard and they are NOT arbitrary. What if we agreed that terminology ought to be based upon actual vocal function……would that be so bad?

And what if teachers actually had to take some kind of test to show that they knew enough about what is happening when someone sings that they could do something with that information to help the person? Seems like a good idea to me. So, why is there so much resistance to it? What’s the harm? (You know the answer…..that thing again…….FEAR).

So while an entire profession is willing to continue to bury its head so that no one will be “found out”, yet more students are lead down the garden path, thinking they are learning something, only to end up confused, lead off course, or worst of all, vocally damaged. This is supposed to be OK, but it is not. It will continue, however, until a large number of singing teachers has the courage to stand up and say stop, out loud, and in print. We have no one to blame but ourselves.

I can usually tell when I am listening to someone singing CCM who has had only classical training, as there are “telltale signs” in the singing. One of the most blatant is nasality. So many teachers think that making a nasal sound is an end in itself, a destination, and a stepping stone to belting. Wrong. Nasality is a disposal by-product (as William Vennard says) that helps firm up the laryngeal and pharyngeal musculature to make the voice more professional. Teachers who confuse nasality with brightness (ping, ring, point, focus) are doing their students a real disservice, as it makes them sound unnecessarily ugly and it makes it difficult for the student to change vocal qualities since nasality causes tenseness in the tongue and soft palate to be increased.

A bright sound is the result of chest register. (What? Isn’t brightness part of head register?) No, warmth and relaxation (yawn sigh) are part of head register and make the voice appealing and pleasant. Brightness or “sparkle” or whatever other of the many words you want to give this quality, brings out the high frequencies in the vocal tone (the “squillo” in Italian, or the “crying baby” here). It doesn’t make the voice sound nicer but it allows it to be heard easily. (We hear those baby cry frequencies around 3000 hz better than we hear the lower frequencies…..evolution, I suppose. Cavemom could always hear the baby crying, even when she was out with the hunters looking for dinner). If you sing with an active, full chest register quality, even when you go back up to your high notes, they will have more sparkle, regardless of whether or not that’s what you want. Try it and see for yourself. Chest register alone is enough to make the sound bright. To add nasality on top of that is overkill. Making a head register dominant sound nasal will cut down on the “open” feeling, camoflaging the “classical” quality, but it is just that…camoflage, not the real deal. It doesn’t substitute for chest register. Lack of clarity about the functions we are discussing here can cause a singer to be really confused.

AND, in a young singer, particularly a female, who grew up singing in mix, all sounds are some form of mix. What that means is that such a singer can sing a “heady-mix” and a “chesty-mix” but NOT a true isolated head tone or a true isolated chest tone. These young woman think they are in head when they are not. They confuse mix with head because it is the only configuration the throat can do. If classical training is put into such a system, the vowel sounds will never, ever sit in the right place and the resonance will never really be adequate to classical repertoire. Such students will manipulate the voice to try to create “forward” resonance, again by going toward nasality, and that just makes matters worse. If you don’t fix the imbalance before you do the material, you tie up the throat, confuse the singer, skew the singer’s perception of what she hears and feels and spend a lot of time “creating effects” instead of dealing with causes.

Nasality is useful, but it is important to understand what it does and does not accomplish and what it inhibits. Don’t get sucked into confusion about its functions.

Over the past several years I have encountered so many teachers who have had wonderful experiences learning to work with CCM and with Somatic Voicework. Each has a personal point of view and has incorporated my work into his or her own work in their own special manner. Since the point of my work is to give teachers tools, and not to create “Jeanie clones” I am encouraged by these developments and so hope that each person will give support and encouragement to all the others. To that end, I have asked those who are graduates of my course (and those who are doing this work on their own with none of my training) to write about their experiences. So far, only one person has done so. I am baffled by this. Why will no one put pen to paper? Surely it isn’t because there is nothing to write.

In our society, we validate things by writing about them and by putting them into the various media (TV, magazines, newspapers, radio, and internet). The written word carries with it a certain weight that nothing else matches. People, where are your articles? What are you afraid of? Why are you reluctant?

Each person matters. Each person’s experience matters. Each person’s opinion counts and adds to the opinion of others (especially in a democracy). If we are to make a change in teaching, we can only do so by stating that, and by making an effort to state it in a public place.

Be bold, folks. Step up to the plate. Get those ideas out of you head and on to a piece of paper (or monitor). NOW is the time.

I know that I never really thanked enough the people who taught me, past saying “thank you” at the end of a lesson. (That’s something certain students do but many do not). I wish now that I could go back and say to each person who was an influence on me as a singer and teacher “thank you for what you gave me — it was so incredible.” I would also like to be able to tell the people who hurt me, “thank you for teaching me what I don’t want to be like”. I guess what I am trying to do by writing this blog is to tell the people who were misguided “I wish I had something to thank you for”.

It’s great to see a student make progress, to have break-throughs, to be validated and empowered. It’s wonderful to hear her singing more joyfully, freely and with confidence. It is gratifying to know that someone has had a burden lessened, a load lifted, a struggle end, but it is even more wonderful when the person says “thank you, I couldn’t have done it without you”.

It is easier to teach a student who is grateful for the teaching because the gratitude implies that the student knows that they have been given a gift. It opens the heart to allow for even more giving. It is no fun to work with someone who regards you as the “hired help”….someone they have little regard for like the unfortunate cleaning woman who comes in to dust, vacuum and empty garbage for a fee. Yuk. I’ve had a few students like that (fortunately, very very few), and this attitude doesn’t sit well with me, and probably does not with anyone who is a teacher of anything.

If the student is never grateful, one can assume the student doesn’t recognize or acknowledge any progress that is being made, or value any changes taking place in her singing. Usually the student doesn’t take any responsibility for this either, as doing so would require some awareness that one has to be willing to be taught and to learn from that teaching. Responsibility implies that this is a two-way process. Some people don’t understand the concept of gratitude period. They don’t much learn about appreciation as a state of being. Too bad. It diminishes their lives and if they sing, their art as well.

I am grateful for all my students. I appreciate that they trust me and that they bring me their most precious possessions, their voices. I am grateful for all the challenges that are presented in lessons and for the opportunity to be of service to other human beings, helping them achieve their goals, dreams, aspirations or hopes. I am grateful for the opportunity to grow as a teacher and person, to examine myself and try to be better each day. I more and more appreciate everyone who has ever taught me anything, and hope to deepen my own ability to express gratitude and thanks as I continue to go forward in my life.