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There are 35 muscles in the tongue. The larynx is suspended from some of them. That means that the tongue and the larynx are intimately connected. The jaw, also, has a relationship to the tongue and the larynx. You might think of them as a sandwich. Jaw on top, tongue in the middle, larynx at the bottom. (I don’t know. It’s what came to mind). The swallowing muscles, which function thousands of times a day on their own, have to be taught to remain in abeyance while singing. Keeping the throat open continuously is a very weird thing to do deliberately. Singng sustained long passages where one doesn’t swallow is the equivalent of doing a slow sustained arabesque…quite out of the ordinary, although lots of people learn to do both, OVER TIME. If you are a classical singer who has ever sung such passages you might have experienced that when you are done it takes a few moments for the swallowing response to come back.

The swallowing muscles constrict the side walls of the throat, allowing the larynx to raise and the epilglottis to flap over and cover the larynx so that food or saliva can move down the esophagus. They work to prevent anything caught in the folds to be expelled violently threw coughing (you cannot override this response). In order for these muscles to do their job they have to be free to move. Holding them still is a way to restrict their movement, so too much of that isn’t good. Keeping the vibrato out of a system that has one is also a way to hold the muscles still. Early music, barber shop, and jazz, all use deliberately straight tone and if the singer happens to have a natural vibrato, these styles ask the singer to “supress” it. OVER TIME, this can make free movement of the entire vocal system diffiicult.

If we go back to the tongue, the at-rest position of the back of the tongue (the part we don’t really feel) determines a lot. It affects the position of the larynx in the throat, and the amount of “tilt” in the thyroid cartilage, and hence, the pull on the vocal folds. Pressure on the back of the tongue also inhibits the soft palate from lifting, as the muscles of the soft palate wrap around in the back of the mouth starting underneath the tongue. Classical singers talk about “spinning” soft tones and “floating” them (ah, those “voice teacher jargon” words). This is only possible when the tongue base is released from the swallowing muscles and is actually free to adjust itself in the back of the mouth. Easier said than done. Singing a high note softly isn’t difficult if the muscles are loose enough to do this, to let go. BUT, singing loud asks the opposite…..that the musculature be “engaged” (activated) such that the larynx isn’t bouncing around. The laryngeal musculature has to help, as do the muscles of the jaw, mouth and tongue, and there has to be a good deal of air in the lungs and pressure on that air, for the loud sounds to be sung well, and not shouted. Therefore, these are opposite behaviors and it takes a lot of work to coordinate both ends of the physiologic scale such that all the muscles can make all responses, including the vocal folds. Most people are better at one thing that the other. Big voices sometimes have trouble with soft tones and flexibility. Smaller, light voices can fly like the wind and sing in hushed tones but wear out when constant volume is required. Fussing with the balance of these skills is required for all good singers, no matter what kind of music they want to do. It is a task that is tedious, and sometimes a pain in the neck (not in the throat!).

I have developed the ability to feel the muscles of the back of my tongue and mouth move them more or less independently. That sounds crazy, I know. I would be willing to have someone test me with either more electrodes or through X-ray photography, but I doubt that will happen. I have only this to back up my statement. The first time I had a fibre optic tube put down my nasal passages, I discovered that I could move things around in my throat by looking at the video monitor. I attracted a crowd at the Voice Foundation Symposium (where this happened in the early 80s). It seems that whatever I was asked to do, I could do. What I thought I was doing, I was doing, and it was clear that others saw this as well. Later, when I participated in more research, I repeated this many times.

I believe that we all have the ability to develop this type of responsiveness. Most of my students end up having very accute perceptions of what’s going on “in there”. This is the same thing that happens in bio-feedback. People learn to control body reactions through the feedback loop of what they see and hear on the “machine”. (Bio-feedback training is used to control high blood pressure and heart rate, and other conditions). It takes time, but it isn’t all that difficult.

I know from experience, both as a singer and as a teacher, that very small adjustments can make an enormous difference in the sound. It is possible to change the shape and position of the entire tongue, and of the other intrinsic muscles, and to change them deliberately. Learning to do this produces authentic stylistic changes, not imitation or manipulation. I don’t mind nit-picking with experienced professionals about getting these adjustments to show up (through changing the registration and the vowels). It’s the way to move from excellent to sublime.

A woman used to advertise in Back Stage with an ad that read: “If you can’t sing, no one can teach you. If you can sing, you don’t need lessons. If you are somewhere in between, I can make you a singer.”

This ad always made me laugh, then sigh. She wasn’t alone in those beliefs. There are other ideas about singing along the same lines like, “kids don’t need lessons, cause kids just sing naturally” (wrong). “Some people just don’t have a good ear” and the old favorite, “if you can sing like I do, then you’re great. If not, you have no talent”.

Put these alongside the ones like “if you study classically you can sing everything” and “all singing is the same” (that one really gets me), and you have quite a stew. Is it any wonder that singing training is a jumble?

Let’s say that it would be better to put things in a different light.

The LARYNX can or it can’t.

The larynx, and the vocal folds within the larynx, is the boss of the system. It is a scientific fact that the vocal folds control the airflow, and NOT the other way around, even though every singer in the world has been taught that the air controls the sound. If the vocal folds don’t do what vocal folds do easily, efficiently, correctly and continuously, no amount of breath support, resonance adjustment, “placement”, or any other maneuver is going to make up for that.

Anyone who works with injured vocal folds, or ones recently recovered from injury, in a singer, finds out soon enough that the folds decide what kind of a sound the person is going to produce. All the other things that affect the sound are important but they won’t make up for the folds themselves. Singing teachers and singers, as well as anyone else who works with the voice professionally, need to understand that, as not to comprehend this is to confuse the forest for the trees.

That’s why, as long as you treat the symptom as the cause, you are doomed to failure. If you don’t understand that the person is singing flat because the folds aren’t able to properly adjust, because the larynx is somehow stuck, you will think the singer “isn’t listening to the pitch”, has a “bad” ear, or that she isn’t using enough “breath support”. If you don’t understand that a persistent register “break” is caused by lack of flexibility in the folds and in the laryngeal musculature, and not by poor “breath support” (only) or lack of “forward resonance”, you will never get anywhere. If someone is singing with an unsteady tone, and that person is a relatively decent singer, and the person cannot get the tone to be steady no matter what they do, something is wrong INSIDE. If the voice is hoarse, rough, or raspy, no amount of “nasal resonance” or “forward placement” or abdominal strength is going to make that hoarseness go away all by itself.

The larynx is the source. THE SOURCE. It is the Godfather. All the other ingredients that go into voiced sound are the CAPOS (sorry, my grandfather was born in Sicily). The lungs are the CAPO di tutti CAPI, but they are not the Godfather….remember you can live without making sound, so the lungs cannot override the vocal folds and insist that sound come out on their own.

What direct influence do we have over the vocal folds, over the larynx? NONE. It’s nice if you think “my larynx is down” but you cannot make that happen on purpose, and if you do, you will not sing well. It works the same if you think “my larynx is up” (just as incorrect). What we can do, very deliberately, is make a specific kind of sound. We can learn to repeat that sound consistently. We can label it. If we are lucky, we will be able to replicate it with more and more accuracy, and also to vary it with greater subtlety. That’s it. We should be paying a lot of attention to sound for its own sake, but what most singers are told is “don’t listen to yourself” or “you are listening to yourself” (as a negative judgement). Without the ability to hear yourself, how can you possibly learn to control what you are doing? Deaf people don’t sing, right?

So, remember what we can and cannot do and don’t confuse them. Remember what happens indirectly, as a response, and what we do to cause those responses is MAKE CERTAIN TYPES OF SOUNDS. All else follows. Cause first, effect second. Don’t lose that, ever!

ARROGANT — I have been called arrogant. I don’t like that accusation, but I suppose it could be true. Certainly I do my best NOT to be arrogant, but I am pretty definite about my opinions and not very willing to change my mind about most of them, at least in terms of singing teachers and politics!

The most common occurance of this accusation is when I assert that classical singing training is not “one size fits all”. That costs me (and also my colleagues who think similarly) the most. Still, I find this such an odd label.

Here am I, singing decently at 57+, both classical and CCM, including belt songs and Handel, Mozart and Motown. Teaching hours and hours every day, singers in all kinds of styles from classical (yes, classical), music theater (on Broadway and not), jazz, folk, rock, gospel/R&B, and working with singers who have injured vocal folds, with children (professional and not), with people who have been recommended by my speech pathologist or medical colleagues, and with teachers of all ages and backgrounds. Here am I, who have had my vocal folds wired with electrodes, right straight through holes made in the outside of my neck, for the sake of science, who have been scoped and studied by all manner of doctors, and who have made myself my own guinea pig, trying out every single exercise before I ever gave it to a student, to make sure that it was safe to do. (I never ask anyone to make a sound I would not myself make, and make repeatedly, for any reason. )

This gives me enormous confidence, certainty, and courage, because I have been there and done that over and over. I know how it feels, both good and bad, and I have (in the past) trashed my voice a few times in exploring things. When I speak, I base what I say on more than 35 years of teaching (that’s 185,00 continuous hours of listening to people sing just in lessons, not counting recordings and concerts, or listening to myself). I have had plenty of time to see what helps people consistently and what doesn’t, what kinds of things work with what people and in what circumstances, and what don’t. No, it isn’t ever a guarantee, or a promise, and it isn’t always possible to ABSOLUTELY KNOW, but vocal problems do have some “typical” qualitities, and after a while, you see what they are and how they develop. Often, now, I can tell what kind of problem someone is dealing with and where the problem will show up, just by listening carefully to someone’s spoken description of the problems they have with their singing.

Is this arrogance or experience? Is this arrogance or knowledge? Is this arrogance or self-confidence? Should I make believe I don’t know what I know just to make myself look humble? Shouldn’t I say what I have experienced so that others who have not had the chance to garner the same experience might at least have the opportunity to consider the efficacy of what I am suggesting? (Not that they have to accept what I say, only try it out to see what happens when they do). In fact, isn’t this my moral obligation?

And, when the person accusing me of being arrogant hasn’t ever sung, or has only sung classical music, and may, in fact, not have been in a public performance for years, and maybe wasn’t all that great as a classical singer in the first place, and maybe hasn’t ever read even one voice science article about CCM, let alone done research, and hasn’t traveled the world listening to a wide variety of vocal music styles, and doesn’t like those styles, and isn’t capable of making any of the sounds of any kind of music except classsical……..who is such a person to call me, or anyone like me, arrogant?

When someone speaks with authority based upon long years of experience, study, investigation, practice, observation, experimentation, documentation, validation, and results produced, it is bound to be frightening to someone who does not have that same kind of background. And, if such a person says “you need to improve what you are doing, as it is not adequate to meet the needs of the situation at hand” I suppose it can be seen as an arrogant statement — as a threat. BUT, perhaps it is just an urgent plea, like when someone who is standing at the top of a tall building watching a big Tsunami approaching the shore is saying to someone on the beach, “I can see what’s coming and I am telling you, you have to change your position”. Such a statement would not be one of arrogance but rather an urgent plea and a warning to take care.

That’s me. I know that the music world is going to keep changing and that all styles of music are going to continue to influence each other. I know that voices will continue to be placed under great stress and that composers will continue to write things for the voice that take it where it did not go in Handel’s or Puccini’s music, or in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s music, or even in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s music. I know that vocal instruction has to be geared to function, and to style, and that is going to be more necessary in the future than even it is now. If saying this out loud, to whomever will listen, like the folks reading this blog, makes me arrogant, then I stand guilty as accused. I will be sorry, when I leave this earth, that this was a label I acquired, as I really do strive to see myself as just another ordinary person in every area of my life, but if it makes the process of getting accurate and excellent vocal training one tiny bit easier for young singers, then it will have been worth it.

Human beings are capable of believing some amazing things. I couldn’t begin to list the ideas that have been taken up by millions of people that are, at best, silly, and at worst, dangerous.

Singing teachers, then, are no worse off than a lot of other groups of folks. They are no less blind, pig-headed, and stuck in their thinking than any other collection of individuals. I write about them, of course, because I am part of this group, and I get to see and deal with their attitudes on an almost daily basis.

It seems to me that many singing teachers don’t know and maybe never knew that there is a difference between a “good voice” and “good singing” and between “having a good voice” and “being an artist”. Even if you stick to classical music, you can go to Maria Callas, whose instrument became flawed at an early age, as someone who didn’t sound great, but was an amazing artist. In CCM, there are dozens of people who have had major careers with awful voices or not great voices. These days, it is as if the music business seeks out people with no special vocal quality, deliberately.

What’s worse, the teachers, who are supposed to be the experts about what constitutes “good singing” often don’t know what that is either. They think that good singing is whatever they like. (How’s that as a fair basis for evaluation?) That means that the people teaching opera sometimes don’t know what good opera singing is, or what an “operatic voice” is. I know that sounds ridiculous, but I am talking here from personal experience. (I couldn’t possibly make this stuff up). A teacher I knew once told me that Leontyne Price “couldn’t sing”. (??????) Another one told me that Fredericka von Stade was “boring” (!!!!!!!) Give me a break! I would have understood either of these people saying “I don’t care for this artist’s voice or style” but to make these comments is to demonstrate enormous ignorance, not wisdom. I could only quake thinking of their students.

The people with ideas like this are sometimes in positions of great importance…..they are making rules about audition and course requirements, choosing winners of competitions, and choosing who gets work. It’s scary to think of how little fundamental agreement exists in teaching singing over even the smallest criteria, yet teachers of singing act as if we all had the same ideas about all sorts of things. Voice science has helped some in this regard, but now there are a lot of teachers who know a little science and think that’s all they need to know. We are all familiar with the adage “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing” and this couldn’t be more true than in the case of singing teachers. They throw around words like “larynx” and “vocal folds” with little connection to anything more than whatever they imagine these body parts to be in their own minds.

I read an article recently written by someone who had taken a course in introductory voice science that contained every buzz word in the course. Anyone reading it with some modicum of knowledge garnered immediately that the writer barely understood how to discuss simple vocal function, but she surely knew that if she used all the big, fancy words she would impress the folks who had never seen them before, including the editor of the publication where the article appeared.

Singing teachers who believe that classical singing is a “one size fits all” training will continue to lump all CCM voices into the same category (awful or acceptable). Since most of them wouldn’t know a “good” belt sound from a “bad” belt sound, and have to rely totally on the singers’ own perception of what works, analyzing further what is happening is pointless. Sending such people out to teach (happens every day) is a sad and sorry state of affairs, and saying so isn’t meant to be an inflammatory statement, just something truthful. The teachers of singing who find such sounds awful would love for the sounds, and the styles in the music business that generate them, to just go away and die. The ones who have found them acceptable, but won’t personally sing them, will continue to hope that what they think and what they teach are somehow in the ballpark (and the students are on their own with that). Those of us who do make the sounds, who understand what we are doing when we make them, who understand how to explain that to another person to help them make them, who know what constitutes doing them in a healthy and appropriate manner, and who can make other kinds of sounds as well, will have to just keep on keeping on with the crusade. There’s no harm in hoping that we can have a universe as we want it to be.

Tonight I had the great pleasure of attending a rehearsal for a show I am in called “Broadway Soul”, which will be done on Monday evening, November 13th, as a benefit for the Amas Theater and its related functions. The creator of the evening is the same man I did shows with between 1975 and 1978, and I haven’t performed anything with professionals since my last show with him in 1978. It was fun and rewarding to attend this evening’s rehearsal of gospel, rock, blues, and soul music, all of which we learned by ear pretty much on the spot, for the show two days from now. It was great to be with four people who were with me in that last performance (three of whom I haven’t seen since then) and a whole bunch of others, some of whom were born well after 1978.

I am singing in every vocal quality, I go from G below middle C to a sustained high C#. We are also doing some simple choreography or movement in some songs, all of which I picked up on the spot.

Why is this significant? Why should anyone who is reading this care?

Because I am living proof that you don’t have to sing only one kind of sound to be healthy, to be viable, to be in shape. Because whatever “chops” I have, have been maintained by teaching, not by performing. Because the other people who are singing with me are also in great shape, and some of the gospel singers who are wailing away have been doing so for 40 years and sound absolutely terrific.

I expect to do a performance of Handel’s “Let The Bright Seraphim” with baroque trumpet and organ in December. I will have about four weeks to get it ready and I expect that will be more than enough time. I sang it successfully this past May.

Doesn’t it seem worthwhile to look at what I have done vocally? Not because I am this great singer, or because I have the best voice on earth (hardly), not because I have a different kind of vocal folds than other human beings, or more talent and ability than most professionals. No, it is because the process of learning to sing in a variety of styles, and of staying in shape has to do with respecting what works in the body. No one “owns” that knowledge, no one can possess it or take it away. It is learnable and it is teachable. And THAT is why paying attention to what has happened with me, and to me, all these years is important.

If you let the voice go where it wants with awareness, if you allow yourself to breathe, if you keep your connection to your heart and to music, only good can come from that. We are not limited, and neither are our voices.

I am thrilled to be singing again with these wonderful artists. It catapulted me right back to where I was all those years ago, as if in a time warp. The only thing piercing that bubble was my awareness that my voice is better and my mind is clearer now, at 57, than it was when I was 29.

Is college vocal training supposed to be development of Cultural Sophistication or is it Occupational Training? Is it both?

I think most schools are confused about the direction of their vocal instruction courses.

If I were spending $250,000 for a four year college education, (that’s what it costs here), I would want to be able to get a job after I got out…right after I got out! Of course, I think that cultural awareness, as well as many other wonderful things that are supposed to be part of a “liberal arts” education are very important. We do need to know about the great composers and the times in which they lived, just as we need to know about the great writers, painters, sculptors, architects, and leaders of civilization, in order to be well-rounded individuals.

BUT

Students can learn about composers in a class on music literature, or vocal literature. The do not need to sing “O Del Mio Dolce Ardor” to become good vocalists. Vocal training based on function develops the voice to its fullest capacities, and is aimed at giving the vocalist the widest range of choices for his or her singing. That this has been associated with learning Italian, German, French and English art songs is happenstance. It doesn’t have to stay that way, but this idea is slow to die as an ingredient in training programs at schools and universities as well as in private studios. There is no benefit in singing “Caro Mio Ben” versus “Edelweiss” to a beginning singer, one works as well as the other in terms of application of technique to music, provided that the teacher knows how to make and teach the appropriate sounds necessary in either song.

Going back to the schools, aren’t “mock auditions” occupational training? Isn’t it also true that inviting agents in to see productions is about “getting a job”? Preparation for singers to go to job interviews (called auditions) for jobs (parts, roles, concerts and recordings) ought to be based upon a knowledge of what the job particulars will be. (Job description). If you apply for a position at a corporation as Chief Accountant, there would be specific skills that you would be expected to have. Why wouldn’t that also apply to a job in the music industry?

If the music business/industry (show business) knows what it wants, and it usually does, wouldn’t it be useful to have any vocal training program align with those requirements? Isn’t that, in fact, what the schools are doing when they hire “professionals” with life experience as performers to be faculty?

Why, then, don’t more schools have curriculum that reflect the standards and practices of the 2006 music industry, rather than those of 17th and 18th century European society’s musical tastes and expectations? How is it that certain “Doctors of Musical Arts” who teach “music theater” don’t even know how it sounds on Broadway right now? (Some do, a lot don’t). Why is there such an emphasis on “songs before 1968, 69, 70” in college auditions? What happened after that? It was that Rock music came to theater. Hmmmmmm.

In classical music there is tremendous emphasis on respecting the composer’s wishes. No one would think to “re-write” Puccini by changing the notes, rhythms, words or markings of “La Boheme”. Why shouldn’t the same be true of CCM? Shouldn’t the wishes of the composer be important? If a show was written to be sung by rock, pop, gospel, jazz or country vocalists, shouldn’t the performers in a student production be able to meet those requirements? Why is it considered unreasonable to have young people make those sounds? Because the teachers can’t make them and/or teach them, and because the teachers don’t like those vocal qualities, or those styles of music, and because the teachers are afraid of the sounds, thinking they are dangerous (which you would likely conclude if you couldn’t make them). Conversely, if the students are making those sounds, shouldn’t the people in charge (music directors, coaches, conductors, teachers) understand when the students are making them in a way that is incorrect (unhealthy)? Isn’t it, at the least, unfair, and at the worst, unethical, to send the students on stage to sing “Seussical” with no clue as to how they are doing, other than asking the student, “Do you feel OK?” Not good. Not good at all.

No one needs to sing to stay alive. In fact, no one needs to speak. You could take a vow of silence (people do) and get along just fine. You certainly do not need to express music to communicate with others.

So, why sing? Why bother? Ask anyone who does….you will get all kinds of responses.

I sing because I love to sing. As a child, it was the most joyful thing I could do. Singing was a very wonderful experience. Later, when I understood it better, I would have ranked it as a “high experience”. Right alongside eating vanilla ice cream or kissing my sweetie.

As a child, whenever I sang, I got noticed. This was a mixed blessing. Sometimes the attention was nice and sometimes it made me uncomfortable. I didn’t understand why what came out of my mouth was any different, or better, than what came out of other kids’ mouths, but the world seemed to think it was. It wasn’t like I tried to make myself sound a certain way.

I found out quickly that some people said they couldn’t sing, and even amongst those who could sing, as in “carry a tune”, that not everyone had a “good voice”. I could have opted to keep my mouth shut, I suppose, but it would have been almost impossible, as I sang for myself. My life at home being less than happy, singing was one way to cheer myself up and to get away from everything else. In high school, the experience of getting a leading role in a local musical at 17 changed my life. Actually, it gave me a life, as up until then, I really didn’t have one that made me want to continue living in it. Singing was a miracle, it was a path, it gave me a reason to get up in the morning, and that was something I really needed. If I could have measured my love for singing, I would have had to find a very large scale.

Little did I know that my singing was going to be a lifelong journey. Learning about singing has been the biggest passion of my life and continues to inspire, enchant and enrich my life every day. With each person and each lesson, I learn something valuable about singing and about life.

The saddest thing to encounter is someone who used to sing but gave up after taking singing lessons unsuccessfully. What an awful legacy! The second saddest thing is to encounter someone who has lost the ability to sing for unknown reasons and can’t seem to get it back. The third saddest thing is to meet someone who has never sung because they were told to “be quiet” due to “sounding bad”. Such a terrible and unncessary fate! Fortunately, if anyone in any of these circumstances would be willing, the situations can be remedied with guidance from a knowledgeable authority.

I think the best question to ask is “Why not sing?” Since it is a fact that everyone can sing, even if they have little ability to do so at the outset, why not? Singing is a healthy, free, available, entertaining, fascinating thing to do. It’s a great hobby, and an interesting profession, with lots of avenues to explore. We all agree that singing is different than speaking, but the agreement stops there. What if we sang in our day-to-day conversation instead of spoke? What if singing was so rare that it was difficult to find anyone who could do it? Our entire world would be different, wouldn’t it?

No one knows why we can sing, where singing came from or what it’s for. All cultures have singing in them somewhere, so it is a universal thing, something very human. Remember that the next time you hear someone singing. Remember it when you hear yourself humming in the kitchen or singing along with the radio in the car. Be grateful. You are experiencing something inexplicable and powerful, something unique and ordinary. Enjoy!

What, exactly, is training for the voice anyway? We all learn to speak by listening to our parents or caregivers by the time we are about two. Our genes determine our anatomy — how long the vocal tract is and how wide it can be, the length and thickness of the vocal folds, the size of the jaw, and mouth, etc. Some people grow up in circumstances where the voice is used energetically and some don’t. Some families are musical, some are expressive, some are performers — it varies so much. Why does anyone need training anyway?

It depends. If we speak about training in the sense that it coaxes the voice to go beyond its own natural tendencies, and prepares it to stand up to doing things no one’s voice was ever meant to do (like singing 8 times a week in a Broadway show), then we are discussing an atheletic development. It seems that music has always taken the voice somewhat beyond speech, although exactly how much has varied widely. Theatrical speech, however, also used to demand a lot from the voice that wasn’t exactly the same as conversation at dinner, but much of that kind of skill is disappearing, since virtually all professional (and a lot of amateur) theater is now amplified.

Based upon science, loud sounds and high notes need more air to be produced. The only way to get more air is to take a bigger (deeper) breath. If the air pressure inside the lungs isn’t sufficient, it needs to be pressurized so that it can be high enough to get the job done. Seems pretty simple, then, to figure out that a person needs to find a simple, easy and quick way to breathe in a lot of air and use it judiciously while sound is being made. The two parts of the body that logically would be involved with this process are the lungs and the belly. One could include the chest/ribs and the entire abdominal area, but the further away we go from those areas, the less direct the activity becomes. It also stands to reason that if the chest cavity is collapsed due to poor posture, not much air is going to go into the lungs. So posture figures significantly into the inhalation process.

If we decide that making continuous sounds is unusual (speech starts and stops), and if we also conclude that making continuous sounds primarily on vowels on specific pitches and volumes is also unusual, (that’s what vocal music does) maybe even very unusual, then we would have some good reasons why we would need to do something to acclimatize the voice to executing these tasks comfortably. If you just kept making such sounds, over and over, at increasingly loud volumes, you would be training the voice, and indirectly the breathing. That, in fact, is what self-taught singers do and in a lot of cases it works very well.

The problems come, then, when the above doesn’t work well, doesn’t work fast enough, or actually causes a set of problems. For instance, one could just lose one’s voice doing the above, and keep losing it over and over, unless you figured out something about what you were doing to cause the problem. Some folks can do that, and some can’t. It isn’t so much that there is just one way to train the voice, or that one person has found “the” answer, it is that the body (voice and breath) seem to like a certain way of working and not like other ways. Understanding how to take the voice beyond its natural boundaries and tendencies in a way that isn’t going to cause problems isn’t effective when it is just a random process of trial and error. In the case of quite a few singing teachers that is exactly what it turns out to be. Figuring out that you really cannot force the body to do anything that is not in its best interests, because sooner or later it won’t hold up, is just a question of common sense.

A great deal is known about exercise physiology. We know that straining the neck happens frequently while doing stomach “crunches”. Many atheletic trainers have modified stomach exercises in order to avoid this negative side effect. A good singing teacher is going to do the same thing with vocal exercises, so that the student will understand how to go beyond the normal demands of speech and simple singing, and into vigorous vocal expression without strain.

Because that is so, many people can teach singing effectively, with or without an organized method. For those who haven’t had time to figure out a variety of approaches and test them in order to see what kind of results they produce, learning about effective methods that someone else has developed and tested over time seems reasonable. As long as the exercises and attitudes work, as long as they are useful, as long as they get to the goals of the singer and do so without violence or harm, to the body or mind, the proof is in the doing.

Training that prepares the voice for any extended behavior is good. Training that is directed towards helping the singer do whatever kind of style they choose is good. Training that takes the voice into only one kind of sound or one way to breathe, is not.

Do you think that babies are afraid to cry really loud, lest they lose their voices? Perhaps infants do get laryngitis, but I have read also that vigorous crying is necessary for lung development and for strengthening of the muscles of the throat and mouth. Do you think that children on a playground generally worry about the sounds they make? It is true that children can and do injure their voices, but many children just play, making various kinds of noises and sounds, and end up just fine.

At what point does really using the voice fully and freely begin to engender fear? When does the fear of making some kinds of sound override the spontaneity and joy of just letting sound go?

Think about this. If you want to sound like an opera singer you must not let yourself do anything to disturb your set-up. (If you are a pop singer, you don’t have a set-up available that will let you authentically sound like an opera singer, so that’s not an issue.) If you are a popera singer (a la Bocelli or Sarah Brightman), you can’t really sing classical or pop music full out. Isn’t all of this odd? Some sounds are better than others because of how we have accepted them and labeled them culturally.

Fear isn’t a good basis for any art. Art implies that there is creativity at the bottom of the process and that anything could or can happen. Fear of being spontaneous or creative seems to be anti-both. On the other hand, since being afraid occurs frequently on the road to being a vocal master, it is something useful to look at, explore, investigate and absolutely face. The fear is within, it is real, it is a block, and it is a useful teacher.

What frightens you most as a singer? When? Why? What have you done about it?

Tonight I watched a few kid belters on YouTube. Some of them were 9, 10 and 11 years old. The singing was impressive, but pretty pressured, and to me, anyway, troublesome. I would love to know what happens to these kids over time……I mean years. I was also troubled by the fact that these little girls were singing love songs. Should a 9-year-old be singing “I’m Telling You You’re Not Going”?

Our society likes loud, pushy singing, not just in kids, but in everyone. We really don’t think as much of the silvery angelic girls voices as we do of the kids who can belt to the rafters. I want to know what happens to the kid belters when they grow up. Do they turn into Whitney Houston? Look at her voice and her life……….

Belting isn’t automatically damaging, but it is stressful in what it asks for from the throat if not done well. For the same reason that the old traditions didn’t ask a child to make an adult operatic sound, we need to ask if letting a young woman belt without any limit at all is good for the voice over time. Andrea McArdle survived really well, but she sang more than she screamed.

I don’t have an answer here, just questions. There is so much we don’t know.

In a perfect world children would always look, act and sing like children, not like little adults. I think maybe this statement dates me, but that’s how I feel. How about you?