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The medical profession is bound by all kinds of legalities and protocol. Doctors have to be very careful in how they treat patients and how they record that treatment. They have to operate under the possiblity that anything could go wrong and that they might have to justify their treatments in a law suit, perhaps years after the fact of seeing the patient. They have to take care with what they say and how they say it and know what the medication they administer can do. There are so many restrictions, it’s amazing that doctors have room to function.

Often, they don’t spend a lot of time with patients. If they are busy, they need to see as many people as possible who need their care. It costs a lot to run a medical practice and you need patients to help pay the bills. Also, you want to help the most people you can, so seeing each person for less time would help you do that.

After a certain amount of years in practice, most doctors have seen the typical problems hundreds, maybe thousands of times. They dispense their care with integrity but they do not necessarily need to dwell upon their diagnoses for lengthy amounts of time. Occasionally, when something unusual shows up, or when the situation presented is complex, their attention and their interest might increase. It can be a challenge to address things that you don’t see every day.

So, in a difficult case, is it ethical to keep probing to get an answer to a patient’s problem by ordering test after test after test, even when the tests do not reveal anything definitive? Is it the best policy to tell the patient to get a second opinion or to undergo exploratory procedures which may be dangerous or even life threatening? Is it in the patient’s best interest to probe and poke until you find something that can be described, no matter what the cost in dollars and in discomfort, disruption and pain?

I wouldn’t presume to answer these questions as I do not know about medical ethics. I see that these issues are challenging and the medical profession has its own strict guidelines about what is and is not accepted protocol. From a moral point of view, there is perhaps leeway to discuss an individual doctor’s choice about how to best serve the patient, and certainly there is descretion in what kinds of treatments to offer, depending on the expertise and experience of any individual expert. Again, the overarching protocol of the profession itself helps shape these choices.

If you attempt to look at teaching singing as if it might relate to the medical profession (or any other licensed profession) seeking guidelines, you will find the principles do not align easily.  All of the three American singing teaching organizations (NATS, NYSTA, AATS) have a “Code of Ethics” but no one pays any attention to them and no one ever gets called out for a breach of ethics, so these codes are effectively useless. There are no boards to enforce ethics, no watchdog groups to advise or judge the behavior of teachers. In fact, there isn’t one single thing about teaching singing that could relate to the principles that guide doctors (or almost any other profession).

There are no “consumer rights organizations” for students of singing at a college or in a private practice, either. There is no one to say “Be careful, this teacher has been sanctioned for harming a student’s voice”. There are no groups to do the sanctioning. There is no one to tell you what to expect in singing lessons. The only way to know is to take some and see what happens when you do.

There are no discussions at national conferences about what kind of behavior on the part of a teacher of singing is considered ethical. There are no panels about what should be manitory in singing lessons. There are no clear cut ideas about what during the process of studying singing would be useful or good.

I find this, still, after all these years, utterly amazing.

I recently saw a master class in which a famous classical teacher was working with a young mezzo soprano. This man has doctoral degree and a university position.

It was clear that he wanted the student to make a specific sound in a specific way. She was expected to get this sound and was doing her best to get there. He was pulling her along very energetically.

To me, however, it seemed like he had her on a road that had no turns, swerves, upgrades or valleys. It seemed like the destination was already on the map and that he was taking her there because he takes all his students to this same base of operations. It struck me that the sound he wanted wasn’t the sound that matched up with her very pleasant speaking voice.

I asked him, “Do you have in your mind beforehand an expectation of what your student should sound like?” His reply was “Yes. Absolutely. I consider it my responsibility.”

Oh.

I don’t have that attitude at all. I have the attitude that my students’ voices should operate from a functionally free place, in balance, going towards personal expression and uniqueness, communicaton and authenticity. Typically it takes not less than two years of consistent hard work by me and the student to begin to get there. This is in concert with experts like Vennard and Brown and has strong roots in classical vocal pedagogy from the earliest pedagogues as well. Never, at any point, do I decide ahead of time how a person “should” sound. We discover as time passes how they do sound and sometimes the changes that emerge are dramatic, dynamic, exciting and very surprising. I wouldn’t dare to presume that I “knew what was best” for the student’s voice before the singer even had a change to find out what the instrument wants to do or can do.

An open-ended system, in which there is no set goal, flies in the face of Western thinking. It is process-oriented rather than goal oriented and supposes the result will emerge in good time if you have as an intention a desire for it to do so. If the intention is to “see what the voice will do” in any given set of circumstances, that is often enough. Given enough time and diligent work, the singer’s heart will lead her towards the music she wants to sing and the ability to sing it, without sacrificing anything along the way.

For a singing teacher, having in mind the requisite requirements of musical styles is important, but that is different than having in mind how the student “should” sound. If you are in a college program that makes you train students to do art songs and arias in a juried context you really are under the gun to get a student to sing “professionally” as quickly as possible, particularly  if all you have is four years or perhaps six. This might necessitate “shaping” the voice to go where you think it probably ought to go as an educated guess. It might be so that most of the time these educated guesses are good and useful, but in the cases where they are not, the teacher runs the risk of “making” a young vocalist fit into a box that she might never leave. Inside, if she feels that her real voice is struggling to get out of that box, she could end up very depressed and unhappy, even if, “on the outside” she sounds completely acceptable and musically viable in her repertoire.

Asking questions, probing, exploring, playing, experimenting and waiting for growth is vital when working with someone who has a clear idea that he or she wants to be a professional singer. Trying things, technically, that stretch both the throat and the person, allows the singing psyche to grow and develop alongside the vocal mechanism, and gives the emerging artist time to evolve. While it may occasionally be possible to coax a prodigy into a high level performance mode in very little time, the vast majority of people who sing are not prodigies. Even very talented people need time and patience to  allow the full measure of their vocal artistry to flower.

“I Know What’s Best” is a very patriarchal attitude (if you are old enough, you will remember the 50s TV show, “Father Knows Best” which pointed out every week that he did not). We are not mini-gods knowing what’s best for everyone else. “Let’s See What Happens” is a much less domineering attitude and one that gives the student room to stop and look around during the training process.

Who you teach, where you teach, what you teach and how you view teaching is important. It makes up your world experience, your point of view about all things vocal and how you interact with it.

If you have only taught kids, or if you have only taught college students or if you only see adult beginners and non-professionals as students, you might draw certain conclusions about “singers” or “singing” based on that population. If you do not sing yourself, but teach some form of singing, what you see and hear, how you interpret those things and what you do with what you deduce will be filtered through that specific framework.

Many of the people who are at the top of the profession have only one kind of student as their primary clientele. If you are a college professor and you do not teach professional singers with lengthy careers, what you conclude about “singers” might be very different than what you would observe if all you taught was adult professionals at a place like the Met or on Broadway.

And, if you believe your teaching is representative of the expectations and standards of the profession but you don’t know any high level working singers to check on that belief, how do you know if you are correct in your assumption, particularly if you work alone?

It’s not unusual for a human being to (sometimes unconsciously) assume he or she is the center of the world. Particularly if you are an artist, this is a common reality. The artistic ego has to be big enough to withstand a huge amount of criticism, competition and condemnation not just at the beginning of a career but throughout it. Most average people have three, four, maybe five job interviews in a career and a few dozen “evaluations” in a job. A performer can have five auditions in only one day and hundreds or even thousands of “evaluations” (of all kinds) in a career. It takes a lot of self-esteem to stand up to that constant onslaught of having to prove or change oneself over and over.

An egocentric person will assume that she knows everything and that she is always right “because”. Teachers who assume they know everything because they have life experience or training are harboring a deadly attitude. It’s fine to believe in yourself, in fact, it’s necessary, and you have to have a solid center in your approach to teaching if you are to be effective, but you can never allow yourself to assume you are incapable of improvement, of being better, of making adjustments and changes or of being ineffective or just flat out wrong. You can never allow yourself to be the center of the universe.

If you teach in a small studio in your home in a small town, your population of students will be quite different than someone who teaches in a rented studio in a large city with many different kinds of singers, of all ages, most of whom are professionals. If you have a job at a university or conservatory you can have any kind of student from novice to very talented, but you will still be teaching primarily young people. You may not see a student for more than a semester or you may have the same student for several years. You may be able to choose repertoire for the student, but you might have requirements to deal with as well. If you have a student who is required to take your course you may have someone to teach who would rather be somewhere else, but if you are a private teacher you can be fairly certain the student wants to be there because if they do not they can leave and never return. There are so many differences. There are so many influences.

Each of these states of being of teaching singing has an impact on who we are as teachers and how we operate with our students. It shapes us and we react to that shaping. The students inform not just the teacher but the teaching and it is crucial for every teacher to know this and deal with it as long as the teaching happens.

As a profession, we never speak about any of these things. They are completely invisible. Why should that be so? I think it’s because people would have to ask these kinds of questions just to get the conversation started.

Our expectations, whether we are in the city or the country, are fed by our experiences and our experiences are colored by our expectations and our past history. They feed each other. If we don’t look at the underlying attitudes, beliefs, thoughts, viewpoints and assumptions we have, both individually and collectively, it’s nearly impossible to make objective assessment of how effective we are. Whether you are a city mouse or a country mouse makes a difference in your teaching and you need to know that and take responsibility for it as you teach.

Non-classical styles. That term existed since the get-go until 2000 when I called for its end. The new term I suggested, Contemporary Commercial Music, was meant to call all of those styles together under one umbrella. They all come from the USA and have their roots in the common person. Classical music came from European aristocracy and nobility and from the church. Huge difference. Most of the CCM styles are about 100 to 125 years old or less. Classical music goes back to the 16th century or earlier, depending on when you start counting.

When we speak of “commercial theater” we are speaking of professional level theaters (as determined by the unions), that do professional shows, on Broadway and elsewhere. Producers, directors, music directors and others in show business (the business of doing shows) understand that they work in commercial theater. They consider themselves to be part of an artistic business. That has always been true.

Classical music can be “commercial”, too. Certainly when the first Three Tenors came along, they were very commercially successful. Opera on TV is a commercial success. It can certainly be that it makes money in the right circumstances. I suppose you could call it Commercial Classical Music. How’s that for making things even more contentious???

There are far fewer jobs for singers in classical music. The jobs for vocalists are to be found in the CCM styles…..many more of them. The educational system unfortunately turns out a new crop of classical singers every year. There are more graduates of classical vocal programs than there are jobs for even one graduating class.

What happens to all those young people with degrees in “applied voice”? Do they all get cast in operas or concerts? Do they all get to sing professionally as classical singers? I don’t have statistics, but my guess is that very few of them actually end up with careers as classical singers such that they can earn a decent living from singing. I imagine quite a few of them go back to school to get higher degrees or to enter another, perhaps related field, like teaching, conducting, composing or arranging.

We don’t have control over creating singing jobs. The marketplace isn’t really interested in promoting anything other than rock, pop, country and maybe R&B or gospel. We don’t really have major folk singers like Dylan or Baez coming down the pike anymore and we don’t have major vocalists in other fields like jazz becoming “household names” (although some few people do make it to a certain level of fame in the general public’s awareness). I don’t know if it’s lack of music education in the public schools (a lot of it is gone completely and what’s left is diminished in quantity and quality), or if it just lack of exposure (there are no sources on mainstream TV of other styles). It is certainly true that at a grass roots level there are just no paying jobs for musicians who are not well known. Wedding gigs, corporate gigs, maybe playing at the local bar, do pay, sometimes well, but even getting these kinds of jobs isn’t always easy. In the big cities there is a lot of competition. In the rural areas, there isn’t a lot of interest.

Looking at the divergence of the music business over the last century, CCM singers were part of the changing cultural landscape of the USA and of the world. Classical singing changed but by comparison, those changes were much smaller and less obvious. La Boheme sounds pretty much the same now as it did when it was first performed. The productions may change but what Puccini wrote does not.

The world has gone on. I would say that most of the classical vocal programs at the college level are operating out of the old model, expecting that singing will continue to remain the same as it has. The few universities that are addressing CCM styles understand that this isn’t true, but they have not yet let go of their need to prove their “validity” by hanging on to at least some vestige of classical training, even though no one really knows what classical training is or should be, anyway. In any case, the discrepancy between the number of jobs available anywhere in the marketplace for singers and the number of students who are prepared in college to go out and get them is enormous. That this is ignored by everyone is very interesting.

If anyone ever creates a school (not a university) that lets people get all the skills they need to become successful singers without having to bother taking other things they don’t need, that person could get very wealthy. Some day it might happen, and wouldn’t that shake things up!

What happens if you spend thousands of dollars and many years or decades training your voice only to discover that the training process you have invested in doesn’t work? What do you do?

Can you “untrain” yourself? (Yes, many have). Do you blame your teachers? (Maybe, it depends). Do you find yet another teacher or school? (Maybe). Do you train yourself? Do you stop singing? What do you do?

No one can tell you what to do if you find yourself in such circumstances but it certainly would be possible to feel totally disgusted about such a state of affairs. It could make you feel depressed, angry, despairing, frustrated, afraid, lost and confused or any number of other things.

Along the way it’s possible to go down a path that looked good initially but somehow went wrong when you weren’t paying attention. It can be that you had problems with your voice that were undiagnosed as functional issues at the beginning and that they got worse as the training got more intense. It can be that you developed problems by training to do things that were vocally too difficult too soon. It could be that you were asked to pay attention to things that were not important until they became dominant in your singing with negative results. There are all sorts of possibilities of how things can go wrong. Worse, you could be blamed for all these issues and you could believe those accusations.

As I have written here many times, there are no rules about singing, about training for singing, about performance, about vocal ability- no rules anywhere. There are expectations in each section of the profession (out in the world) and sometimes a completely different set of expectations in academia. Academia can be very removed from real world music marketplace values and parameters. It takes a long time to know what you don’t know, what the profession knows, how it works, where to look for what you need, and how to assess what you are “purchasing” in terms of vocal education. One of the reasons I write this blog is to help make more information about the profession available to people who seek it.

Voice science is very important. It should prevent people from going too far afield in terms of what they teach, but unfortunately, it is no protection. I know some teachers of singing who are very big names in the world of voice science/vocal pedagogy who do not themselves sing well, and do not know how to make the science apply to themselves in a way that serves their singing well. This does not bode well for their students. So, sadly, science doesn’t automatically help us. You have to know how to apply the principles of vocal function to singing such that it helps you sound good and feel good. It’s not automatic.

Singing with your thyroid cartilage tilted and your vocal folds stiff might give you a good sound, if you knew how to tilt your TC and stiffen your vocal folds. Me? I don’t know how to do that. I just know how to sing a firm head dominant tone. It might help you to sing with your larynx in a certain place (down, up, held, or position #2, or #3) and good for you if it does. Me? I don’t know where to put my larynx, I just know if the sound I’m singing is the sound I want and the sound that feels good and belongs in the music I’m singing. You might like singing with your arms hanging limply at your sides like wet spaghetti. Me? I move my arms, my body, and anything else that allows me to be honestly expressive. I don’t think about it, I just do what seems natural.

If you had training for singing that did not serve you well, regardless of what it was or where it took place, and you want to keep singing, dump the old habits and behaviors and give your throat a chance to find itself. If you aren’t happy with your singing for any reason at all, go out and find a way to recapture your happiness. It’s worth the search. If you don’t know what’s good or bad, right or wrong, and you feel lost, know that there is a community of people that will be there supporting you as you fix that. It’s the community of teachers and singers who use Somatic Voicework™. We welcome you. We know how you feel. Let go of that old, not so good training and find what makes you happy. It exists. All you have to do is reach out.

Sometimes I wonder if the people involved in running the professional organizations think about the good of the profession over the long haul. It has only recently occurred to me that they do not. They don’t know how.

Thirty years ago I did a presentation at a meeting of The New York Singing Teachers’ Association in which I said that voice science was going to become very important in the profession and that all singing teachers would need to learn basic voice science to be relevant in the 21st Century. Many of the older teachers in the room simply laughed at me, seeing me as being young and foolish. The other people who were closer in age to me were skeptical. Several said they hated voice science and would rather avoid it even if it were useful.

I also said that the profession was going to be forced to deal with music theater and other styles back when there was still only classical training at a college level. I said that it was going to be impossible to ignore our own styles of CCM because economics would be such that the schools would have to address them in order to keep their halls full.

Along the way, people made fun of my studies of voice science and the time I spent with voice scientists, especially since I wasn’t teaching primarily classical students. I didn’t care.

Now I preach about functional training. I say that the profession is going to have to grapple with the fact that voice training is about physical training and that not understanding how we make sound in various styles is going to make teachers look like dinosaurs. These days I say that we are finally going to accept that training has not to do with repertoire before it has to do with coordination of the physical process of making a sung sound. “Caro Mio Ben” and “An Die Musik” not withstanding as great songs, we don’t need foreign language art songs to teach you how to sing “Out Tonight” from Rent.

I don’t believe that in 100 years we are going to be teaching “classical” voice at colleges. I don’t believe that we will be seeing jazz students learning Italian art songs to “prove” they can sing correctly. I do believe that we will be seeing teachers of singing who teach correct function applied to various styles of singing and that they will know how to adjust for each individual student, singer or situation based on solid objective information.

I won’t live to see this (unless I come back in another body that wants to sing……..not sure about that) but I know we aren’t going to go backwards. If, for making these statements, and taking the actions that I have over the decades, that means I am to still be a punching bag of the frustrated, the foolish, the unknowing, the disconnected, the disenfranchised, and the disgruntled, so be it. I’m not the only one who has taken blows. Robert Edwin has been beaten up just like me, and other colleagues as well. We know what we know.

Commercial Theater, at least in the big cities of the USA, operates like a business because it is one. The idea that art should be done because it’s art does exist but only those who are either extremely rich or altruistic can support art that loses money. The rest of the world is looking for art that makes money. That doesn’t mean it is less artistic. That was always true, it probably will always be true, at least as long as we live in a capitalist society. The artists who care about the quality of their work but achieve  success often have the greatest influence, sometimes not just over their own work but in the world at large. Many creative people, artists all, have used their success to help the world politically or in a humanitarian manner.

Arguing about whether or not belting is harmful is like arguing about whether or not MacDonald’s double cheeseburgers are harmful. It is like arguing about whether or not you should be able to drink a 32 once Coke because it’s there and cheap or maybe just the same amount of water. What seems obvious to the people who work in the music business is that people belt. They have always belted. Many of them do just fine belting. They don’t sing art songs to stay healthy. The idea that they should do so would strike them as being laughable, even if the head of some voice department at some big university argued otherwise.

The discussions which are for the good of the profession are much bigger than that. They are about where we need to go now and in the future as a group. No one is asking questions that are large enough to steer the ship through uncharted waters……except a few “outside the box” folks.

If you had a magic wand, and could do something that would ultimately be for the good of the profession, what would it be? Why? What would happen if you got your wish? I have already asked and answered that question for myself. Now it’s your turn.

“Open it up in the back, dear. Spread the bones in the back of your head.”

“Spin the tone down from the top. Don’t grip your jaw.”

“Let the sound release into your eyebrows more. Lift it into the forehead.”

“Support the tone from the groin. Go down in order to go up.”

“Keep the laryxn down.”

“Stop swallowing the tone.”

“Place the center of the pitch into the tone before you sing it.”

“Don’t drag so much weight into the top.”

“Activate the diaphragm on the inhalation.”

“Open the tone into the cranium as you go higher.”

“Sing as if the sound were wider than your cheekbones.”

“Don’t let the support go at any time. Be sure to keep the same amount of support on the soft high notes.”

“Keep the tone forward but stay out of your nose.”

“Make the tone brighter but don’t make it harsh.”

“Sound sadder.”
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How do you do any of these things? What can they possibly mean in terms of execution?
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Translated, they more or less boil down to:

Allow yourself to smile broadly and easily as you inhale, and let your face stay that way while you sing.

Come in as softly as you can on that note and let both your jaw and your tongue relax as much as possible when you enter.

Think of a happy feeling that lets your face muscles move up and out, and keeping that feeling, sing as comfortably as you can while maintaining it.

Use your lower abs more vigorously as you continue to hold the note and go higher. Let the jaw hang freely.

Think of a soft, cooing tone, relax your jaw and tongue, come in gently and allow yourself to sing gently on these low pitches. Think of being really relaxed and comfortable in your throat and mouth.

Let your tongue relax forward and out, smile, take some pressure off your throat, and exhale gently while you sing. Try to make the sound “nasty” without pushing anything.

Listen to the note before you come in and relax as you start the tone easily.

Take all pressure off your throat, allow the tongue to move, change your face, leave your mouth open only a moderate amount and back off as you go higher.

Allow your belly muscles to move out and forward as you inhale.

Keep your vowel sound as simple and undistorted as possible, allow the tongue, all the way to the back of the throat, to sit comfortably so everything feels easy.

Smile while you sing that vowel.

Keep your ribs stable during the exhalation and go up as softly as you can while staying comfortable.

Allow yourself to sing in a nasty sound but without squeezing in your throat or pushing for volume.

Keep the sound clear and smile a little bit while you sing. Keep your throat comfortable while you sing. Avoid squeezing anything.

Think of something that makes you feel sad. Sing, thinking about how you feel.
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If I were the terminology police, I would give out tickets to any teacher who uses the first phrases (in quotes) in a lesson.

We live in a profession that makes up words every day. Each teacher creates his or her own vocabulary. The words make sense to that teacher and (hopefully) to his or her students but not to another soul. We allow people to teach using jargon that makes no sense to the outside world. We do not have any punishment for those who charge a great deal of money and don’t really know what happens when something is wrong with a vocal sound. They can’t explain things accurately even when they do know because they do not have objective vocabularity to do so.

People who watch anything as fans have lots of opinions. Football, hockey, fashion design, architecture, movies, TV, theater, music, singing. If you find a fan, you will find an opinion, sometimes several opinions, sometimes very strong opinions.

If you have done the activity that you are watching, you might surmise how easy or difficult it is to do, but if you have only “dabbled” at it, you might underestimate the amount of energy it takes to be a master. By definition, a master is someone who has complete control over an activity. It can be assumed that the mastery was achieved through a great deal of effort, dedication, perserverence, study, trial and error and courage.

Opera fans are known to be very avid in their tastes.  It’s quite easy for one of them to say that Callas didn’t have a very pretty voice or that Sutherland couldn’t be understood. A fan of old rock, could say that the Beatles were no big deal and that the Stones were overrated. Anyone who has a favorite designer, composer, or movie star, can easily find fault with others that are not to their liking. In America, we have careers based on finding things to criticize. A critic, professionally, is expected by definition to criticize. We don’t call them “unbiased evaluators” do we?

People who aren’t very good at something don’t always know that. It is not unusual for someone to formulate an opinion of his ability based entirely on what he, and only he, thinks. I had a student who thought of herself as being quite skilled and expressive both as a pianist and as a vocalist but the experts with whom she worked (me for voice training and others for performance  training) found her to be exactly the opposite. When the topic was approached as gently and respectfully as possible by the consultants (separately), the student simply brushed off the comments and paid no attention. Eventually, she stopped her studies, something her instructors did not lament, never addressing any of what the people she had consulted had tried to broach. She either assumed they were all wrong, that they weren’t really experts after all and never considered in any way that there was something in those messages that she really needed to hear and acknowledge. Unfortunately, she teaches in both disciplines and I can only cringe to think how her lack of awareness affects her own students.

All of us see through our own lens. It is colored by past experiences, emotional patterns, psychological attitudes and intellectual understanding. Most people don’t know or recognize their own prejudices. It takes a very open person to see the biggest picture.

If someone is a great singer and you are only so-so, if someone is a successful artist and you have not been able to gain recognition, if someone is a spokesperson for a new organization and you are holding up a banner for the institutions that are old and fading, you could find yourself becoming an armchair critic, and perhaps even one who is very strongly opinionated. If someone comes up with an idea that you wish you had thought of first, or if someone gets acknowledgment for accomplishing something that you had hoped to accomplish but didn’t, it might make you quite angry, envious, jealous and vengeful. It would depend on what kind of character you had and how objectively you viewed your accomplishments in light of those by others.

Remember, no one is an island. No one accomplishes things alone. That it takes a village is true. The bigger the village, the faster and better the transformation. One is a very lonely number, indeed. If you are critical of someone or something, and you are alone or nearly alone, that criticism says more about you than what you criticize.

We live in a time when all things are in a state of flux. Some people can see the brave new world and some people are frightened by it. Some people see the unity of life and some people see only themselves and their own opinions. Some people understand that all of us are frail and human, and some people think they are invincible and perfect. Some people will give another person a break, or a lot of breaks, and others will turn their back from the outset.

The proverb he who lives in a glass house shouldn’t throw stones is a good one. If you are an armchair critic, be careful who you criticize and why. Be careful of what you say. Your house is more see-through than you know.

Those of you who follow this blog regularly understand that I see voice as an aspect of spirituality. You know that I see the totality of being human as being connected to having a voice, being heard in your world, having your opinion count, speaking out and speaking up for your point of view, and raising your voice in all manner of human expression.

I value human sound, animal sound, natural sound. I value the sound of birds, cats, dogs, cayotes, sheep, whales, ocean waves, trees swaying in the breeze, thunder booms, and hard rainfall. I value crying, laughing, shouting and whispering. I value giggles, baby gurgles, hilarious laughter and the sound of little children playing. In fact, I appreciate sound as a true blessing of being alive.

If you have normal hearing you are the same as most other human beings. If you have a normal larynx, that is also true. Nearly everyone has two ears and a larynx with two vocal folds. If we are sound makers, coming in with a breath or a cry and going out with a rattle and a sigh, we are part of humanity. In this, everything and everyone is the same. Universally, if we are alive, sound accompanies us throughout our life journey.

It is also true, however, that each voice is as unique as a fingerprint. Each voice has its own acoustic fingerprint of formant frequencies. Each sound spectrum is ours and ours alone. You might sound something like another person but the machinery that analyzes voices will tell you that the small differences are there, even between identical twins. Forensic science can help identify the voice of one individual from another in order to help solve a case. In this, everything is different, everyone is different.

It is also true that all music is music. And, in fact, if you are familiar with the works of people like John Cage and some of his contemporaries, the line between that which is music and that which is not can be very arbitrary and blurred. Cage once did an entire concert that had no sound at all. To him, all sound and all silence was music.

So, where are the boundaries?

The boundaries are where we set them. Different people have different ideas but within each style there is some kind of consensus or there wouldn’t be a recognizable style. I know jazz when I hear it and I don’t confuse it with metal rock. I know a country singer when I hear one but I can distinguish her from someone singing gospel or blues. I can certainly hear the difference between a pop diva and a traditional Broadway star. I know what roots or folk music sounds like and I know that it isn’t the same as a song by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein.

Yes, of course, there is all kinds of overlap and many of today’s styles do not fit snugly into just one style. There are so many influences on music today, and things change so rapidly, that a style remaining unchanged is nearly impossible. Still, there are recognizable if subtle characteristics that need to be present or the style just “doesn’t sound right” to those who are experts in it. There isn’t anything worse than an opera singer doing a rock song in her “opera voice”.

Why it is that so many people who deal with singing cannot take this in, I don’t know. But they are out there. Unfortunately.

These three terms, “legit”, “belt”, and “mix” are used as normal parlance on Broadway and on the West End in London. They were terms created by the marketplace. If you audition for a Broadway show, you must understand these terms and the sounds they represent. If you do not, you won’t get a job.

If you think that singing all music in your “classical sound” is appropriate, you are living in a world that has nothing to do with the music business. Most of the people on Broadway, in jazz, in R&B, in gospel, in country or folk music do not know or care about “vocal technique” and many of them never have a single lesson in their entire lives until and unless they have a vocal problem. This has been true since the early 1900s. You can go back to the early movie musicals and find Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy, both classically trained singers, and compare them to Joe E. Brown, Al Jolson, and the young Ethel Merman. If you hear all of their sounds as being “the same”, you need to get someone with educated ears to help you listen.

If you do not know that classical music has its roots in Europe in either the church or in the halls of the aristocrary and royalty, you should. If you do not know that most of the music indigenous to the USA (separate from the music of the original native Americans, who have their own musical traditions) then you should. The origins of the two overarching genres are totally different.

The reasons that all styles in CCM are grouped together is because of their common roots in the average person, not in the sophisticated, the educated, and the elite. In fact, Cole Porter was probably one of the first people of “upper class” status who had a significant and lasting impact on theater music and he was heavily influenced by the many immigrant composers whose families came here in the great influx of the late 1800s and early 1900s. Composers like Gershwin and Berlin had their compositional roots in the music of eastern Europe and that music was influenced by other cultures going back for generations.

The idea that all singing should be regarded as being the same is not only not grounded in the real world, it is detrimental to those who would train singers to get a job in any CCM style. Contrary to the idea that all musical training at a college level is part of a “liberal arts education” making the student a more well rounded human being, functional training has no such goals. In an applied degree program, if you are not training students to get jobs, what are you doing? Making them better at appreciating music? If you bring in casting agents and directors from Broadway and you do showcases for your graduates and you are not doing voice training geared at having a viable career, what are you doing? The confusion isn’t in the music business, because, truly, when you stand up to audition no one cares where you went to school, or even IF you went to school, they care how you sing the song. If you don’t know how to do what is expected in the audition, you won’t get the job. Period. If you are singing for a jazz combo and you can’t easily sit in and jam, you won’t be asked back up. If you are making a demo of country music and you don’t know how country music sounds, and you sing in your best English pronunciation, you won’t get a record deal.

The list of young singers who came to me to learn “CCM styles” after graduating from a college where they could not belt or belt/mix is very long. Why should this be so?

If any of this had to do with exclusively with one person, one approach, one philosophy, one kind of
training, that would be so revolutionary it would attract attention world over. Seriously, it would be nothing less than a miracle. The music is so diverse and it is necessary to know so much about each style to do it comfortably and authentically, that it would take lifetimes to be equally good at everything.

I admit to having absolutely no patience for the arguments of those who are “classically trained” who think they know more than the people doing the hiring.