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Is Ella Fitzgerald less of an artist than Bryn Terfel? Is Tony Bennett less of an artist than Thomas Hampson? Is Bernadette Peters less of an artist than Natalie Dessay? Is country music less of an art form than a recital? Is gospel music less of an art form than opera? Is rock and roll less of an art form than oratorio?

Are those who sing jazz, pop, rock, folk, gospel, country and rap lesser artists than vocalists who sing opera, oratorio, art song, operetta, orchestral solos, or chamber music?

Who gets to decide that they are lesser, if they are? Who gets to define what is an artist and what is artistic? Who says this music is better than that? This artist is more of an artist than that one?

I dare you to answer these questions.

But people do answer them, sometimes definitively.  Sadly they invest great passion in their arguments. The question is, why?

This argument is a waste of time. Is a sunset better than a sunrise? Is the Atlantic better than the Pacific? Is skiiing better than ice skating?

The people in this world who have made life more interesting, more vital, more exciting, more inspiration, more fun, more MORE, are all artists. Master furniture makers, special chefs, fantastic craftspeople……all kinds of people are creative, courageous artists. Is Grandma Moses less valuable than a present moment painter? Is Billy Joel less valuable to society than Murry Perahia? No. Over and over, the answer is no.

I don’t want to have anything to do with a world that says Elvis was cheap entertainment pandering to the masses and Luciano Pavarotti was an artist because he sang opera. Luciano sang with all kinds of people. He was no classical music snob. Elvis was amazing. Luciano was also amazing. Placido Domingo recorded with John Denver. Both of them are amazing. You cannot possibly compare them.

The idea that being “commercial” is somehow a put down is exceptionally narrow minded and reflects a parochial point of view about both art and life. The world decides who it wants to put in its various “halls of fame”, not academicians, not educators, not critics, not writers and certainly not single individuals. Recognizing what the world has defined is a sign of broad awareness of things as they are, not as how any particular individual thinks they should be. There is a big difference.

Contemporary — goes all the way back to the beginning of the 20th century. Stravinsky was born in the 19th century but he died in the 70s. Copland was born in 1900 and died in the 90s. Both of these men are still thought of as contemporary composers, because we contrast them with composers born (and working) in the 18th, 17th and 16th centuries. In fact, modern music, going back to the 50s, is still very much a part of the present moment contemporary scene, alongside compositions being written at this very moment. A rigid definition of this word makes no sense, either. It is meant only to say that the music we hear now that is commercially based (but absolutely artistic) is not from the 19th century or earlier.

Contemporary Commercial Music: music theater (old and new), jazz, rock, pop, gospel, R&B, country, rap, alternative, and all the derivitives in between, perhaps also including world music ain’t classical folks. It is important, significant, deserving, worthy, important, valuable, and should be respected for the art that it is by everyone. There is no such thing as music that is “more artistic”.

It seems that classically trained tenors and female belters have a lot in common vocally. Many people recognize the similarity of production.

If we discuss function and can agree that the classical tenor is taking some version of his “chest register” or “chest voice” up above the break/passaggio, we could also agree that the female belter does the same thing. Of course, if you don’t “believe” in registers, or all you know about singing is based only on “breath support” and “placement” or “formant tuning” and “resonance strategies,” that discussion could be very difficult.

If, however, you listen to the sound as sound, it is unmistakable that the “edge”, the “ring” or the “carrying power” of both tenors and belters, male and female, is found similarly in both groups.

Generally, the male larynx is larger than that of a female and the vocal folds are thicker and longer. Often the neck is larger or longer as well. That’s the main reason their typical range is about an octave lower than the female. You could have a small framed man (Sonny Bono) singing with a low voiced female (Cher) in the same octave. Her voice was actually lower than his.

The intensity factor is a combination of volume and acoustic efficiency. Somehow or other the vocal tract has to get either smaller or tighter or both, in order to amplify the “highs” where the ring can be found (2800 – 3200 Hz). How that happens, indirectly of course, is up to the individual singer but when it happens it only works if the singer is managing that behavior with as little physical effort in the throat as possible.

It’s interesting to me that many of the men who teach belting are classical tenors and think they understand belting because of that one fact. As a tenor, the bigger the instrument the more “belty” it will sound. If you have a spinto or dramatic tenor, he could come close to belting just by changing his vowels to be more “spread” or “bright”. If he is singing without “holding the larynx down” (that won’t work!) and has decent high notes above A440, he could sound OK enough, especially in a Broadway context.

If, however, you have as a student a light lyric soprano who wants to belt in a rock band and has never developed her “chest register” or speaking voice quality, and has a sweet, pretty instrument, having a hefty tenor for a teacher could be very problematic. This situation is ripe for causing the student to push, get tired and generally misconstrue what she hears as example from her teacher and unless he is very experienced and knowledgable, she could end up as a terrible belter or having severe vocal problems. (And she will probably get blamed for this if it happens.)

Another bumpy situation would be for the same tenor to have a lyric baritone of a young age also seeking to belt, perhaps while also singing classically in a college situation. The gradation of tension on the instrument between a young baritone and a more mature tenor can be significant but the flexibility of the young vocalist’s instrument might allow him to push into the higher notes, again trying to imitate his teacher. A skilled and experienced teacher who can belt or not, as needed, would be the best guide.

What happens with a female who is a good belter but is also comfortable in a classical sound when she has to teach a classically-oriented young tenor, again, perhaps in a college situation. The vocal function might be very similar in the female teacher’s belt, but learning to hear the sound from outside as a student, as a young man, could be quite difficult to do. Students don’t learn to sort out overall sound quality from vocal function for quite some time. They tend to imitate the sound of the teacher (which is why I insist that teachers need to sing decently in order to be good role models) for quite some time.

I think the easiest set up for teaching is voice to voice, at least in beginners. In other words, a lyric coloratura is probably best taught by another lyric coloratura. I think a singer who wants to learn to belt is best taught by someone who has also learned to belt. I think someone with a “big” voice is best off teaching someone else with a “big” voice, preferably within the same SATB category. Of course, this is not always possible and even if it does occur there is no guarantee that good results will emerge based on these factors alone.

AND

The emotional character of belting has to be considered if it is to be a valid musical expression for the singer. We have lost the context of belting due to the stylistic influences in the marketplace.

We associate chest register at a loud volume with authority, power, strength, and passion. It can also be associated with anger, with masculinity, with forcefulness and with pain. We associate head register with all opposite qualities: submission, gentleness, delicacy, and intimacy. We associate it with comfort, purity, sweetness and clarity and with femininity and being soothed. A drill sergeant’s voice barks out marching orders in a loud chesty “hup, two, three, four”. If he did that in a voice like Tiny Tim or Marilyn Monroe, we would laugh. The reverse is true: If Marilyn Monroe shimmied up to a guy and purred out, “hello, big fellow,” in her best drill sergeant rasp and we would also laugh.

Whenever we hear a belt sound it should be associated with excitement, passion, exuberance, declaration, passion, intensity, and expansiveness. If you can’t tell what the emotion in the sound is, and it is loud for loud’s sake, the usefulness of the belt sound is left unharnessed, and the singer has to work twice as hard to be authentic while performing. Music that is written to utilize belting as an emotional expression of something that makes sense works better and is easier to sing and to hear. Finding the sound as function first and then hooking it up to music that suits it is a package. In order to do what’s best for both the music and the singer, all this needs to be in the toolbox.

Things change. Resisting change is futile. You can’t keep something static for very long, as sooner or later entropy sets in. Even the sun is going to die one day in the distant future.

Nevertheless, human beings seems to like the comfort of the known and the constant. We speak admirably about loyalty and dedication and consistency and continuity. We like to know that what was will still be, particularly if we like it.

The rebellious souls of the world have ever chaffed against the status quo, seeking to shake things up and create something that has never been. The traditionalists maintain the through line to the past, keeping things from falling apart, blowing up and (heaven forbid) disappearing altogether.

There are a few folks who respect the past and honor the new at the same time. I would say John Williams is one of those people. His is not considered a “serious” composer by the likes of Mr. Gilbert of the NY Phil or Mr. Dudamel of the LA Phil, and I doubt these organizations give concerts of his works. He does, however, write in a style that is instantly recognizable as his own and sounds pretty “classical”(at least to me). Just because the music has traditional melodic and harmonic roots doesn’t mean there isn’t anything about it that’s new or good. It’s expressive, it’s memorable and it appeals to a broad audience. Most current classical composers would give their eye teeth to have those things said about their work, but since they don’t write for a broad audience, they write for the elite and their peers, those comments are few and far between.

You can find artists like this in dance, in theater, and in fine arts. Thomas Kinkade is someone who was enormously successful. His paintings are also denigrated by the “art world” but lots of people bought them, paying a good deal of money for the originals. He laughed all the way to the bank. There are others in this niche.

It has always been so that some artists and some artistic work was aimed at educated people with sophisticated tastes, many of whom were also wealthy. Not all of the people who supported the arts over the centuries were or are educated about the arts specifically. In fact many of them made money in other endeavors, and for some of them, having “fine art” or supporting “the performing arts” was a way to show their peers that they had “good taste”. Is it a bad thing when someone who would not know good from bad from the proverbial hole in the ground buys a painting or commissions an opera just to show that he or she is “sophisticated”? The artists probably wouldn’t say so.

We live in a time of great change. Those who hold to the “old ways” are terrified of the enormous changes that are taking place all over the world. Things as they were for most of the last several centuries have been slowly changing but the pace is greatly accelerated now, if for no other reason than the planet has now about 7 billion inhabitants. Many people deny the changes that are quite apparent. Perhaps it makes them feel safer. Others would hasten the changes because they believe that things will be better once the period of transformation is over.

We have had classical music for decades that is hard to listen to and hard to perform. It resists staying in the mind, it resists fitting into a box, it resists all sorts of things. The audience for classical music continues to shrink world wide and artist managements are at a loss as to how to increase audiences and revenues. They encourage new artists to come in and give things a shift in perspective, thinking that this is the magic answer, but it has rarely been successful.

The boundaries between what’s new and what’s old are transitory. The boundaries between what is appealing to a mass audience and what appeals only to a small group of very elite afficionados is also quite wobbly. The shifts taking place are both good and not so good. It’s a tough time all the way around.

You can’t nail down what will arise out of the death of the old and the birth of the new, and going through the transition is usually not pleasant. It is inevitable, however, and resisting it only makes it more disconcerting.

The new production of “Maria Stuarda” currently at the Met has been heralded this week as a model of Bel Canto style and singing and is very successful for all involved. It allows new artists to sing in a very old model but with present moment adaptations. A nice blend of old and new. The NY Times had this to say:

“Directed by David McVicar, this production takes a traditional approach, but with some vivid colors and stark imagery to lend a contemporary touch to the period sets and costumes by John Macfarlane.” 

We could find, however, productions in which the opera’s time frame has been changed, the location has been changed, the attitudes of the main characters have been changed and the costumes reflect those changes. The music might be the same, but nothing else of the old remains. Sometimes these productions succeed and sometimes they are awful. You can’t decide without going to see for yourself.

This is true of Broadway productions. Sometimes they are faithfully revived, sometimes there are changes, even big changes. Sometimes that works and sometimes is it a disaster (like the recent revival of “On A Clear Day” which was changed a lot and failed, a lot).

I believe that singing should have its roots in the past and its trunk in the present and its branches in the future. I believe that all styles of singing should be respected and honored for what they were at their beginnings even if they have changed and evolved over time. I believe that traditions should be studied and understood before someone decides that change for change’s sake is a good thing. I believe you don’t really have the right to break with a past you don’t even know existed.

Food for thought, folks. Food for thought.

What, exactly, is a big voice? Is it just one that’s loud? Is it loud and unusual in some way? Is it “hefty”? What’s that? How do you know if a voice is big?

Today, especially in opera, there is a predominance of “big” voices in the USA like never before. I don’t mean to say that other kinds of voices that are not considered big don’t show up in major houses, but the more the voice is substantial, the more likely it is that it will be noticed.

Even the lightest voices, generally called lyric coloratura sopranos (a slightly erroneous description since any voice can do “coloratura” passages) aren’t so light as they once were. Since Dame Joan Sutherland arrived on the stages of the world 50 years ago with a voice that was both very big and very high, that category hasn’t ever been the same. Even the woman who dominate that category now, like Diana Damrau, Elizabeth Futral and Natalie Dessay, bear little vocal resemblance to Lili Pons, Mado Robin or Mady Mesplé.

There are myriad reasons why this trend might have emerged. Certainly, the size of the Met, opened in the mid-60s, is a factor, as is the idea that conductors let 80+ piece orchestras play at full volume and force a single human voice to compete with the musical instruments to fill a 4,000 seat house. Certainly the fact that we are into our fourth and fifth generations of people who grew up hearing loud amplified rock music as a norm has bearing on this situation. Repertoire has contributed its influences to expectations and categorizations, too. Some pieces ask for powerful, intense communication which doesn’t lend itself to soft, gentle production.

There are all sorts of theories about voice “size” (EX, S, M, L, XL, Plus?). Big voices take longer to develop, big voices are difficult to train, big voices are born rather than made, big voices are most commonly found in big people. We don’t really know if these things are always true, never true or true once in a while. We don’t know why some voices can be very loud more easily than others and we don’t really know for sure if a voice can develop “bigness” through training alone. Voices can be “too heavy” (another thing that is nearly impossible to define) which causes problems.

None of this applies in a straight forward manner, at least as far as I have encountered, to CCM voices. We don’t think of CCM singers this way, but we could. Surely, a voice that can belt away singing gospel songs at full tilt for hours at a time, filling a big church easily, even without amplification, is a big voice. Ethel Merman’s voice was not only brassy, it was very loud, and easily so. Would you consider Bruce Springsteen or Tina Turner big voices? They don’t seem to suffer from their rough, noisy singing and shouty delivery. Would you put Tom Jones, the 70s vocalist from Wales, there? I would. Kate Smith absolutely had a big voice. What about Susan Boyle?

It’s odd that the two worlds, CCM and classical, use such different descriptors for vocalists. As I frequently say, we all have only one larynx and two vocal folds, one throat and a mouth. The divergence reflects the vast difference between these two environments and the people who inhabit them.

In classical singing it isn’t a complement to be told, “You’re voice is quite small.” Several spectacular vocalists have not been “able” to have an operatic career because the general consensus by the powers that be was that they had voices that were too small to fill an opera house…..Elly Ameling, Dietrich Fischer-Diskau, Arlene Auger, Robert White (the tenor). I’ve never heard anyone in CCM say that X singer failed because his voice was “too small” to sing jazz or folk music. It CCM styles, does anyone really care about what size your voice is or do they just care how you sing?

This is another one of those curious “oddities” about singing that you only encounter when you are in the field for a while. It is one of many many things that you only learn about through exposure, as it is rarely written about in a serious manner, although many years ago I heard an excellent lecture about it by the late Craig Timberlake. Craig was a true scholar and pedagogue, someone who was both an excellent opera singer and concert artist and a music theater performer. He was faculty chair at Columbia for many years. He explained that the idea of “bigness” in a voice was strictly a 20th century construct. I never forgot that lecture.

If you are a vocalist who wants to sing CCM in any of its many styles, be grateful that you will not be judged by this somewhat arbitrary evaluation of your voice as if it were a pair of shoes or a coat that was the wrong size to be of any use. Be appreciative of the fact that you can sing and have a career with whatever kind of voice you have. It’s a much better situation for your overall mental health!

All of us who have been trained to sing, particularly in a university setting, were trained in some form of “classical pedagogy” because, until very very recently, that’s all there was. That classical training is very broad and uncodified is a topic I have addressed many times on this blog. Nevertheless, vocal training that was created hundreds of years ago to help people sing music written in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries may or may not have any useful bearing on rock, pop, jazz, folk, gospel, country or any other CCM style.

Still, I find over and over that those who have invested many years in learning German, French, Spanish, Russian, Italian and English art songs and numerous operatic, oratorio, and orchestral works are not, understandably, eager to just let that training sit on a bench while they examine other philosophies of vocal function and vocal training. It typically rankles those who have invested thousands of dollars and years of effort to be told that, now, they have to learn something brand new. The most common reaction is simply to add on the new ideas to the old ones, even if you have to bend the new ideas into an unrecognizable shape to do so.

It is for this reason that we are now hearing about “resonance strategies” and “formant tuning”. These are 21st century words to substitute for “placement” and “forward resonance”, which are rapidly becoming dinosaur descriptors. The new words deal with the exact same concepts, however, with scientists talking about how a certain tenor or mezzo will “move the second harmonic to come closer to the second formant”, as if that were something deliberate.

You will also hear people talking about “appoggia” in terms of breathing, as if this set of physical behaviors was a universal behavior that all singers should know. Do you think Kate Smith (who was an amazing vocalist) thought about using appoggia when she sang “God Bless America” and belted out that last “home”?

You will find teachers talking about belting as if it sourced out of classical singing. Since one of the roots of belting was the singing of slaves in their homeland and then later, here, in the USA, in the fields while they picked cotton, do these teachers think the singers were thinking of “masque resonance” or did they just find a sound that allowed them to be heard by their colleagues without wearing out their voices?

Why is it that we insist (and insist and insist) that CCM vocal pedagogy has to fit into classical pedagogy in order to give it validity? Why? It doesn’t need classical anything to be valid. It has validity on its own because it does.

Folk art and modern/pop art finally came into their own in the last 50 years. We have museums for modern art and for folk art here in New York City. Folk art is found in many cultures and is created by artisans who do not necessarily have formal training. It can be passed down from one person or one generation to another as tradition or developed as a form of self expression. Pop art, particularly as created by Andy Warhol and his contemporaries, was originally denigrated. Now, it’s worth millions of dollars and is found all over the world in collections of both private individuals and museums.

We do not need to make CCM vocal pedagogy fit into a classical mold. Doing so causes problems and muddies the water. We need to pay attention to things like language (how we explain things), accuracy of terminology (basing things, as much as possible, on voice science), how we work with a singer’s individual physical and vocal behavior (both learned patterns and unconscious responses).  We need to distinguish between what people need to do in order to sing music the way the music was (or is) meant to be sung and what they would do if they could sing in the way which was best for their own vocal well being and artistic authenticity. These are different things.

Enough. Let CCM styles alone. Leave the pedagogy developed to address CCM styles alone, letting it be whatever it is without negative judgement or need for justification. Enough.

I saw “The Hobbit” tonight at the movies. OK, as those kinds of movies go. Prior to it there were five trailers of upcoming films. All of them were full of violence, even in the short time of these teasers. There is a Disney film called “Jack The Giant Killer” which is just about as violent as the two films called “Oblivion” and “After Earth” both of which concern the remnants of the human race surviving some future doom and gloom. There is a new movie about “The Lone Ranger” coming with Johnny Depp as Tonto, but it surely doesn’t look anything like the 50s TV I grew up with! Of course, there was a ton of violence portrayed in the Hobbit, most of it computer generated. I would have been hard not to  notice that all of these films use violence and the portrayal of killing as a form of entertainment.

We all have come to accept violence in entertainment and in the media in general as being normal. We dare not question its presence lest we seem prudish or “up-tight”. No matter how graphic the violence, or how it is created (realistically or through computer animation) we think “that’s how it is”. We even purchase games that feature all manner of violent killing to while away our free time.

I, for one, do not go along with the idea that accepting any and all kinds of depiction of violence is just fine and dandy and that it has no effect on those who view it or participate in it. It isn’t great to watch mainstream TV for several hours and lose count of how many murders I’ve seen. Most of the cop shows feature serial killers who torture and rape their female victims and then murder them. Now, mostly, when I encounter these awful scenarios, many being very gruesomely enacted, I have to turn them off.

The old feminist in me doesn’t like this one bit. I can’t imagine that these shows are predominantly written, directed, produced or sponsored by other women. Perhaps they are involved, but when I can catch the credits, which fly by, I see a lot of male sounding first names. Perhaps this is coincidence. Perhaps. But then, that’s a different, although related, topic.

How has this to do with singing, you ask?

A lot of singing these days is violent. Women screaming at the top of their lungs in the loudest possible sound is a form of violence. It doesn’t represent the archetype of “feminine” in any way. The quintessential “female” quality of the voice and of singing is probably most commonly represented by what is called “celtic singing”. It could possibly also be found in Early Music but not a whole lot of other styles. Loud singing for loud singing’s sake is the name of the game in most styles, including classical. It has been true for several decades now that the singers with the “biggest” classical voices have the best chance at having a career. Angela Meade is a good example of someone with a truly beautiful voice who has no clue about emotional connection whatsoever to the music. Hasn’t hurt her career a bit.

Screamy singing, up to and including losing your voice as a badge of honor, is absolutely an aggressive  act. Singing in a raspy, ragged sound can be taken by both the vocalist and the audience as a sign that the singer is “giving it her all” or “not holding back in any way”. It would be very unusual for anyone to think “This kind of singing shouldn’t be necessary. It violates the integrity of the vocal folds and therefore the body, and therefore of my own being”. That would be a very odd thought indeed even though it is true.

It is so that strong emotional singing is possible in all voices, males and females. Woman can sing as powerfully as men and, conversely, men can sing as delicately and sweetly as women, when they choose to. Philosophically, however, as we live with more and more violence and justify its existence through many arguments, sooner or later singing will become part of the equation.

The next time you hear someone singing as loud, as high and as long as possible and you admire it, remember that the cost of such singing can be vocal fatigue, vocal strain and vocal injury. If this becomes the accepted daily cost of being a singer, something is wrong with the system and the people in the system who willingly go along with that cost.

I think quite often about the statements, “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.” It always makes me cringe, because I believe there is some truth there. How might this be so?

A lot depends on how you look at the statements and what your interpretation is.

If we speak of singing as a career, not many people get to become singers at a high enough professional level to make a decent and consistent living by singing. Many people try but not many people succeed. Those who do not achieve this goal might end up teaching because it is a way to stay in touch with singing rather than give it up entirely. That’s not so bad.

Another way of configuring these statements would be to imply that the people who sing in any public venue are successful, regardless of whether they make a living from singing or not. It’s possible to be successful at a local level and be highly regarded  as a vocalist, even if you are not paid to sing. However, you may not be much able to expand upon this success, or you may not be really interested in doing so. I would say that such singing still counts as “doing”.

It could also be possible that there are people who aren’t really very good at singing but who think they are and through shear force of will and determination, forge their way into the music business and somehow create a viable career. There are quite a few of these even at high professional levels. Some last, some don’t, but it is certainly true that they are “doing” some kind of singing.

What about the people who choose for various reasons to teach knowing that a life on the road, a life that is transient, isn’t for them? Are they not also people who are doing? If you like to sing and get good at singing, does it mean that you have to have a career as a singer? I actually don’t know the answer to this question. It seems to me that without any professional (level) experience you miss out on some of the key ingredients that can only be learned on the job and not in a school environment. It seems to me that the kind of thing one learns singing, no matter what the venue, is only learned in front of an audience and not in front of a student or a class.

The truth is somewhere in all of this. Some people sing well and succeed at having a career. Some people sing well and don’t bother with a career. Some people sing well but don’t succeed at having a career, even though they try and would like one. Some people don’t sing well but succeed at having a career anyway. Some people don’t sing well and don’t try to have a career, but still sing at a local level here and there.

None of this has anything whatsoever to do with teaching. Any of the above people could or could not have a clue about how to teach someone else to do what they do or what they think others do when they are singing. The two skills are not the same, although it is often assumed that those who sing well can teach. That’s not the case. Some people who don’t sing well could be very good at helping others learn to sing, but those people would still have had to spend some considerable amount of time thinking about and working with singing as a concept and art. Some people who are magnificent singers who have had an easy time with singing from the outset don’t really understand what they are doing, because it is nearly effortless. They generally don’t teach well unless perhaps they encounter a student who is as gifted as they.

The assumptions we have about teaching are many. Some of them seem reasonable, but they may not be. Generally speaking, teaching something you don’t do to someone who wants to do it isn’t a good idea, because you can’t really teach from direct personal experience. But it can be argued that direct personal experience is a vastly different thing for each human being and understanding what you do isn’t going to help you understand what someone else is doing or could do.

Finding a teacher that is the “right match” for you is very important. It isn’t so that those who can, do, and those who can’t teach, but it might be true. You have to go slowly and see.

If each person, of their own free will, chooses to let go of violence, and to burn their personal weapons (in thought, word and deed, whatever they may be) and turn them into plowshares or peaceful gestures, the world will transform in an eyeblink. No one can make another person choose to be peaceful. Each must come to this choice in their own time and in their own way. That the vast majority of people in the world must choose this soon is a dire necessity — lest we kill ourselves, one way or another, and the planet as well.

Love is God and God is Love. That love can best be described as acceptance. It is in universal acceptance of the good and the bad, the horribly ugly and the sublimely beautiful, and the knowledge that all we can ever be is flawed, that there is release. Love that goes beyond all understanding requires that we not meet deed with deed in kind, but that we see what is and let it go, for our own sakes, if not for that of others. For our own sakes, we give and forgive, and in this, we become love itself.

This simple truth lies underneath the dogma of all religions and many philosophies. It is deceptively easy and frightfully hard, both to understand and to live. Each of us carries within us the entire world, all of what there is to experience. This reality is beyond what most people understand. It is nevertheless so that what we perceive builds our view of reality and effects how we act on a day by day, hour by hour basis. We may not choose what happens to us but we can choose how we react to it.

Throughout the day, each person must make choices and accept responsibility for who they are, how they operate and what their actions produce in the world. While we might not know ahead of time what those consequences will be, we must accept responsibility for them when they occur. Whenever we act with love, with compassion, with acceptance, with tolerance, with forgiveness, we are helping to liberate human kind from bondage that is as old as the history of our own origins. Transformation comes when each person realizes that, moment by moment, behaving in the most loving way possible is all there is to do.

Each of us has in our own small universe things that need to be liberated and transformed. We all have places within us that are small, ugly, nasty, sour, selfish and repellant. Those who refuse to look at themselves in an honest way will avoid those places, thinking they can “expunge” them through various means, or worse, that they are perfect, with no such flaws. Others perhaps follow the opposite path, dwelling on their human failings so much they are overtaken by them, and in so doing, lose their way and their will. The rest of us struggle to go past our own foibles and to strive with open hearts to be trusting, willing, vulnerable, fallible, joyous, grateful and loving. This takes both courage and perseverance and yet it is all there is to do.

As artists, as singers and teachers of singing, we strive to allow art to be our pathway, our way to be in the world as creative souls, uplifting our world through the gift of song. We offer what we do and what we know to the world as a vehicle for inspiration, for joy, for healing and ultimately, for peace. We may not ever see the actual fruits of our labors played out on a grand scale, but we toil on, against obstacles both personal and global, remembering that each adds to the whole, plus or minus.

The kingdom of God is within each of us. It isn’t “out there somewhere”, not even in “heaven”. At the end of this year, 2012, will you commit in your heart to the intention of creating “peace on earth”? The only person who can make that pledge is you.

On this, the shortest/longest day of the year, depending where you are on the earth, we mark the end of darkness and the beginning of return to the light. The ritual celebrating the Solitice is very old, and has similarities to lighting the candles of the days of Hanukah and to the symbolism of Christmas, which celebrates the birth of Jesus Christ, often called “the light of the world”.

We have long associated ignorance with “living in darkness” and education with “illumination”, of bringing light into an area of darkness. We “light the way” when we lead others, and we “lighten up” when we make the mood merrier, allowing others to feel less burdened by the sorrows we all bear from time to time. The idea that learning brings us to a better place is in many cultures and many fields of endeavor. There are, however, those who do not want to be illuminated. They do not want to be “lifted up out of the darkness into the light”. They want to remain in the dark.

Darkness can be comforting. Darkness as we imagine it in a womb is benign. It can be a place to find solitude and peace. Light is usually thought of as being a good thing but if there were no darkness we would not be able to know that it exists. We need the darkness in order to know about light.

Such it is with all things. When we look at singing, we can look at it in the darkness or in the light. If we keep the topic in the darkness, it means that we don’t look at it at all. If we bring it out into the light, we must examine it in comparison to the darkness or what we didn’t know, because that is the only way we understand what it is and is not.

The potential for singing of any kind is only limited by our imaginations and by our abilities to make sung sounds. Singing, when fully revealed in all its glory and magnificence encompasses the messy, the awful and the not in any way “good”. We need every kind of singing in order for it to be fully what it is.

The value that singing has for us has to do with what we know about it. If we know little and care little, singing has little impact upon us in our lives. If we live with singing, spend time with it, listen to it, look at it, and generally think about it a good deal of the time, it increases in value. The more we embrace all it’s extremes, the more value it has for us and the more it can have an impact on who we are and how we live. To deeply and fully embrace singing — the good, the bad and the in between — is to become unafraid and non-judgemental. In this calmly accepting state, we can really decide what kind of singing matters to each one of us, personally, and why that would be. We can decide for ourselves if we want to engage with singing, our own or others’, and in what way we would do that. We can totally commit to whatever singing is or becomes but we do not risk losing our way, because we understand that singing is just singing, and not life.

No matter what kind of singing you do or teach, embrace all of it. Get to know all of its forms, styles and espressions, it’s history and it’s conventions. Every time you learn something about one part of it, it makes what you know about the rest of it richer. Don’t hide in the darkness, in fear or in denial, because   singing is a big, broad topic that asks a great deal of you if you are to be its master. Step into the light. Put your feet on the yellow brick road and follow it. You will know when you arrive in Oz.