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It broke my heart yesterday when I read in the NY Times that one of the teachers who survived the Newtown horror shepherded her kindergarden students into the closet where, to keep them calm, she had them quietly sing Christmas carols. These children were not harmed, since the gunman died before he could get to their class, but it struck me how much we turn to music when we are in pain.

Every religion has some kind of music intertwined into its rituals. The larger and wealthier Christian church often have “music ministers” who can be very well trained and paid, and who lead the congregation in the services.  Even in the smaller, poorer churches where the “music person”is often drawn from the congregation and might do music for free, they try not to leave music out completely.

I am not as familiar with other traditions, but I have enough general knowledge to know that singing, chanting, intoning and reciting are frequently part of services and that there are times when everyone sings and times when only the “special” person or leader gets to sing. In such circumstances, when people join their voices together in simultaneous sounds, they can discover a feeling of unity that is unlike any other. In experiencing such moments of coming together with others in a peaceful and beautiful activity, there is the opportunity to draw comfort from that closeness, which often lasts long after the singing is over.

The power of music is still  largely untapped in our society. The only way any individual can sing is to seek out singing. You can sing at home, maybe in the shower. You can sing in the car. You can sing in a house of worship. You can sing in a choir in your community. You can perhaps sing with your family, if they also sing. Most people don’t sing any other time or place. Some people go through their entire life not singing one single note. In fact, I once gave a lesson to a student who “didn’t know music” meaning that she did not know music in any way at all. She grew up in a household where there was never any music at any time at all. She said her family didn’t like it. I found that astounding. It was like being told that someone didn’t like dessert. In our society, perhaps unusual, but certainly possible.

What singers have that most other people don’t have is an on-going relationship to singing and to song. The songs make us sing and singing needs us to live the song as a pathway. The music comes from within, goes out, lifts us up, filling us with emotion, and then repeats. A very nice positive re-enforcing cycle.

At this time of the year when we can hear carolers strolling and music fills the stores with the same familiar songs, take the time to really hear them. Let yourself hum along. Let the music transport you to a good, warm happy place. Let it fill your heart, even if you don’t honor Christmas as part of your tradition. Let the sounds of the songs, in all their many varieties, carry you off. As you do, know that many others are doing the same thing. Music has the power to heal us as individuals and in its largest sense, it has the power to heal our world. Those of us who know that music is magic understand the healing power of song is a gift available to all who seek it. It’s free, it’s always there and it works best when you give it away.

It often strikes me that there is very little by way of common sense in the singing teaching community. So much has been handed down through word of mouth experience, one to one, that the general expectations of the community are largely resting on hearsay. Common sense says to question things that are not proven, but we lose common sense when we get to singing and that’s a shame.

Without common sense, there’s bound to be a disconnect between what people say about singing and what people do when they sing that goes unquestioned, especially in the academic community.

If we accept that “classical singing” is not anything real, and that is absolutely so, then the first and most widely accepted premise about it, which says that being “classically trained” is necessary in order to sing well, is a bogus assumption. In order for it to be real, it would have to be codified, organized and accepted with a set of general specifications agreed upon by an objective organizing body of some kind, and it would have to be verifiable within a large group of individuals displaying the specifications consistently and broadly under a wide range of singing circumstances. Tennis is real. It has rules, the international community agrees upon those rules. The players abide by those rules. The audience knows what the rules are. Both professionals and amateurs have criteria upon which to base their evaluations of who is a good tennis player and who is not.

Any conversation with a group of singing teachers will reveal within minutes that even those who are deemed “very successful” teachers who have had great careers in opera and who have produced many students who in turn have gone on to become working professional singers, do not agree on even the smallest point about what “classical training” is or is not. The ideas about breathing (“support”) and resonance (“placement”) run through as wide a range of possibilities as can be imagined. Skill acquisition comes along “as it does” with no special order or sequence to be expected in anyone. There are no rules, there are no uniform guidelines, there are no completely accepted goals. In fact, the idea that anyone actually manages to end up singing classical repertoire well at all is something of a miracle. In the end, people who are smart and talented somehow figure it out on their own, perhaps with the assistance of others who are also smart and talented, and garner enough group recognition to know that what they do is considered acceptable to others who do something similar. Somehow or other.

If you doubt this, listen to a Met broadcast sometime. Many times, you will hear sublime singing and dreadful singing in the same cast. Same with Broadway.

THINK ABOUT THAT.

If you send a student to study with a teacher who may or may not know what she is doing, and who may or may not have had a high level career as a classical singer, and who may or may not be capable of  communicating the ideas that she has learned (whatever they are) to another human being in a meaningful way, and you also don’t have a criteria for what the training is supposed to help the student learn to do as a mechanical skill, wouldn’t you think that someone along the way would have noticed this pattern and brought it up for discussion in the community at large? Nope. This is the syndrome called “The Emperor Has No Clothes”.

And, if you further assume that this mystical thing called “classical training” has magic qualities such that it allows you to also sing the sounds found in rock, gospel, blues, country and rap styles, simply by singing the sounds you’ve been taught in your lesson regardless of what they are, you would also be drawing conclusions where there is no evidence that they should be drawn. Oops.

Finally, if you were to observe many professional singers who have had long lasting careers in any style and draw up a chart of their vocal and musical abilities to see if there are any universal behaviors or characteristics that they share, you could perhaps come up with a large grid to show where each style of singing falls and where each individual singer fits into the grid of each style. We are far away from anything that resembles this in even the tiniest way.

I recently heard of someone who has written a book discussing the pros and cons of allowing boys to sing through voice change. She believes that all young men should stop singing while the voice changes because it will cause damage, because that has been her experience as a choral teacher. Since there are clearly men who sang through voice change without issue and could continue to sing after the voice had stopped changing, this would seem to be a shaky assumption upon which to write a book. There isn’t any way to stop her from writing whatever she thinks. There isn’t any empowered authority or organization to stand up and say, “this is only one possibility of many.” This information will join all the rest of the books, articles and videos already in existence that are based only on one individual’s personal experience. Why question a woman writing a book about boys’ voice changes? Because, typically, we don’t challenge even the most unsubstantiated notions as there isn’t as yet any scientific data upon which to base those challenges. I know someone else who wrote a biography of Ethel Merman in which it says she was not a belter. He knows this because he works within the opera world as a writer (doesn’t sing himself) — a great way to understand belting, right? He has decided (and he isn’t alone) that Merman wasn’t belting. Too bad nobody told her.

The thought process is this: If you experienced it personally yourself, either in your singing or in your training, then it must be true, and if it’s true for you then you can extrapolate that it must also be true for all others and if it’s true for all others, then it must be real. Carried further, if you decide something, and you find at least one other person who has also decided the same thing, your opinion must be real.

Cyclical thinking here, people. Defining a word by itself isn’t allowed in the dictionary.

Yes, I exaggerate. There is research and there is some consensus about what happens in classical singing, but it’s still a very small amount of data and there isn’t anyone verifying it. That is left up to those who read the articles and the books that quote them. There is next to no information on children’s singing, on CCM styles and on the marketplace and it’s demands. You are on your own with all of it. People kinda sorta know what good classical singing sounds like, but maybe not. See above.

I never ask anyone who works with me to “trust” me, believe me, or accept what I say. I always tell them to go out, read, research, study, experiment and stay away from making up rules. There are no rules.

In the meanwhile, if someone offers you a course of training for singing and provides you with a series of syllables on a series of pitch patterns and tells you that, by singing these syllables and patterns, you will learn to sing well, question that. If they also tell you that “if you know how to breathe, you can sing anything”, question that, too. If they tell you that you have to sing in X way or place because that’s how all good singing happens, question that as well. If they tell you to constrict something or move something you’ve never heard of and can’t feel, ask lots of questions. Never give away your common sense!!!!

You might end up being a pain in the neck, but you won’t get sold a bill of goods. Cavaet emptor — let the buyer beware!!!!!!

The idea that we should have smooth transitions between registers is an old one. Most classical pedagogies espoused the idea that smooth transitions were a sign of “good” technique and a mark of skill.

In the pedagogies that say you should only sing in one register or that there are no registers or that each note is its own register, you can have trouble with the smooth transition idea. What are you transitioning into and out of?

Simply put, if you don’t understand register function and so many singers don’t, you can get into trouble, you can end up trying to do something with “resonance” that belongs in the category called “register” and you can be truly lost in terms of understanding what you hear and feel while you sing or, even worse, while you teach singing.

Ethel Merman sang in one register most of the time. She could transition into a light heady mix in her high pitch range when she was young, but she lost that over time. Her vibrato widened as she got older and she ended up sounding like a parody of herself at the end of her career. Lily Pons sang primarily in head register for most of her range and it served her well to do so for decades. Most pop singers sing in some kind of chest mix and they can manage that for an entire career as long as they are careful.

Why the big deal, then, about “smooth register transitions”? Who cares?

The answer is that the vocal mechanism works best when it is free to move. Restriction of any kind limits what you can sing and how you can sing it. Currently, there are a great number of very popular pedagogical approaches in various styles of CCM that advocate pushing, forcing, holding, squeezing, constricting, and retracting all manner of muscles in the throat and body as a goal. AS A GOAL, folks. No smooth register transitions for them…..uh uh. They can just sing — high to low — in the same hamburger mash of whatever sound they can manage.

The idea that the voice can carry honest, heart-felt emotion makes some people angry. They have been taught that they have to portray emotion or portray feelings while singing. (Sing “like as if” they are angry or sad, rather than actually feeling sad, if the song is actually sad.) They have a vested interest in keeping the voice in a particular “place” that is deemed “correct” and anyone who suggests that this is not the case is suspect. But if you read the pedagogical literature, you will see that the old teachers, from Garcia and Lamperti to the more modern ones like Brown and Bunch Dayme do not advocate manipulation (the direct movement of any musculature in the throat), but rather advocate changing the sound quality or intention. They also advocate finding “pure” vowels, ones that do not distort. Many of today’s singers don’t even know what a pure vowel is and wouldn’t know if they were singing one if they were. Too bad.

Of course, you can get by without smooth register transitions. You can yodel from one register to another like Joan Baez or the young Joni Mitchell, or the 50s doo-wop singers who would flip into falsetto on high notes. Many people have had big careers with a big break right there in the middle of their range. Others have paid no attention to this vocal “smooth transition” response at all. Surely Peggy Lee didn’t think about singing through all her registers smoothly. She sang in a breathy mix for her whole life and it was just fine. If, however, you learn to hear register change as register change and not glom it onto other things, you will find that the singers with the widest range, the broadest change of dynamics and the most expressive colors are also the ones that change registration. This implies that they are also managing how they use their breath and that, in turn, implies that they are able to manage the body as needed as well.

If this makes you angry, you should ask yourself why.

Many years ago, when I was about 16, my mother attended some kind of “women’s gathering” at which she sat next to someone she did not know. Inevitably, they started to talk about their children and the topic of singing came up. My mother mentioned to the woman that her daughter was studying voice. The other woman said to her, “Oh, that’s too bad. My daughter sings too, but she is so talented she doesn’t need lessons”. Much to her credit, my mother didn’t reply with anything except a smile.

This mentality is still out there.

In August, a woman who fancies herself to be a jazz vocalist called me to have a lesson. She had been to see me three years prior, for one lesson. She informed me that she had been practicing with that lesson (for THREE YEARS!!!!) and that she had discerned that the exercises I had given her were “pretty helpful” and she thought maybe one more would be “good”. She had the session, she disappeared.

There was another woman, trained originally as a classical soprano, who also moved into singing jazz, who had been taught that “chest register” was harmful and that it should always be avoided. That’s a tough attitude to cling to when you want to sing jazz. She had three lessons with me in which we touched on her suppressed chest register and, bingo, that solved her problem! Magic! We barely scratched the surface of making significant changes in her technique, but she didn’t seem to notice or care. When I ran into her three years later she told me she was still practicing with the last lesson every day. [Hokey Smoke, Bullwinkle!]

The idea that you should practice every single day of your life with the same exercises, done in the same sequence is popular in some circles. In my former apartment building, a classical mezzo soprano who had a very viable career lived directly over me. She would always start her day with her vocal practice, which I eventually learned, unfortunately, by heart, but not by choice. She sang the same awful exercises in the same awful way, every single day, sounding covered, swallowed and loud, but consistent. By golly, she was consistent. I went to see her once in a performance of “The Creation” at Carnegie Hall and when she got up to sing the song about “frogs, frogs, frogs” in her croaky swallowed sound, I nearly imploded, keeping myself quiet.

There is a difference between rote learning and conscious awareness that facilitates transformation. Repeating anything mindlessly isn’t particularly useful but it can still produce a result, if you know how to do whatever it is correctly. Singing a pattern of notes and pitches in a certain sequence because someone told you to is better than singing nothing, especially if while you sing you are singing freely and without issue. Singing a different pattern of notes and pitches in a certain different sequence might be good, but not necessarily. Doing rote practice, however, doesn’t give you much except muscle patterns and sound making behaviors.

Actual learning must involve awareness, particularly when dealing with a highly complex physical skill. Although not much happens initially, and practice at that point can be more or less rote, it can’t stay that way for long. The person practicing needs to know why the exercises are being done, what they will do for the voice over time, how to do them, and when. The vocalist needs to learn to pay attention to the various feedback loops of sound, feeling and sensation but also to understand what to do with that gathered sensory information when it is obtained. If it can’t be used, why bother to collect it?

Absolutely no one who has reached any level of expertise has no training at all. Even if they have natural ability, they have to study with someone who will advise and guide them. Mozart and Picasso studied with their fathers, as did Pavarotti and Marilyn Horne. Joan Sutherland studied with her mother. Beverly Sills, who was a child soprano of great skill before she became an international opera sensation  as an adult began studying as a child with her one and only teacher, Estelle Liebling, herself a student of Mathilde Marchesi, who studied with Garcia. Illustrious artists and teachers in that lineage!

The idea that you can gain expertise or mastery by singing along with the same limited, specific group of CDs or a DVD every day for years is simply ridiculous. The thought that a talented person doesn’t need private lessons is equally so. The beliefs that there is one way to sing or use the voice or one pattern of exercise that “keeps you in good shape” or one approach that will never fail, are all based on very limited vision and understanding.

Even the most talented students need lessons. Sometimes the more talented you are, the more you need the lessons to help you clarify, deepen, define and own your talent. The people who manage to get by without lessons are doing just that.

I wish I had a crystal ball to look 200 or 250 years into the future. I would love to know what singing will be like then.

I often wonder, if we continue as a society (and sometimes I doubt that) what will endure? When we look art and music history we see many works that have endured. The most important artists who left a lasting mark are revered for their gifts.

If we look at our current world as if from the future, it will surely look like a very chaotic time. Degradation to the earth being ignored. Turbulence in the USA and Europe economically that effects the day to day life of so many millions. Warfare in many places, and religious zealotry all over the world, making extreme beliefs popular with a vast number of people regardless of the cost.  Leadership floundering globally.

If we looked at the musical world, we could see that the works of past masters like Gluck, Monteverdi, Purcell, Bach, Handel  Mozart and Beethoven were appreciated alongside works by Verdi, Brahms, Chopin, Liszt, and Rachmanioff. We might see that music aficionados were also listening to John Adams, Phillip Glass, Tan Dunn, John Cage, and Nico Muhly. We could notice that there were few  female composers, even in the late 20th and 21st centuries, and that they were not given the same recognition and appreciation as men. We might notice that most of the conductors were male, and most of the people running large opera and musical companies were also male. We would see that women, when they did have works published and performed were always in the minority. We would also see that classical music was dominated by caucasian males except in countries where the population was not also mostly caucasian. We would also see that a very small percentage of the music was classical in nature and that the average person who was listening to music was not listening to classical music, most especially not to vocal classical music, which was the smallest segment of that genre.

We would also know that the popular music of the late 20th and early 21st centuries was heavily homogeneous, and that it was difficult to discern one vocalist from another in terms of style, in any style. Unless I was an music history expert in 2212, how would I know the difference between Maria Carey and Beyoncé, or Nora Jones and Diana Krall, or any of the younger country stars between each other? The rockers who stayed around for several decades will surely go down in history: The Stones, McCartney, Elton John, Madonna. But who knows? Maybe people like Tony Bennett, Barbara Cook, and Ella Fitzgerald will be remembered along with Elvis and Bruce Springsteen as “singers”?

What they may have that is recordings and visual media, if it survives in a form they can reference. Who will listen to ancient musty 33 rpm records or cassette tapes in 2212? Will there be archival YouTube videos then?

The point is that while you are living in an era, you can’t know what will last — ending up in the history books — and what will be forgotten. Today, with all the hype, PR, media spin and the like, and with a total lack of music education having become the norm for the average person, what we see and hear is remarkably similar from person to person and style to style. If you watch “The Voice” or “American Idol” even if the singers are very talented (and some of the winners surely are), they certainly aren’t changing anything or creating something new and different. They are preened, prompted, packaged and promoted along with the music they sing so that they are marketable to the broadest possible audience, so that a lot of money can be made. The driving force behind what is put forth is an economic one. Only well after an artist is established and has made plenty of money is she free to set up her own company and call the shots for her own work. How often does that happen?

If you graduate thousands of students from college every year who have degrees in voice or music theater or jazz, and there are not thousands of  available jobs for them to fill such that they can have viable careers, where are they to go except back to school to educate more people who will do the same thing, in a self-perpetuating cycle? It cannot be that all of these graduates are highly talented and deserve to be heard, nor can it be that all of these graduates are doing work that is unique and will be lasting. Standardized education serves the masses but it does not serve great art. If we are to find great singing in the museums of the future, we have to do a better job in the present moment of discovering and nurturing real genius. Is that happening in your area? If so, you are very unusual.

Over the last 100+ years, music has changed an enormous amount. What someone would have heard in 1912 bears very little resemblance to what he would hear in 2012. Going back even further, what someone would have heard in 1712 is enormously different than what we hear today.

Yes, music has definitely changed. What about the larynx? Think maybe it has evolved some new behaviors or responses in the last three hundred years? Do we have many many singers who routinely sing 7 octaves or who can sing at 120 dB? Do we have lots of people who can sing off the low end or high end of the piano on a regular basis?

Seems like the things we do with the vocal folds now are probably closer to, rather than farther away from, what we did in times past. The one thing that might be more variable is the vocal quality being used by a singer. That has changed quite a bit and is reflective of what has gone on in the music business.

So, how do you put these two things together effectively? Do you decide that you can do “wild and crazy things” with your vocal folds because you are “far out and cool” (or whatever today’s version of those words would be. Sorry, I’m old.) Do you decide that you can make sounds that no one else has ever made because you have vocal folds unlike those of anyone else on earth? Some people act as if they believe that’s true. It’s much more likely that you will encounter health issues in your vocal folds if you don’t know what they do and how to produce sound efficiently. Do you bury your head and say, “I will only do what was done in 1875 or 1929, because that’s what’s right. My teacher told me to so it has to be true.”

Young people, in particular, may not have any interest in or experience with traditional vocal pedagogy. Reading the books and articles published by experts ought to inform us, but many do not read at all. Some few have read a bare minimum of the giants in the field, and their lack of knowledge about the field always shows. Singing experts such as Garcia, Lamperti,  Bunch Dayme, Miller, Vennard, Reid, Brown and speech experts such as Berry, Turner, Linklater, Fitzmaurice, Houseman, Melton, Rubin and speech pathologists such as Boone, Verdolini,  Murry, Behlau, and medical specialists such as Brewer, Gould, von Laden, Brodnitz, Grabscheid, Sataloff, Leanderson, Woo, Korovin, Zeitels, and those who do pure science, like Sundberg, Hirano, Titze, Scherer, Ternstrom, Howard, and many, many others provide everyone with a broad base of knowledge that effects clear thinking regarding the behavior of the larynx and the acoustics of the singing voice. Since several of these people were my mentors, informally, and a few were my teachers, formally, and the ones who have lived in recent times were my colleagues, I have been blessed to have them in my life. As a person with a keen interest in the voice, I am humbled that this is so.

It is not my experience that human physiology has changed in any meaningful way, except maybe that we in the West are generally larger in frame than we were 150 years ago, nor is it so that the acoustics have changed much either. What has changed is the music and the demands it makes on the vocalists which are much greater than they were years ago and are not likely to decrease.

Whether or not it is intelligent, useful, healthy, or even good to sing in ways that our forebears never dreamed of, is a discussion that might be intellectually stimulating but is nevertheless useless when it comes to the marketplace. Just as extreme sports might be highly dangerous they are also very exciting and are more accepted than ever before. If there were to be an injunction again them, they would not go away, they would just go underground. There will always be people who are excited by testing their own limits whether it be by climbing Mt. Everest for the first time or going to Antarctica for the first time, running a mile in less than 4 minutes for the first time, or jumping from the outer limits of the atmosphere, higher than has ever been done before by another human being. There will be the people who push all of our limits by pushing their own.

Teachers of singing, then, as well as researchers, speech experts (both pathologists and trainers), medical doctors and performers need to know what’s going on in the world of the music marketplace. Not to address what is happening in the musical world while working with singers is folly — one that puts the health of the vocalist at even more risk than is necessary. While the larynx remains the larynx, music is ever shifting. It’s up to you to know the difference.

Very occasionally, I encounter someone who “wants a few lessons” to (a) get a gig, (b) go to an audition, (c) get into college, (d) help with their high notes, (e) help with their “breath support” or (f) help them with their break.

I decline to work with such people. They think that they can fix functional issues in a few lessons but 99.9% of the time you can’t do that.

People who are content to be “pretty good” and want to get to their goal in a hurry are looking at the surface of singing without any desire to gain mastery of it at a substantial, deep level. Those people are not the kind of people I have in my studio. The people who come to work with me work on their voices every day, year in and year out, after having achieved career success, because they value their art and have something meaningful to say through it as they sing. This is not the vast majority of singers and it is not the vast majority of teachers of singing either.

Asking the why, how and what questions, probing for their answers whatever the topic, involves self-confrontation. It involves facing your flaws, foibles, weaknesses, hang-ups, neuroses, and lacks. It isn’t an easy direction to take and most people aren’t the least bit interested in such inner dialog. A real artist, however, knows well that in order to create lasting and profound works that touch the souls of those who come into contact with them, the artist has no choice but to plum his or her own inner labyrinth. Doing so is one scary journey and not one to be taken lightly, especially because it has to be walked alone.

Creativity comes out of self-exploration, self-discovery, and the release of pain, suffering, and finally the expression of joy and self- knowledge. It is not a substitute for skill, nor is it easily coalesced into a meaningful work without a form of some kind.

Anyone can sound nice. Anyone can hum a tune. Enjoying your voice as you use it in life is a wonderful gift. Feeling confident enough about your voice to think that others should hear it, and in fact should pay to hear it, requires more than thinking it is “nice”. You have to have a deep belief that you are really a very good singer who really wants to sing. If you ever get to do that, sing professionally, you will encounter others who will point out to you how your singing is not yet adequate and how to make it better. If you don’t deal with that, you could end up on the outside looking in. A serious vocal artist has to be willing to take constructive criticism, listen to others’ opinions, change how they do what they do and remain open without losing self-confidence. Not everyone can manage that.

The people who want to “dabble” in singing can do that, as there are many teachers who will give them “a few lessons” and make suggestions or offer advice. The teachers who are typically dealing with artists who have a deep and meaningful message to convey are aware that this kind of artist is always looking for external guidance, inner understanding and the balance between them. Fame has nothing whatsoever to do with these kinds of artists. Some are famous, some will never be, but they are the ones who are the most inspiring to teach, as they bring something with them that the other kind of students do not have to offer…….substance. The surface is only impressive to those who do not have the awareness to look deeply within.

Singing training is never finished. Like life, it goes on.

When you are very young, you begin by learning the basics. You have to study for quite a while before you know what you don’t know. It doesn’t come with rules (although that would be nice). You have to keep going to find out if what you are being taught is what you need to learn. (Very often, it isn’t.) You have to have a high level of drive and commitment to the entire process unless you are very talented or very lucky and get by on your higher than average gifts and blessings.

When you are older, you have to contend with “higher education”. That has been addressed here many times. College training for singing runs the gamut from soup to nuts (not a pun) and the risk is real. After college, you must decide “what you will do with your training”. After all, you spent a lot of money and some considerable amount of time learning to be a very good singer, should you waste your efforts and stay at home? Another big decision.

Some go into education, some into choral conducting, maybe with an additional degree or two, some try to become professional singers locally and some few come to the big cities, maybe even to NYC or LA, and see if they can “break into” the music industry in one of its forms. Music Theater, opera, jazz, or rock music. There isn’t much by way of a folk scene at the highest levels or of country music other than that coming out of Nashville. There is a very big Christian music industry, but the standards aren’t very different there than outside the religious based world, and it isn’t really located in just one city.

Some people do get started and become professional singers, making their livings by standing up in front of audiences and singing. Mostly, they are invisible but respected. It could be that they are in the Ensemble on Broadway, or have professional “ringer” jobs as classical vocalists, or do “studio sessions” or go out on tours as back-up vocalists or some combination of all of these. Generally, even though there are jobs in these areas the number of people who only sing for a living is very very small. Again, if you have enough money to work for little or no pay you might have a career but not one that pays the rent. How many people are in that category?

The people who don’t make it or get tired of the hard work involved in keeping a career going without fame eventually have to face stopping. Where do they go? Back to school? To teaching? To another kind of work altogether? Yes to all of these options.

If you persevere, you might end up in middle age finding a way to get all of this to work and being content with your choices. You will still have to think about “upkeep” of your voice, though, because you need to sound at least decent in order to have some kind of credibility, if not with your students than with your colleagues. As the body ages, the voice follows. No longer are you striving to build your vocal skills, you are working to keep the ones you have so they do not deteriorate.

And, if you continue until you are in the category we kindly call “senior citizen” what you once took for granted is now a daily challenge. You return to wondering what this thing called singing really is, day to day, and what the overall outcome of your vocal decline will be when it finally catches up to you enough to take over. You remember well that you had to answer some of the same questions about “vocal skills” when you were a kid. The familiarity isn’t comforting.

And when you are in your “golden years” and you have lived a good long life, your voice will still be your traveling companion. How it works and what you can do with it could vary day by day or even hour by hour. You, your body and your voice, as lifetime partners, will be submersed in the adventure of discovering what works and how it works to sing in any form at all.

Your work with your voice is never finished until you are. When you are gone from this earth and your voice is silenced the sojourn will be over, but while you are alive your voice should never, can never be finished. It is always being its creative self. Don’t ever give up on it and it won’t give up on you!

When a singer says to me “I can’t” I believe her.

If I go to a dance class, and I tell the dance teacher, “I can’t lift my leg high enough to put it on the bar,” and she tells me, “Oh yes you can, you’re just not trying. Here, let me show you how much it can move,” and she grabs my leg and tries to lift it up and put it on the bar, I will definitely yell, “Ouch! You are hurting me!” If I were to run in a race and not be able to finish (I am much overweight and out of shape) and the running coach were to tell me, “You should be able to finish this race, you are a quitter!” I would look at the coach and say, “Are you kidding me? I should never have been in this race in the first place! I didn’t have enough training or conditioning to even participate. Why did I listen to you?” I wasn’t always this self-confident.

But if I were a singer, I could be in a session with a teacher, a coach, a conductor or even a friend, and say, “I can’t sing that phrase. The notes are just too high.” I could be told, “You absolutely should be able to sing that note. You are a soprano, for heaven’s sake. You aren’t using enough/correct breath support!” or maybe, “You can definitely sing that phrase, but you will have to bring your resonance more forward to do it,” or perhaps, “You are just being resistant and blocked. You need to let go more and stop holding back.”And, if I insisted that my throat was just closing and that I couldn’t get the notes out, I might just be told that I can’t sing and should give up. I could walk away thinking “What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I do what they say?”

The game of blaming the singer is real. So many singers are blamed for what they can’t do, yet the purpose of lessons is to learn to go beyond what you can’t do until you can do it. The way to get past your limitations is not to be browbeaten by your teacher, or to force your throat, or manipulate some other body part or intellectualize the process, but that is what a lot of people think and that is what they are taught. The instructors know only that singing is about “doing something” and if that something doesn’t work, then it doesn’t work because the singer is just too untalented or too stupid or too resistant (or all of those) to make it work.

Yes, there are times when the student is really at fault. There are people who cannot learn, don’t really want to change and would prefer to do whatever it is they already do even if they think they want to study with or consult a voice expert. I have written about them here. It is not my experience, however, in more than 40 years of teaching, that this is how the majority of singers are. It is my experience that people who pay for lessons want to learn something in those lessons and will try to apply what is being taught to the best of their ability.

In a system in which the teacher can never be wrong, never be questioned, and the student can never ask the teacher why something is not working (without fear), there can be no true learning. The teacher has to be willing to be vulnerable so that the student can also be, and the teacher has to be able to own what she knows and what she does not know, equally. Unless that situation exists all the time, the atmosphere in which the session takes place will not really be safe and all that will take place is that both individuals will do their best not to screw up in front of the other. In that environment, no learning can take place, no education is possible.

If I asked the singer, “When your throat closes, what do you experience? Can you describe your discomfort in more detail?” and actually listened to her answer, I might understand better what technical or functional issue was at the root of her problem. If I asked her “When do you experience this difficulty? Is it all the time, just on certain pieces, or just in certain kinds of repertoire?” I might also get some clues as to the source of her problems. If I approached her as if her experience was real and also valid, I might be able to say, “Oh, I’m sorry. That must be so frustrating. I know how hard it can be when things in your voice aren’t going the way you would like them to. Let’s see if we can investigate a bit and find out what’s going on in there,” I would at least be providing some support and reassurance for the idea that indeed, things can go wrong unintentionally, and that there are remedies that can help, once the problem is dissected and investigated.

I stopped taking lessons at 29, after 14 years of training, because the teacher I had had for 7 years insisted that I was “just being temperamental” when I told him that I could not sing the high notes as he had requested. High notes had always been easy for me but in my work with him my voice got heavier and fuller and heavier and fuller until I could barely sing above the staff. It was an absolute fact that I could not sing high notes easily but he could not and would not listen to me, nor believe me. I stopped studying because no one, ever, had inquired as to how I felt, what I felt or what I heard when I sang, and no one had ever asked me if I felt good about what I was doing. Consequently, I never asked myself those same questions, until that day when I just could not sing up high. When he insisted that I was wrong and he was right, I somehow found the courage not only to leave his studio but to never return to anyone’s studio for technical training. It was, after all, MY throat and my experience and I was telling the truth.

Thankfully, this was a great part of the impetus for me to investigate voice science, without which I would surely have given up singing and gone to find a job in a completely different line of work.

Learning to listen to what a singer has to say, and take it to heart as the truth, is a requirement of a teacher of singing or any other related support profession (coach, conductor, speech pathologist, voice doctor). It is the starting point of transformation, of growth and of compassionate service to another human being who is struggling and striving to be an artist.

If there is an “I can’t,” in a session, and you are a service provider, consider it a gift and handle it with care and deep sincerity. It will tell you how to find the pathway back to “I can.”