Uncategorized

It might be hard to believe but it was way back in 1983 when the New York Singing Teachers’ Association presented the first workshop on Broadway and Popular Singing: How To Sing Without Hurting Your Voice at Donnell Library (which is long gone) to a sell out crowd. Two weeks later, because this event was highly successful, half of the Board of Directors resigned in protest because we (the Music Theater Committee, of which I was a founding member) were “dragging the organization down into the gutter” with that “awful music”. Fortunately, I was able to coax them all to stay, but it was a daunting experience, to be maligned for doing something that was a big hit. I should have known then that it was only the beginning of a long, not very nice battle.

In spite of the fact that most universities are now very interested in offering music theater programs, the vast majority of the singing teachers being asked to teach MT styles are classically trained. Since most universities ask for a master’s degree or even a doctorate, it is nearly impossible to arrive at a job interview with the proper training for pop, rock, jazz, folk, country, gospel or rap music since there are no degree programs in these styles. There are a few music theater master’s degrees in the USA, but I believe that most of them are offered through drama departments, not music departments. That means they may have little or no formal vocal music training in the degree. ALL the doctoral programs are classical and will likely continue to be until this generation gets to be in the leadership positions of departments and that will take a couple more decades.

The universities understand that there is money to be made by offering music theater. Some schools have a music theater “emphasis”, some actually have a degree in music theater, and some have a classical degree that allows for a little music theater (usually legit) as part of that degree. The system, country-wide, is in a state of flux, maybe even chaos, and no one seems to know how to proceed.

The universities rely on the faculty to have higher degrees in order to be sure they are well trained, but if they are well trained in something they do not teach, what’s the point? The saddest thing is that neither parents nor students understand this situation until a student is already enrolled in a program. You could be assigned to a teacher who has literally no clue about belting or rock style but who is going to teach you anyway, or you could be assigned to a teacher who actually has a very good idea of what’s needed and has a way to give you what you should be getting. It’s typically just a role of the dice.

For my money, if I was a student, I would feel pretty bad about those odds. I would like to know that the person with whom I entrust my voice actually had the skills to teach me what I was paying to learn. It seems reasonable to me to expect that out of a college degree program.

And, if the university is big enough, you can have a drama department and a voice department and never the two shall meet. The drama students might have to study with the classical teachers in the voice department and the voice students might have to take acting lessons in the drama department, or not. Again, a roll of the dice. If the two departments do interact, the two approaches to singing are so different, there is frequently discord between them. The classical teachers are interested in resonance, legato line, even vibrato, beautiful tone, musical accuracy, and, of course, good breath support. The drama department people are interested in authentic delivery of the lyrics with a good understanding of their depth and implication, with emotional intensity, clarity of diction and connectedness to the physical expression of the music and text as a whole. Guess they don’t see eye to eye or hear ear to ear. Who suffers from this? (Are you thinking — the students?) Who gets blamed when things don’t work? (Are you thinking the same thing?) Good.

Many decades have elapsed since 1983 and the NY Singing Teachers’ Association now considers music theater an important ingredient in what it addresses in its activities. There are no arguments about its being “awful”. The National Association of Teachers of Singing now devotes a good deal of its time in its national conferences to music theater, at least in its somewhat straightforward traditional styles. That’s progress. The organization still favors classical “training”as a basis to sing anything, but sooner or later the wisdom of that assumption will be seen for what it is, which is silly. It can help, but it can also get in the way or even cause trouble. Since there are no standards for voice teachers, “classical training” can mean anything to anyone at any time.

The idea that America should be the home of excellent training for whatever style of singing a person wants to sing, no matter what it entails, is still a dream that is just beginning to emerge into reality. 1983 was a long time ago, but there is a light at the end of the tunnel.

I recently attended a concert that presented a range of art songs and CCM music. It was sung by very good classically trained singers and covered R&B, blues, jazz, and opera arias. The presentation of the 10 singers was well done, in terms of staging of the material, and the jazz musicians (piano and bass guitar) who alternated with the classical pianist were very good. Still, the program was a hodge podge. The four women were much worse off than the six men. All of their songs were too high. They were stuck in head register and classical “resonance” and most of the songs suffered badly due to that.

Clearly, the singers were left to their own devices. This was a poor choice on the part of the producers. Classical singers doing material that isn’t classical often carry their classical production with them when they leave that repertoire. If you are singing a song that was written to be a belt piece by taking it up a fourth and turning it into an aria, you are not only not honoring the music, you are making yourself seem highly ignorant of correct style.

That this still happens isn’t news. That it isn’t news says how far we have yet to go. The double standard of the classical vocalists, upheld largely through obliviousness, is unacceptable but they don’t even know that there is anything wrong. I have said here that until things are really equal on each side of the bar, I will campaign to make sure that all the CCM styles, most of which originated here in the USA, are honored by singing them in the way the composers intended, including using the correct vocal quality. Doing this typically requires adjusting the keys, and with women those adjustments can be as much as a fifth up or down, in order to help the song stay in a “speech oriented mode”.

If I am a rock singer and I only sing in a rock sound and you put me in a concert and assign to me the song “Caro Mio Ben” and I sing it like a rock song because that’s how I sing, would you take that as being valid and acceptable, or would you tell me that it needs to be sung in an entirely different manner, using different sounds and feelings? Would you think that the song was OK no matter what I did with it or would you wonder if I knew that it was a classical song and typically done in a classical manner? Would you just let it go and present it alongside other songs as being equal?

Woman are at the greatest disadvantage here because men, singing mostly in chest register, can adjust the songs by simply lightening up, changing vowel sound shape and paying attention to the words. Women classical singers are going to be very head dominant in mid-range and have to do a much bigger gear switch than their male counterparts.

A few people have taken classical pieces and turned them into jazz pieces or folk songs, singing them in a chest register dominant, speech oriented sound. They have been successful with their performances in these new arrangements. But if you leave the song pretty much as written and try singing it as if it were something else, you are not totally in either a CCM or a classical world. You look and sound like you are at sea.

Leave the arias in classical music. If you sing a Kander and Ebb piece, don’t turn it into something by Strauss. If you like words, be careful that you aren’t sustaining up high (because it doesn’t work to do the words easily if you do). It’s hard to go to a performance like that, where the performers are singing in a sound that doesn’t suit the music. I want to say “NO!!” but, really, what would be the point?

Each of us can help this situation. If you are a classical singer and you are asked to sing a CCM song, find out about the style and do your best to follow that style authentically in your own way. If you do not know how to get the right vocal quality, you must learn. Notice the key, and volume and the tempo and stick closely to those things until and unless you have a very good reason not to. Learn to use a microphone, amplifier and speaker. Learn what style the piece you want to sing has been done in by others in the past.

Many singers can sing all over the keyboard comfortably. They can be very loud or very soft and can be very expressive if they choose to and they can do a wide variety of styles authentically. If you are not one of those people, please be very careful about what you sing and how you sing it. Don’t just assume your way is the right way…..find out!

Here’s a post of someone who should have known better. Great artist, awful rendition of the song.
Go to YouTube and put in: Kiri Te Kanawa I Dreamed a Dream.

Once you get someone into a new default position, which can take a lot of work and time, it’s important to emphasize the idea that you have to do maintenance to keep it going. Particularly if the default is not the most natural position for the person, it’s essential to do regular practice.

If someone has been singing only in chest register for a long time and thinks of himself as a baritone, only to discover after two or three years of vocalizing in a strong head register dominant sound that he is, after all, a baritenor or even a tenor, that can be really liberating and freeing. Nevertheless, even if the new sound is the more natural sound for the voice, it isn’t the one with the longest history and that matters. That can’t be taken for granted, even if it sounds and functions better than the old position, simply because it is new. It might be more “natural” but it isn’t “more habitual”.

Muscle memory is real. Muscles remember what they do, sometimes long after you stop doing it. Even if you haven’t ridden a bicycle in years, once you get on again, after a moment or so, you can ride just fine. Perhaps you wouldn’t pick up the violin and play a concerto at first touch, but if you had played well for a long time, years after you stopped you would probably be able to play a simple melody in short order.

First in, first out, they say about jobs. The most recent hires are the most likely people to get layed off. So it is, too, with muscle patterns. What you have done for the longest time and most frequently, is the deepest pattern. New patterns that are more comfortable may be better but they have emerged only recently and will be susceptible to falling apart if you stop practicing for a while.

If you have gotten into a new default, perhaps for a role in a show, and you know you have to keep yourself there for the an open-ended run, you will need to include regular practice along with activities like taking a shower and brushing your teeth. Not to do so is to ask for problems. And, if you know that the role is a couple of tones too high for your easy comfort but that you can get through it as long as you are practicing your vocal exercises, you might also need to put into the equation exercises that allow for relaxation and calibration of your voice every now and then to help it remember its normal default, so you don’t completely lose it.

As someone who is in recovery from a left vocal fold paresis (since May), I can tell you that I am now having to work hard to stay in what was my normal sound. This default, the one where I lived effortlessly for my entire life, is now only there when I practice and practice vigorously. I am grateful that I have come back to a much better response, sometimes seeming as if my singing was totally normal, but I can testify that when I don’t practice, it rapidly begins to fall apart and go back to its errant ways!

Remember, the default position is the position from which you would sing, without warming up or preparing in any way, coming straight out of your typical speech patterns. If you don’t know how to authentically change your default, without manipulation or immitation, this entire post won’t make any sense, but if you are curious to understand more, you are welcome to come to my Level I training in January at UMass Dartmouth.

The idea that the larynx should stay down at all times is incorrect. The idea that laryngeal stability is produced by keeping the larynx from moving is wrong. The idea that the larynx should be held down is dangerous. Yet, these ideas are very popular in current classical vocal pedagogy circles. They even show up in CCM circles.

Why would they have become so prominent? Because when voice science came along it was possible to observe that classical singers seem to be singing consistently with the larynx resting rather low in the throat. This observation was accurate. Mostly, that’s what they do. The problem was that the result was viewed as a cause and the response was viewed as deliberate rather than indirect.

Perhaps this was also influenced by the influx of teachers of singing from Germany and Austria to New York during World War II. These teachers brought their Germany vowels with them and the influence of them would have been to have the larynx be more down than not. There were a lot of them on the faculties of Juilliard and Manhattan School of Music and perhaps also other university conservatories in the USA. This is just a guess and could be wrong, but clearly, this observed phenomenon seemed significant and became a very popular idea.

A low larynx makes the vocal tract long. The length makes it larger and the largeness gives the lower frequencies a boost, making any vowel “darker”, “warmer” and “fuller”. That would seem to be a good thing, in classical singing at least. The problem with a low larynx, however, is that it can get to be too low (Vennard called it depressed). This causes all sorts of problems, both functional and musical.

The first rule of singing training is FREEDOM. If you can’t sing freely, something is wrong. Tones that do not allow natural movement in the mechanism are not optimal. There are times when stability is in order but when that stability becomes rigidity, then there is trouble. The larynx, after all, is a sinovial joint and what joint functions well when it can’t move? Keeping the larynx in a depressed position shuts off expression, makes for a wooden sound, causes tension on high notes up to and including them closing off entirely, and generally makes for poor pronunciation. It makes brilliance in the tone nearly impossible.

At first, especially if the voice is organized to be very “forward” and “ringy” a lowered laryngeal position might be good. It would warm up the tone and make it seem to be “rounder”, but after a while, if freedom is not emphasized at all times, the freedom would go away. It would also promote a certain amount of volume, but it could become fatiguing and can absolutely cause the pitches to be slightly flat or even very flat, despite the vocalist’s desire to remain on pitch.

The vowels that come out of the Italian language seem to be the ones that lend themselves to classical singing most readily. They are bright, and they carry well without effort. The language, Italian, sits very differently in the throat, and it doesn’t take as much work to produce sounds that are clear and vibrant.

When Luciano Pavarotti arrived on the opera scene in New York decades ago, one of the most common criticisms of his still young voice was that it was “too bright”. Clearly, his voice was certainly  bright, but not too bright. It was thrilling, and free, and strong, and consistent, and highly expressive. I seriously doubt he was striving to keep his larynx down on purpose. The kind of sound made by Corelli and Tebaldi is hard to find now in classical singing, even in Italians. The late Salvatore Licitra’s voice bordered on woofy and had problems while he was still in the prime of his life and career. If you want to know what this is like, go to the link here. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yyz75uHNHeI

Ms. Ponselle’s larynx is “low” but she isn’t keeping it down on purpose. It’s also not low when it needs to be and I am certain she never thought about any of that. The larynx remains low because the vowels are consistent and the air pressure is steady and because the registration is balanced. The position of the larynx is adjusted by the tone quality and the volume and nothing else. It tilts a bit and perhaps rises slightly on high notes, and that allows the vocal tract to shorten and widen, and the tongue to adjust in the back of the mouth, for the purposes of both comfort and expressiveness.

If you have been taught to “keep your larynx down” or “never allow the larynx to move”, remember that we don’t feel the larynx nor the vocal folds. If you are busy trying to feel the larynx, you are causing yourself trouble. If you have to work hard to sing high notes, especially if they are soft; if you have to struggle to get the consonants to be articulate; if you can’t easily brighten the sound, if you have to open your mouth very wide and drop the jaw way down to sing a sustained loud tone, be aware, you may be singing with your larynx down too far and have too much pressure on it. If you also go flat, if you have been told that your sound is “muffled” or “too far back”, be suspicious! What you want is to sing with natural sound, vibrantly free and unique, and with great EXPRESSIVITY. Keeping your larynx down (or way up, equally problematic) isn’t good and you can’t fix it by deciding that you are going to just stop. You have to work it free until it finds a balanced place on its own.

Remember, the proof is in the singing. If your teacher sounds woofy, stuck, and boringly the same, change teachers. Keeping your larynx down on purpose is just simply a bad idea.

In order to get somewhere with functional training, a teacher has to pull in two opposing directions and that is confusing to the student. It is very well stated in William Vennard’s book Singing: The Mechanism and the Technique. The teacher has to get the singer to be both flexible and strong, and the mechanism to be sturdy and malleable. The sound needs to be “bright” but also have some “warmth”. This is usually described as being “chiaroscuro”or clear and obscure at the same time.

If you work only in one direction, sooner or later you will dead-end. You need to get the voice to have a strong healthy chest register response but if you only work on chest register you will find that the voice gets stiff and starts to have various problems like flatting and constriction. If you work to develop and strengthen head register to make it stronger you will find the high notes flying out with little effort and the soft tones easier to do, but you might also get weak on the bottom and end up without warmth in the tone in the middle. Either way, you pay a price for not being balanced in both registers.

The work in the voice is always in the middle. It is in the middle that mechanics matter. If you do not know how to mechanically adjust in mid-range, you will never sing easily in a wide range of pitches. And, if all you can do is sing in mid-range, you will never have a strong bottom and easy top. Either way, you will be limited.

If you expect the middle range to take care of itself through random vocal exercises, you will waste a lot of time waiting for it to “arrive” in a finished state. It is only through deliberate cultivation of various vowel and register responses that the middle voice can come into its own and that takes both time and practice.

If you study with a teacher who asks you to do something to “get lighter” and then, a few weeks later, she asks you to sing with “more fullness”, that might sound contradictory, but it would mean that she is a good teacher, who is seeking to strike a balance between two seemingly opposite behaviors. Somehow or other, they can coexist, and in fact must coexist, if the singing is to be secure.

And, while working on the typical things like “breath support”, “resonance” and “placement” could be useful, they could also be useless, depending on how they are approached. The teacher has to have a good deal of knowledge about how to cultivate a balance of registers and vowel sound configurations in order for things to be coordinated with breathing.

Functional training is hard to do in many ways because it asks for a wide variety of abilities that take time to absorb. It can be confusing to a student to be told to “do this” and then “do that”, but in the long run, that’s the only way to go.

“You don’t need to understand physiology to sing well.”

“You don’t need to understand voice science to sing well.”

“You don’t need to understand vocal function to sing well.”

These statements are all true. If they were not true, there would be no singers without formal training in physiology, science or function, singing in any style, who have had big careers. Since most singers are in CCM styles, with classical singers being in the minority of money-earning vocalists, and since it is highly probably that many more CCM vocalists don’t have any knowledge of these subjects (no stats to refer to here, just life experience), it is self-evident that a majority of CCM singers have sung without any knowledge of physiology, voice science or vocal function. A lot of them do very well without this knowledge — until there is a problem.

Then, when the voice decides to go south, they get “motivated”. Suddenly, it might seem like a good idea to learn about anything, all things, that have to do with making a voiced sound. Why? Is that going to bring the voice back? The answer is, it just might.

If the alternative is doing what you’ve always done (nothing much) it might be that a vocalist would conclude that being blithely innocent isn’t any longer a good idea and that probably she needs to understand the machine and what makes it go if she wants to keep using it to earn a living.

So why not learn these things in the first place? Why would any singers want to sing without this knowledge? Because it isn’t expected and because it isn’t really life and death necessary until there is a problem. And, if they should seek out some kind of instruction, there is a good chance that they will either encounter people teaching singing who don’t know these topics or know them but don’t understand how to apply the information gleaned from them to improve their work. That’s a big deal.

Knowing that the vocal folds vibrate and the air comes from the lungs isn’t going to make you a great singer but understanding that every sound you make starts in your throat in your vocal folds is a much better piece of information to have than not. It is also useful in case some “vocal expert” should tell you that your voice has to come “from your diaphragm” or that you need it to be “in your masque”, because it would allow you to know that such statements have nothing to do with what actually happens when you make a sound, and that the person dispensing this advice is not going to do you much good.

Knowing where your carburetor is won’t help you drive the car. Neither will knowing that the gas tank is inside the car if you run out of gas, but if you thought the car ran on fumes from the carbon dioxide of people’s exhalations, or if you believed that the car had a little man inside who was running really hard to make the engine work, that wouldn’t be so good, would it? Better to have an idea of what actually happens even if you think it has nothing to do with your driving. If your car stops running or has problems, at least you would take it to a garage looking for a reliable mechanic and not to the place that feeds the little man a better dinner.

Just because you don’t have to know something doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t know it because you choose to know it. Having information that has to do with whatever you are doing can only be a good thing, even if at first you don’t know exactly how to use it. If you run into trouble singing, having information about physiology, voice science and vocal function could help you choose a good “repair person” or “garage”, but not having it could lead you to run around, lost, not knowing what to look for, or even give up looking, thinking there was no help to be had.

If you sing, take the time to learn about your instrument. Go to workshops, take classes and seminars, read articles and books. It will protect you in the moments when things aren’t going along nicely all by themselves, and there will be such times. Be pro-active. Learn before you have to.

Singing well requires strength. You have to have strength in your core muscles, which includes the muscles in your back from the sacrum to the shoulders. You need strength in the intercostal muscles and you don’t get that unless you have done something that stretches and strengthens your upper body like volleyball, basketball, gymnastics, swimming or tennis. Dance would qualify but there are so many variables in dance training it’s hard to make a blanket statement.

You also need strength in the vocal folds, and in the muscles of the pharynx, and in the muscles in the back of the mouth (the soft palate muscles) and stretch and flexibility in the muscles of the jaw and face, including those on the inside and on the outside.

Relaxation is a favorite word of teachers of singing and it can be useful in someone who has a relatively inflexible throat and “stuck” sound, but relaxation alone can’t make a voice strong enough to handle professional demands, even if the singer’s general sound is typically soft and easy (as in some CCM styles). The system has to stand up to vigorous use and if you are not a strong, sturdy person being able to generate a clear firm sound can be quite difficult. The tendency would be to push, to shout, to over do, and that can cost you in lots of way.

Many people who end up having careers in classical music start out with stronger than average voices and develop them to be even bigger and sturdier over years and decades. When they begin to teach, the distance between them (and their sound) and a 100 pound soprano with a delicate sweet sound can be a Grand Canyon. No matter how much talent, determination, and hard work a student who is 18 or 19 has, if he or she is not a strong person with a strong body, making a “full” sound that has “resonance” or acoustic efficiency can take a long time.

I would say that it takes about two years, minimum, of regular lessons (not less than twice a month) and regular practice (half hour five times a week) on technique (separate from songs) to begin to get a sense of what kind of a voice the person has (assuming they are young or beginners) and getting it to a kind of technical balance. That might seems like a very long time, but it’s just the beginning. It takes five years to get really solid and free and ten years to be a real vocal master. Less time is possible but very very rare. More is also possible, but that would be slow for someone who is aiming at a high level professional career.

People who do not have formal classical training (who come to teaching from CCM styles) may not realize that this time frame is normal. If you are new to teaching or to singing training, please keep this in mind. Your body needs time even if your brain doesn’t. Understanding what you need to do is not the same as being able to execute it with ease and reliability.

How do you know what kind of vocal boundaries you should have? In fact, what are functional boundaries and what, exactly, is functional training anyway? Isn’t all vocal training functionally based?

Hot and heavy questions and few would dare to respond to them with answers, but that, of course, won’t stop me. (OK, stop laughing).

A boundary has to do with how the voice responds to exercise. It should respond within certain parameters. What parameters, you ask?

The vibrato should remain normal (if one is there and is desired), not slow and wide or fast and small. The breathing should not be physically draining to do. The neck muscles should remain relaxed, not involved. The mouth opening should be moderate except for very high, low, or very loud pitches when it can be more open and exaggerated. The vowels should be UNDISTORTED, that is, recognizable. Vowel modification on high notes should not make the vowels muddled or skewed, just pleasant and comfortable both to do and to hear. Consonants should be easy to manage, again with the exception of very high pitches where they may be less distinct, particularly for sopranos. The jaw should never shake and the tongue should be quiet as well. Comfortable volume changes over 3/4 of your range should not be impossible to do. The tone should be clear, neither nasal or breathy, unless those things are desired as stylistic gestures as they are in certain styles.

If your voice has these things as responses to any exercise, you are still within functional boundaries that are working for your voice. If any of them go away for any length of time, you need to ask why. They might be temporarily absent in the short term as you learn something new, but they should never disappear entirely. If they do, you have gone past a functional boundary and you need to understand that and know why.

And, of course, if the sound is unpleasant and you don’t want it to be, you need to understand that the exercises should be helping you get it to sound pleasing, not causing it to be unpleasant.

Anytime functional boundaries are passed without awareness or explanation, the voice will let you know. If you don’t pay attention to it, as can happen when you are young, you can miss things and you can be pushed into making sound that, down the road, your throat will pay dearly to continue. Your singing teacher should know what the appropriate boundaries are but many do not, so you could be on your own to find the range of responses your voice can tolerate while you are being trained. That’s not easy to manage without help.

Functional training is supposed to take your voice past its own natural predilections into new territory. In fact, if it does not, you are not learning anything. You are simply singing with more control and awareness of what your throat would do anyway, all by itself. That’s not giving you abilities you wouldn’t have anyway. Functional training teaches deliberate development of the various responses all human voices can have, particularly those that are not typical in any given voice, and makes those responses eventually become second nature. Without boundaries, any time your voice fails to respond in an expected manner, you will assume that something is wrong with it, or with you, and misinterpret those problems as something that has to do with “flaws” in your voice instead of functional issues that were either not properly addressed or even caused by your training.

If your singing training is goal oriented, that is, if it is focused on getting the sound out in a certain way as a goal, you can miss what’s happening in the process of making sound and not notice or dismiss the experience of being a vocal sound maker in a moment-to-moment manner. If you are busy trying to produce a certain kind of “resonance” by using “better breath support” you can misconstrue what happens while you are singing assigning the wrong cause to a vocal response. That makes it harder to correct problems. Training which is aimed at music, without much regard to how the sound is being made in the throat and body, is not functional, (although it could be very musical). Training which is based upon finding various “resonance strategies” in the throat is not functional, although some people might think that it is. It is still a way of trying to manipulate a result, not a cause. Training which emphasizes a specific use of the breath, is not functional if it is not also connected to the knowledge that the vocal folds control the airflow, and not the other way around. It also has to be connected to specific and personalized information about how you use the ribs, the abdominal muscles and the rest of the body while breathing as you make sound, including how you inhale before you make sound.

Training which says you can only sing well if you learn classical repertoire first as a “good grounding” is misplaced. Learning classical repertoire is good if you want to sing classical repertoire. It is useless if you want to sing something else, UNLESS, “classical” is a substitute word for functional in which case   the training would work for the voice and body regardless of what repertoire you would sing because the functional exercises would be aimed at the needs of the repertoire as if they mattered.

Finally, functional training allows the voice to be both strong and free, variable and reliable, sturdy and adjustable, consistent and spontaneous. It is not a compromise between two things, it is a combination of two things, physical coordination done in a deliberate manner, and artistic freedom of choice, used in response to various kinds of music. It may or may not have to do with “resonance” but it always has to do with personal satisfaction and ownership.

This is a lot to think about. I hope you will.

In Italian the word “spinto” when applied to singing voices means “pushed”.

Every singing teacher worth his or her salt is against pushing the voice, so what’s up with that?

You have to know classical singing to understand this term. Jerry Hadley was a light lyric tenor. He studied for a long time with a teacher who “beefed up” his sound until it had more “heft”. Mirella Freni started her career singing Susanna and ended it singing Elisabeth in “Don Carlo”…….some change! Both of these singers made these changes gradually, over a period of years, and ended up singing well as they grew older. There are many examples of singers whose voices gradually got sturdier or fuller or more capable of sustaining sound at a loud volume for longer periods of time who move from one “fach” to another, or, (for those who don’t know this world), from one kind of singing to another. They sing one kind of operatic role in various works but finally move into another one. Rarely does a voice get lighter throughout a career (although it can go higher or lower).

Most people who survive singing loudly for a long period of time without losing their vocal chops manage to develop the ability to sustain the sound without hurting the voice. We don’t know why some people can manage this and others can’t, but it probably has to do with anatomy and with the kind of singing and training (if any) for singing the person has.

There is something to be said for 10, 15, 20, or more years of doing something that produces a result which simply cannot be had in 5 years. A mature adult who has been doing anything for decades is simply not the same as someone who is in his 20s and has been singing as an adult for a brief period of time. The old (meaning centuries ago) teachers understood this and understood that taking on a really big, heavy role too soon could do things to the voice (that were not necessarily vocal health issues) that were hard to undo, functionally. Many a career has been ruined by singing material that was too taxing and demanding on a body that was too young to manage it well.

This is true in dance as well. Although 30 is old for a ballet dancer, the role of the Swan Queen in Swan Lake is not done by a very young dancer because it is so demanding. It takes enormous stamina to sustain that role. That’s also typical of the role of “Norma” in the opera of the same name. Only Rosa Ponselle was able to do it while young (28), but she took a year off to work on the role, during which time she sang nothing else. No one would do that today, but she did and she was not harmed by doing just that. When Laurence Olivier prepared to do “Othello” for the first time he took two full years to lower his voice by two steps so it would sound authentic rather than imitative. Imagine that — two years!

Why would people do this? Isn’t it foolish? Isn’t it a waste? Why not just change?

Because the voice doesn’t work that way and the body doesn’t either. Things in the body, like all things in nature, take the time they take. You don’t grow a garden in a week and you don’t develop the stamina or strength to do a marathon in a month. Singing is no different.

Yet, in the world of vocal training, few have an understanding of this and almost no one has any reference to in CCM material at all. Why should belting be an automatic thing? Shouting is immediate. Singing loudly in a sustained sound that is freely produced is not. It is not a natural activity unless you have a loud voice and you talk incessantly, and even then, that’s not a musical function, so it isn’t exactly the same.

The singers of the world should pay attention to and understand why the things that were observed many long years ago made sense and why they should not be thrown away blithely just because we live in a very different era today. Bodies may be quite different now than they were then but not THAT different. Going slowly worked then and it works now.

If we let go of repertoire entirely for the moment and looked at singing training strictly as a physical activity like a sport or like dance we can talk about what it takes to develop an Olympic quality vocalist (which is related to, but not the same as, an artist who sings).

Gymnastics requires greater and greater physical skill, pushing the body to its limits. Its combination of enormous flexibility and great strength are found most aptly in the young and the diminutive. Long lanky people don’t do well in gymnastics, mostly for reasons that have to do with physics. The long lanky folk do well in basketball and volleyball and the sturdy, wide and densely muscled seem to do well in weight lifting and football. Other sports may have other physical parameters that make it easier for individuals with certain kinds of bodies to do better at them than others. Ballet dancers tend to be long like volleyball players although not quite so tall. The women, particularly, do better with smaller breasts (whether natural or decreased through surgery).

No one has ever looked at singing in exactly this way, except through the externals of the sounds they make. We do have “dramatic voices” (ones that seem to be quite loud and rich) and “lyric voices” (ones that seem sweeter and not quite so powerful) and a range in between. We describe voices with descriptive words like “warm” and “earthy” and “cutting” or “creamy”or “delicate” and “shimmery” but those words only mean something to the people that use them. They aren’t objective terms.

We don’t know if a certain size larynx or a certain thickness of vocal folds makes for a certain kind of sound, or if a certain thickness of neck or length of throat gives certain harmonics a boost. We do know that longer throats tend to be lower pitched voices, and small ones higher pitched voices, but that’s about it. It stands to reason, though, that anatomy has to have something to do with what we call the voice itself.

Nevertheless, the vocal ligament is part of a complex muscular system. Only the hyoid bone in the tongue is an actual bone. Everything else is either cartilage or muscle, meaning it is soft or malleable. That being so, why would it not respond to development, at least in the muscles? The muscles of the pharynx and velo-pharyngeal port (the throat and the back of the mouth) can change shape by contracting. The more they learn to contract, they more they develop strength and flexibility. Even the vocal folds themselves can learn to contract more firmly and resiliently, closing more firmly to resist great air pressure from the lungs. The muscles of the chest (intercostals) and the abdominals (all four layers) can become very strong.

The predominant method of training for singing, developed in the 1600 and 1700s, passed down mostly one person to one person for all these centuries has evolved and changed along with the music being written and sung during that time. By the mid-1800s when orchestras became large and loud, voices really needed to have a certain kind of “oomph” in order to be heard, since there was no amplification other than that which could be created within the singer’s own physical body. At that time it became imperative to find a kind of “carrying power” that allowed a vocalist to compete with an 80 piece orchestra in an opera without ending up with a severe case of laryngitis. The “singer’s ring” seemed to help the sound soar over the orchestra and seemed like the “golden answer” to operatic vocal production. That end product, that special resonance, became the goal. Problem is, it never was the source of the sound and it isn’t possible to “do resonance” deliberately.

In observing the ingredients of those who had succeeded in this endeavor, singing over the orchestra loudly enough to be heard and sound good, but also not lose their voices, it was clear that it had something to do with breathing and with that “golden answer” in the sound. The breathing and the resonance became the pathway to this answer and today, hundreds of years later, it still is. The goal became the pathway, and the pathway became less important that getting to the goal however one could.

We know that winning in gymnastics means that you have to have all the various maneuvers mastered to perfection but that you must also look a certain way (comfortable) while you do them. We know that even small infractions of the movement parameters or the execution of them in terms of their smoothness and ease can make or break winning a medal. We understand that executing the maneuvers takes a lot of practice but I don’t think the athletes or their coaches confuse doing a routine on the uneven parallel bars as something that “just happens”. Clearly, they understand that a very complex kind of training has to happen every day for hours and hours for many years to make that routine into an Olympic one. They also understand that the gymnast has to have certain physical requisites and a certain mindset in order to make the possibility of success greater than it would be for an “average” person.

If we applied that to singing, every singing student would have a lesson every day and practice under the watchful eye of the teacher for 10 years before the student would be skilled enough to equate with a gymnast of the same age and kind of training. Imagine what that would mean to the level of singing that young people could address by the time they were 17 or 18! But, with the attitude that training can only begin after puberty, and with the attitude that one lesson for one hour once a week is sufficient to teach someone to sing well, there is no realistic possibility that at the same age the singer could ever be to singing what the gymnast is to gymnastics.

I am asking here, why not? It isn’t because it would be impossible, just that it hasn’t been done in a long long time or maybe it has never been done at all.

And what does this have to do with learning songs in foreign languages that were written in 1650 or 1720 or 1805 if you intend to become a professional singer in some style that has nothing to do with classical singing? The answer, obviously, is nothing at all. The training process, for its own sake, is about learning to make the desired sound, comfortably, easily and freely, in whatever quality one needs,  on demand, over and over again, in a way that is expressive and satisfying. The training process is about discovering what you have, in terms of the voice and the body, while being guided by a trained expert who encourages experimenting with various kinds of sounds in many different directions until finally the process itself produces the results almost without effort.

If you are an artist, if you have a desire to create and to express, if you have something special to say about how you view the world and life, if you want that expression to come through your voice in music, then, you must have a strong vocal and physical scaffolding as a secure platform to do all of these things and to make the world a better place by doing so. When that scaffolding is in place you can rest upon it with confidence, without giving it more than a passing thought, and express that which only you have to say.

So many people who would sing from the heart are robbed of this experience by poor or inadequate training. They have the artist within killed by teachers who lack skill, life experience, and high level singing ability of their own. Many singers stop singing altogether because someone who was teaching without a clue said or did something that went to the core of their soul and silenced them forever.

The way out of this dilemma is through solid functional training, grounded in science, and applied with care and kindness.