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There are a lot of people whose idea of singing is based on making the voice do something. They have never, not once, sung a free, unmanipulated sound that arose without interference. From the get-go they have been taught to “find resonance” and “open the throat” or “keep the larynx down” or any number of a million other things. They have accepted this behavior and allowed it to become their default, without any deep investigation of any kind.

People with big loud voices who can make a lot of sound and still sound halfway decent can manage that way. They can certainly fill the big houses of the world with sound and they can absolutely make an impression, sometimes even while singing without an ounce of real feeling or expression. They incorrectly believe that manipulation is good, it’s necessary, it is desirable. Many of them have careers, particularly in opera houses.

No accepted pedagogy book, however, agrees that deliberate manipulations of any kind is desireable. All of the books that are considered important in vocal pedagogy (for classical singing, as mostly those books are the ones that have any widely accepted credibility) all say that freedom is paramount. Above and beyond all other capacities, freedom has to be affirmed first and often.

Sounds that are squeezed, tight, pushed, swallowed, rigid, and immobilized ultimately don’t express much of anything and certainly don’t sound attractive and very often end up causing both musical and physical (vocal) problems. Yes, there are people singing like this in every walk of professional music, and there are people teaching in various situations who rest their entire approach on these ideas. There are even some people who think that singing freely is a hoax and that there is, really, no such thing. If they do hear someone who seems to be singing freely, they think that the person is a freak of nature. I have even been told that singing with deliberate tension is the only way to really know what you are doing. Yikes.

You cannot sing freely and also at the same time “hold your larynx down” or “put your larynx in a certain place” (up, down, back, etc.), you cannot “make your mask resonate” any more than you can “make your food digest” because both functions are by-products of other things the body does. They are not causes, they are effects. You can eat and you can make a sound, but you cannot deliberately digest or resonate anything.

Somewhere along the way, people never hear about the fact that the voice is a reflexive instrument. It reacts to the messages of the mind. It reacts to the intentions we have to make sound in a specific way (words or music). It produces sound and the sound is modified by the vocal tract in myriad ways before it emerges out into the world as a vibratory movement of air molecules. You can decide to sing, but you cannot decide to produce “resonance”. It just shows up or not.

In order to “come home to your own voice” you have to spend quite some time exploring all of its potentials and letting it do its own thing, even while you are learning to harness it. If you stop its natural movements or responses, it will push back and let you know it’s not happy by giving you a hard time and it can be pretty creative about how it does that. If you learn to partner it, with awareness and sensitivity, it will let you know clearly, in good time, what it likes to do and what it would rather not do. It will allow you coax it into new places that wouldn’t show up without coaxing and if you give it permission to react spontaneously it will show you places you didn’t know it could go. When the sound you make is the sound you want to make and the sound that gives you pleasure, believe me you will absolutely recognize it and you will know that you have found something that you were always seeking…something that you deeply knew was in there somewhere but that you had not yet been able to discover. Finding that sound is absolutely coming home to both your heart and your voice and there is no other experience that compares to that one. It is unique in its joy and its comfort.

Anthony Tommasini, the classical reviewer of the New York Times, recently reviewed 85 year old Barbara Cook and had the nerve to say [my words, paraphrasing] that she wasn’t quite up to singing really hard music, the way classical singers do, since she is so old. What nerve. The Times (another reviewer) said something similar about Streisand last week, too. At 70 she sounded great. Not like her 30 year old self, but why should she sound like that? Why should anyone? Yet, they make those comments. PLEASE.

Mr. T particularly is so unbelievably clueless. He lives in the world where classical singing is “elevated” and “great” and other styles are well, “something less”. That he gets away with this attitude is always obvious in his reviews as he manages to say something unconscious or deliberately snarky, thinking, it seems, that this is the “correct” view.

American music of all styles is not lesser than classical music, it’s just different. It is just as hard to sing “Take Me, Baby, Or Leave Me” from Rent as it is to sing Mozart’s “Non So Piu”, maybe in some ways much harder, especially if you have to sing it 8 times a week. There isn’t much difference between singing “An Die Musik” and singing “In The Still Of The Night” in terms of vocal use. What is different is the style and that matters, but the level of difficulty for the voice is low in both songs if the singers are skilled and experienced.

If it were up to me I would make the large institutions change what they think today. In the future, opera houses will have musicals running alongside operas as regular fare and it may be, if training continues along functional lines, that we could even see Rent running along side Lulu or Carmen. You never know. The point is, just because opera has been around longer, it isn’t any more valuable than other styles.

Art has caught up with this idea in every are except singing. Andy Warhol and Alexander Calder are not considered “lesser” artists than Monet or Degas, at least in terms of what they cost and how they are regarded by museums and critics. I don’t think anyone would say that Balanchine’s choreography was more valuable than that of the choreographers working in the major ballet houses and companies of this present moment. We have Twyla Tharp creating dances for ballet companies and Broadway shows. No one makes “remarks” about that. She’s not alone, either.

But, when it comes to singing, the Times major critic has only one point of view — classical is harder, classical is better. This attitude continues to feed the people who also share it all the other places of the world, most particularly, and unfortunately, in this country where all but a few CCM styles were born.

If we really respected this music there would be requirements that people who wrote about it or taught it or had to deal with it in any other public arena would understand each style, each world, on its own terms and treat it with dignity and integrity. You cannot write about music theater with a classical mindset. Yes, there are a few places where the viewpoints overlap, but they are less every day.

Classical singing requires singers to generate a “singer’s formant cluster” in order to be heard unamplified over an orchestra, (all but the very high sopranos, who can rely on the pitches) and you need to be able to generate a good amount of volume. You need consistent vibrato, consistent production, and a distinctive voice. You need to understand languages, and you need to be an OK actor. You had better have some clear way of using your breathing mechanism, too, or you won’t have enough volume or stamina to keep going. You need at least an octave and a half to two octaves of range.

Music theater is driven by lyrics and communication of their meaning. It asks for specific vocal qualities and various styles. It is concerned with clarity most of the time, both of word and of intention. A good voice is always nice but I have heard so many not so good voices over the years….some of them have actually won Tony awards. Range depends on the role.

Jazz is concerned with phrasing, intonation, musical variation and rhythmic freedom and consistency. It may or may not be concerned with the lyrics in a literal sense, because sometimes there are no lyrics, just syllables or humming. Sometimes words are “bent” on purpose. You don’t need a certain kind of vocal quality, or range, or vibrato, or power.

Each of the other styles has its own parameters. Some artists can go in and out of several styles comfortably, some not. If they were all equally easy everyone would sing everything and nothing would be its own distinct style at all.

One of these days the Times will have reason to replace Mr. T. When they do, I hope they get a reviewer who isn’t stuck in classical snobbery.

You can blink, swallow, cough, and breathe on purpose but when you are not doing so, those things happen on their own through the wiring of the nervous system. We can intervene, but we cannot stop ourselves from doing these things.

The “fight/flight” mechanism, which connects to the old limbic brain, kicks in when we are stressed. It makes the breath shallow, it brings the circulation to the central organs deep within the body, it makes the limbs cold and makes us clammy and sweaty if the “threatening” situation continues. Since most of us live with a low level of stress all the time (if there is anyone who does not, I haven’t yet met them) we all encounter a certain amount of activity from this biological reaction. If it becomes chronic, it can effect how we breathe and even how we stand.

If the throat constricts to restrict air (which it does in the case of this F/F response) the larynx can rise in the throat. If the constriction continues, the larynx can continue to stay in a raised position and that, in turn, can make the head project out over the body, forcing it forward. It’s hard to breathe with chronic constriction so the body tries to relieve this strain by pushing the head out. It isn’t efficient, but it does have some effect. This tension will also creep up into the back of the base of the tongue, making it tight and immobile. The voice becomes “pinched” and “strained” and can sound squeezed and choked off or muffled.

Another factor that effects us in a similar way is emotion. “All choked up”, “Cat got my tongue”, “Can’t spit it out”, “Swallowed my words”, “Speechless”. These phrases exist because if we are in certain emotionally powerful situations, the throat can literally close, making it almost impossible to breathe or speak. If you are in a constantly volatile emotional situation but can’t or won’t express what those emotions are, you can end up with chronic constriction in your throat with all of the same effects on your voice as described above.

In fact, keeping the throat free and open is, in our society, something of a miracle. We have so many reasons why we have to suppress what we feel or what we are experiencing. Some people probably do manage. Perhaps these expressive souls are more uninhibited than the majority of us. Perhaps they just don’t let things get to them!

If you sing, however, you have to address these patterns, whether you want to or not, because if you allow them to remain your singing will be compromised. If you begin training without allowing the throat to relax and unwind, the training will sit on top of constriction that may have been buried in your throat for decades, perhaps since childhood. You might still sing but your freedom will be compromised and your authentic vocal personality will be too.

Of course, most singing training addresses these issues from the outset because all teachers of singing realize that these conditions exist and are impediments.

RIGHT.

Find me a teacher who understands these biological and psychological response patterns and knows how to undo the long-term consequences of same. One in a thousand, maybe.

If you begin training by telling a student to “bring the sound forward” and you insist upon “good breath support” in a young inexperienced student and that person has chronic throat constriction which they do not realize they have you will tie the student in a vocal knot and get absolutely nowhere, no matter what exercises you use. Then you will blame the student for not trying hard enough or being resistant.

On the other hand, if you do know about these patterns, you will allow the person to slowly relax, learn to move the muscles of the tongue, neck and eventually the throat, and let the musculature soften so that it can let go and release the tension and accompanying anxiety that is held there. It takes time and requires great patience but it can be done. In the end, the person will not only sound better, she will feel better, both physically and psychologically. They go together, particularly in those who sing.

You cannot fight the body. You cannot work against the nervous system. You must learn to make friends with it and ride on it so that you can sing freely. There really is no other way.

Sooner or later, you come to a place where you think, “That’s it. I don’t need to learn anything more about this topic. I’m an expert and that’s the end”. Then, as time passes, you just rest on your laurels, you do what you’ve always done, you know what you’ve always known and you preach your own gospel of knowledge from that platform.

Or, you confront yourself and look in the mirror and wonder, “Is there anything new out there? Have I really found out all there is to know on this topic even though I haven’t investigated it in over 5 (10, 15, 20, 25) years?”

I strive to learn something new every day. I strive to be open to change and new information about singing, coming from all directions. I assume I never know when the latest, hottest new discovery will open up my world to excitingly fresh possibilities. I naively assumed that most teachers would have that viewpoint as well. I was very wrong.

I have encountered many, many teachers of singing who have found their own way to teach and are not in the least interested in changing anything about it, mostly because they feel it’s just fine the way it is. They are well satisfied with themselves and their work and make no bones about letting others know that they feel that way. It’s kind of stunning, but it’s not an uncommon attitude.

How is it possible to think that you have a perfect way to do anything? How is it that you do what you do and never adjust or change it or what you think about it? How is it so that you aren’t even curious to see what someone else is doing?

Licensed professions are required to keep up their skills by attending educational courses that keep them abreast of the newest trends. Speech Language Pathologists need to get CEU’s in order to keep their credentials current. That is certainly not true of singing teachers. They don’t have to have any skills in the first place……a plumber could put out a shingle and say he was teaching singing and no one could stop him. In fact, I know a very well known singing teacher who was a piano tuner before he became a recognized faculty member at a college conservatory.

This holds true for other professions who deal with us as singing teachers. Most of the laryngologists I have met think they know what good singing teachers do. Some of them have taken singing lessons but most have not. Some of them have observed a teacher of singing over a period of time, but most of them have not. Some of them have read about vocal pedagogy (from a classical point of view, since that’s all there is), but most have not. Yet, they do not attend voice conferences. There are no ENTS at a NATS national conference unless they are invited there. I have been to medical conferences as a singing teacher (just to watch), but I have never seen a medical doctor attend a singing teacher conference. Why not? Because they think they don’t need to learn from us even though they could benefit enormously from what we have to share. I have spent time observing in several doctors offices and seen more than a few SLPs working. I don’t intend to become an ENT or an SLP, but watching them work was very beneficial to my overall knowledge of the voice. And I always enjoy watching them present research because I always learn something. Why should that be only a one-way path?

It’s very hard telling people who think they know that maybe they do not know. It’s very hard pointing out to someone that curiosity about what others do or know is a good thing, not a harmful one. It’s quite challenging to let another person know that you would like to share your knowledge if that other person has never even thought that there could be something new to learn from anyone.

There will always be people who are content with themselves but when that contentment contains the seeds of complacency, it isn’t a wonderful thing. Self-satisfaction can be lethal or wonderful, depending on the circumstances. If you already know everything you need to know, do yourself a favor, and think about it again.

This blog has addressed the changing atmosphere of teaching singing int he 21st century numerous times. It is slowly but surely moving towards changes that will be truly seismic once they are instituted.

The biggest and most significant change will be when college students are no longer required to learn “An Die Musik”,”Caro Mio Ben” or “Apres Un Rêve” in order to prove they are “well trained” and have “good technique” even if you have no interest in or desire to sing classical music.

Good technique is being able to sing whatever you want in whatever way you want all the time. Period. It has nothing to do with art songs or classical music. It isn’t about “good taste” it is about good function.

Learning about the great composers of the western world is a hugely valuable thing to do. Human beings need to know and appreciate the great classical music of the last 400 years. Learning about the composers and their works, however, has zero to do with learning to sing functionally. They are separate, now more than ever. As I frequently say, singing “Les Berceaux” will not help you one bit to sing “Out Tonight” from Rent.

Functional training is the same as any training for a physical skill. It is more like a sport or dance than not. Being musical, expressive, and singing in foreign languages are three separate things that may relate to functional training after the training has helped established healthy, reliable vocal behavior, but they are not interdependent.

If you want to play basketball and you go to learn how and the instructor says, first you have to be a good swimmer because that will develop your entire body and make you stronger, that might make sense but being stronger and more developed won’t make you good at basketball. Only playing basketball will make you better at playing basketball.

Currently, talented young singers take classical lessons and use them to figure out on their own how to adapt their sound to other styles. Some succeed and some don’t. This has been true for 50 years. Some teachers understand how to teach belt and mix because they have learned to sing in these qualities but some don’t sing in them or have not studied them and teach them anyway (that’s backed up by research published in the Journal of Voice in 2003 and 2006).

When we get to the place where students who want to sing Elton John songs can do so alongside of songs by Rodgers and Hammerstein and Jonathan Larson, then we will have crested this big wave and will be on the down side of its energy. We aren’t there yet but we are closer by a long way than we used to be.

In spite of the fact that I am always championing students, placing the responsibility of learning to sing squarely on the shoulders of the teachers, I must reluctantly admit that are some people who just cannot learn.

I have had various students over the decades who have spent lots of money on lessons, have made progress in lessons and in fact, have sung quite well in exercises, who cannot or will not make the effort to apply any of what they have learned in a song. I find this baffling because I was always eager to apply what I was learning in my lessons as soon as possible. I wanted to make adjustments and changes because I found it exciting.

Still, these people often do not realize they are not singing in a way that makes it sound like they had ever had any training at all. I could better understand this if I could not get the student to make progress in the lessons, but that is a different situation and is very very rare in my studio. Those people usually don’t stay very long. The folks I’m discussing do make progress in the lessons, sometimes really amazing progress, and then proceed to sing the same way they always have.

I had a woman who was intelligent, talented, and dedicated, with experience in performing, who was musical and expressive, study with me for over two years. She went from one workable octave to two and a half, sometimes three. She got smoother, louder, more resonant, easier and freer vocally and sounded wonderful in the exercises. She could do almost every pattern easily and it was really encouraging to hear her.

Every performance she ever did, however, was just like the first one I saw before she had taken any lessons. NOTHING changed. Her range was very low and short, the sound was uninteresting and repetitive and it had no real connection to any kind of emotional expression. It wasn’t wrong, exactly, as there was no constriction or distortion, but it was just blah. After two years, I encouraged her to “try another teacher” because I was at an end.

I have even had “heart to heart” talks with some of these people, telling them that they are not really using what they have learned and that they must make some connection between the sounds they make in the exercises and the ones they make in music, but often that doesn’t work either.

Clearly, this is a mental block of some kind. The throat is ready, willing and able, and so is the body. Only the mind can create this kind of disconnect.

I don’t have any answers, just raising the issue. Perhaps it will help younger teachers to understand that it isn’t them…….I hope so!

How many kinds of singing are there in this world? Do we really know?

How many kinds of singing are available to the average person who wants to listen? How about how many are available if you want to sing them yourself?

The truth is there are so many kinds of singing and so many kinds of music, it’s hard to know about them all. In addition to all the American styles there are world styles and many variation of all of them. If you include recorded music, going back about 100 years, there are historical recordings to hear, too. With all this diversity you would think you could find a wide range of vocal music 24/7 on mainstream TV and radio. You would be wrong.

In American popular culture on TV there are two styles: country and pop. You hardly ever hear folk music, or classical vocal music of any kind (including legit music theater), you don’t hear much by way of other styles except maybe R&B, or gospel music on religious programs. Contemporary Christian Music is a big genre and has millions of fans, but there is no special TV show that promotes it that on mainstream TV. Still, even there it is the same styles, over and over.

Who decided to narrow the field so much? Who was in charge of promoting only these styles? Where was it written that the people on American Idol, X Factor, The Voice and the other shows are the ones who have the right to decide what singing is? Where are all the other styles?

It is irking to think that the musical taste of American listeners is fed a steady diet of these narrow views of singing and music. Since some school systems have absolutely no music training at all and others have very little, kids learn about music by listening to the radio and watching TV. In the 50s, even cartoons had classical music. I remember a cartoon of cats singing on a fence that used the sextet from Lucia as the music. I didn’t know it, of course, as a kid, but I recognized it immediately when I heard it as an adult. The Lone Ranger’s theme song was the William Tell Overture. Mighty Mouse’s voice (on the theme song) was that of a classical tenor.

We live in a time when our popular culture has sunk about as low as it can go. It is nearly impossible to find decent drama on TV, to watch shows not permeated with horrible violence as a matter of course. Even “Law and Order SVW” had an episode in recent years about a serial killer of woman that showed such a graphic scene that was so upsetting I had to turn it off. All of the “Crime Scene” investigation shows are extremely violent. This in early evening, while kids could watch. Why?

It is easy to watch “reality TV” about the inside of prisons, prostitutes (Bad Girls), “low-lifes” of all kinds including mafiosi and crooks, and things like “Raw” which I think is about unrestricted fighting. The violence in football leaves many permanently injured, boxing sometimes kills people. We call this “sports”. We pay money to watch. Remind anyone else of the Colosseum in Rome?

If you complain, you are a prude. If you say nothing and allow it all, you are “supporting first amendment rights”, if you object, you are accused of encouraging censorship.

That’s not true. People can do whatever they want creatively, but that doesn’t mean all kinds of content  should be treated with equanimity, regardless. If you are getting rich from making shows about cooking, that’s a bit different than getting it from making shows about how the mob lives day to day.

Music, too, is the same. If all you can give the world is more of the same old thing, if you have no taste yourself and you enforce the same lack of taste of others because you can, what does that say about you? That you are ignorant, not sophisticated. That you don’t help the culture, you just ride on it. Yes, you are getting very rich, but, honestly, so what?

I don’t see any of this changing any time soon. The more disgusting, gross, disturbing, violent, dark, revolting something is, the more people promote it so they can make money from it. That’s possible because the public actually likes it and is willing to pay money for it. Those of us who turn it off, walk away and hope for something better are in the minority and no one is going to cater to us any time soon. It remains a personal statement. That which is beneath me does not deserve my attention.

The possibility that there will be a mainstream TV show that allows singers to sing in virtually any style is very very small. Too bad. We could use one. We are all guilty of fostering the shows that would be better off going away.

How about you? Are you watching Honey Boo Boo?

I have two students, both middle aged men, who came to me with no background in singing who wanted to sing and who, two years into the process, now sound very good. They practiced, they were disciplined, they were dedicated.

I write this because there is an idea out there that a person can be “too old” to learn to sing, especially technically. This is nonsense. Anyone can learn to do anything if they really want to and put in the time. True, not everyone is going to end up at a professional level, but you can come close in people who are hard workers, naturally musical and have determination.

This is also true about people who “can’t match pitch”. I’ve heard all kinds of teachers complain about how hard it is for their students who can’t match pitch to learn to do so. That’s because the teachers are always trying to fit the poor hapless student into their pre-existing box instead of going to the place where the student lives and seeing what’s in their abode. Doesn’t work. I can usually help someone sing a five note scale in a half and hour. Hm.

Teaching any skill requires that you understand not only what the skill entails but how the various ingredients fit together. People who are naturally good at something don’t make very good teachers. That’s because they are “talented” meaning they can “just do it” right off and don’t struggle to get the basics. They get them easily, quickly and with little conscious effort. Until and unless they have a severe problem and have to re-learn the skills, they may have no clue as to how they did what was so easy.

In learning theory experts have studied how we learn things. Experts have also figured out the processing of kinesthetic awareness in terms of how the brain works and how new information gets processed and stored as it is taken in. There are certain sequences that work and others that don’t in the way that makes it easiest to learn. Do you think anyone who teaches singing knows about this? You could probably count them in the entire profession on just one hand.

We also have out there the idea that it’s bad to teach children to sing. Why would this be so? There is no research to back up this claim and certainly not scads of children who have been trained only to later be unable to sing. This is an old wives tale, but it persists. As long as the training is functionally grounded and the kids sing in an age and style appropriate manner, the training is not only not harmful, it is beneficial. Marilyn Horne took lessons as a kid from her father, ditto Sutherland and Pavarotti. They did pretty well, no? Garland sang as a child, so did Andrea McArdle, so you don’t have to learn classical music – other styles work well, too.

Teachers light the way. They shed light on the dim places, the hidden places and light up the darkness of ignorance and blindness. They inspire by explaining things in ways that make sense and work. They guide others because they have walked in the dark themselves and they remember the steps they took to get to the light. They tell the truth as they have discovered it, but they have dug deep to be sure that their own subjective experience has something universal in it, understanding that the next person’s path might need to be a slightly different one.

Just as with anything else, it’s never too early or too late as long as you know what you want, you have a willing and experienced teacher and you can put in the time to take the information you are given and make it your own.

Lenny Bruce was arrested a number of times on charges of obscenity. Compared to what comedians get away with now, what he did was minor, but back then, it was a big deal. He broke the rules and it was because he did so that comics like Richard Pryor or George Carlin had it a little easier when they broke rules, too.

Bruce said that it was necessary for a few people to “push the envelope” and he was right. In every case whenever anyone came along to challenge the status quo, that person or group was seen as being a threat — to stability, to decorum, to standards, to security, to ……… Yet, because that person had the guts to break through the accepted barriers, those who came after had a new path to follow. In time, the renegades become the heroes, the trendsetters and the “important” influences. It’s ironic that some of them don’t live to see this happen.

In a field where there are no accepted criteria, and teaching singing is certainly one in that category, it is difficult to “push the envelope” because not many people even know there is an envelope. The world of learning to sing in a formal sense only began in the USA at Juilliard in 1938. Before that, you had to take private lessons if you wanted to be a professional singer. For a long time, there were very few places you could go to study in a school. Now, of course, all that has changed.

When Juilliard started its program, there was no discussion of training singers for other styles because (a) styles as we know them now didn’t really exist. There was jazz, folk and maybe country music, but only jazz was a national phenomenon. Music theater was still heavily influenced by opera and vaudeville. Rock, pop, gospel, rap, and their variations didn’t exist so there couldn’t have been a pedagogy in a school. Then, (b) experts who would have been needed to teach other styles would have had to have been coaxed from the musical world to become academicians and to create codified “norms” for testing and grading. None of this would have been very feasible in l938, so training stayed classical and only classical for singers who wanted to attend a college for a very long time.

Finally, in the 1980s, colleges began to realize that there was money to be made by allowing students to sing “musicals”and began asking the faculty (all classical) to teach music theater repertoire as a part of the degree programs. It took a while longer for a few colleges to offer bachelor’s degrees in music theater, and now a very few offer master’s degrees in music theater, but they are not vocal performance  degrees in music theater, but general degrees in which singing plays a part.

It would have been hard to “push the envelope” of singing training in any of the prior decades because there wasn’t much to push. You can’t push beef stew. Now, however, with the many vocal degree programs at various colleges, both classical and music theater, as well as some few jazz degrees, the “envelope” seems ripe for a fracture. Why not train singers to address the many and varied technical demands of each style as if those differences were real and mattered?

First you have to recognize that there is zero agreement about what a “classical” sound is amongst those who sing it and teach it. Problem there. [Yes, we know it when we hear it, but we can’t write it down in a way garners agreement from multiple parties, so what can we really say about any of it?] Second, you have to acknowledge that there are no accepted criteria regarding training in terms of developmental parameters or functional applicability. Third, there is no way to test for teaching effectiveness except by noticing how many singers studying with any specific teacher are working in the music marketplace as vocalists. That can be misleading, but I suppose it’s better than nothing.

Then, in order to “push the envelope”, you have to establish that there is an envelope, that it has certain contents and that it needs to be pushed. In other words you need to have a sense what the “big picture” (the envelope) is. In terms of classical vocal training that would mean knowing what it typically entails, where it takes place, who teaches it, what kinds of things are taught, why they are taught, and why any of the preceding matters. Not many people are familiar with all these parameters. Sometimes not even the people who are teaching in the colleges see the bigger picture. You have to go into those programs but be outside of them in order at the same time to see the whole with some degree of perspective. If you can make an assessment from this vantage point and you see that a whole lot of things are missing or just plain don’t make sense, you have to get that envelope ripped open. You have to push it until it yields.

Who are the Lenny Bruces of singing teaching? I know a few personally. They aren’t going to be arrested, but if there had been any “voice police” I’ll bet they would have been locked up a long time ago.

Recently, I was called upon to give a talk to an mixed audience of teachers (new and experienced), classical and not, speech language pathologists, students (all ages), and interested amateurs. During the breaks of the seminar I again encountered people who came to me to say, “I’m so glad you are saying these things. This is my experience exactly!” Meaning, they related to what I was saying, in several ways. In fact, two young women (early 20s) sat with me at lunch and explained how they had been told never to sing anything but classical repertoire even though that was not their primary interest because it would “ruin their voices”. I was told that too, nearly 50 years ago. What profession has not progressed in 50 years? That of teaching people to sing.

Although there is far less prejudice than there was decades ago, it certainly is not gone and it isn’t hard to find someone who is being told that classical vocal training will prepare you to sing anything in spite of the very clear evidence that there are vocal fold, airflow and acoustic differences between classical and CCM styles in research done by many people on many different subjects. It’s as if they insist the world is flat because that’s how it always has been and it’s so because they were told it was so.

As to “ruin your voice”, that’s nonsense. It might interfere with your technique, especially if you are going to sing various styles, so you have to know what you are doing when you change gears, but it won’t “ruin” anything. You can easily ruin your ability to sing by studying with a teacher of classical music who has no clue about vocal production, and believe me, there are lots of them out there.

There persists, too, the idea that you “just warm up” and then you can sing any kind of repertoire. If you are getting ready for a performance, you do a few scales and arpeggios, then you work on the song and hope that it sounds OK. That idea is found quite a bit in choral groups. The extent of the technical work is “use support”, “open your mouth”, “pronounce the consonants” and “don’t go flat” (think “high” on the pitch). It is, I suppose, better than nothing, but it is mostly useless insofar as getting a person to sing outside their own vocal habits, whatever they may be.

Talented people always find ways to learn what they need to. They dig until they get what they were seeking. Talented people who can sing and want to be singers will somehow or other find a way. That they do doesn’t always have to do with training, in fact, it can happen without any training or with very little. The people who are interested but only moderately able, however, need genuine help to improve. They need guidance and encouragement and appropriate repertoire. They need teaching.

The people who can barely sing can learn, as long as the teacher thinks of the training as “special needs” and is incredibly patient, supportive and clear. Not everyone is cut out for that, but it should be that there are special needs singing classes for teachers. There are none, as far as I know.

And, there is no research that compares the vocal health (long-term) of working opera singers with that of working CCM singers, and that would be a welcome study. There are no books of “graded belt songs” for students who are fledgling belters. There are no studies on the evolution of American CCM styles insofar as their development decade by decade in relationship to the expansion of other media. By that I mean, in the 1920s when amplification came along, singing changed. When the movies came along, it changed again. When radio came along, it changed again. During the war, it changed. When television was available in the average home, it made a big change. Meanwhile, classical music was going through some stages of its own. Now, in this present climate, the line between styles continues to blur and what was “hard to hear” in the 70s seems not so jarring now. Our ears have gotten used to all manner of music. Surely there is an enormous area here for scholarly research of all kinds, as well as scientific investigation. It would be great to have something to draw upon for further intellectual comprehension.

I teach from over 41 years of life experience working with all kinds of people in all kinds of styles. I have all that to draw upon and, really, sometimes think I have seen and heard it all. This kind of life experience isn’t very common and it would be great if I wasn’t in a situation where I can only pass on what I’ve observed and learned through my own years as a teachers in small dribs and drabs. I am repeatedly asked for a book, but you can’t learn to teach singing or to sing from a book. Nevertheless, one of these days, maybe I will attempt one. Meanwhile, we need more resources. Young people, are you listening???