Various Posts

Opera Singers Who Can’t

Can’t what? Quite a few opera singers have made “cross-over” recordings to show their versatility. They seem to want to say, “I can sing anything”, except, of course, they can’t.

I presented a lecture on CCM styles a number of years ago to a university/conservatory that was strictly classical. I was invited there by the faculty to discuss the possibility of having the school offer a degree in Music Theater. I spent the day working with students and talking to the faculty. One of the faculty was a star teacher, someone famous who had sung at the Met and other first level houses. After I was done, she said in her most imperious tones, “I don’t understand why this is necessary. I sing everything from Mozart to Wagner.” I responded by saying, “Yes, I’m sure you do, but do you sing rock music, or jazz?” She said, looking surprised, “Of course not.” My reply to this was, “That’s my point.” She was silent.

The university instituted the music theater degree and it is doing very well. I was not informed that my presentation had convinced the Dean to go ahead. I heard later, via the grapevine, that I had offended the diva. Uh-oh!

What happens if you are a star opera singer is that you can live in a world in which nothing else but what you do seems real or seems to matter. You can forget what is going on in the rest of the world where you and your persona are not given the same amount of deference you get in your own community. In point of fact, if you are an opera singer and you decide to make a jazz recording, and you bring your opera voice with you, even if you hire great jazz artists to play for you and you have great arrangements, people with ears are going to hear “classical training” in that vocal machine, and if they are serious musicians, they are not going to take you seriously because you did not bother to take the music seriously. Fair trade.

Don’t Make Yourself Sound Out of Touch

I recently heard a recording of a Broadway tune meant to be belted, recorded by an opera singer, who was singing in a high head-register dominant sound that was uneven and had little to do with the music or the text. The meaning was there. Clearly the artist knew what the song was communicating but she either didn’t hear or didn’t know to listen to the kind of sound she was making.  The song is essentially bitter and  we don’t associate bitterness with head register.

Remember, the music business, the people in the industry, don’t care about academia. They don’t care about your vocal technique, your degrees, they don’t care about how you trained yourself. They care about how you sing — just how you sing and what you do with your music while you sing. If you don’t listen widely and you don’t work with industry professionals you won’t know that you don’t know and then you can end up making yourself sound foolish. While you believe that you are showing the world how versatile you are, what you might be revealing is how unaware you are. You might be viewed as one of the opera singers who can’t. Be careful.

Most of the people who love teaching singing also love singing and people. If they are good teachers, they will hold voices, music and people as being equal and worthy of love and respect.

Love. What is real love? (I know, you can hear a song coming on. Not.)

True love is that which is all-accepting but allows for and understands that which is not perfect.  For instance, weather includes all kinds of atmospheric conditions. Some we like, some we don’t, but weather, generically, includes it all. There may be judgement that storms are bad and clear skies are good but any meteorologist will explain to you that we need every bit of what happens in order for things to be normal. Weather just is.

Singing, at its most basic expression, includes all forms of vocalization that people would consider singing. Whether other people agree with their definitions or like them is of no consequence. In the greatest sense, singing just is. What we make of it is up to us. Our constructions consisting of the various value judgements (including many that I have expressed here over the years) are made up. There is no absolute determination of what is or is not singing. Singing exists.

If everyone remembered that, then we could approach each kind of singing to see what it had to reveal, what it could teach us, what it could offer? We could explore the possibilities of that kind of singing to see what the depths and edges of it were. We could regard it with respect and perhaps even admiration. And, if we considered that all singing potentially starts out on equal footing with all other singing (a radical idea), then we could see where our value judgements might be helpful and where they were a waste of time that just got in the way.

So, on Valentine’s Day, remember your love, remember what love is. Don’t forget to sing your sweetie a love song, even if you just make one up. And, if you are a singer or a singing teacher, remember to love the song. Cupid might shoot you with an arrow to make you fall in love with your art all over again!

Breath pressure (Sub-Glottic Pressure) is how much air is in your lungs when you begin to make sound. Breath pressure goes lower as you run out of air. If you push, pull or otherwise activate the abs while at the same time resisting the collapse of the ribs, you can keep the breath pressure increasing so you stay at about the same level of pressure (volume) even though you have less air in your lungs. [Sometimes called in classical training “appoggia”.] You can even do a crescendo at the end of the airstream if all of those muscles are strong enough to keep pushing what’s left out harder and harder. This is in Dr. Johan Sundberg’s book. All of this together is “breath support”. The measurement of the air movement is done by a ‘Rothenberg inverse filter’ which measures Sound Pressure Level (SPL) through changes that take place in the mouth using “pah” as the standard sound.

Open-closed quotient is how long your vocal folds stay together in each cycle of vibration. [A440 = one/four-hundred and fortieth is a cycle of vibration of the folds as they open and close in a wave.] That’s different than when they make contact (partial closing). The longer they stay together, the higher the closed quotient. We associate this with chest register or mix at high volumes, or maybe even any loud sound. Long open quotient is associated with head register. The dynamics between the folds and the air pressure is variable so this is why “breath support” taught as “one behavior” is misleading. How the breath moves while you sing depends on what kind of singing you are doing. Counter tenors have the lowest (sub-glottic pressure) and dramatic opera tenors and sopranos  the highest, with belters right after that. Everyone else is different and in between. This is from research done by Johan Sundberg about four years ago.

Depth of vocal fold vibration. In most cases the full depth of the fold is operating in chest register. Only the upper edges vibrate in pure head. This would effect also the open/closed quotient and the breath pressure below the folds. There is much discussion about this now with the scientists. Air that flows out over the vibrating vocal folds is called “trans-glottal” airflow. The glottis is the space between the vocal folds. When the glottis is closed, the vocal folds are touching.

All of these things are observed phenomena. The have been observed by scientists. Knowing about them is good. It will not help you sing better. It cannot even help you avoid singing poorly. You cannot do them, they happen. THIS IS A CRUCIAL THING TO UNDERSTAND.

You can learn to “do” movements in your throat, although in the best scenario, the movement starts happening because the exercises stimulate it and then you notice, “Oh, I can feel something moving around when I sing that.” Reid calls it register rotation, Vennard calls it the dynamic larynx. Without this movement it is nearly impossible to express deeply felt emotions easily.

If the muscles of the base of the tongue are loose enough to move in response to messages from the brain to allow for changes in pitch and vowel, the thyroid cartilage will rotate (tilt) by being pulled on by the crico-thryoid muscle as you ascend in pitch. The two will touch at the front of what we see from the outside as being the “Adam’s Apple”. If everything is flexible inside, the larynx will also drop slightly down on a closed (dark, covered) vowel and raise a bit on a brighter vowel. This changes the shape of the vocal tract (the resonance or “placement” of the sound) and allows a smooth, gliding transition from one register to another (chest to head, head to chest, mix in-between). In mid-range, if the vocal folds are free to adjust in length and depth and the breath pressure is constant but can also adjust, a smooth register transition will be possible. This also implies that vowel shape has to change along with registration in order to maintain comfort. This is why a “fixed low larynx position” cuts off  high notes and makes soft high singing very hard. It gives the voice fullness, but it sacrifices brightness and ease at the top. The ideal “home base” configuration for the most natural “default” of the mechanism in everyone is allowing the registers to roll through from chest to mix to head on their own as you ascend in pitch or do the reverse going down. Knowing about it still doesn’t help you do it.   :  (

Head voice, head register, head tone, head vibration (pick a spot) are all the same, if understood incorrectly, however, head voice may or may not be associated in the mind with head register, hence the confusion. If you are singing a “connected falsetto” as a guy….it sounds like falsetto but you could crescendo into a full sound without a break. If you could not crescendo without “breaking” it is considered “pure falsetto”. Head voice (voix blanche) or “re-enforced falsetto” is something a classical singer might do at the end of “La Fleur” , Jose’s aria from Carmen, although you don’t that much anymore. Listen here to Jonas Kaufmann:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8rNEuiyQ70

The first three notes are in head voice and then he goes smoothly into his full voice. He does a pretty good job of singing in soft chest mix at the end but doesn’t really go into head. Who cares? It’s beautiful singing, very expressive and these days very rare.

In commercial music, NO ONE CARES. Franki Valli was singing in a squeezed falsetto. Worked for him!

Want to know what gives me a real high?

Working with college students. Young adults have better concentration, can actually sit still, are more adventurous, and seem capable of grasping the abstractions inherent in singing better than young children or kids in high school.  Whenever I encounter them, I find college students a whole lot of fun.

I worked this weekend at Roger Williams University in Rhode Island with wonderful students who did their best and were quite successful in their singing but were still able to take suggestions and improve further. All levels of ability were present and all levels of experience with singing from hardly any to quite a lot. It was joyful to work with them, exploring what they would discover as we “looked around” their vocal landscape. I even had an opportunity to work with a talented 11-year-old from outside  (not a college student !) who had done some professional music theater work. That was exciting, too.

It’s great to have a job, as many of us do, that allows us to be in touch with singing and music. It’s great to share what we have gleaned through our years of training, experience and understanding, and it’s great to see it light up young minds with some kind of “new thought”. Really, what else is there to do with life experience but pass it on to the next generation? Isn’t that the greatest gift?

A teacher, no matter how effective, cannot teach someone who does not want to learn. She cannot teach someone who will not be open to new experiences, someone who has a set idea about what is or is not possible. She cannot teach if the student is not ready, willing and able to learn. The moment when a young person encounters anything that might feed a deep interest that could last a lifetime is an unknown. A teacher’s work could go on well after the teacher is no longer there. We may never see where the ripples go, but we can hope that they do go and that the effect they create is empowering.

I would like to thank colleagues Eric Bronner and Vaughn Bryner who brought me to Roger Williams and all the other wonderful people who, over the years,  have invited me to their universities to work with students there. I enjoy working with adults, of course, and that is mostly what I do, but working with college students for an entire weekend is a special experience and one I appreciate every time.

 

If you think of the body as just a bunch of parts that happen to somehow randomly have gotten together, or if you think the way to deal with the body is strictly through Western science, you cannot understand the holistic point of view that says everything is connected. The body is far more than we understand. You can relegate it to being a bunch of muscles, bone, nerves, and a brain, or you can think that everything about it can always be greater than the some of its parts. That’s a big difference.

If you look at the surface, one set of vocal exercises is the same as another. One way of working on singing is just as good as another –as long as the person singing thinks it’s good. If you just look at the output of the sound and think that all roads lead to Rome, it really doesn’t and shouldn’t matter whether you study with teacher A or teacher B. This method says you have to breathe like this and someone else’s method says you should only breathe like that, but in the end, if you figure out a way that works, whatever it may be, that should suffice. If you think it’s good to squeeze your throat so you can sound more like a rock singer and you learn to do that successfully, then you wouldn’t look further unless you got into a problem. You might never know that there was a better way because you accepted the surface answer as being enough.

The teachers who regard the body and the throat as just a bunch of muscles, some bones and nerves, and who believe the best way to train a singer is to get to the result in whatever way you can are numerous and popular. They are not really looking at the singer or the voice in a way that includes authenticity, nor comfort, nor subjective satisfaction in the act of singing. Conversely, the people who say, “just feel the music and the sound will follow” discount the appropriate and reasonable limits of human beings who live in bodies that have boundaries which, when crossed, are harmful.

Without discrimination, you will not know the difference between either of these situations, and everything will end up being pretty much the same. Take a few exercises from this teacher and add a few more from that teacher and mix it in with your philosophy that the body behaves the way it does and you have a nice package. Unfortunately, this is only a surface examination. It will never investigate what needs to happen to liberate any individual’s body and voice and how that instrument behaves when the person singing finds an honest, simple and direct way to use that sound in whatever music he or she longs to sing.

The art of teaching singing is the in application of science and pedagogy to the individual one moment at a time. You cannot find that in a book, even a really good book, and you cannot find that by looking at music alone. You have to be able to see deeply below the surface to the depth of both body and mind.

You might have a really fancy car but if someone put an old used engine in it and you didn’t know to look under the hood, or you looked and couldn’t tell the difference, you might be very happy with your purchase because the car is, after all, pretty fancy. If you knew better, you might be happier to have one that looked plain and simple, but that had a really amazing, fabulous engine that would never give you any problems.

Look below the surface. Don’t buy the package by how it’s marketed. The only way to delve deeper is to dig a little bit.

Hi, coach, nice to meet you.

Hello, Mary. Nice to meet you, too. What brings you here?

I was told you could help me prepare to be on the team. I’ve been preparing myself but I was told that I need training to be really good and get to a professional level.

That’s true, Mary, and I’m glad you came today to start working with me on improving your tennis game. I know a lot about tennis. I was a pro. Have you played a lot?

Yes, coach. I’ve been playing with my friends for about three years and I’ve actually been in local tournaments and won against much older players. I’m excited to start working with you on a lot of details. I promise to do whatever you say as I really want to be good.

Great. The first thing I want you to do is go learn to swim. If you want to play tennis, first you must learn to swim.

Swim?

Yes, swimming is a full body sport, right?

Um, yeah, I guess so.

And it makes you strong and flexible in your whole body, right?

Un-huh.

Well, everyone who is a great tennis player has learned to swim well first. In about two years you can add tennis to your training, but first, you must get good at swimming.

But, coach, I am in pretty good shape already. I run a lot when I play, and I ride my bike to school, and I am trim and have good muscle tone.

That’s great, Mary, as it will make your swimming get better much more quickly.

So, let me see if I understand you, coach. In order for me to learn to be a great tennis player, if I study with you, I have to first get good at swimming?

Absolutely, Mary. That’s the way it works.

OK, coach. I suppose I will learn to be a good swimmer and I will wait  two years to learn to improve my tennis game. I find that confusing, but I guess that everyone does.

That’s right, Mary. We don’t question the things that work.

______________________________________________________________________

Hi, Professor Smith, nice to meet you.

Hello, Mary. Nice to meet you, too. What brings you here?

I was told you could help me prepare to be get into our school rock musical. I’ve been preparing myself but I was told that I need singing training to be really good and get to a professional level.

That’s true, Mary, and I’m glad you came today to start working with me on improving your singing. I know a lot about singing. I was a professional. Have you sung a lot?

Yes, Professor Smith. I’ve been singing at school for about three years and I’ve actually been in local bands and in musicals with much older singers. I’m excited to start working with you on a lot of details. I promise to do whatever you say as I really want to be good.

Great. The first thing I want you to do is learn to sing classical music. If you want to sing anything well, first you must learn to be a classical singer.

Classical singer?

Yes, classical singing works with your whole voice. You know that, right?

Um, yeah, I have heard that.

And it makes your voice strong and flexible, right?

I guess so.

Well, everyone who is a great singer has learned to do classical repertoire in foreign languages first. In about two years we can add music theater to your training and then, maybe after another two years we can add in rock, but first, you must get good at art songs or perhaps some opera in Italian, French and German.

But, coach, I only need to sing in English and I sing pretty well already. I have been a belter in some shows and I also sing as a soprano in church, and I never lose my voice.

That’s great, Mary, as it will make your classical singing get better much more quickly.

So, let me see if I understand you, Professor. In order for me to learn to be a great rock singer, if I study with you, I have to first be good at classical singing in foreign languages?

Absolutely, Mary. That’s the way it works.

OK, Professor. I suppose I will learn to be a good classical singer and I will wait two years to learn to be a music theater singer and then I will wait two more years to work on rock. I find that confusing, but I guess that’s what everyone does.

That’s right, Mary. We don’t question the things that work.

_________________________________________________________

A lot of people would find nothing wrong with the second scenario. Question that. Question that. 

We all remember “Back to the Future”. Fun movie.

We could say, however, that we are now living in a time called, “Forward to the Past”. All over our society we are seeing things we thought were fading or gone long ago revive and gain strength. This includes measles, suppression of African-American, gay and women’s rights, denial of environmental degradation, condemnation of science in all disciplines, mocking of higher education as being for “elites” and several other scary things.

In singing training, we see that formants and resonance strategies are hot topics and semi-occluded exercises are even hotter, and that CCM styles are not so bad after all, provided you filter them through a classical framework. Right.

If you want to look at the singing past in a way that works, read Garcia and Lamperti. Read Vennard, Bunch (Dayme), Reid, Miller and Brown. If you want to understand classical singing, listen to the great classical singers of days past, like Caruso, Ponselle, Warren, Gigli, Tebaldi, up through Corelli and Pavarotti. Ask yourself if any of these singers gave a thought to a “low larynx position”. Do you suppose they were taught to line up the first harmonic with the second formant?

Listen to old country singers — old timers from the 40s and 50s, before rock and roll became the predominant influence it is now. You could hear those folks and it wasn’t because of fancy amplification. They weren’t opera singers either. Do you suppose it was because they had good breath support and masque resonance or was it because they sang with the accent of the Appalachian region from which the music emerged?

Listen to young Ethel Merman and to Al Jolson. Listen to Angela Landsbury. Do you think they used semi-occluded exercises to develop their belt sound?

Listen to Ella Fitzgerald, Mel Tormé, to Cab Calloway! Do you suppose they were trying to have “low larynges?” Do you think they thought of “breath flow” (or maybe just getting to the end of a phrase?)

Let’s teach our rock singers to have a “smooth legato”, and “clear articulation”. Let’s teach our pop singers to “let the tone flow out on the breath” and have “round vowels.” Show all your students of gospel how to “align the vowels so the resonances match”. Tell any student you have that “breath support is what makes the sound work”, and then explain that you have to sing classically first, in order to sing well.

Take whatever you randomly discover from the past and mix it intermittently with things you have found in the present and project all of that into the future of your students’ lives with a hope that it somehow helps them sing. Cross your fingers.

What is the truth?

We are surrounded by liars of all kinds every day. Most people “fudge” the truth to be polite (we are taught to do that), to be non-confrontive, to avoid conflict. Some people delight in deliberately lying (politicians, maybe?) Your neighbor? Your boss?

Who decides how much not telling the truth is too much and who can say when the boundaries become so blurry you don’t know any more what the truth really is?

Truth begins with your body, not your mind. It is in your body that you will find exactly what you are experiencing. If you ignore its signals, and most of us do, you will lose track of its messages and you will be lost. In order to know your own truth, you have to know what you feel when you feel it and be able to express that truth in words. Good luck if you have been taught not to notice what your body feels or to deliberately suppress those feelings. After a while, they just go away and don’t come back. That’s really bad.

One way we describe people who seem lost is to call them senseless. They no longer feel or notice their five senses, grounded in their bodies. If you pay attention to your physical experience over time you will find that, indeed, most of the time your body reads life quite well, regardless of what you tell yourself in your mind. Once you get used to reading your own senses, you can allow them room to be, and that, in turn, allows you to frame your truth carefully. It is almost always possible to tell the truth (as you see it) tactfully and kindly without lying. It’s just that that skill takes time to cultivate.

If you lose track of what you feel you will also lose track of how to sing authentically, because the singing has to feel right in your body. You will allow yourself to become convinced that some sounds are more “right” than others because someone in authority told you they were. You can even get used to those sounds and think they fit even though they really don’t make you happy. If you live with your own deeply felt truth, you can’t help but notice when you are singing in a way that doesn’t belong to you. Your sound becomes a lie. Then what?

You cannot discover any of this by looking outside yourself. The truth is not “out there” it is in you, now. It inhabits your body, always. Learn to listen to your physical sensations and pay attention to your perceptions about them. Keep your judgements at bay. Tell the truth about what you notice. It will keep you sane and make your singing powerful.

If you are seriously committed to being on an artistic path, if you think of yourself as an artist, if you long to create and will do so regardless of what gets in your way, you are on a spiritual path, even though it may not have a formal name. If, on the other hand, you want to sing to become famous and make a lot of money (not that being truly artistic precludes that), you might want to skip this blog.

Art may not be definable but it is recognizable. It doesn’t come cheaply to the artist to be  one.  Art comes from within the mind of the artist and it takes a lot of self-exploration, self-examination and self-honesty to tackle being deliberately creative for its own sake. As you express what you have in your heart and mind, you will inevitably have to face your own limitations: physical development (skills), emotional obstacles (courage and commitment), mental blocks (evaluation of your own work and criticism of it by others), and psychological problems (what is the value of my work in my own life?)

If you do not dig into yourself with “why” questions you will have no clue as to the “what” or the “where”. If you do not see what you want to express as being sourced from your vision of life, your art will be pretty dull. Genius is only possible if what you create comes from you and only you and is unique, compelling, special, different, new, fresh, and/or unusual. If you are a really good carbon copy of someone else, you might be able to make money, but no one will remember you. (How many Elvises are there in Las Vegas?)

The advantage a vocalist has that others do not have is that the voice is by definition, unique. (see previous posts). You start out by being recognizably YOU. If you train your voice until it is unrecognizable, you lose something really valuable, so be sure you don’t get caught in training for training’s sake. The point of training is to enhance and support your special sound, not to cover it up.

If your singing teacher does not guide you to a part of yourself you have never met before (again, in your body, in your mind, in how you react emotionally, or in your philosophy about your art), you aren’t really learning anything valuable. A master teacher makes the process more profound for the student, not more obscure. The challenges have to be met, but they do not have to be met without some sense of what they will give you when you meet them head-on.

If you do not have someone to support you in studying singing as if it were part of your own spiritual journey on this planet, you need to look for a new teacher. The gift is in the revelation of what is around the next corner, and that is always an unknown.

I have given this talk twice, both times as a keynote speaker at two conferences. Basically, its essence is that there are certain people, famous ones, that are not only known for their skill of speech or song, but whose voices came to represent a time, a place, or a moment for a society. Whenever we hear those voices they bring the entire experience to mind.

Each individual has a signature quality to his or her voice that is unique in the world, just like your fingerprint. We can imitate another, sometimes quite accurately, but we can never sound exactly the same as someone else and that is used in forensics as a tool. The “voiceprint” can be identified by scientists who know how to read the resonance frequencies on a visual printout. Think about that.

If the body holds trauma (and there are several credible theories  that believe this to be the case), and if the body is a hologram (everything effects and is connected to everything else throughout the body), then we must recognize that events, particularly powerful negative events, will leave their residue in the body unless they can be faced, acknowledged and dealt with in some conscious manner. Crying, screaming, moaning, shouting, shrieking, yelling are all ways to release sadness, fear, anger, and all manner of distress. We can also release happiness that way and surprise, and certainly sound is involved in giving birth, women, isn’t that so? The spontaneous release of sound in that act, birth, and in the baby’s first breath which can sometimes be a cry, is a mirror reflection to the last out breath at the end of life. Sound carries us in and out. It is with us all the time throughout our life if we do not suppress it.

Learning to sing is learning to see what your throat wants to do if…… what does it do if I go up high or down low, what does it do if I get loud or soft, what does it do if I slow down or speed up, what does it do if I sustain just one pitch? Experimentation is a key ingredient in singing training but when students are only allowed to experiment with one kind of sound, what kind of an experiment is that? Isn’t the point of education (educare: to illuminate or bring forth) to help someone discover something new? Isn’t the point to cause them to trip over something they have never done before so they can be surprised by their own experience? Hopefully in a pleasant manner.

If I make all the sound I want, all that I can manage, do you have less sound to make? Will I take some air away from you by filling my lungs to the brim with every breath? Is there a limit to how many sounds I am allowed to have in my life? If I were to reach it, would I suddenly go silent? Is there a person to tell me (if I live in a free society and am also free) what kinds of sounds I must make or can choose? Are the sounds you make better sounds than the ones I make? If so, who decides that? Is my throat less good than someone else’s?

The most powerful form of communication human beings have is a clear intention to communicate something specific with emotional commitment to the truth (in that moment as you see it). When you give your word, if you value your word (or your own integrity) you will keep it, or explain why you cannot keep it, because if you do not follow through either way, you will weaken yourself. If only people understood that, how different the world would be!

Your throat chakra is a reflection of all this. Your voice is also. It represents your energy in the world. It is a metaphor for your entire being. Powerful, huh?

Do you still want to study with a singing teacher who has captured all the “right sounds”? Really?