Various Posts

If there are no standards and everyone is equally good at everything then where are we? If holding standards makes you a snob, and having an education makes you an elitist, and speaking up about standards makes you a boor, where are we?

I recently heard a version of “O Holy Night” from 2013 by Patti Smith. It was, in every possible way, horrid.

Don’t get me wrong, Patti Smith is great at what she does and she has a powerful career behind her but this rendition of the song was unmitigatingly awful. She was attempting this with a classical orchestra. Surely, there were coaches to help her that should have stopped this embarrassment, but there she was anyway. My question is “WHY?” [See paragraph one.]

Artists have a right to do whatever they do however they do it. That is what artistic license is supposed to be. But, if we, as artists supposedly with some kind of expertise, allow people to do whatever they want when they get famous at something, just to show how “open minded” or “flexible” we are, is that valid?

Things being what they are in the music business at the moment, fame supersedes everything else. If you somehow manage to be a “CELEBRITY” you are given permission to do things because as you do, you will generate  M O N E Y for the promoters or the producers or someone somewhere and that is the end of the discussion.

Years ago I saw Joe Namath in a production of “Damn Yankees” at the old Jones Beach Summer Theater. The production starred Donald O’Connor as “Mr. Applegate” and Joe as the romantic lead, Joe Hardy. By then, Namath could hardly walk, his knees were so shot, let alone dance, and sing……well, I won’t say but you can imagine. Why was he cast? Because he was just out of football as one of the most successful players of all time and he was bankable. Poor Donald O’Connor, a supremely talented and experienced man, dealing with Broadway Joe as an equal!

I saw Rosie O’Donnell as Rizzo in Grease on Broadway. She didn’t dance, she moved her arms standing stock still. She couldn’t sing (by her own admission), but there she was. I saw Melanie Griffith in Chicago. She was a good actress, but she couldn’t dance or sing at all.  The list is long and growing. OK. Not going to go away.

The point is that the singers involved have to have enough self-knowledge, humility and decency to admit they have limits and that the music has integrity of its own that has to be respected. As long as  people don’t know and don’t know they don’t know and don’t bother to investigate, and those same people are in charge of presenting ill-informed and poorly prepared artists to the public, things can only go downhill. That’s bad, since we are already in a trough.

Every day there are more and more “methods” of training people to sing. There are brands and copyrights and merchandize and all sorts of claims put forth.

Any method of teaching singing is limited. It is limited by the person teaching it, by their life experience, their training, their interests and their own ability to sing. It is limited by their talent and their ability to communicate and by their understanding of how human beings make vocal sound.

Since functional training does not belong to any one person, method or approach, despite what some teachers would like you to think, all that can be done is to organize the material into some kind of cohesive whole that is accessible and useful to those who sing and wish to teach others to do so as well.  A “method” is no better than it’s organizational factors. Those factors should allow complex information to be conveyed in a way that it is useful to a broad sector of interested parties.

The people who study any method are responsible for making sure they have clearly understood it before they use it. They are responsible for making sure that what they have taken away from the course is accurate, not only in relationship to the course itself, but to voice science and vocal health in general. They are responsible for staying in touch with those who hold the form of that method, adjusting to new information as it comes along.

If you are looking for someone to tell you how to teach singing and you want to be given complicated information that will require you to do exactly what someone else has thought of in the way that worked for them, and if you do not want to have to figure anything out on your own, you can certainly find such methods of teaching singing, as there are several that are popular all over the world. You can follow the premises of the founder of that method as if the founder was a genius who believed that he or she had found the holy of holies of teaching singing. If you want to be lead like a little sheep, it’s not hard to find methods of teaching singing that will regard you exactly in this manner.

If, however, you want to understand function and how it applies to you and to all other people who sing, you will not find all of that information in any method. You will need to read, study, attend conferences and congresses and immerse yourself in vocal study for a long time. If the person you have chosen to work with as your mentor is a valid expert, he or she will encourage you to do that and to look at a wide range of material in order to come to a deeper understanding of the teaching of singing. They will have no fear of what you will encounter in the wider world.

If, however, you find that the “method” you find most interesting does not help you in practical ways to be a better singer and teacher, no matter what that method claims to be or do, you need to keep looking, both at methods and at what you have learned or not learned. And, if the “method” you find keeps you stimulated, growing, expanding and enjoying what you do with your singing and your teaching, then dive deeply into it, plumb its depths and step up to the plate by sharing what you have learned with others. That which is solid, valid and practical will not go away, it will stand the test of time and of investigation.

It is very easy in this materialistic society in which we have deliberately shortened the day of giving thanks so that we can shop, to forget how much most of have to be grateful for. We live in a culture that favors the very rich — one that likes violence, greed, and a very low common denominator for “entertainment”. Nevertheless, there is still more good here than not and much more kindness, generosity and love than gets acknowledged in any media.

Those of us who sing, whether it be for fun or professionally, know that singing is a universe. It is a teacher, a guide, an adventure, a surprise, a challenge, a mystery and an enigma all at the same time. Those of us who sing can easily take that ability for granted, and that should never happen. Many people would love to sing but experience that it is difficult, or that they just sound “bad” and choose to keep quiet, even when they are alone. Some people have, for all sorts of reasons, lost the ability to sing, or even, in cases of accident or illness, lost the ability to speak, and if you ask them, they will tell you that this is a dreadful loss.

There is nothing more wonderful than to hear a child sing, in innocence and joy, or to hear someone who has lived a very long life, do the same with awe and wonder.

The gift of song that you carry around with you, always there, always free, always available, and the gift that is the very same for every person on earth who also sings, is priceless. Always remember, every single day, to be very conscious of all that singing is and give thanks for what it provides you and others, every time you hear a melody arise from your own throat.

If you have ever wanted to study singing, do it!

Singing is a very healthy thing to do. It makes you breathe more deeply and with more energy. It is aerobic when you learn to do a vigorous song and it has the same benefits to the body as any moderate exercise. It’s also very rewarding to make “nice” sounds that feel and sound good while also expressing yourself in music.

Learning to sing doesn’t have to be confusing, hard, obscure or frustrating. A good teacher will make the process , fun, interesting, clear and accessible and give you simple instructions about how to practice. He or she will instruct you about how your voice works functionally and what to listen for in the sound so your mind will comprehend the ingredients we want to have in our vocal music. The songs you do should be easy enough to be rewarding and difficult enough to give you a bit of a challenge, without discouragement.

If you practice five times a week for about a half an hour, in about two to three weeks you should notice an improvement in your vocal output and control over your body’s ability to handle inhalation and exhalation while singing. In about six months you should hear a definite difference in the overall quality of your singing and if you work steadily (lessons once a week or as close together as possible) in two years you should see and hear results that are much improved in all aspects of your singing.

If all you want to do is sing informally, for fun, after two years you should feel like you can do just that. If you have more serious aspirations, it will take longer, as you will need to learn more about the details of vocal production and about various musical styles. However, even if you are talented, it can still take three, four, or even five years before you get to a minimally acceptable professional level, and if you start without any background in voice or didn’t have much experience in singing, you might need additional instruction such as a performance classes, or an audition coach, to help you properly prepare for your higher aspirations.

Remember that there is no one right way to learn to sing and no one has a “instant method” that makes everyone able to sing like a high level professional. All reputable singing teachers understand how the voice works, how the body works and the relationship between the two. They understand music, professional market-based expectations, and know the difference between vocal production and stylistic appropriateness. They should be supportive but honest, encouraging but able to offer kind-hearted corrections, they should know what kinds of songs to suggest (neither too hard or too easy), and they should be respectful of your questions and interests while guiding you to expand your horizons. If you feel uncomfortable for any reason, a good teacher will address those concerns if you share them and will make reasonable adjustments in order to meet your needs as seems best.

Never ever work with someone who tells you they are better than everyone else, or that they are the only teacher who knows “what’s right”. Do not work with someone who promises you the moon. Be wary of studying with someone who sounds unpleasant or sings with great effort, as this does not bode well for what they want to share with you. Some people with vocal health issues don’t sing well but can teach, but this kind of situation can also interfere with the teaching, so be very careful. If the teacher claims to be vocally and physically normal and he sounds awful or sings in a style that you do not want to also sing, find a different teacher.

Remember, you do not need to learn classical songs in order to sing well. Classical repertoire is nice to know, but it is not in any way a necessity if you want to sing CCM material. Functional training is a separate thing from “classical training” which is based mostly on “breath support” and “resonance” as configured by each individual teacher. While it can be helpful in the hands of a qualified experienced teacher, it can also be useless or even harmful. Look for someone who has a background in voice science and vocal function as well as performance in a variety of styles.

Good luck!

Today, while I was doing some Christmas shopping at a well-known department store, the Christmas music was alternately in English and then Spanish. I do not know, for the most part, who was singing, but I certainly knew the songs.

I had the very unfortunate experience, again (this happened last year, too) of listening to simple holiday songs being butchered by the vocalists. How hard is it to sing a pitch-accurate version of “Rudolph, The Red-Nosed Reindeer”? One vocalist was not only flat but far away from the actual melody and her changes were not “improvisational” so much as they were avoidance. The major sixth pitch leap on “red-nosed” was a bit much for her so she consistently sang those two words on the SAME pitch. She shortened the range of the entire song so it covered about a fifth (kinda sorta, as much of it was off-pitch anyway).

Since they fix these things now, why, WHY, would this recording be released to the public? Is everyone in the recording studio deaf? Sadly, the other renditions were just about as bad. Only the songs that were OLD (as in, from decades past) were musically and vocally accurate and, believe it or not, pleasant.

And, the current practice of picking four, six or maybe even eight measures of a song and repeating them over and over is incredibly annoying. It strikes me as some kind of aural torture. “Jingle Bells, jingle bells, jingle all the way”, eighty times is not my idea of generating holiday spirit, no matter how they dress those measure up. It makes me want to leave the store!

The current Coca-Cola Christmas commercial that has Jimmy Durante’s version of “Make Someone Happy” truncated by leaving off the last three words of the main lyric is also terrible. Bad enough they usurped this lovely song to sell us sugared, colored, gassed water, but they had to mutilate it in the process?

Oh, bah, humbug, and fie on them all!!!!!!   : /

If you approach singing as a spiritual discipline, it is a lifelong challenge of the greatest depth.

Spiritual “work” asks that qualities which are universal and unchanging in human character are developed over a long period of time. Things like patience, perseverance, determination, loyalty, honesty, diligence, purposefulness, commitment, courage, humility, and resilience can only be developed over a period of months and years. To devote oneself to a “higher calling” asks that you confront yourself on a daily basis to examine your actions and hold yourself to some kind of standard that is beyond personal selfishness. In a society that loves excess, money, sex, power, and violence, that is a tall order, particularly when the path you have chosen to follow has no markers. If you join a religion, there are practices to guide you. If you adhere to a moral philosophy, ditto. If you are a singer, where do you go to ground yourself in the art from the perspective of developing your soul?

Finding a teacher who is knowledgeable about pedagogy in a wide array of eras and styles, who is capable as a singer in many kinds of music, who has dedicated him or herself to gaining both experience and knowledge of voice science and vocal health, music business parameters, and person-to-person communication based on compassion and truth might seem like an insurmountable task, but it is not. There are such teachers of singing out there, but they are not “run of the mill” and they are surely not hanging out a sign on the internet highway saying “I am better than everyone else”. If you don’t know where to look or what to look for, you will miss them.

Singing is a very challenging thing to do when you are asking yourself to take it to its fullest level. Writing for the voice is just as hard. If you sing, and it could be any style, and you do not confront who you are in the process, you are not addressing it as a spiritual discipline at all.

You cannot hide in any spiritual discipline. You cannot run away from the present moment you, good and bad, in order to be “better”. You have only this moment, this sound, this body and this awareness from which to generate the next you. If you do not stay present, you cannot create a miracle in your own life. That this is difficult almost goes without saying, but that it is NECESSARY, is also true.

Singing is a very spiritual discipline. It can allow you to touch the hem of the robe of Creation itself. It can show you humanity in all its glory as nothing else can. Your voice IS your spirit in sound in this life. Reach out to someone who can help you understand this and walk alongside you on that path. Dive deep. It’s worth the effort.

It’s hard to sing with a broken heart.

If you are really effected by an event in your life that overwhelms you it is possible to lose the ability to sing. Even if your vocal folds are completely normal, you can find it nearly impossible to sing in the normal manner. This can be from something physical like an accident which might have an impact on your body but not directly on your vocal cords. However, I am not speaking about that kind of event, I am speaking here about emotional and psychological trauma,  particularly events that don’t get addressed after the fact in some kind of counseling or therapy.

Physical, sexual or verbal abuse is bad enough, but it is often ignored, with the victim being silenced. If there is no one to hear the story or validate the experience you can feel disempowered.  Sometimes the event can be far in the past and have a lingering effect on singing in the present moment. If no one heard you when you tried to tell your story, your voice was silenced and your experience denied. If you sing and your heart is connected to your song, encountering something in life that is “heart-breaking” will impact your singing, whether you acknowledge it or not.

The thing to do if you find yourself in this situation is first tell yourself the truth about it. Don’t lie, don’t deny, don’t try to make it better or to go away. Mourn the loss without embarrassment and grieve over the trauma, whatever it may be, whether that seems to make sense or not. Then, seek support. If the event was extreme, look for professional counseling. If it was a bad but less obvious problem, perhaps loving friends will do as listeners, but they must allow you to tell your truth without judgment as fully as possible. Then, when you are ready, and with healing as your intention, sing and use the singing as a way to comfort yourself.

What you do not want to do is force yourself to ignore the messages of your body (your heart) and cheer yourself up only on “the outside”. This will just make things worse. Honor the depth of who you are and wait for your heart to once again have a song to sing. It will come back in good time and in the meantime the sounds you make are not for the world, they are just for you.

No, I’m not talking about your tummy (although it could be that the sentence also applies to that part of your anatomy), I am talking about the middle range of your voice.

If you are a young professional singer and have been taught to “sound good” and aim for “resonance” and volume, you can, especially if you have a good natural voice, get pretty far on not too much skill. In fact, you can actually sound decent, even quite good, and still be over-singing in your middle voice. You can get away with this for a while, mostly due to your youth, but sooner or later you are going to have problems and then things will go downhill in a hurry.  This can also happen as a response to repertoire that is dramatic and powerful. It can pull you into a place that is not ideal but one that you can’t fix when the job is over.

The vocal folds will resist a reasonable amount of air being pushed out harder than normal from below by abdominal muscle contraction, and the larynx will stabilize if it’s parked in a “low position” such that nothing much in the throat moves, but the entire mechanism may not hold up well if it is almost always over-stressed.  Just because you have strength doesn’t mean you also have stamina. Just because you have stability doesn’t mean you have intrinsic strength. There is a difference and it really matters once your voice is in decline.

Symptoms such as a big, wobbly vibrato, or effort in high notes, or inability to sing softly, especially in high pitches, or needing to use “extreme breath support” or singing slightly flat consistently without hearing it, or feeling like your high voice suddenly “tops out” are indications that your vocal system is way out of balance. Regardless of your teacher’s credentials, it is quite possible that she  will miss these issues or blame you or tell you “it’s temporary” or give you remedies that don’t help. Many teachers simply do not understand function well enough to see what is obvious, as their training is largely musical and that is a very different set of skills to have.

It is also true that you can be singing with too much “openness” in your middle voice. How could that be? How can your throat or your sound be “too open”? If all you ever do is sing open vowels at full volume to vocalize and you are encouraged to use a lot of “breath support” all the time for everything, you could still sound very good aesthetically, but functionally, you could be in the kind of trouble I just described.

Be alert to the symptoms I have described and catch them early if they start to develop. You can correct this situation if you get to it before it sets in but if you miss it you can go far down a bumpy road and find it quite hard to come back again.

When was the last time you heard someone sing who made you cry? Was it on a recording? Was it live? Was it amplified?

Voices filled with emotion are very potent. They should be able to move anyone who is open to that. (Of course, many people are not). Music is also supposed to be able to carry emotion but a lot of music doesn’t do that and some composers wouldn’t want it to. They make sure of that by writing it to be very dry.

In training singers to make certain kinds of sounds it is possible to loose track of the emotions that might be connected to those sounds, and that is a terrible loss. I remember well a performance of “Tosca” on PBS in which the Tosca was singing “Mario! Mario!” while looking for him. The sound she made was so awful, so ugly and frightening and hideously loud, that if I had been Mario, I would have hidden behind a pew in the church! I heard a tomb scene at the end of “Aida”, with some of the most beautiful music you could ever want to hear, sound like a recitation of the alphabet. There wasn’t even the smallest attempt of either vocalist to sound like they were about to die or even that they might be late for dinner.

I am at a loss as to what to do about any of this. It has always been so that some people sing with greater emotional expressivity than others but it seems to me through my own person experience that this is less likely to be the case now than ever before in the past. So much is done to voices in recordings and so much is written that discounts emotion that finding someone who actually feels a genuine emotion and is singing music that allows for emotional expression is a rare event.

If you sing, make an effort to connect to your own emotions when you perform. Find a way to make every song a personal communication about something that is meaningful to you. Don’t let anyone talk you into singing something that is disconnected from your ability to communicate authentically. It’s never worth it and it won’t help your career to let go of what you have to say that only you can.

Did you know that the Beatles wrote “art songs”? Yep. Did you know that Bob Dylan wrote songs that don’t deserve a beautiful voice?

Well, that’s the attitude I ran into tonight at a venue on the Upper West Side. The material presented was largely not classical, but it was certainly presented in a quasi-classical manner. That this kind of performance somehow “elevates” it seems implied. The essential elements written into the music (like rhythmic clarity) were missing as was the vocal quality one expects to come along with the style.

This is a tough situation to address. On the one hand, the singing was indeed excellent, from a vocal production point of view, and in some instances it was close to appropriate to the material being performed, but, and this is a big one, it other cases, it was completely out of keeping with what the composers had in mind when the songs were written.

Sadly, I missed Audra MacDonald’s recent performance as Billie Holiday but everyone I know (who knows singing) all raved about her performance because she did not sing like an opera singer, she sang like a jazz artist, and she did not “classicalize” Billie’s songs. That was certainly not the case this evening. It seems to me that you need to honor the composers on both sides of the fence. If you are going to hold to bel canto as a style that is different from verismo, or Handelian style as being different from Puccini, then you need to honor The Beatles just as much as Bob Dylan or Duke Ellington and sing the music the way they expected it to be sung. This is not an impossible standard to uphold.

That this is ignorance or arrogance is hard to determine. Perhaps it is both. There are, as I frequently say, no voice police, and no one is likely to step in and say, “Hey, don’t you know this is old-fashioned? Don’t you realize that you are doing something that isn’t really acceptable in the places where this music has its roots and is still being performed now? Don’t you care?” Vocal diversity isn’t that hard to manage and most singers can do far more with their voices than they are encouraged to do in traditional classical training. That they are encouraged to make everything some version of “classical” is a shame. That this idea is perpetuated by those in a position of authority is even more of a disappointment.

We have a very long way to go before vocal training is universally understood and before all singing and all singers can sing authentically in any style. What will help, however, is for those who understand the difference, and want to uphold the integrity of all composers and all styles, is to step up to the plate and object (politely, of course) when there is an opportunity. If we say nothing, things don’t change.