Various Posts

The ground upon which something sits is important. The context, the  principles, the atmosphere, the point of view, matters. You can plant the same seeds in two different kinds of soil. One might grow while the other might not.

Two experts could know exactly the same information. They could be familiar with the very same facts and statistics, knowledge and experience. If one of those experts, however, was mean, arrogant, condescending and verbally abusive and the other was patient, compassionate, kind and flexible, who do you think would have the most success? It would be wonderful if I could write that the kinder teachers always do better, but I have no statistics to quote to prove that. My guess is that some people would not necessarily like the condescending teacher but would still learn, perhaps shaking in fear, perhaps feeling that the teacher’s fierceness was a sign of strength. I have heard of instances in each case.

When you are a novice at something or when you are unexposed to a topic, you have no way of knowing whether or not the information you are being given by a teacher, a book or any other resource is good, bad, right or wrong. You have no way to evaluate which experts are really experts, which are frauds, and which are not quite either. In fact, you have to go through life via trial and error until you have been around the block enough times to know what’s what on any topic.

The world is full of information now. You can use the internet and find virtually anything, but it’s just as easy there to find mis-information as not and to find so many conflicting opinions that you still can’t tell what to trust. And, there is so much “spin”, so much that is deliberately skewed to make you think or feel a certain way, regardless of what other effects it may have, that you can never really trust anything until and unless you experience it for yourself or you know from a very trusted personal source that it is safe to place your trust in it.

If we all have a viewpoint about life — if, in fact, we all have many viewpoints about life (and we do), each idea, each memory, each experience colors how we take in the next situation. As adults we have so much life behind us that we arrive to each new situation with a carload of baggage and it is very difficult to approach something in an open, neutral and evaluative manner. It’s not impossible, however, and it is more likely to happen when you deliberately choose to do that.

Before you decide whether or not a teacher, a method, an approach is right for you, spend some time with it. Do some research, talk to people who are more familiar than you. Find out what you can but be open to having your own, unique experience. What is good for me, may not be good for you and that’s what matters.

No matter how good or experienced the teacher, no one is right for everyone. No matter how kind or nasty someone may be, what matters is the ground upon which you approach that experience. In the long run, each of us is responsible for searching until we find that which we are seeking. Then, you are standing on firm ground, with deep roots, and you become a resource yourself if you want to be one.

The traditional point of view in classical vocal pedagogy was that you could not start training the voice until after puberty and that after about 30 your voice was set and could not be changed.

We know now this is false. It is possible to train a child to sing well (as long as you train the child to sound and behave like a child and not a mini-adult). It is also very possible to train an adult of any age, even a “senior citizen”, and get very good results, provided they understand you, are healthy, and practice. Over the decades I have worked with many older singers and in every case, with the above criteria in place, seen them improve in their singing. Willingness, persistence and a positive attitude are the most important ingredients. In fact, younger people with less life experience can be much harder to teach, in that they can have a limited understanding of process-oriented work. Learning to sing well takes time and older people know that many things in life work that way.

Obviously, someone who has singing in their background has an advantage, even if was decades ago that they had sung. The muscle memory is there, somewhere, and also the mental awareness, and that can help when “restarting” the engine. Someone who has never sung, however, but who is highly motivated can make progress if they are consistent in their studies. In fact, even people who have been told repeatedly that they “can’t sing” or are “hopeless” have done well with me, slowly, and over time. Why? Why would it be that they make progress with me when they have been written off by another teacher, sometime several other teachers of singing.

This can partly be blamed on the lack of underlying structure within the profession that would allow a broad dissemination of information that could benefit everyone. If someone has the capacity to teach people who are not at all able to sing, to sing, there must be something going on there that was not available to the other teachers. What that something is ought to be of interest to virtually everyone involved in singing. Sadly, that’s not the case. People who don’t know that they don’t know (and there are many) are often suspicious of information they have never seen. Crazy, cyclical thinking, I know, but a real circumstance.

So, if you have been told that older people can’t learn to sing, or if you believe that you can’t start singing training until after puberty, there are new things to learn that should change your mind. If you think that there is just one way to teach someone to sing (your way) and that you can’t find a way to work with someone who is motivated, sane, and willing such that they learn to sing and enjoy singing at almost any age, there are new things to learn that should change your mind. Look around. Read. Talk to others. Open up your world.  Age is not a factor when teaching singing or learning to sing.

The truth can sometimes best be expressed through paradox. We are all unique, we are all the same. The hours of the day and night are always the same, but how we experience them is continuously different. I can love you and not like you. I can like you but not love you.

Love, a word that we hear a lot, is total acceptance. Love at its highest level is nonjudgmental. Many are familiar with St. Paul’s letter:

If I have all the eloquence of men or of angels, but speak without love, I am simply a gong booming or a cymbal clashing. If I have the gift of prophecy, understanding all the mysteries there are, and knowing everything, and if I have faith in all its fullness, to move mountains, but do not have love, then I am nothing at all. If I give away all that I possess, piece by piece, and if I even let them take my body to burn it, but am without love, it will do me no good whatever. Love is always patient and kind; it is never jealous; love is never boastful or conceited; it is never rude or selfish; it does not take offence, and is not resentful. Love takes no pleasure in other people’s sins but delights in the truth; it is always ready to excuse, to trust, to hope, and to endure whatever comes. Love does not come to an end.

If you love something or someone, and you love in this way, you are truly blessed. If you come to love singing in all its forms as a life force, an expression of the Higher Power made manifest here through human beings, you will experience great joy and satisfaction while you sing or if you are in the presence of someone singing. It takes a lot to encompass all that singing is or can be, but the expansion is worth the striving.

If you teach and you accept everything a student does in a lesson — the good sounds, the not so good sounds, the attempts both failed and successful, the movements of the body and voice, the expression of the music, as if all of it were gifts, and if you treasure those gifts as they come to you, only good can come. It does not mean that there should be no correction or evaluation, no learning of “right” from “wrong” but when these things are done in an atmosphere of loving acceptance, the possibility of growth opens for both teacher and student.

Most people have a lot of programming about “not being good enough”. We don’t need to deepen those thoughts by making our students feel like they “can’t sing” or “can’t be good enough”.  Always hold your students in an atmosphere of loving acceptance.

Acceptance and acknowledgement make for safety and affirmation. In this atmosphere, the paradox of singing is found. All singers sing, every singer is unique, every song is just a song but every song is special. Don’t forget.

The idea that the larynx should never move and that, in fact, nothing should move while singing is simply silly.

When we are singing everything that can move should move and move freely. The movements should be smooth, coordinated and not unpleasant to do or to watch. Keeping everything absolutely still will cut off expression, make it impossible to change the quality of the vowel and deaden the vocal production so that the voice becomes uninteresting or even unpleasant.

Why would anyone teach such an idea? Why, indeed? This, and many other ideas like it, are out there and sincere students seeking to learn how to sing run into them every day. In fact, doing anything deliberate with the larynx is a bad idea, as the larynx isn’t something we should be trying to feel, let alone move. And, if you can’t change your jaw position, you can’t change the formants very much. If you can’t move your face muscles, you can’t change the vowels much, and that, too, limits formant “adjustments”. If you can’t allow the larynx to adjust (indirectly) you will have a terrible time singing high notes or soft tones. Bad ideas every one.

The larynx is a joint. What joint in the body does better when it can’t move? Smooth movement of a joint depends on flexible muscles and coordination. Muscles develop flexibility through stretching, but in order to stretch them you have to move them — to pull on them repeatedly.  What happens when you deliberately don’t move? They get stuck. They atrophy. Then it gets nearly impossible for them to do their job in supporting the joint to carry out its primary function, whatever it may be. Trying to “unlearn” that is quite difficult, especially if you do not have a teacher who knows how to give you help.

Attempting to control the things you should not be trying to control  and not controlling the things that need to be calibrated deliberately is like standing vocal training on its head. This is where the inexperienced teachers have no clue about what is cause (the vocal folds vibrating) and what is effect (the vowels we hear as acoustic response) and the purpose of airflow (moving across the vocal folds as they vibrate). You can’t teach at a high level if you are busy telling people to do things that (a) are not under direct control, (b) are best left alone.

How many times over the years have I had someone come to me for lessons who has been taught and who has deliberately practiced behavior that was detrimental to both the voice and the heart. Singing training like that closes you up, cuts you off from your body and makes you sound like a machine.

If you are studying with someone who tells you not to move, you need to ask why. You need to LISTEN to your teacher sing, throughout his or her range, and LISTEN to how they sound overall. You need to look at his or her face and body while they are singing. If it looks awful and sounds pretty bad, change teachers.

Communication is a two-way event. You say something, the other person receives your communication. Both people are equally responsible for that interchange.

I can be unclear in what or how I say something. You can misunderstand or misinterpret what I am telling you. Sometimes this causes great problems. We think we are being clear. We think the other person is understanding us. We think we agree. But maybe we don’t.

If you are teaching singing, aside from using the sound itself as an example and a form of communication, you have to use words. The precision of those words matters. The only way the student can grasp what you are saying is for you to be extremely clear in not only what you mean, but what you imply. The literal words and the meaning of the words must match. And the impact of the words has to be accounted for in the exchange, because they count as much as the words and their meaning.

If I stick to simple, well-known words that most people know and most people will agree upon without argument, I am relatively safe. If I use poetic language, unless I am careful, I can begin to be obtuse and my listener could get confused or lost. If I use a jargon that only I know, or perhaps a few select people know, I am perilously close to talking in a way that most others cannot possibly understand.

Most of us are sloppy in how we communicate and don’t really notice if the person with whom we are communicating gets what we are saying or not. We can’t, after all, ask continuously, “What do you think I mean when I say this? Do you understand me exactly? Please say it back to me.” The way we typically find out that there has been a mis-understanding or miscommunication is to bump into the problems that arise from it after the fact.

The more serious the issue, the more carefully you must select your words and think about their impact before you speak. You can’t take them back after they are out. The more the impact of what you say matters, the more you need to think of that impact prior to opening your mouth. And, if you are in a position of authority, and you speak from that position, your words and their impact have greater weight or potential within them, and you must consider even more carefully how you say what you have to say.

Communication is at the heart of what we do as teachers, as artists, as singers but also as human beings. If I am to trust you, you must tell me the truth. (The whole truth, the complete truth, so help me!) If you tell me only some of the truth, perhaps the part you “think I can handle” and I find out later that you held something back, and that something was important, I might never really trust you or what you say again. If we tell the truth with compassion, no matter what it is, it’s better to get it all out. Holding back always has a cost.

Trust, which is necessary in a teacher/student relationship, is built on honest conscious speech, backed up by consistent action, personal integrity, and a desire to honor and respect the person who is your partner in communication. The root word of communication is commune, which means to join with or bring together. True communication will allow you to align comfortably with another. Anything less will ultimately come back at some later date to cause trouble.

If you expect to communicate with your audience, you must know exactly what it is you are singing, what it means, what you want its impact to ideally be, and you must be as emotionally committed to that truthful communication as you can be as it is sung. Nothing else will substitute. If you feel vulnerable in doing this, and you will, the audience will repay you by trusting you completely and giving you its communication in return in the form of generous applause, or a standing ovation, or, occasionally, tears. Then you will know that you communicated well and that what you wanted to share was clear, true and well received. You and the audience will have shared the sublime experience of “communing” with each other —  heart to heart and mind to mind.

 

What happens when a person is trying to get out of a bad vocal habit and doesn’t yet have a really strong new habit to replace it with?

If you are a process-oriented, rather than goal-oriented, teacher, this happens frequently. If the person is motivated to get better and is already out in the world singing, he wants results. He wants to get better fast and know what is necessary for that to happen. He wants to be told do this and don’t do that, and he wants to have whatever you give him work right away. Unfortunately solving vocal problems is rarely a fast or short-term thing.

Habits, whether consciously developed through training, or acquired along the way in life, rarely go away immediately. In the case of unconscious (not deliberate) habits that interfere with vocal production, they have to be brought to the level of conscious awareness before they can be remedied and that can take time.

Teacher: Your throat is very tight. It closes and tightens when you go up.

Singer: I know. I thought that was what everyone did.

Teacher: No. That is a habit. We need to teach your throat to change pitch without doing a bunch of other things that aren’t necessary.

Singer: How do we do that?

Teacher: Let’s start like this………..

T: Your throat is tight. It causes your tongue to retract and your vowels to sound muffled.

S: It does? It feels OK to me. I think it sounds sort of warm and round when I sing.

T: Well, most of the sound isn’t getting out because of the way your throat is functioning. 

S: But I am supporting the tone the way I was told to and I am keeping my larynx down, too, just like I was taught. How could my throat be tight? I don’t understand.

T: Let’s experiment with some other exercises and see if we can get a new or different response from your throat. Try this………

S: I have an awful time in my mid-range. I can’t seem to keep the pitch accurate and my volume control is very unpredictable. I think it’s my breath support. It interferes with my placement. It’s making me very anxious.

T: Your mid-range is weak and it sounds as if you might have a vocal fold issue there…..perhaps some bowing of a fold or a partial paralysis. Have you ever had your vocal folds examined by a laryngologist? 

S: No.

T: Well, the first thing to do is get you examined by someone who knows how to evaluate professional singers. When can you set up an appointment with your laryngologist? 

The exercises provoke movement and the movement provokes awareness and the awareness grows both kinesthetically and auditorily over time. As the function returns to a more normal response, and as the reflexes of the throat are restored so that breathing is easier, the singing will get also easier but not necessarily more consistent, and therefore, musically speaking, better, right away. Freedom increases but stability decreases.

This trade-off is necessary but it is difficult for both the singer and the teacher. If the teacher does not pull in two ways at once, the problems will not go away, but the student can end up confused and frustrated. If the student can’t live with some vocal messiness and disarray the process cannot happen at all. You then end up flipping back and forth between two kinds of problems that both persist.

Just as you cannot will a plant to grow faster, no matter how much plant food or water you give it or how much sun it is exposed to, so, also, can the voice not be made better “right away” without paying a price. When fixing a voice that is in some way “broken” or less than optimally functional, zigzagging between two temporarily better alternatives might seem like a way to get nowhere in a hurry, but in the hands of a skilled teacher who knows how to address and resolve functional vocal issues, this is the  most productive direction in which to work.

 

“People who are famous have to be good at whatever they do because they are famous”.  – J. Q. Public

Really?

There are famous people in every profession. Famous lawyers, doctors, Indian Chiefs. There are many famous performers, famous painters, famous composers. There are people who have been famous for a few hundred years and people who got famous last week. We are as a society enthralled with fame and the people who seem to be famous.

Fame isn’t, unfortunately, an indication of anything. Some people get noticed and others notice that someone else has noticed so they notice, too, and the story rolls along on its on, growing moment by moment. A new self-reinforcing “word of mouth” (called these days “going viral”) becomes an end in itself. Particularly since the emergence of the web and the incredible impact it continues to have  on virtually everything, fame is easily and quickly associated with “followers” or “views” on the internet. (Not necessarily with anything else.)

Getting to be famous is a great way to sell stuff. You can have “merchandise” and make lots of money just because, being famous, people will want to buy anything associated with you. The reason why you are famous doesn’t seem to make much difference to many people. Just ask Snooky and Kim Khardashian.

There quite a few people who teach singing who have methods for sale on the internet. They convince you with their promotional videos that you can learn to sing really well if you just buy their CDs, videos  and books. They tell you about all the famous people who have studied with them. They tell you how famous THEY are.

In the professions of law and medicine, it used to be that advertising was not allowed. It was considered unprofessional. There are now “ratings” available on-line and certainly hospitals advertise discreetly, saying how excellent their care is and how successful  their surgeons are. It was also so that singing teachers did not advertise as it was considered unprofessional. A “listing” was OK. Saying that you taught was OK. Making claims about yourself was not. There was no law about this. There isn’t one now. Those who “advertised” were viewed with suspicion. This isn’t so true as it once was, but it hasn’t disappeared entirely either.

Most of the very famous doctors, lawyers, and other professionals still do not advertise. In fact, they do not need to advertise (even with just a listing). The “fame” they have is not generated by the internet or advertising in magazines or any outside source. These experts are known and recognized, not just by their patients and clients, but by their peers. That recognition doesn’t come easily but it is significant. Some few lucky people are recognized by more than one group of peers. You can be recognized for your acting, recognized for your philanthropy and recognized for being a champion horse breeder. All of these recognitions are not self-generated.

I know of at least five singing teachers here in New York (and I would guess there are more) who wouldn’t hesitate to tell you that they are the best teachers, above and beyond everyone else, in the world (never mind just little old New York). They will tell anyone they meet how much better they are than virtually every other singing teacher on earth.  That doesn’t stop these teachers from convincing their students that these statements are the TRUTH. The teachers truly believe that they are better than everyone else. The problem with this is, of course, that this opinion is not shared by their peers, or, actually, anyone else who is knowledgable.

Therefore, if you are studying anything with anyone and that person tells you how FAMOUS they are, and how much more they know than everyone else in their own profession, and how many others don’t know what they know, be alert. Even more significantly, if these teachers are selling their books, tapes, CDs, t-shirts, coffee mugs and pens, please, please WAKE UP. No one who has standing in their own profession has reason to behave in this way. (This always reminds me of the old greeting card that said on the front, “Congratulations to someone who is outstanding in their field” and inside showed a person standing in a field of wheat.)

Every legitimate expert recognizes that other experts have valid, if different points of view. All bona fide experts realize that there is disagreement amongst those at the top of any profession, but that the disagreement is normal and often helpful to the profession at large, fostering broader discussion in the greater community. Everyone who has strong opinions is going to conclude, sooner or later, that they know some things uniquely, but if they discount that others will also know other different things uniquely, they are off-base.

Beware narcissistic, self-absorbed, self-declared “famous” teachers. If someone tells you that their studio is “the best in NYC” or anywhere else, run away. There is no such thing. Learn to look at what’s below the surface before you buy the fancy label!!

 

Many people understand the basics of vocal function. They “get” that the vocal folds vibrate, they change pitch, the resist the airflow, they affect registration. People understand that we breathe in the lungs, that the abdominal muscles pressure the air from below, through the viscera, as we release air while singing. They understand that the vowel sound shapes are what we sustain on pitches and that  accurate shaping of those vowels makes for efficient acoustic behavior. None of this has anything to do with one person, one method or one approach. It is just factual info. The rest is personal……you shape the /a/ like this, I shape it like that.  If we could agree on these things, 95% of the confusion and rancor amongst singing teachers would go away. Don’t hold your breath (no pun intended) until that happens…….

My work, Somatic Voicework™, however, is much more about the human being, the person. It is about helping someone learn to be present in their body while experiencing making sound directly. It is about mindfulness as it applies to all kinds of singing, without judgment, and to singers. It is not about “making” the throat do things — pushing, pulling, squeezing or yelling — as a way to sing. The work trusts the body and its reflexes. It trusts the singers and their minds and hearts. It is not about impressing anyone, it is about being vocal artists. It is about service.

The platform of the work is science and functional behavior, but what it “launches” is a methodology that takes time to learn, not a pre-set bunch of syllables and notes on some random vowels. It isn’t interested in “breath support and resonance” as the answer to every vocal issue. It looks at singing much more broadly than that. It looks at people who love to sing and want to do it very well. It asks for respect, dignity, honesty, authenticity, simplicity, insight, depth and many other spiritual qualities, in both the teacher and in the artists. It isn’t about the “exercises” although many people think it is.

If you have taken one or maybe two courses with me (either where you received a document of certification or not) and you believe you understand everything about what I am teaching, I would beg to tell you, as nicely as I can, that you are absolutely not correct. What happens in a lesson between me and a student, and what I am told repeatedly, is that the attitude with which I come to the lesson is not something that you just “pick up” from a weekend (or even a week’s) course. If you use the mechanical principles (and they work well no matter who is using them) with understanding, surely that is better than not using them or not knowing how they work; and you will absolutely get results. If, however, you really want to go deeply into the process of guiding someone to sing, you have to know much more  than that to understand how to be transformational. Even the people who have worked with Somatic Voicework™ for a long time (a decade or so) do not always grasp that. They, too, sadly believe that the work is in the exercises. Wrong.

Finally, if you are going to teach and you have no interest in or only minimal interest in your own singing, and you do not work on it and on your own vocal performance, you cannot possibly understand Somatic Voicework™, because part of being a teacher of my method is also being someone who is a superb vocalist (any style). Far too many people who teach don’t care about their own singing at all (just that of their students). In my work, it’s not OK to have that attitude. I don’t consider that a serious commitment to the principles of Somatic Voicework™. It is nearly impossible to teach what you can’t or won’t do yourself.  If your own singing is flawed, your teaching will reflect that, whether you think so or not. Being a very good singer is hard work and nothing substitutes for that in this method. Nothing.

The depth of the work reflects the depth of the person teaching it. If you cannot illuminate a song from your own heart, if you are not willing to risk revealing what life means to you in a piece of music, if you do not bother to address your body, your throat and your connection to both, if you walk through the exercises thinking you have “learned enough” (which is never possible), you totally miss the point. Better to go take one of those courses that teaches you to put your larynx somewhere, or yell, or move your false folds or sing a bunch of syllables on some pitches.  Those courses are resting on very different points of view than mine.

You can buy a cookbook and use a great chef’s recipes and get very good at all kinds of cooking and baking, still knowing that when you put the cookbook down, you are lost. If you cannot create wonderful delicious food on your own….without a recipe at all……you will never be a world-class chef or even an interesting cook.

Not everyone can become a master teacher. That’s fine. But everyone who sings can come to singing with complete commitment to be the best vocalist possible and never stop working towards that goal for their entire life. Excellent teaching comes from excellent singers. Committed teaching requires a solid connection to committed singing and performing. If you believe otherwise, please show me how this is wrong. My door is open.

While shopping today I was in a store that played “top 40s” songs as background music. I was struck by how similar all the songs were to each other and how much the voices were the same. I admit, I don’t follow these songs much so I don’t profess to be an expert at discerning one artist from another, but it was striking that I was listening to different singers and different songs but everything sounded alike.

Why?

What’s going on is based entirely on marketing strategies. Everyone has to sound “trendy” so the artists’ work will sell. The voices are mechanically manipulated such that everyone’s flaws are fixed, but then everyone is perfected to sound more like a machine-made voice, not a human one. The “beat” is also controlled by machinery. Human beings, playing on their own, aren’t so strict. And the amount of “alteration” in the arrangement with its layers and layers of electronic manipulation is so dense that it, too, doesn’t sound much like what you would hear “live and in person”, either.

It’s true that not all styles of music are this bad. Sometimes live albums are made that are honest, but even there, if the sound system was sophisticated, and the engineer skilled, things can be changed “in the moment” or the recording can be tweaked after the fact. It remains true that fewer and fewer people, especially those who are not personally involved in making music themselves, get to hear a live human being singing full out without any kind of help. Acoustic performance is rare (except possibly in church) and that’s a shame. In my opinion one of the reasons why our young students have such unrealistic expectations of themselves as singers is that they have almost no experience listening to excellent singers who perform without any help.

Training a voice to be the best it can be is not dependent on a microphone, a set of monitors and speakers or on an engineer. It depends on your vocal folds, your mouth and throat, your lungs and your belly muscles. It depends on your relationship to pitches, vowels and consonants and on things like vibrato and tone quality.  Electronics can help (or interfere) but it can NEVER substitute for the voice itself and how it is working as it emerges from someone’s body. It doesn’t matter what kind of music you sing, the body does what it does with those vocal folds and the rest of the physical equipment. Either you work with that to get a better result or you rely on something outside of yourself than can never be entirely yours.

When you go to a used car lot to buy a car, how do you know if the car you are buying is what they say it is? One good thing that we have now is online resources. You can look up all kinds of things about cars before you buy one.

How do you know when you start taking singing lessons that the teacher you have is the best one for you? There are no rating systems and, even if there were, how would you know if they were truthful or not? It comes down to reputation or personal recommendation or trial and error, or maybe you are related to a singing teacher!

If you can find a teacher who is a faculty at a highly rated college or university program, that should be a good place to begin. People who are knowledgable in singing have hired this individual. Perhaps you could research a famous vocalist you like and ask that person if they have a teacher to recommend. If you know someone who sings professionally you could ask that person for a recommendation or advice about how to search. You could go onto one of the singing teacher sites and look at what people have written there. They have lists of teachers.

Still, the “trial and error” part is hard to circumvent. Since the process of learning to sing is complex if done well and confusing if not, it takes a while to determine if what you are being taught is what you actually ought to be learning. You have to do what you are being asked for a while in order to see if it has an impact on how your sound when you sing, and how you feel. If you sound better and feel better, you might be working with someone who is a good choice.

But you can sound better and feel better for a while and then start to sound not so good and feel even worse, even if you are doing the same thing.  How could that be possible?  It’s like your car develops a knock even though you’ve taken good care of it.

When you are young, particularly if you are talented, training can take you too far too fast. You wouldn’t know until it is too late, until you were already in trouble.

I know many many people who have been in this situation. It isn’t so that it is unheard of. Most of the people I’ve spoken to who have gotten caught this way who are still singing managed to dig themselves out, sometimes with help and sometimes on their own. The rest — gave up and stopped singing.

It’s possible to push the muscles of the throat and body to do more than they should particularly when the vocalist is young, but adults can get caught this way, too. The symptoms include inability to stay on pitch or to sustain high notes, wide, wobbly or too obvious vibrato, extreme effort to use “breath support” on even moderate phrases, a feeling of squeezing in the throat and neck, and a necessity to over open the mouth/jaw and sometimes to nod the head in a downward way while going to higher pitches. The vocal folds, when observed, could be normal, but the response the singer gets is not. This is an insidious problem and one that many singing teachers not only do not know about, they might even be unknowingly responsible for causing it.

It’s not quite the same thing when you start to study singing as when you go out to buy a used car. You can look up car statistics online. You have to be a bit more careful when you look for someone to teach you how to sing.