Various Posts

Age gives everything a different, more diffused perspective. It makes it easier to tolerate things that seems unacceptable when you are young. It teaches forgiveness and compassion. Things are not always just black and white.

When you begin something, unless you are very lucky and have an excellent mentor, you can’t see very far into the process. You may not know the way to go unless you have been taught what steps to follow and that leaves you to trial and error, a painful and slow process. Even when you have a mentor you can still get lost but without one it’s both lonely and scary.

Since singing isn’t organized in any formal manner and there are so many ideas about it, it is perhaps even more likely that you will get lost or at least face a few serious detours if you study. Even if you have a clear idea of where you would like to go, there is no guarantee that you will arrive.

After decades of life experience one has the advantage of looking backwards. It is possible to see where you have been, what roads you have traveled. It’s possible to review the ups and downs and the successes and failures and gain some insight into the whole tapestry. If you are lucky, there will only be a few regrets.

Age cannot go back into the past and make it be different but it can change how you look at the past and that perspective actually does change things in the present, sometimes a lot. Recently I read that the actor Patrick Stewart has always resented his father who beat his mother and was very cold and brutal to him. Turns out he discovered that his father had been on the front lines in the war and had seen a lot of violence and was suffering from what we now call Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. While it doesn’t excuse his father’s actions, it allowed Stewart to see that there were reasons why he behaved the way he did. He has decided to do charity work for both battered women (for his mother) and work with PTSD victims (for his dad). How he sees his past, now, as an older man, has changed what it means to him in the present.

I have met and spoken to many people who had terrible voice training in their younger days and who were damaged by it, some so badly that they never sang again. This is a tragic loss. I have met people who loved to sing more than anything else who gave up singing because of someone who hurt them so deeply they did not have the will to go on. I came close to being in this situation more than once but my desire to sing was ultimately stronger than my ability to throw in the towel. I’m still here. Beat up, maybe, but not a quitter. I have learned to look at my past as a journey during which I learned some hard lessons. Now I make those lessons work for me as a teacher. I use what I learned, what I experienced and what went wrong to help others avoid, as much as I can, the same messy issues. It’s not a guarantee, but it’s a possible map and that’s better than having none. If there is such a thing as “aging well”, I’m trying my best to do that. Sometimes it really is the best “revenge”.

What is good singing? Can anyone capture it in words?

All kinds of singing can be considered “good” for all kinds of reasons. Certainly, if one applies the thinking of the typical “classical” voice teacher to all styles, then some singing is “more good” than others. Clearly, I do not adhere to that at all in terms of style.

What I do think, though, is that singing has to have some kind of integrity unto itself and to the artist singing. If it doesn’t have that, it cannot be “good”. Integrity is defined in the Webster College Dictionary as being “fidelity to moral principles; honesty; or soundness; completeness”. To me, that means that if you don’t know what style you are singing and you don’t know the accepted parameters of that style either musically or vocally, and if you don’t know the boundaries of your own vocal production, you are singing without integrity, regardless of what style you are singing. That can never be “good”.

When the artist Pink sang at the Grammy award ceremonies in front of Liza Minelli, “Somewhere Over The Rainbow” she murdered the song. Having no clue about how to perform it nor how to sing it in anything other than a crude, sloppy manner, it was in very bad taste. I felt very sorry for Liza. I like Pink. I think she is an interesting artist. She just had no clue and someone should have told her so. Guess not.

When Deborah Voigt sang “Annie” in the Glimmerglass production of Annie Get Your Gun, there was no integrity in that performance. She sang “Annie” as Debbie, suiting her own vocal capabilities regardless of the way the character was written to be portrayed. Unfortunately, since the role was written for a belter and Debbie wasn’t about to belt, (since she (a) has very little chest register to begin with and (b) certainly doesn’t take what little she has up very far in pitch, and (c) was about to sing her first “Brunnhilde” at the Met a few months later), she turned the role of a  young woman who starts out as an backwoods hick into something unrecognizable. Too bad for Irving Berlin. He’s been dead a long time so why not stomp on his composition because if you are a Diva at the Met, who’s going to stop you?

Then, of course, there’s the highly commercially successful (as in it made a lot of money for the TV network) Sound of Music with Carrie Underwood. There we had a natural belter from Oklahoma unable to make herself into a European woman who was aspiring to be in the convent just before the second World War. Oh well, who cares if you don’t have a mezzo-soprano voice or acting skills when you can bring in 18 million viewers?

What constitutes good? Staying on pitch? Singing a style as if you know what the style is supposed to be? Understanding the limitations of your own vocal output? Truth be told, there are no voice police and whatever “standards” there may be are arbitrary, subjective, felicitous, and fleeting. Today’s “great” was yesterday’s “so-so”. Today’s “successful” was yesterday’s “crass”. This is not going to go the other way any time soon. Of course, that means today’s “so-so” might be tomorrow’s “wonderful”. We just don’t know.

Therefore, when you see and hear someone who is singing in any way that presents a cohesive whole, be appreciative. If the person and the performance and the music hang together uniquely but effortlessly, that’s about as “good” as it gets.

If you have studied any discipline — yoga, baseball, violin, acting — you know that you have to spend time working on that discipline before you become very good at it and even after you are good it takes years to be a master. A master is someone who can deliberately do very difficult things with little struggle and still be effective at a high level.

Those who think that learning to sing is about finding the “right” sound in one moment and then staying there, misunderstand the nature of vocal training and its purpose. Those who think that “vocalizing” is just a way of warming up and that learning songs teaches you whatever you need to know are equally misguided. People who assume that you can sing any song in any manner and that this is just fine because its part of “individualizing” the song are also incorrect.

Repertoire is useful for polishing something to a high degree after it is ready for polish. After Michelangelo finished the “Pietá” he polished the marble to a high sheen. He did not do that while he was working on the basic form of the sculpture. If you do the “finishing touches” while you are in the middle of a task, you will have to do them again when you are actually done. You might even ruin things so you can’t finish at all.

So it is with repertoire – songs or roles, classical or CCM — you sing to the level of your technique as evidenced by your vocal function exercises. Nothing else is possible. The choice, therefore, is to know what level your vocalizing is at and to make sure that you do not try to sing a song that is over your head. Sadly, singing teachers often assign repertoire that is extremely difficult to beginners, thinking (incorrectly) that this will allow them to “grow into” the material and teach them things along the way. No. If you take someone who can barely make it through a one mile run and put them in a 10 mile run, they will collapse in the middle or perhaps be injured while pushing past their physical limits. If, however, you let that person gradually run distances that are slightly longer than their easy endurance encompasses, they can build up to doing a 10 mile race and maybe winning it. In fact, if they are to coast through the ten-mile boundary, they should train to run at least 15 miles in hard conditions over a period of time. THAT would make the 10 mile race much easier.

If you can barely make a sound that is secure, free and undistorted, at a moderately loud volume, in your highest pitch range, then singing a song with those requirements, particularly if they happen over and over in the song, is doomed at the outset. You can only struggle, push, and ignore the extra effort you are expending and that, more than anything else, will actually set you back rather than help to develop your vocal skills.

When evaluating a song looking at the pitch range, comparing it to the normal pitch defaults of vocalists (SATB and all derivatives thereof), at the tessitura and the lyrics (how emotionally potent are they?), the tempo (how fast or slow) and the style (ballad or driving pop/rock song) can give you a lot of information, even if you have never heard the song or seen it as printed music before.  When you choose or suggest repertoire for a student do not pick songs that are more than a small amount beyond the student’s present skill level.  In fact, the song should be easier than the vocal capacity of the singer as evidenced in vocal function exercises. Even if the song is very easy, making the singer dig into the meaning, the communication and the nuance of the style should be challenging enough. Even “Happy Birthday” can be interesting. Remember Marilyn Monroe at JFK’s birthday long ago?

If you want to push the person, make the exercises more challenging, but not so hard as to wear the person’s voice out during practice. If you can’t make informed repertoire choices, go learn how to do that. Don’t guess.

These days things everywhere are looser then they were even 25 years ago. It seems that it’s OK to list things as casually as possible without any degree of correctness just to put some “spin” on them, maybe to enhance who you are or what you do.

I am not in this camp, however, and I try to be as scrupulous as possible about what I claim to have done and not done. If I write something with another author, it gets listed as “co-author”, not “author”. I don’t try to make it seem as if I wrote it alone. If I publish something, it is with the other authors’ names in order and what it is and isn’t is CAREFULLY noted so as to be exact.

If you take a course, one or even three courses, or if you take a few private lessons (less than one year’s worth of bi-weekly training sessions), the old “Code of Ethics” would not allow you to claim that you were the “student of” whomever it was that you saw. In fact, you cannot use “studied with” if you took a course, as that implies that you were a private student. You have not “worked with” or “worked under” for the same reason. You can claim, I took this course. I was given certification to say that I got the information from this course from this specific person. That’s not wrong. That is ALL you can claim. If you have been a student in a master class with a master teacher, you MUST list it that way.

Speaking for myself and others in similar circumstances to mine, I really do not appreciate it when someone who has seen me twice or three times, or who has taken one of my trainings, claims on his website or social media to have “worked with” me. Especially if I wouldn’t remember the person if I bumped into him or her on the street. I do not expect to see on social media that the person has “worked under or with” me. If you want to claim that you have a personal relationship to me, you have to actually have one.

You have to earn your own reputation. Young people, be aware, claiming to be someone’s student when you have not met the above criteria is borderline unethical behavior. True, it’s not illegal, but it is misleading. If I catch anyone doing this, you are going to hear directly from me and you won’t be happy.

The only people who can say they are my students are those who have worked directly with me, one-on-one, for a minimum of one entire year (on-going) or who have been involved in my coursework over a long period of time (several years). I’m watching.

There is such a thing as learning to sing step by step. Most singing teachers don’t know which exercises are difficult and which are easy. They don’t know what kinds of things are vocally challenging for everyone and what’s only difficult for certain students. They can’t decide what kind of progress is slow, rapid or average (until they have been teaching for years).

The advantage of teaching for over 150,000 hours is that you have heard a lot of people sing a lot of exercises for a long long time. If you have your eyes and ears open you can’t help but notice patterns. The patterns between individual singers, in different voice categories, doing different styles at different stages of their lives. You notice what happens that’s typical, what happens that is unusual and all sorts of stuff that varies but not chaotically. It’s like studying the ocean. The ocean is the same all over the planet. It’s just one big body of water broken up by land, right? If you ask an oceanographer, I would venture to say that this answer would not suffice. Even sailors know this isn’t really the whole truth.

If most people who teach singing don’t learn how to teach singing (and most don’t), but just sing and go by what they were taught and what worked for them, it’s no wonder that there is confusion. If you are someone who has only sailed in a small boat in Long Island Sound for all of your life, then  teaching someone else how to captain a tug boat in New York Harbor or sail an ocean liner in the Caribbean wouldn’t be a good match.

The point of studying different approaches to singing is to develop a broader base, a wider perspective, a more diversified skill set in order to be useful to all sorts of students. If you do not know how normal voices function, you will not know what to do with a voice that is unhealthy or unhappy. If you do not understand kinesthetic learning or intellectual process you will throw exercises at students thinking that one of them might “stick” and be helpful. Of course, if it doesn’t, you can always blame the student for his or her inadequacies.

If you ask second graders to do calculus and they fail, is that their fault? If you ask a beginning vocalist to sing a song that has all sorts of difficulties (for any number of reasons) and they can’t sing it well, is that the student’s fault? If you are mystified as to what’s wrong, or what to do to make it better, go take a course in pedagogy. Anywhere. Just go.

CCM Institute, Shenandoah Conservatory, Winchester, VA. July 12-14, 2014.

 

What if the sounds you make could be heard by angels? What if they were invisibly there, listening to you? Would that matter to what you were doing?

If thought is energy (we know this since it can be measured now with electronic instruments and various kinds of scans), and if energy can neither be created nor destroyed (thank you, Mr. Einstein), then every thought you have is still floating around in the universe somewhere, maybe even inside your own grey matter. Now wouldn’t that be interesting?

If the words we utter can never be retracted, and if their impact can never really be undone, shouldn’t we be taught to pay attention to what we say and how we say it from the first day we  say “mamma”?

I have been writing about “mindfulness” lately (along with everyone else). What is that? Mindful means being aware of what you are doing while you are doing it. It means that you operate in each moment with awareness. You think about what you say, how you act and the consequences those activities have, before and during the action. It’s rare that anyone actually does that.

What you say to yourself, both in your mind and out loud, matters. If a lot of it is negative and judgmental, it will cause you to look at life,  particularly your own, in a depressed way. Read the last two sentences again out loud.

Some people don’t want to trust the universe, they don’t find it benign. Some people don’t want to be open-hearted, loving and kind, they would rather be suspicious, cold and mean. Some people don’t care to put the good of the whole above their own personal gain. And some people would rather try to control life than let it flow through beautifully as it does. Those people relate to singing methods that promote squeezing something in their throats or bodies. They like the idea that holding on inside themselves protects their message or uniqueness.

In point of fact, the opposite is true. The freer the sound the more likely it will be to be healthy and also to convey honest emotion. The more the sound will ring true when you tell your truth. Why, why would anyone want anything else as a vocal artist????

You can sing however you want to sing.  Not everyone is interested in singing freely and telling the truth. Not everyone cares what kinds of things (words and intentions) she says to herself all day long. Not everyone “believes” in angels. If, however, you do care or maybe would like to care, then I invite you to try being mindful and conscious for just one day, watching what you say and how you say it for all your waking hours (both in your head and out loud). What you tell yourself is true. It is what it is. Unless you actually have two separate voices in your head (which is a mental illness) there isn’t anyone in there but you.

Watch how you sing and how it sounds to you. Sing as if “the angels” were real and are there with you……….treat your sound, both words and music, inside and outside your head, as if it is sacred and powerful. See what happens.

Things are changing now, faster and faster. Everyone is jumping on the bandwagon to champion functional training based on body awareness and voice science.  Mindfulness and voice science are jumping out of everyone’s mouth. They are the flavors of the month.

“Bring in the high partials.” “Tune the 2nd harmonic to the 1st formant.” “Find the singer’s formant cluster on those high notes.”

Twenty five years ago when I spoke at a meeting of the New York Singing Teachers’ Association and said that sooner or later the profession was going to go over to voice science, the room was against me. They were artists, not scientists. They were musicians and actors, not researchers. The scientists didn’t understand singing because it was mysterious. THEY understood because they sang and that was the only way into their private club.

Oh.

Now I read about all sorts of things that were “forbidden” years ago and for which I was called “fringe” by mainstream classical teachers. What was ignored or mocked years ago in my not so long life (I’m 65, not 95),  is now touted and celebrated. It’s funny.

I also keep saying that the opera world is going to one day wake up and allow electronically amplified music by pop/rock composers into the house and then opera as we know it will change, in the blink of an eye, into a museum piece. The seats, however, will be filled by young people with money to spend and sooner or later, the old folks, who will be outraged, will slowly disappear and their objections will disappear with them. Has to be.

So, beware the teacher who has read a few books, attended a few conferences and knows the buzz words. They sound like they know what they are talking about (“Increase the subglottic pressure.”) but many times they still are as clueless as when they were talking about “pink mist” and “singing from the back over the top while spinning out of the dome”.

Can the teacher sing? How well? What excuses do they make if they can’t or sing badly? Is their explanation something you can validate by going online and looking it up on a voice science website? Do they talk to you in plain simple English? Do you feel stupid at the end of a lesson? If you don’t get good answers, L E A V E, people. Caveat Emptor.

This word comes from “soma” or body in Greek. Psyche means mind. Psychosomatic means  of the mind and body.

Somatic education, experiencing, awareness. All of these words imply that the body is directly involved in something that has to do with what is happening. Surely, if anything was ever “somatic” , singing is.

Yet one must go to acting work to find deep connection between sound and movement. It is actors (and occasionally dancers) who find ways to make sound while moving around, breathing. It is actors who work to find a sound that comes from the body’s free expression of the human condition. Why is it, then, that classical vocal training programs have no such courses? They might have dance (but maybe not) and they might have “stage direction or deportment” but developing acting singers or singers who act seems separate from vocal technique training and learning repertoire for juries. Why?

The very act of separating these things is foreign. When human beings are connected to their bodies in a conscious and deliberate manner, they can move and express a wide variety of emotions and ideas and their voices follow suit by coming forth with little strain. It is understandable that things need to be isolated and investigated both physically and intellectually in order to learn about them and assimilate them, but that separation needs to be acknowledged as a construct, not an end in itself. “You are over-thinking this. You are thinking too much.” This is a common criticism singing students hear. Of course, they are thinking too much. You can’t do something new if you don’t think about it!!!

It may be easier to produce a big, fat operatic sound while standing still. I have heard that said. Still, the great singers of opera and concert repertoire were able to move enough to convey the emotions of the characters in the music. Being a tree trunk isn’t very interesting and doesn’t work well for singers’ voices either. I have seen amazing performances of opera in which the star vocalists were very flexible and busy with stage movement but still sang well enough to give the audience chills.

If we study how human beings look and sound at dramatic moments, we will find that they all share many basic things. Martha Graham knew this and made excellent use of it throughout her career both as a dancer and as a choreographer. If you see someone kneeling down, head bowed, you assume something different than when that same person is standing up looking at the sky with amazement. So, too, do we assume something when we hear a scream that is different than a laugh. The primal sounds we all make, such as grunts, groans, shouts, screams, howls, laughs, giggles, cries, sobs, moans, sighs, and cooing, all convey some kind of emotion without any specific words or language. These sounds should remain available to us as undercurrents in all of our communications. Human beings who sing should not lose the primal quality of expression through body and voice that conveys authentic emotion, lest their singing be empty. They will do so, however, if they are trained to ignore their bodies and the information they contain. As I wrote the other day, classical singing can sound like empty howling. Who would want to hear that?

One of the reasons the great singers were great was because they were always deeply connected to emotional truth and authenticity. Angry music sounded (and looked, if you could see them perform) angry. Callas, Pavarotti, Hvorotovsky, Horne…..many more. Memorable because the voice, the person and the communication were always one and the same. All of it passed through the body, over which they had great control. Streisand, Bennett, Cook, and many other of the “old timers” all powerful communicators. Maybe this is not so much the case with the present generation of singers.  Amplification doesn’t substitute for emotional truth.

The path into the body and its consciousness is slow and requires dedication. You cannot get there in a moment or in several moments. You can only get there through patient, repetitive persistence, over a great deal of time, and with a desire to know and explore all that it has to tell you as you go.

Somatic Voicework™ is a way into your body through your voice and into your voice through your body.

 

Learning to pay attention to something when you have not previously had a reason to do so can take time and commitment. Paying attention in a broad general sense asks that you proceed very slowly, taking time to absorb experience as it occurs, moment by moment. This mental state, alert and alive but not filled with “word thoughts” is one that many people in our society do not experience, except perhaps when they are in nature or deliberately meditating.

This kind of mindfulness can be directed by intention. For instance, what is my body doing when it breathes in and out? Where am I moving and how much? What else is shifting? Can I locate other areas in my body that respond to the air moving in and out and if so, which areas and what sensations do I have there? Is my breath even or uneven? If I watch that, how regular or irregular does it stay if I keep noticing over a period of minutes? Is is possible for me to allow the body to do all the movements of inhalation and exhalation effortlessly? Can I intervene with deliberate movements? What happens when I do? How does that change, if it does, my earlier awareness of what my body is doing as the breath goes in and out?

You can’t possibly know any of that if all you do is force yourself to “breathe in your diaphragm”.

If someone is working on you as a Feldenkreis, Alexander or Shiatsu practitioner, what do you experience as the work takes place? How does it shift your perception of your body during the session and after it’s over? If you are doing yoga, how much can you bring your conscious attention to the asana and what it is doing to and with your body? Can you stay linked to your breathing, your sensations, your movement and your sense of moment by moment experience? If you are linking your body with your mind, how deep and how broad can that link become?

This kind of awareness can, of course, also be brought to any other life experience. You can learn to be aware of eating patterns, work patterns, patterns that show up in relationships. You can notice that you are behaving in a reactionary manner (this is how I always am and always will be) or that you have a choice, in the moment, to watch the desire to react but not follow it. (I want to eat a donut now but I will have an apple instead). You can do this with your voice. (I have a hard time singing that note. I’m just going to yell until I get it to come out or I have a hard time singing that note. I wonder if I could find a way to get there in an easier manner and still sound OK?)

Some people will never “get” any of this. The people who read this blog regularly are probably not in that category. Most of the people who “get” my work are conscious, open, loving beings who desire to use their artistry in the highest possible manner.

If you do not know how to increase your awareness of your body in an “out of the box” manner, please learn. If you are a graduate of my Level III Certification, come to work with Peter Shor in July at Shenandoah. You will not be sorry.

Many people work on “physical fitness”. In that world, feeling the pain isn’t uncommon. Pushing the body to go past its natural limits comes with the territory. If you do that enough, you deaden yourself to pain and learn to ignore your body’s natural wisdom, and then you run a greater risk of becoming seriously injured.

Cultivating awareness of the body is exactly the opposite of “getting ripped”. It has to do with drawing your attention into your body and noticing what, how and where it feels something. If you ask it to do something it typically doesn’t do, you might not get much of a response or have much control. If you are not deeply in touch with your body, you may not only lack strength and coordination but also may not be able to direct specific movements even if you understand exactly what you want to move.

Even dancers and athletes can be out of touch with their bodies when they enter into activities that require a different kind of movement than that which they typically use. All dancers know that they have to adapt to each new choreographer and depending, that can be easy or take a bit of time. Being a great tennis player doesn’t automatically make you good at baseball, even though both require great hand/eye coordination.

Physical awareness happens best in a body that is in good health and decent shape but it is not limited to that condition. People who are ill can have great physical awareness and people who are really strong and powerful can have very poor physical awareness. Also, noticing subtle changes in the body takes some degree of sophistication in awareness, as the smaller the change or reaction, the greater the level of conscious attention (awareness) has to be.

Generally, unless you are familiar with “mindfulness” techniques that are directed specifically towards the body, you may not even know if you are physically aware or not or if the awareness you think you have is all there is. You can only become more knowing by experience and the experience has to be anchored to intention. Anything else is not helpful. Only physical awareness is physical awareness. If you sing and you have not done something to increase your conscious awareness of every part of your body and what it is capable of, you don’t know it well enough to do yourself much good. How would you know that? You wouldn’t until and unless you participated in some kind of bodywork.

If you have the opportunity to work with anyone anywhere who will help you gain a very personal, and perhaps unusual, perspective on what it is to live in, experience through and have a body, take it. This can only benefit you in every aspect of your life but most particularly in your singing.