Various Posts

We have all heard the phrase “The show must go on”. It means that you have to leave your baggage outside when you step on the stage and deal with things as they are in the present moment. Nothing less will do if you are a professional.

Many of us have had to perform under less than perfect circumstances. In fact, that happens a great deal of the time. We are tired, or slightly ill. We are emotionally down or struggling with a personal problem. We have to contend with equipment failures, with difficult people who work with us, we have to contend with issues that impact how we feel (like terrible food, dry environments or sudden changes that we must accommodate). Given that we sing, we also have to deal with our voices in all their human and “oh-so-not-reliable” idiosyncrasies.

We can forget lyrics, miss entrances, lose track of where we are in a song. We can crack, go flat or sharp, or yodel unintentionally. We can have trouble with monitors, with theater acoustics, with conductors or instrumentalists in terms of mis-communications. Someone else’s mistake could cause us to have one, too. The list is almost endless.

And then, there you are, in front of an audience who may have paid money to see and hear you, and you have to look and sound like everything is rosy and cozy. You gather your resources, use what’s at hand, no matter what it is, as if you intended to have it be there all along. In anything but a genuine emergency (the theater is on fire or there is an earthquake happening), you go on, doing what you do, and making it work with a smile on your face (or in your mind). When it’s over, maybe no one but you knew that anything was “out of balance”. If that’s so, you did your job and you deserve to call yourself a pro.

I have seen some of the most famous performers in the world make mistakes in a performance and deal with it uniquely in a way that works. It should be comforting to the rest of us that even those who are the highest level of the business are still human and can mess up. What makes them really professional is not that they don’t make mistakes but that they deal with them so well.

Blessings to all who perform live in any situation or who do a recording that can’t be done over. Bravo to all of you! If you make it work, however, you are a real professional and that’s the highest compliment that anyone can pay.

The line between arrogance, confidence and courage is very tiny. It’s also a perception, like everything else.

I might appear very confident to someone who is self-assured, but arrogant to someone who is insecure. I might seem to be bold and courageous to someone who is shy, but just ordinary to another who is energized herself.

People who are “place keepers” (as Eckhart Tolle says) are important. We need them as audiences, as supporters and as grounding anchors. People who make waves, shake things up, and cause a fuss are necessary, too, because if a few people don’t push the envelope, then there is nothing new.

It is paradoxical to think that performers can be very shy. They might carry out or execute the play, the song or the dance, but prefer to do it in their own living room. Enjoying being in the limelight can be different from being in the artistic process, creating something, but sometimes they occur together. I actually love being on stage in front of an audience. What I don’t like is getting ready to go on. I still get nervous. When I was young waiting was terrifying but as soon as I got out there and started to sing, all the fear just flew away. I know people for whom the entire process has always been easy, and those who like the prep but not the actual show. I have met some who don’t like any of it except when they are creating in private, but go on stage anyway. It’s very personal.

Since I wrote here about courage recently, it seems that we should investigate the characteristics of arrogance and confidence as opposites and partners to courage. An arrogant person might think that only she is right, that her ideas could never be incorrect, and that she is better than others. An arrogant person might never think of the impact of her words on others or of what others think of her words and actions. A confident person might say exactly the same things in the same way but is interested in what another person might think. She would seriously consider another person’s different opinion and give it fair investigation as an alternative point of view. She would believe that she might not always be correct. Her confidence has room in it for human frailty.

The difference isn’t in what is being offered, it is in the person’s attitude about herself and her message. If you don’t care what others think or how they react, and if you think you can’t ever be wrong, you are not likely to have much fear or need much courage. What would you be afraid of in the first place? You have your arrogance to protect you. If, conversely, you have great confidence but you also have a mind that is open to the considerations of others, you might also be full of self-doubt. That would require you to gather up your courage before putting your message out, so no one else knows you are trembling in your boots the whole time.

Artists must be very self-confident if they are to share what they create with the world. That courage is personal, in that each person has unique challenges to overcome, and if you are to do that in public view, you can’t shrink from all that being brave entails. You have to deeply believe that you have a right to put your message out (and know that others can simply reject it and you ). You have to deeply desire to share whatever it is you are creating (even though it may not be as clear to others as it is to you), and you have to be willing to be both persistent and flexible if you are to keep going in spite of any and all obstacles.

If you become very successful you can also get arrogant, thinking you are special, above everyone else, and can’t fail. That is a sneaky danger. The only way around it is to be vigilant, and to have good friends around you who always tell you the truth, no matter what. An alternative might be to go volunteer for a few days in the local soup kitchen.

Classical vocal recitals are boring? Rock concerts are boring? Jazz standards are boring? Shakespeare, too?

Hmmmmmmm.

Anything can be boring if you don’t know how to appreciate it for what it is. Taste and intelligence are part of cultivating sophistication. When I was a teenager I attended my first vocal recital at Carnegie Hall. The artist was Birgit Nilson, about whom I knew next to nothing at that time. I will never forget that recital, as I had no idea people could sing like that. It opened up an entire world to me that took quite some time to deeply appreciate. I liken it to being a connoisseur of fine wine. It takes years to develop “a nose” but those who are wine experts can discern the grape, the flavors, and sometimes the winery and other details, just by tasting and smelling the wine. That is true of those who make perfume as well — they have very developed “noses” but for a different reason. Art experts can see small details that others might have overlooked allowing them to authenticate work. The knowledge to appreciate the small things is vital to such expertise. It is a marriage of art and intelligence.

Those who “follow” anything, be it a sport, cooking, dogs, art, dance, design, music, theater, culture or singing, gain more and more information about what to notice. To people who immerse themselves in the pursuit, there is never an opportunity to be bored about any aspect of that endeavor. I have always found that to be true about singing. Any form of singing, by any person in any style, is always interesting to me. I can’t imagine finding it boring in any form.

I find football incredibly boring but clearly there are millions of people who do not have such thoughts. I wouldn’t want to give football any of my limited free time nor do I pay much attention to it in any form, including the Super Bowl. I often do not know who is playing in it and have never seen it.

If, however, I had a reason to pay attention, (say, if I had married someone in that profession) I would have good reason to learn to appreciate football and to develop a fondness for it and maybe even become expert about the various players and teams and strategies and statistics of the sport and that would make it more and more interesting. My intellect would become engaged and any boredom I might have felt would simply melt away.

Some of my most sublime moments in life have been appreciating things and experiences that it has taken me a lifetime to know well. The subtleties of an art song recital in the voice of a master vocalist, the dynamics of a performance of a world-class actor in a Broadway musical, the high-flying improvisation of a jazz vocalist singing with extraordinary musicians — each in its own right an amazing moment, could not have happened if I had not had the interest and the intelligence to learn how to listen and to savor the art in front of me. Seeing “The Picasso Exhibit” at the Museum of Modern Art in the early 80s changed my life, and I knew little about Picasso’s life or work at that time. My knowledge of singing, however, was enough to inform my ability to recognize greatness in his work and that literally brought me to my knees with awe. Ditto with my Aunt Ann’s meatballs (back when I used to eat meat) which were in a class by themselves. You have to eat a lot of good Italian home cooking to know an Academy Award winning meatball when you taste one.

Boredom is intellectual laziness. It is the consequence of looking at something only on the surface or at a distance. Don’t be bored, be curious. Don’t be bored, be surprised. Don’t be bored, be discerning. You would be amazed at what you can find when you expect something to show up.

It takes great courage — guts — to be a creative artist. It is a fearful thing to do and requires enormous commitment, dedication and willingness to stare down all manner of demons.

You pour your heart into a piece of music. You prepare yourself, your body, your voice, your heart and your mind and pour it into a song or a piece, working on it until it is a jewel, shining in multi facets, and you offer it to the world in a pubic performance, only to have hardly anyone show up, or people show up and give you a luke-warm reception, or someone reviews it and cuts it to ribbons. You can want to jump out the window, and all other artists would understand.

So, along the way, you can develop ways to protect yourself. You can find ways to hide, even without realizing it. You might call it something else, you might even believe it is just a good comfortable place that you’ve finally found where you can have some relief. That, sadly, can be a trap.

All artists face the possibility of becoming stuck in their own patterns, even if the patterns (when they were new) were very good ones. If an artist becomes predictable, he or she is in trouble. Worse, if an artist is re-visiting different versions of the same old same old, or variations on a recurring theme, the world begins to notice, even if the artist does not. “Finding your own truth” and “being yourself” can easily become “old hat” and “there’s that pattern again” and if your audience is paying attention and notices………uh oh.

Beware “this is how I do it”, “this is my style”, “this is what I am known for” and other such states of mind. Spiritually speaking, there is no “I”. Your function as an artist is to create. Period. Your “identity” in that creating is of no consequence. Hard to grasp but true. To create this way you must at least try, from time to time, to begin without necessarily understanding before the fact what the end product will be. If you do not do that, you will end up hiding (from yourself and from the next most creative thing you could discover). You will stagnate, and the spark inside will grow dim or maybe even go away entirely. In the end, the only answer is to gather your courage, plunge into the unknown and take your chances. GUTS, folks. It takes guts.

Chest register, chest resonance, chest tone, lower register, heavy register, heavy mechanism, “supported voice”, full voice, speaking voice quality, thick folds, TA activity, “twangy” belt (I really dislike that one). There are probably more words.

Are they all the same? Many would argue they are not. You can go on:

Mix, head/mix, chest/mix, legit/mix, belt/mix, light/mix, twangy/mix, bright mix, warm mix, forward mix, etc.

Head register, head resonance, head tone, higher register, light register, light mechanism, “pure tone”, angelic sound, CT activity, floaty sound, “off the voice”, etc.

What do any of these words really mean?

Nothing. They mean nothing until and unless you have a voiced sound happening and at that moment you label it with one of those terms. Then both the labeler and the person singing can agree that the sound was whatever the labeler said it was.

So, I can sing an /a/ (father) vowel on C5 at 85 dB and someone can come along and tell me that I am singing in (pick one of the words from the lists above) and I can either (a) agree (b) disagree (c) not understand or (d) call it something else of my own. If there is something else that can take place, do please tell me what it is.

If I sing with an electroglottic collar on my throat so I can monitor open/closed quotient on a computer software voice analysis program, and I also have a sound pressure meter to tell me how many decibels my sound is, and I know what frequency I am sustaining (but with some fluctuation, since human beings do not hold one frequency without variation) , and I can see my vocal folds on a computer monitor, and I can also see my larynx and the structures around it at the same time, while I am singing that /a/, then I would KNOW what was happening in my throat while I was singing. The label would go with that experience. The label, however, could be “throat position A”. That would work, wouldn’t it?

If we assume that we can “feel” TA/CT activity directly (we cannot), or if we assume that a sound we are making is happening because of where we feel the vibration of the sound (it is not) and if we label sound “the new Broadway sound” because we like the term, and then, further, decide we “know” what’s causing the sound based on our experience of it, we would become like 99.9% of all the teachers of singing who have ever lived.

The labels the music industry and Broadway in particular use are “group mind agreements” (see post from March 8, 2014). That means the people who use these labels have a certain kind of sound in mind when they are describing it. You can either recognize that sound and agree that it is called the same thing or not. If you do not, you are not likely to get hired by someone who is seeking it. Simple.

So, if you want to have a conversation about your speaking voice on a low pitch and say that it isn’t chest register or about head and say that it is caused by making your head vibrate, go ahead. No one will stop you. Expect other people to argue with you. Expect that things will remain unclear. Expect that nothing will change. We’ve been there a very long time.

There is a difference between not knowing something and knowing it but covering it up to hide something for a deceitful purpose.

There are some few individuals who teach singing who have a very skewed view of themselves. They have managed to ingratiate themselves to the right people by “playing their cards well”. To medical doctors, to those in important positions in voice science and medicine, they are very deferential, making sure to say just the right things. To their colleagues they are disdainful and condescending, making sure to drop names and act “important”.

These people manage to convince others that they “know something” and, in fact, often have very valid credentials. They wear expensive clothing and jewelry, they live in the best buildings. When it comes to promoting themselves, they have absolutely no shame, and will do whatever it takes to make themselves sound impressive. Here in New York and in other places of the USA I personally know of several singing teachers whose regard for their own ability is far beyond what it deserves to be.

I am not impressed by status, money, position, possessions or documents. I rate people based entirely on how they behave, how they conduct themselves in life, and how others regard them. I look for honesty, decency, humility, willingness to work hard, willingness to acknowledge others, willingness to lend a helping hand, unselfishness, generosity, and kindness. In terms of teaching singing, I value first: do you sing well? I value: do you sing well in several styles? I value: do you understand the process of singing as a physical skill? I value: do you work with all kinds of students? I value: do you treat all your students with respect and dignity? I value: can you be honest kindly?

The worst thing in the world is to be impressed with yourself. It is the first step on the path to your own downfall.  If you have to impress someone with what you know, or who you are, be very careful. Actions speak louder than words. It matters not who you are, it matters what you leave behind that helps the world. If you teach, what matters is what you’ve taught and how you’ve taught it. Be a vehicle. You will someday be forgotten but what you give, lives on and on.

There is general consensus from decades of research that belting raises the larynx in most people. The degree to which it is raised can be anything from a little to a whole lot. The position of the Speech Language Pathologists has always been that a raised larynx is by definition hyper-functional. That would be under all conditions and circumstances. The conclusion, therefore, was that belting was hyperfunctional.

This flies in the face of common sense life experience, however, since there are clearly people belting and not losing their voices or having other vocal health issues. And, there are clearly people who speak in a loud, brassy manner habitually (which is what belting should be) and who do not have vocal issues either.

The issue becomes then, COMFORT. How comfortable can you be if your larynx is riding just under your hyoid bone? The answer, of course, is quite comfortable. People do it every day.

How do you become comfortable? There are many possible answers. One would be that the larynx never descended to a normal level during maturation. Two would be that as a child you sang in a belting sound, got used to it, and kept it into adulthood. Three would be that you learned to belt gradually over time and your throat become acclimatized to that adjustment. Four would be that you took lessons with someone who taught you to do that through vocal exercises.

But what if you are not comfortable? What if you don’t feel good or sound good, even though you can make the sound well enough to function?

When the larynx sits very high in the throat and the throat is quite constricted, the tongue gets squeezed and the space in the back of the throat at the top of it, near the soft palate, is made quite small. All of these conditions contribute not only to general tongue tension and jaw tension (indirectly) but also to a shrill thin bleety sound. The remedy for that would be keeping the mouth very open (jaw dropped) for high and loud notes and open vowels like /a/ and /o/ (father and open). The closed vowels like /i/ and /u/ (free and true) become nearly impossible to sing with resonance of any kind so they sound thin or distorted or both, particularly as the pitch rises. None of this is optimal or even necessary when belting is done well, but it is typical of the behavior and the sound that one hears in all sorts of music and singers at this moment.

Further, the larynx riding very high increases the possibility of vocal fatigue, of flatting, of muscle tension dysphonia and of making the overall sound quality of the voice uneven and unpleasant. But guess what? Having the larynx ride  up as far as possible is a direct goal of a very popular method of singing training. It can work well enough if you want to do loud R&B riffs on super high pitches, but it absolutely doesn’t work if you want to sound good during any other kind of sound-making.

Further, if you want to breathe deeply and easily, so you could stay connected to your actual emotional expression, keeping your larynx tucked up into the highest place in your throat where it can go, will absolutely stop you from doing so. And, if you are typical, you won’t notice any of this until and unless you (a) have a vocal or musical issue or (b) someone points out to you another way to work with your voice. You might not have a clue in the world as to where your larynx is but you would have a sense of “something’s wrong” even if you can’t explain what it is.

Singing is not yelling. Yelling is yelling. Singing and yelling are not the same. Yelling, however, on a sustained pitch on a single vowel often passes for singing these days, and it does so because it is impressive and “exciting”, although perhaps not very moving. Or maybe not even a little moving.

If you want to sing like you are yelling, there are hundreds of people who will help you get there. If you don’t want to sing like that, but you still want to belt, and to sing CCM styles well, you need to look into training that takes you to a better place. It exists, but it’s up to you to find it.

There are many people who are interested in the extremes of singing. It is, actually, a fascinating topic. If you do a little searching, you will find vocal artists of all kinds who are exploring all manner of vocal sound in all pitch ranges and all volume levels. They do not want to be limited, they want it all.

Contrast that to those who specialize in one kind of singing. Early music, Balkan music, Folk music of various eras or cultures, opera, recital, church music, mainstream jazz, experimental jazz, pop, rock, country. There are artists who sing in a certain style and have no interest in or desire for any other style.

What about the folks who don’t fall into one of these categories? There are quite a few of them, I would say. There are people who get very well-known for being in a certain style who long to look at other styles. Certainly, YoYo Ma has ventured outside of traditional classical music in his collaborations. Wynton Marsalis has gone outside of jazz to look at classical music, as did Andre Previn in reverse years ago. Many singers can easily go between rock, R&B, jazz, blues, and pop, and might even include music theater of some particular composers. A very few can also manage classical music. There haven’t been too many classical singers who ventured successfully into other styles but Eileen Farrell did so nicely. Many classical singers have taken their more or less classical vocal production into “non-classical” styles, but not too many of them have been comfortable enough to have been taken seriously by aficionados of the style who are specialists in that style.

Yet, we are still quite stuck as a society. “Mainstream” music as found on American Idol, X Factor, Glee and such shows features only pop, R&B and country with an occasional brave soul trying something else. Mostly, though, they are mocked if they try to sing outside what the shows producers consider acceptable. There is enormous ignorance on the part of the “judges” who know so very little about what they presume to judge. Still, the shows go on…..and on…….and on…….

At the level of university training we are still operating under “classical vocal training” is the best and most important thing, regardless of what people are asked to sing. This is nonsense, but it is deeply ingrained as a kind of “group mindset”.  Seeing it change has been very slow, although it is beginning to open up.

The world is going to mix and match sung sounds and music over the next 50+ years. That is what there is now to do. The blending of styles, vocal qualities and human expression including but not limited to both acoustic and electronic production, is going to expand and push both the vocal boundaries and the auditory perception of those boundaries further and further. The questions then become, who gets to do this and how do they make it work from both a career perspective as well as one of vocal health? You don’t know what’s healthy when you are pushing singing to extremes until and unless you do that and then you discover what’s possible by life experience alone. If you blow out your voice and do it permanent harm, then I guess you do. You deal with it or you don’t, after the fact.

It’s very easy to become insulated if you are only in a certain environment all the time. Even the extremes of singing become predictable after a while. In the end, mastery over something is only possible when there is something to master. What that something is, is changing.

There is something called “group mind consciousness”. Karl Jung called it “collective unconscious” but I would call it “collective agreement”. It is a kind of loosely held group of ideas that many people agree to hold as being valid.

In each group, whether it contains millions of people or just two, there are assumptions about what “is” and what “is not” that are shared. We are moving towards a global consciousness, but that will probably take several hundred years (maybe more) if we don’t kill ourselves or make the earth uninhabitable before then, before it becomes an idea held by most people. We also have religious, social, political and other group assumptions, some of which people are willing to go to war over.

The teaching of singing as held by “singing teachers” isn’t really an organized group mind consciousness, even though many people think it is. There is no one organizing body that sets guidelines or parameters for singing, for the teaching of singing generally, for the teaching of singing in certain styles or for singing health. There are no widely held ideas about what singing should be or must be or could be. There are no groups who “decide” what can be called singing. But we do act sometimes as if all that were “real”. We act as if there is a kind of agreement about singing, when there isn’t and has never been any such thing.

In fact, unconscious beliefs, meaning things that are not examined and questioned by individuals or groups consciously, are often a source of problems simply because they are not probed. “The way it is” assumptions determine attitudes and behaviors and, typically, conflicts in every area of human existence .

The way out of this mire is to come home to the physical body, but even there we encounter “issues”. People are taught that the body is weak, it is stupid, it is to be “conquered”. People are taught to ignore the body because it is unreliable. These beliefs carry over into other ideas and all of them lead to problems simply because the body is our one constant companion in life and we cannot avoid it and its messages as long as we breathe.

If you have no negative programming about your body (and that is nearly impossible to achieve if you live in our society) then you will know that it cannot lie to you. It always tries to heal itself as soon as it is injured. Blood clots, bones knit, wounds heal, if they are not too severe. The body needs to inhale and exhale and it will do all it can to make that happen easily and effortlessly, unless we are stressed, in which case conflicts arise and the body sets into motion other mechanisms that step in to protect us from the source of the stress. You can’t shut that system down. (the fight/flight mechanism)

In point of fact, your throat will remain comfortably open while you sing if nothing stops it from being that way. If you consistently yell, however, or if you consistently are trying to sing in a pitch range that is well above your comfortable middle, you will have to tighten the muscles of your throat, and, eventually, they will stay tight. That shuts off your ability to move those muscles freely and easily, and in so doing, you lose the ability to feel sensual and luscious sensations in your throat that have to do with natural responses of being alive. In fact, some people never experience such sensations for their entire lives and would look at the idea of that as being not only silly but out of the question.

In the end, you are on your own with your body, experiencing life from the inside out. You live through your five physical senses, through your mental and emotional perceptions and through your many many “assumptions” about what life is and isn’t on every level. If you are going to sing, you need to know about these things and to explore them because if you don’t, you won’t have much to draw on as an artist. It won’t prevent you from singing but it will allow you to sing from a very shallow place and you will never know the difference. The only people who will know are those whose life is deeper, fuller, richer and more physically present and all they can do is watch and listen, with a certain degree of sadness, since they know what could have been and what others are missing.

Attention teachers and students:

Are you a singer age 10-17 or do you know a young singer who sings jazz and blues who wants to pursue singing at a high level? Here’s a chance to meet other serious young singers in a supportive and professional environment with leaders in the field of jazz and voice instruction.In this FREE workshop, you will review the basics of making a great sound using your whole body to make vocal music. You will also learn the fundamentals of singing soulfully in the styles of jazz and blues.Outstanding vocalists from the workshop will be invited to participate in the Original Cast Recording of Message From Saturn, the jazz musical by Eli Yamin and Clifford Carlson. The recording will take place this spring at the world famous Avatar Studios in NYC.The workshop is free but parents/guardians must register here for students to reserve a spot. Register right away as spaces are limited.

Monday, March 31, 2014 from 4:30 to 6:30 PM

Jazz Drama Program Vocal Workshop for singers ages 10-17 with Eli Yamin and Jeannette LoVetri.

The Jazz Drama Program Studio
303 West 42nd Street (at the corner of 8th Avenue)
Suite 303
New York, NY 10036