Various Posts

There is so much in the world to lament. Suffering of all kinds, unnecessary selfishness, unbridled greed, poverty and disease. Artists with sensitive souls often watch all this and feel a strong pull to “do something”. What can we do?

There are many great causes. Artists of all kinds have devoted their time, money and energy to excellent organizations to make a difference. The famous can start foundations or charities, the not-so-famous (which is most of us) can do benefit concerts, teach pro-bono, and reach out into our communities to offer ourselves and our art, to raise money and consciousness, to uplift.

The power that drives all this toward the good is love. Love is that which allows us to give for the sake of others. Love is the energy that fills us with gratitude and grace, and allows us to share that outpouring through music. If the world would sing, dance, play and create art instead of doing all the other things it does to cause harm, how different things would be!

Love is also what makes us want to be “the best”. It’s what pushes us to strive to improve, to overcome, to expand, to grow. It is what allows us to appreciate other artists’ contributions, and to receive what they do with joy and satisfaction. It gives us courage to keep creating, go on with our path, re-dedicate ourselves to the purpose of opening ourselves to the next discovery or facing the next failure with dignity and humility. Love is what makes us see the sweetness of life, the beauty all around us that gets lost sometimes in all the bad news that comes at us every day. Love lets us fly. It keeps us from feeling “less than” other artists who might want to do something different or who seem to be “more successful”. How can we compare ourselves to others? Each artist is always totally unique.

If you can find the love in what you do, if you can sing love in any form, if singing is what you love and you love to make music, what you are doing is connecting with the force that is at the essence of all that is. Sound. In the beginning, there was sound. Maybe it was the Big Bang. Maybe it was the Divine speaking, “Let there be light”. Maybe it’s you, practicing for your next lesson or gig.

Never lose track of why you are here………the name of that reason is L O V E.

Music today is not simple anymore. It’s overdone, hyped, electrically altered, arranged, and hardly ever just plain left alone. I wonder if any of the pop divas, on their own without any equipment, could hold an audience in someone’s living room. I wonder if they have ever sung at a wedding, in a small church, or anywhere on their own with no help and been really wonderful or maybe even memorable.

I wonder, too, what happens with opera singers? Can they sing simply? I’ve known quite a few who could not sing “Happy Birthday” without going into full opera sound, which is simply ridiculous. Every Christmas when the NY Singing Teachers’ Association held its annual holiday party the teachers would sing Christmas carols, and when they got to O Holy Night, I literally hid under the grand piano. It was just scary. Silent Night always sounded like the Anvil Chorus. Stupid.

You can listen to a dozen versions of Amazing Grace on YouTube and never hear the actual melody straight through. So many melismas!

Yes, of course, there are artists out there who do sing honestly, from the heart, and have something to say that is real. There are people who still care about the songs they do and how they do them. The music that gets attention, however, is not so much about that. The stuff you hear on the competition shows and the awards shows is about being impressive, powerful, and loud. Occasionally, it’s moving, but mostly it’s just loud for loud’s sake and who cares about that? Oh, I guess, most of the audience!

So many people who “know” about singing don’t. They don’t know that there is a way to sing that is balanced and free, based on health and function and grounded in expressiveness. Some of the people who know least about it are composers, judges of competitions (on and off TV), producers and directors. When the people who are in charge of vocalists know next to nothing about singing everyone suffers, particularly the artists.

Helping a young vocalist find her true, honest, real, grounded voice and the connection of her sound to her heart is the DUTY of a good teacher. If you study singing and your teacher isn’t helping you be more of who you are, run away!

We all know the planet is three-quarters water. The body is just about the same.

Water represents the emotions. A calm smooth mirror lake is very different from a hurricane fueled onslaught of huge waves crashing ashore. So, too, can we be calm and serene or raging with fury.

Water molecules like each other and stick to each other well. Water seeks its own level. It is very heavy (a gallon weighs 8 pounds) but we can walk on it only when it is frozen. When it gets really hot, it’s dangerous and it disappears into steam. Water, if inhaled, can kill you. Without it, however, we die in a very short time. Think of all these different aspects in just one thing.

The voice is like water in some ways. It has many aspects and can be used in many ways. It can be calming, it can be agitating. We can keep it contained, cool and stiff or we can let it go until it is passionate and steamy. It is affected by air, just like water, and it needs water (hydration) in order to stay in good shape, if, however you become ill and are drowning in mucus, it needs to dry out in order to be healthy. Your voice, coming from your larynx, can be silenced and you can still live, but if your larynx is damaged, you could die. Your vocal folds help to keep you from choking, help you lift heavy things, and allow you to prepare for anything that frightens you by helping you hold your breath. If any of these things doesn’t happen as it should, you could, again, die.

When we use the voice and use it with conscious intention it is the most powerful tool of emotional communication we have. If we all allowed ourselves to fully experience all that the voice is capable of, we would find that it serves as a joyful, powerful, satisfying, clear and personal tool that fills us with life energy. There are times when the voice needs to be full of fury and times when it needs to be mirror calm. There are ways in which the voice can be warm and soothing and other ways when it is deliberately loud and urgent. We all need to encounter ourselves as voice in this way. We need to feel the emotion of water as sound running through us like a river falling toward the sea. We need to know who we are as sound makers so that we better know who we are as human beings.

Let the water be your teacher. Let it teach you about your voice. Be a lake, a river, an ocean. Be a force of nature. Let the sound flow out and the air flow in. You are your sound. Live it and let it live in your world.

What do you do with a voice that is just not doing what the vocalist wants it to do? This can happen. Do you tell the singer that he can’t sing the music he wants to sing? Do you tell him he can’t sing it the way he wants to sing it because “he just doesn’t have that kind of voice”?

When training singers, if you have an open-ended agreement to work together until you get where you want to go and if the teacher is patient and the student is willing, almost anything is possible. Throats, people, bodies and minds are flexible. If you are in a limited time frame (like a semester at school or a year at a college) you might not make it to the “desired destination” but you can go a good ways toward it and have a plan that will continue after your student stops and goes out to sing on his own or to work with another (hopefully cooperative) teacher.

All of the many muscles in the mouth and throat have either a direct or indirect effect on what the vocal folds can do when air is passing through them as they vibrate. All of the muscles effect the position of the larynx in the throat and that effects the behavior of the vocal folds and the pharynx. The volume (air pressure and flow) will have an effect on the vocal fold amplitude (how much the vocal folds wave open and closed on each cycle of pitch), and that can be a distinct reaction, separate from vertical laryngeal position in the throat. Said another way, what your vocal folds do and how your larynx behaves are interdependent but can also be independent. You wouldn’t necessarily be able to track those differences directly, but they would show up as having the singing be “easier” and the sound “better”.

Since the larynx is suspended from the muscles of the front of the tongue and is also held in place by the constrictors (swallowing) muscles which form the side walls of the throat, all of these muscles need to release and “let go”, but there is no direct access to them, so then what?  The only answer is to work with the muscles on the outside, ones that you can see and feel, until the response they make gradually goes deeper into the throat and work their way down. In order to stimulate change, all the muscles involved must be made to move, and move a lot.

If you gradually stretch the tongue starting with the front, the jaw and face muscles, in time they will move, release, lengthen and loosen. The soft palate (vela-pharyngeal port) muscles will not only lift and widen, they will do so more or less on their own and stay there without effort. This is accessed through the face muscles and through the mind (through anatomical imagery and vowel sound accuracy). The combination of these things — muscles moving, stretching, lengthening, releasing, and finally responding, also allows (gradually, over time) the vocal fold response to change — either becoming strengthened and energized or eased and relaxed (indirectly, over time). The end result, providing the teacher and the student know where they are going, will be the desired vocal quality which, when it emerges and stabilizes, will not only be stylistically appropriate, personally authentic and emotionally satisfying but comfortable to do.

Few who sing or teach have the opportunity to work this way but I have been privileged to do this many times. I can’t give scientific sources to say that this is true (there are none) but this is based on four decades of life experience teaching. You can accept what I say or not, as I can’t “prove” it. I write about it here to let people know that things that seem impossible might not be, given the right attitude and circumstances.

How do we learn? Educational experts are investigating this topic and discovering new things every day. The science of neurology is examining brain plasticity and discovering that our brains can grow, change and improve all through life, and that we can learn new things as we go. The idea that the brain stops at about 14 years of age has been much discredited by research on brain function.

We were taught in the “old days” that you couldn’t really learn to sing past a certain age, say late twenties. That’s just silly. Often people with more self-awareness and capacity learn better and more quickly than youngsters who lack the ability to concentrate and have little ability to track their physical or auditory feedback. I’ve had plenty of adult beginners learn to sing very nicely even when the amount of time they devoted to the task of singing was limited by other outside pressures in their life.

One thing we do know, however, is that it is very hard to pay attention, really significant, conscious deliberate attention to more than one thing at a time, especially if it’s a new task.

Teachers of singing, however, are quick to load up students with a multitute of instructions. Keep your head level, drop your jaw, relax your tongue, inhale deeply and keep your belly muscles engaged while you sing. Keep your shoulders down, make the sound clear and don’t let the vowel or the pitch drift. Be sure to move smoothly from one note to the next and keep the vibrato steady, and don’t get softer as you go through the phrase. Guess that would be successful with a beginner, huh?

I just read that different parts of the brain get engaged when we encounter new experiences. Our brains resist new things, finding them “dangerous” and are drawn to things that are familiar for the opposite reasons. They think this had to do with being cautious with the unknown for survival reasons and allowing greater comfort as the situation became more familiar and it was no longer necessary to be on guard. Makes sense.

Give your students time to learn one thing at a time. Don’t blame them for “thinking too much” if the task is new and difficult. Don’t expect them to remember things they have done twice or three times. Learn how we learn. It’s not hard to take in new information if you want to do that as long as you are not overloaded or confused.

One of the things that medical students do is learn to “argue” or discourse about cases and patients. Doctors learn that verbal discussion and disagreement (point/counterpoint) is not only important but useful. A closed system in which argument is forbidden is always deadly. We see this in countries where freedoms are curtailed, and in our own country where, in the past, some books have been burned because they were not acceptable to “certain people”. A free system is MESSY, but necessary, if true freedom is to exist.

In academia, however, and in associations of teachers who are unaffiliated with an academic organization, arguing over anything is considered “awful”. No one speaks up about any issue lest that protest seem “unprofessional”, “disrespectful” or “disruptive”. How unfortunate.

If I disagree with you, even very strongly disagree, and let you know that I do, it is because I trust you, not because you are my enemy. I don’t believe in enemies. I am not paranoid. If you can point out to me in an argument that I am wrong, and supply me with rational reasons and judgment about why, I will change my mind. I have done so in the past many times. If you do not speak up, I might never know that I could have done a better job, and that would be bad for me and for my students. I have argued with some pretty high-ranking pedagogues and scientists then gone on immediately after to laugh, relax and have a nice dinner or lunch, with neither of us the worse off for the “head banging”.

I have colleagues who loathe that I am forthright and in being so I sometimes upset others, most particularly them. They wish to prevent me from “doing battle” with “the enemy”. They don’t want me to upset anyone ever. They see things in black and white – the “either you are with me or against me” mentality. Too bad.

I am well aware that there are others who will be condescending and insulting to me as part of their desire to make me or what I say wrong. I have a right, as does anyone, to stand my ground, not back down, and support my own views, and I steadfastly refuse to allow someone else to cast aspersions  on me personally for my professional beliefs. Hopefully, in telling the truth as I see it, I am making room for them to do the same, without calling me names.

Teachers of singing need to get out of the “Diva Mindset” where all argument is seen as a kind of war. Nothing could be further from the truth, and seeing enemies where there have never been any is a mistake in perception that makes it harder to get to honest communication.

On a recent “American Idol” Harry Connick, Jr. lectured Jennifer Lopez about pentatonic scales. Lopez apparently did not know what one of those was. Are you surprised? Do you care? Mr. Connick does.

This argument reflects some of the things I have written about here over the years. You do not need to be (a) educated, (b) sophisticated, (c) talented or (d) any of those things, in order to be “successful”. Ms. Lopez is remarkably attractive and very very rich and packages herself beautifully. She is an excellent dancer and maybe can sing (who knows, since so much of what passes for singing these days is what comes out of the equipment) and certainly has a large “following”. Mr. Connick is a musician and whether or not he is brilliant I will leave to my jazz friends to decide, but it is clear that he has more musical information than the other two judges.

Humanity being what it is, conflicted and all, it’s always going to be so that those who are most qualified at anything do not automatically end up on top or in charge. It is so that people do things for all kinds of reasons other than those that are best, most practical or serve the most good for the most people. In fact, we are living in a time when finding anyone who thinks of what’s best for the most people most of the time is not only very rare but, even when it happens, fraught with angst.

I heard yesterday that people in the “conservative South” think that the snow which is unusual there is a government conspiracy and that it was put there by the government because the government is controlling the environment to threaten people’s safety. They think the snow was fake. Huh?? That we live in a time when this idea should be taken seriously is just plain pathetic. Still, it was on the network news. I guess it goes along with all the other stupidity these people embrace as “truth”.

Extrapolating this to singing, if you point out that it might be better to have singing lessons based on function and you point out that being musically literate might also be useful if you intend to have a professional career, there will be people who are OFFENDED by this suggestion. (aka, Ms. Lopez). What do you do with that? Laughter is giving it more dignity than it deserves. There will always be people who are so ignorant that pointing out their obvious lack of knowledge is an affront to their sense of their own importance. Imagine, learning about jazz theory as a singer is considered insulting! And this person is JUDGING other singers??????? That’s why I DO NOT WATCH these shows.

All there is to do is read this quote from a poem by Dylan Thomas:

It seems that being traditional requires that all “old” traditions be upheld without question. Traditionalists stick to the rules as they are and have been and hold up the ideas of the past as being “tried and true” and worthy of continuity. A traditional person wants to keep things within the bounds of the accepted norms so they are not tainted or watered down.

We need traditionalists. If we did not have them, things would fall apart, decay and get fuzzy, and there would be nothing old to study and examine, to enjoy or appreciate. For all the people who brag about throwing things away and never hanging on to anything, we have folks to cling to what has been. Without them, museums would be pretty empty. History would be hard to find!

The anarchist wants to throw out the past, get rid of it and start fresh. The anarchist is interested in overthrowing the current ideas. You could think of the anarchist as a rebel, one who rails against stuffy old ideas that have grown rigid, stilted, and confining. An anarchist is someone who destroys what has been around too long and is ready to die and go away.

We need anarchists. Without them nothing new and exciting would ever be created. There would be no radical change, no breaking with things that have grown brittle and useless. The anarchists and rebels, railing against the status quo, are responsible for breakthroughs against all odds. We need them, too.

If, however, you value the past and the traditions it gives us but you also look to the present moment for innovation and for that which has never been before, what are you? A traditional anarchist? A rebel traditionalist? A lost and confused person with no direction?

We need to keep that which is good about the past. We need to honor it, to know it well, to study it, to become friendly with it, to learn from it and to respect it, but we also need to look at what can be better, what can be improved. We need to search for that which is fresh, dynamic, just emerging and exciting in it’s birth. There is no need to choose between the two. We can and should combine them. No one has to give up the past to be in the present or to envision the future. In fact, the more we are aware of and interested all three, the better.

Everything decays. Everything, even the universe itself, falls apart in time. The sun will die one day, so will all the stars. No matter how good or popular, eventually things decay, die and cease to be.

We are in the midst of a sea change of taste, values, and expectations regarding singing and music generally. Educated, sophisticated taste is harder and harder to find amongst those who are in the profession, sometimes even at a high level. In any style, classical or CCM.

To some degree this is a consequence of population growth. In my lifetime the population of the USA has about doubled. The planet has grown by more than a couple of billion people. With that many people, everything is effected. Since there isn’t more land, we are more crowded. Since there are no more “natural resources” they are being used up more rapidly and since it is harder to feed more mouths with the same animals and crops we have room for, we see many problems in various areas all over the world.

You simply can’t educate children in music and art if there are a lot more children and not a lot more money. If there isn’t very much money to pay for music education, you create an entire generation or maybe even two or three generations that has very low level education, or none,  in public school. Then, they don’t care much about music so they don’t put money into music education. Then you have a self perpetuating negative cycle.

The few people that do study music may or may not actually get decent information. And, sometimes people who end up being successful in the music business are self-taught. What they know is anyone’s guess. When these folks are “in charge” what happens is rarely good.

I know this from personal experience. I have met numerous people in my professional life who held positions in various areas of the music world, who were unqualified to do the job they had. Through a circumstance of luck, personal help or some other fluke, they found themselves in a job they probably shouldn’t have had.

It’s fine to watch contest shows, and reality shows, and award shows. Most people find them entertaining. I find them distressing, so I don’t watch them very often, as they remind me that our standards, across the boards, are going down and down, due, I suppose to entropy. Nothing to do about that, except notice it.