Various Posts

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dy00lD2bYT0

What do you do when people are screaming and yelling about how great it is for a kid (age 9) to sing —

(a) a opera aria

(b) that has nothing to do with a subject that could concern a child

(c) is written for a male, a strong, powerful tenor

(d) and requires vocal power and more emotional depth than a child has

The judges on this program, of course, didn’t say, “Honey, you have a beautiful, sweet voice, and you are a lovely lyrical singer, but this material is wrong for you, especially since it causes you to distort your mouth, overdrop your jaw, and go flat on some of the pitches. You need to sing songs that are appropriate for a child.”

And, if you want to, you can find Beverly Sills singing opera arias as a child and, guess what? She sings them the way a child should sing them: effortlessly and easily in her child’s undistorted, unaffected voice. They were just high vocalizes for a kid who could live up there and there’s nothing wrong, really, in that.

No, they gave this sweet child a standing ovation. Kind of like applauding the “rubber man” at the circus sideshow — applause for amazement at what’s in front of your eyes.

In fact, if you look for versions of “Nessun Dorma” which is what I was doing, you can find all kinds of amazing things on YouTube that are downright scary bad but that have audiences screaming their approval. Michael Bolton, Sarah Brightman (in Las Vegas), on and on. Luciano, who made this aria a world famous tune, sang the piece the way it was intended to be sung. The others? It runs the gamut. All the people who write comments on YouTube and are in the audiences of these videos seem to be very happy.

This is indicative of the lack of musical and vocal education available to the general public. People  like what they like and that’s that. It makes me wonder, then, why there is music education at all and what impact it has, if any, on the world at large. This takes us back to the problem with musical categories and the styles as individual aspects of the music marketplace. Saying they are all the same is a kind of ignorance. If you don’t know there are differences, if you don’t hear them, or recognize them if you are listening to them, you won’t sing them, or know not to sing them. Then, you get the kind of situation on the above YouTube clip. Figure that several adults, maybe more, music “experts” who work on the show, had to hear this kid and let her sing this way, and nobody objected? Nobody said, “NO!”??????

I don’t have any solutions. Just an observation that left me wondering.

 

We all know about “freeing up” the voice and letting go and having things relax and allowing them to “be easy”. That’s correct, right? We understand that deliberate squeezing and pushing isn’t good. We get that the breathing has to have some kind of “move low on the inhale” direction. We realize that screaming isn’t a particularly useful way to go most of the time.

Yet, how do we know the sound someone makes is “free”? How do we know if it isn’t pushed when it’s loud? How do we ask for “release” when the singer doesn’t feel what is restricted? What’s the purpose of telling a student to “get out of your own way and let the voice do what it wants” when that phrase has no real meaning until after it happens by itself?

What if you are embarrassed by the sounds you make because you don’t like them or because they feel awkward and you don’t really want to make those sounds in front of anyone else, even your teacher? Are you being neurotic or just being human? If you have a huge big scar all the way down the middle of your face, what does it take to go out into public without any inhibition? Ask someone who sounds pretty bad about why they don’t sing, and you might get an answer that makes sense.

Even in a student or singer who is willing to

“let go” it is not sufficient to bring the physical response of the vocal organs into a realization of their full functional potential. The fact is, some sort of movement, i.e., action, interaction or reaction to a stimulus, is involved.

– Cornelius Reid, “The Free Voice” (a book you should all read)

If you want to see how much confusion there is about singing and learning to sing, take a few hours and scour YouTube for “singing instruction” or some related topic like “singing lessons”.  You will see all manner of misunderstanding by “teachers” meaning to share their “knowledge” and people who want to sell you their courses or books. [Ten easy lessons to sounding like a rock star!!] The actual amount of honest-to-goodness accurate, useful information on singing in YouTubeland would fit on the head of a pin. Some of it isn’t bad or harmful, some of it is just plain silly, some of it is old-fashioned, and some of it, sadly, is scary. Let the buyer beware.

Stimulus (externally directed vocal exercise) should produce a response (internal adjustment of the vocal organs). A specific exercise should produce a specific response. If you can get a student to make a sound that he/she has never made before, no matter what it is, good or bad, then you have begun to teach the student something. New information is arising in the body and the mind is going to learn to track that sensory data by paying attention. It is so that the teacher must provoke this change through vocal exercise in order for the student to recognize AFTER IT HAPPENS that something is different. In going towards new movement, we are going towards freedom. Staying still is only useful in a mechanism that is weak and chaotic. You, as a teacher, must also know what kind of movement should come next and, therefore, what kind of stimulus would take the student there. YOU must know, not the student. YOU.

Be careful that you do not spend too much time trying to get the student to “let go” and “stop being afraid of your high notes”. Work where work can be done with relative ease, stimulate movement, allow for awareness, and acknowledge what happens when it does. That’s enough.

If all music were the same in “character” there would be no need for titles or descriptors. If opera singers could do rock music and rock stars could sing gospel tunes and folk singers could walk onto a Broadway stage and sing a traditional show, we wouldn’t need categories. The Grammy awards wouldn’t have categories, either, nor would Lincoln Center Library, which has even more of them than I was aware of prior to going there. The attitude that everything is the same seems to imply that all music is a spin-off of classical music, and all good vocalists can sing classical music easily and therefore, they can also sing well in any other style, as  all other deviations are simply “individual” interpretations of songs.

So, if you are Paulo Szot, and you sing “South Pacific” and then you go do an opera at the Met, are you a “crossover” artist? [Yes and also no.] If you are Michael Bolton and you record opera arias on an album, are you, too, a “crossover” artist? Does Mr. Bolton sound like Mr. Szot? Not in terms of his own voice but in terms of how he produces sound? Does Renee Fleming sound like a rock singer on her album of “rock songs”? The NY Times reviewed her album “Dark Horse” and said, “Ms. Fleming’s next step is figuring out how to sound, now and then, just a little less serious about it all”.

So, as long as there are different kinds of sounds in different kinds of music, we need names to define them. Within each category, there are all sorts of variations, all sorts of artists and there are no “border police” between one style and another, but until and unless we acknowledge that there are audible differences, we are left to confusion. The public decides and the public has its preferences. We are left with facing the reality of today’s music business, messy as it may be. You can’t train anyone from such a vague place as “everything is the same” and you can’t direct someone toward reasonable vocal and musical goals if all you know is the “it’s all one thing called singing”.

The origin of the terms of each style is interesting to contemplate. Maybe, some day, there will be a new style that emerges and hits mainstream. The last one to do that was rap, and that’s more than 20 years ago. It will need a new designation, too. Until that time, we have what we have.

If you are a rock/pop/gospel/folk/jazz/country/broadway/classical vocalist, good for you. Just don’t confuse the Nashvill rep with An Die Musik.

At a recent voice conference, the use of the term “non-classical” continued with impunity.

Why is it that this term, which uses the prefix “non” to describe an entire collection of styles of music, continues? Would we tolerate the use of the term “non-CCM” to describe all styles of classical music? There is far less classical anything than there is of commercial styles, but, there it was, used by all the classically trained people, to continue to describe music theater, pop, rock, R&B, gospel, folk, country, rap, etc.

This is from Merriam Webster online:

Full Definition of NON-

1: not : other than : reverse of : absence of <nontoxic> <nonlinear>

2: of little or no consequence : unimportant : worthless <nonissues> <nonsystem>

3: lacking the usual especially positive characteristics of the thing specified <noncelebration> <nonart>

Here is a definition from “dictionary.reference” online:

Non – a prefix meaning “not,” freely used as an English formative, usually with a simple negative force as implying mere negation or absence of something (rather than the opposite or reverse of it, as often expressed by un-

1: nonadherence; noninterference; nonpayment; nonprofessional.

This prefix refuses to go away because people refuse to deal with its meaning as if it were consequential. “Oh, it’s not so bad”, is the mentality. Really? I strongly disagree.

Even people who teach so-called “non-classical” styles use this term. (I did so reluctantly for over 30 years because there was no other one). For the past 14 years we have had the term Contemporary Commercial Music and it has grown in popularity. No, it is hardly used universally, but if there are people within this community, particularly, who are supporters or advocates of the methodology developed by the person who coined the term, who refuse to support its use, what can we expect of others?

I’m not surprised, but I am surely disappointed, that we do not have more “cheer-leaders” regarding the use of the term CCM, but even more distressed that we do not have folks who will stand up against the use of “non-classical” in a public forum, particularly if they are there to present on CCM training.

If you are one of those folks, please have the courage to stand up and say, “We don’t use the term “non-classical” any more to describe those styles that arose from average people in the USA. That is because the term describes them as being of little or no consequence and of being absent as a form of music and that is unacceptable. We use the term Contemporary Commercial Music. I hope you will stop saying ‘non-classical’ immediately“. You might take some lumps for being bold, but I think those styles are worth whatever it takes.

How do you get through to opera stars who insist they know what other styles are when they don’t bother to go to the people in those styles to ask? Or maybe they do and the people they seek out are too intimidated to tell the truth.

What makes it possible for opera stars who claim to be singing “crossover” who use their same operatic vocal production in other styles to think they are being authentic or even viable?  They don’t know the difference between opera and anything else. They don’t want to know.

“Just change the vowels, dear, and smile more into your nasal resonances. It’s easy.”

I have heard personally from opera stars who were known for their big booming voices, not once but many times, that in order to sing effectively, you just take a breath and let it go. Really.

For these blessed few people with gargantuan bodies and voices, I truly believe that that is so. They learn a bit about breathing, they learn about “shaping resonances”, they learn languages, and off they go, having world class careers. Bless them. All of them, bless them.

I think of all the people over 6 feet tall who do well in basketball. If you are hoping to be a pro and you don’t top 6 feet, even if you play the game very well and have good skills in the sport, you don’t stand too much hope of being a star professional player. Ditto, if you are nearly 6 feet tall at 15 years old and you want to be an Olympic gymnast. Even if you are really coordinated, your chances of making the team are very small. It is a sport for small compact people. Is this fair? Is this reflective of the rest of the people in this world who like and want to do gymnastics? No. Does it mean that no one should be in basketball if they are short or in gymnastics if they are tall? No. Does it mean that the professional world will not take them seriously if they are in the wrong categories? You bet.

With singing, if you are going to have a chance at a mainstream operatic career in major houses, you had better make a good deal of sound. Even if your acting is awful and you aren’t particularly emotionally expressive, if you have a great big gorgeous sound, standing still doing almost nothing, you have a better chance than most to get to the world’s most famous stages. Same thing, different world – if you can belt pop/rock music to the notes off the right end of the keyboard, you have a better chance at a career than someone who couldn’t do that trying as hard as possible. Even with electronic help, the power to belt stratospheric notes effectively isn’t given to everyone. Having it really helps.

So, taking for granted that opera stars with very successful careers can do whatever they want to do when they arrive at that level of recognition, what makes them decide they need to go outside opera and show the world how “versatile” they are? Do they not HEAR? Do they not listen? Do they not care?

Truth is, I have no idea, but the reasonable answer is that they don’t. Truth is, most people in the audience don’t care either for the same reasons. Surely the people who are opera fans, who only listen to opera, have no clue and perhaps are genuinely impressed with the great “versatility” of the opera divi. Still, it is ever disturbing to know that they don’t know, don’t care to know, and this mindless attitude is being passed on to a new generation when they teach. That smarts most of all.

It’s very hard when you are young to understand that sometimes in life you have nowhere to run. The self is always there and you cannot avoid it. If you are stuck in circumstances in your life, you are also stuck in yourself, and that’s the issue.

Going forward when you have no path to follow is extremely frightening. You are alone, you are vulnerable, you can feel helpless, confused and bereft. But going backwards is never really possible, and staying still is absolutely not possible, as time marches on, relentlessly. You can try to hide, both from the issues you face in the world and from yourself, but in the end, this never works as you pay a high price for the deception.

Countless words have been written by souls far wiser than I about courage. The Bhagavad Gita teaches about this very well. You can read about it in the writings of St. John of the Cross. You can study the life of Buddha or Jesus or St. Thomas Aquinas or many many other people who have dealt with difficulty and learned from it. In recent times, you can look at Nelson Mandela’s life or the life of someone like Gabbie  Gifford.

The way to go forward when you are lost is to gather yourself together, trust yourself in each moment as you go and endure whatever you must in order to keep going. The reason you should do this is because that is all there ever is to do, it only just looks like there are other alternatives from time to time. If you want to change something, create something or build something, the only way to achieve that is to risk failure and loss but try anyway.

The people in this world who are the movers and the shakers, who upset the status quo, who make a path where there has been no path, are not like most people who shuffle along, following the person in front of them. A true artist is never part of the crowd. A true artist has a unique and special point of view about life that only he or she can express. In finding that expression, you can expect struggle, effort and discord to cross your path, but don’t let that thwart you from reaching your goal. Go! Who knows what or who you will become!

We have all unfortunately heard some one or other famous opera star sing a CCM song with operatic vocal production. Even if the musical style is appropriate and the artist has a valid and creative arrangement for the musicians to play underneath her, it doesn’t mean that she sounds like a CCM singer. In fact, in most cases, with women particularly, they cannot sound like a CCM singer because the mechanism doesn’t know how to go there, even if the mind wants it to. (See previous post). I have written here previously of the “Annie” of Deborah Voigt in “Annie Get Your Gun” at Glimmerglass Opera House which was, in vocal terms, completely disrespectful of what Irving Berlin wanted in terms of her character. I love Ms. Voigt as an opera singer but she should have chosen a “legit” role to make her music theater debut, not Annie. She can’t (maybe she wouldn’t) belt and the role was written for Ethel Merman, for goodness sake!

The same could be said to be true of the few CCM artists who have been courageous or foolish enough to make classical albums. Michael Bolton certainly didn’t succeed with his operatic arias album, at least in terms of the opera audiences who knew opera well. He got no calls from the Met to “come on over”. He did no better than Barbra Streisand in 1975 with her “classical album” of art songs. Mr. Bolton tried hard enough to get his voice to make the correct sounds but there were so many other things wrong that it didn’t matter much. I understand Mr. B worked with a voice coach, but not being able to get the rock-based constriction out of his sound, he was also not able to organize the necessary vocal elements into a classical performance that was eventually accepted by a classical audience. What happened? He has plenty of money, he surely hired the best people to help him. Was it just that he didn’t hear his own problems, that he didn’t care, or both? Being famous can skew your ego so much that you think you are really good at many things when, sometimes, you are not really good at even the one thing in which you had success, perhaps by accident, so who knows?

In order to sound different in different styles, you need to train differently for each style and few people do that unless they can figure it out on their own. And, if the styles are not going to conflict with each other (which is the fear that everyone has) such that the primary style does not suffer from learning other styles, artists have to learn appropriate boundaries for all styles and all vocal behaviors in each style. Who does that? (Somatic Voicework™ students, if I may be so bold).

If we are to respect our mostly American-created CCM styles we have to respect their history, their context, their own parameters of execution and the peer-based expectations of those who are mainstream artists in a particular style. In recent years several albums of “popular” music done by opera singers allow the classical singers to “play at” sounding authentic but no one has really been able to completely nail the vocal quality change necessary in order to be authentic. Going all the way back to the album by Placido Domingo and John Denver (Perhaps Love, if I recall its title correctly), the two tenors did not sound at all alike. Mr. Domingo did a wonderful job of scaling his voice down to match Mr. Denver’s but he couldn’t get rid of his “placement” and “resonance”. You wouldn’t have mistaken them, one for the other, even though they each sang the music from their hearts. Really, by now people in opera should be telling each other, “Don’t do that CCM album. You need to retrain your voice before you do. If you sing it the way you usually sing, just softer, it only makes you sound silly”.

Yes, artists can do whatever they want. There are no artistic police. But if Americans in particular are going to respect their own styles they can’t ignore the values those styles are expected to have. If classical music at a high professional level requires that people are fluent in at least four languages, know the difference between Bel Canto and Verismo, and  understand the “fach” system, then the very least they can do when they go to CCM styles is know that you don’t sing jazz with the same sound you make in Mozart or even in old Rodgers and Hammerstein songs.

Stick to what you know until you can sing what you don’t know such that it doesn’t sound like that.

There is no such thing as good generic training for anything. General study produces general results.

One of the basic tenets of acting is that all choices have to be specific and clear. You can’t be “kind of angry” effectively when that’s based on some kind of mood. You can’t be doing anything that requires focus if you have none and that includes things like skiing, cutting up a log with a chainsaw and cooking a delicate soufflé. You have to learn to direct your attention, concentration and mental clarity to the task at hand and stay there until the task is completed. Distraction of any kind is not good.

Students, however, are frequently criticized for “thinking too much”. I always find this a laughable instruction. “You are stuck in your mind”, they are told. “You are watching yourself sing.” Perhaps so, but why is this bad?

When was the last time you were instructed to do something new and complicated in front of someone else and executed that task with no thought whatsoever? The learning process begins slowly and often self-consciously and “thinking about it” is necessary for a long time. In fact, if you do not think about it, it never happens. If, on the other hand, you have been asked to do something that is beyond your capacity no matter what you think of (happens all the time) or you have been asked to do several new and difficult things at once (ditto) you will be left with a mess and remain self-consciously confused and stuck regardless of thinking. If you are then blamed (again ditto) by the person who gave you the instruction by being told, “You are thinking too much”, you are left to feel stupid and inept.

In order to learn to sing rock music you have to prepare your throat to make the sounds that are typical of rock music. If you do not listen to rock music, you won’t know what those sounds are. If you do not make them yourself, you will not know how they feel. If you do not know how they are produced by the vocal mechanism, you will not be able to teach them effectively or learn to do them easily without help. You can’t teach what you do not do and you can’t do what you do not understand. That flies in the face of common sense. But, in singing, people do it (or try to) every day.

If you want to learn to sing jazz, or country, or any other style, including classical, you need to know how mainstream successful artists sound when they sing in those styles and you need to know how to replicate those sounds yourself or help others do so if you are teaching. Since there are still, at this time, very few CCM teachers who have anything other than classical training, and very few CCM artists who understand vocal function, that means the probability for generic teaching is very high. Thinking that “classical training” (whatever that is) will help you sing everything because “one size fits all” also flies in the face of common sense, but that doesn’t stop people from having those beliefs or acting upon them.

Specific training is necessary for specific styles. If you want to learn to sing in one of them, find someone who understands how they work and how to communicate effectively to you, personally, exactly what that entails in terms of skill building.

Anyone who viewed The Sound of Money (sorry, I mean The Sound of Music) on TV recently got to see Audra McDonald juxtaposed alongside Carrie Underwood. If we are to believe that the public doesn’t care, then we must also believe that they did not hear a difference between Audra’s sound and Carrie’s sound.

It’s all singing, you know? Isn’t it just that Carrie had more “oomph”? Aren’t all voices the same?

Both vocalists are good at what they do. Audra is a consommate artist who has a “legit” voice but also has a really solid mix that is borderline belty on lower pitches when necessary. Whether or not she thinks about any of that, I have no idea. I imagine she is a well-trained classical vocalist who has learned to sing throughout her range with a full sound, always in service to the performance overall. Carrie, however, is a belter, and has no change in vocal quality whatsoever as she rises in pitch. You cannot hear a shift to a lighter sound and that has to mean that she has no choice but to stay where she is. Since her belt is powerful and she takes it up pretty high, that would make her typical of today’s young female pop belters. They don’t know about acting, they only know “performance”. They are not the same.

My argument over the last few weeks in this blog has been that the business itself across all styles (including Broadway, although the NBC version of TSOM could be argued to be a network TV phenomenon only) is losing interest in keeping track of who sings what. The sound that is disappearing the fastest is the “legit” sound which is supposed to be classical, but, as was pointed out in a recent comment, is now considered more or less “Disney”. To back this up, go listen to  Sierra Boggess’ version of Belle to hear belt, mix and legit in one vocalist. Here is the YouTube clip:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RdrQy0j39E). She went on to sing classically in “Master Class” with Tyne Daly and did a decent job (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdfHks9klz0. Go nearly to the end of this clip). Please note — Sierra is not singing with a “low larynx” position, the currently favored classical vocal production, nor is she singing with modified vowels.  You may not be old enough to know that all of the early Disney movie leads were sung by light lyric sopranos, so it hasn’t changed all that much, perhaps it is just the stylistic influences that make the singing more “present moment”.

If, however, you think that there is no need for specialized training, this is not correct. It is because there is no specific training AVAILABLE that many singers end up with a hodge-podge of vocal production. That is because there has been no clear, easy, available way to maintain accurate vocal production in any given style and sing in it with authenticity. In fact, classical teachers who teach from a generic knowledge of vocal production (and many of them have only that as a basis for their classical teaching) end up teaching generic singing. That is in fact a common scenario and an unfortunate one for both the students and the audience.

If Carrie gets to sing Mother Abbess when she gets older, they will just lower the key and let her belt away. By that time, “legit” singing will be a relic of the past alongside the music of the 30s, 40s and 50s, and people will only see and hear it on recordings. Richard Rodgers isn’t around to object. His heirs probably don’t care what happens to his music, as long as they are paid.

If you are a singer or a teacher of singing, pay attention. The times we are living in are shifting vocal values as rapidly as you can imagine (although not necessarily in the universities). This shift is enormous and you can watch it happen as long as you know that it’s there.

As has been discussed here frequently, we are ever more in an era where functional training is being recognized as “the only way to go”. It’s certainly not new and it certainly does not “belong” to any one teacher or method. It has been around since the 1800s and has been written about by many excellent teacher/authors. Of course, there are also all manner of books full of nonsense perporting to give “real” information when all that is being offered is the latest version of the author’s bellybutton. You do have to know something in order to tell the difference, but, if you are looking to make that determination, it doesn’t take long to discern the genuine from the counterfeit.

We are in a period of time when it is becoming quite fashionable to publish  books full of vocal exercises. The exercises of various expert teachers are provided in order to help singers and teachers of singing have specific “things to do” to get a certain desired vocal result. This sounds at first like a good idea but, like everything else, upon further investigation, it may be that this is not always what it seems.

Every functional exercise is only useful in the moment. Even if you know what an exercise typically will prompt as a response in a vocalist’s throat or body, you can never and I mean NEVER be sure that it will do so nor can you be certain that the result you get at first will lead you toward the result you ultimately want. If, indeed, you do not have a broad context in which to apply the exercise and a purpose for it that applies to the situation at hand, you will just be doing what teachers of singing have always done and that is sing the exercise for exercise’s sake. Maybe you are doing this because “someone told you to” or because “it’s supposed to work” because you read about it, but this can be faulty thinking.

A good analogy would be going to the doctor for a check up when you are well. The doctor has a series of standard things she will do and tests she will order to determine the state of your overall health. These might be the same for every patient and work well for most people most of the time. If the doctor is experienced, however, and asks the right questions and is a keen observer, she might spot something that other experts would miss and adjust both her exam and the tests she requests. And, if she typically prescribes a medication for reflux or laryngitis, based on her observations and test results, she might go in a different direction if she determines that the patient needs an adjustment tailored to their particular needs. In other words, the procedures can be standarized but not their application. Nothing can substitute for educated eyes and ears.

So, while I might suggest a general exercise that promotes the development of “head” register (or whatever term you use for higher lighter vocal production) I would only use the exercise in its generic form if this was warranted in the person standing in front of me at any given moment. Since there are infinite ways to vary basic exercises, it might be better if a specific student sang it in a different way. The pitch range, the volume, the musical pattern, the syllables and the vowel all contribute to every exercise. The specific application can only be determined in person, in a session, at the moment you hear the vocalist live (or while you are practicing yourself). Yes, if you know the student’s or your own voice well or if the voice is developed to a certain level, there are times when many different  exercises would be fine and when one could easily substitute for another, but you have to know when that would be true and when it wouldn’t work. Not to know is to put both yourself if you are a teacher and the student who is studying with you in a situation where you are potentially wasting time or perhaps even causing problems. You need (a) experience and (b) guidance to know when to do what.

If you sing, don’t be seduced into thinking that people with lots of exercises know what they are for or how to use them for your particular voice and/or vocal situation. Applied incorrectly, functional exercises are no better than the old “think of a big pink mist in the back of your throat” images.