I have been away, as those of you who read this blog regularly must have figured out.

While I was at the PEVOC 10 conference in Prague, attending presentations of all sorts by people from all over the world, I noticed that there is a great deal more diversity than there once was in what people are studying, voice-wise. That proliferation of information, however, doesn’t mean that there is more good information, just more information. It is amazing, but sadly not surprising, that there were people there who had the nerve to present papers that were not only poorly done but outrightly boring and/or stupid.

This is what happens when things expand and these conferences have multiplied all over the world. The idea is, of course, to be inclusive (a good thing) but when you include virtually everyone without criteria, or with very vague criteria, you are bound to encounter a situation where something useless eventually shows up.

In a perfect world, the senior scientists, clinicians and ENTS would have a forum where they could present the result of their work to and with singing and speaking experts and their students, so all could benefit. In the REAL world, you get students working on master’s or doctoral degrees, presenting because it is required in some programs, who have done research (of sorts) on other college students that presents inconclusive data or data that is so obscure as to be completely incomprehensible. You get people doing “research” that really isn’t much. Very frustrating to sit in a hot crowded room and come to that realization halfway through the session.

If you travel thousands of miles and pay quite a bit of money to attend, you don’t want to sit and listen to gobble-de-gook but you have no choice. You also have to struggle with listening to people speak English that is not their first (or even, in some cases, second) language using technical jargon. It’s wonderful that English allows me to attend (I couldn’t go if it were in any other language) but it makes it hard for those who present who don’t speak fluently to do their presentations and even harder for the audience members to follow the statistics and charts.

It was great to be on the last keynote panel of singing teachers from around the world, being asked to say what we would want next from the interdisciplinary exchange that is continuously moving forward. My first request was for research to be done on adult professionals of long-standing successful careers in CCM. So far, there is none.  The second request was for the presentations to be shorter, clearer and more to the point. The third request was that people who are subjects of research be skilled and representative of the best the professional has to offer, (else why bother to use them for research?) The fourth request was for my own profession to establish some guidelines regarding what is expected of a singing teacher. (Right).

The only way for things to get better is for these conferences to take place. Messy, yes —  chaotic, probably — but exciting nevertheless and over the long haul, still the best way for us to learn from each other. The only way out is to keep going and keep trying and see what eventually shows up on the other side………..decades from now.

If you have a career as a performer for 20, 30 or even 40 years, you gain experience that cannot be gained in any other way. You live singing, every day, you are a singer and you deal with whatever music you do, but you deal with traveling, with other performers, with musicians, with your own voice and health. You face multitudes of things that teach you about yourself and your own experiences singing. VERY valuable indeed.

If, then, you “retire” from singing (no real singer ever totally retires, if you ask me), and go into teaching, you may have only your own rich wonderful but very personal experiences to use as a basis for your teaching. This might serve you well in very general ways. If you have students who are similar to you in voice and interests, if you have students who will sing the same repertoire you sang, if you have to teach them to perform in repertoire you did, then it could work brilliantly.

If, however, your students are very different from you, if they have different voices, different bodies, different interests and requirements, you could be really lost. That might actually not be so bad, if you had a sense of your own limitations and could say that you were lost. If, however, you decided to hide from that fact (even to yourself) or camouflage it from others, you could be in big trouble. If you decided that you would plunge headlong into teaching anyway, regardless of what you have to offer and its applicability to others, you could be traveling down the proverbial slippery slope. If you take your student somewhere the student has no ability or desire to go, but has to go anyway since the person is after all, a student, you are highly likely to cause some kind of damage.

The advantage that a career teacher has is that the teacher has long decades of teaching study and experience. It allows the person to study pedagogy in depth and to acquire skills geared exclusively at teaching rather than just at singing. In other words, a career teacher knows many pathways to a destination, not just one. Someone who has decades of teaching under her belt knows what people do when. She has had time to observe trends, tendencies, pitfalls, obstacles, as well as short cuts, direct paths, and simple solutions. Assuming the teacher has also sung, and continued to sing, throughout her teaching career (an important ingredient), knowing what to do for each student, individually, in whatever shape or form the person and the voice may be in at any given time, is a skill that takes a long time to develop. If the teacher has also gone to all kinds of performances, to all kinds of venues and seen all kinds of singers, and has used the breadth of that exposure to inform the teaching, then the information gained adds to her toolbox.

In other words, performing does not mean you are a good teacher, even if you are a very excellent vocalist. All you have to do is watch American Idol and you will see that the performers who have become “judges” (if you will excuse the word), often don’t have a clue as to what to say to help a student other than platitudes or suggestions aimed at getting them to stop doing something they don’t like.

Having judged a number of classical singing competitions in my day I know for a fact that opera singers often have very strange ideas about what constitutes good singing and good singers.

In the end, being able to understand a complex process, which singing is, takes a lot. Many things have to come together in one person, at one time, and the ability to communicate from that base has to be accurate, precise, practical and clear. Is it any wonder, then, that there are so few actual masters of the process, even amongst those who profess to be?

I am in the midst of doing a presentation for the PEVOC 10 conference upcoming in Prague, The Czech Republic in two weeks. In searching YouTube for belters, going back to the beginning of the 20th Century, it has been amazing to see how many of the posts have belters of all sorts doing their thing.

Young people, if you do not know Kate Smith, go listen to her. She certainly was no movie star in terms of her looks. She was rather plain, heavy and, as they used to say, “matronly”, but she could certainly sing. She stood there, planted her feet and knocked the walls down with her high notes. SUNG high notes, not yelled. She was cut from the old mold that was unashamed to “sell the song” with gestures (something no one does now).

If you go find Christina Aguilera (or Carrie Underwood) you will see and hear something very different. Styles have changed so much over the past 50 years that the singing is now very exaggerated. It really is sustained shouting. Yes, it certainly is exciting and amazing to hear (especially in person) but I keep wondering, what’s next? Will the next 50 years see a mutation in the larynx? There really isn’t any kind of sound that is further out than this unless we start getting people who just make noise. Rappers aren’t really singing much of the time. Maybe that’s it — no melody? No actual singing in the old way?

I’m sure that Kate Smith could never have imagined the sounds that these young women are making routinely now. I’m sure, in fact, that if people made those sounds years ago, there were told to stop, because they were considered to be awful. It’s amazing how much the ear gets used to hearing things and then it comes to expect that sound.

So far, anyway, these present moment belters seem to be holding up well enough. I don’t know their individual vocal health history. Maybe some throats are better disposed to these kinds of sounds than are others. In the old days, people were told, “You either have an operatic voice or you don’t,” but I don’t agree with that. I do think, however, that growing up making these sounds is very different than learning to make them as a adult. And, I wonder how they will sound when they are 50, 60 and 70 years old. Kate Smith sounded pretty much the same throughout her long career. Ditto others like Ella Fitzgerald (who sang in chest, but wasn’t really a belter). Only time will tell.

It is true that each generation finds its own form of expression. Aretha was no Beyonce. Barbra Streisand was no Sophie Tucker. What’s next? ??????

There are several new books out that herald functional vocal training. They offer exercises aimed at specific issues or criteria and are based in science, in reality and in usefulness. Well, Halleluiah! It’s about time.

On the other hand, there are still plenty of loose screw teachers out there who, even with a great book full of functional information, wouldn’t be able to work with function if they were on TV in front of millions of people. Often, I feel it is these people who get the publicity.

It has been suggested to me recently that I do the social media thing. I should “tweet”, I have been advised. I should “Facebook”. I should get on “In Sync”.

I’m thinking about it. I know I am a dinosaur, and I have no real interest in such things, but the folks who want me to be out there are telling me that it is “the way to go”. Generally, just thinking about it gives me a headache.

But, to be my own devil’s advocate —

If what we want is to help functional vocal training go mainstream and what we need is for the average person who sings or teaches singers to understand functional information, and if we need people to take a stand for what works and they can do that on social networks, doesn’t it make sense that this is a good thing?

There has been a big push from all fronts about helping people learn to eat healthier foods and it finally seems to be working. Low income children are gaining weight at a slower pace than they used to. Maybe Mrs. Obama’s program has helped with that, but there are many other contributors to the idea that we all need to eat less red meat and more vegetables, exercise more and drink water, not soda. The visibility of these issues and the availability of the information around them has been a vital ingredient in helping things change.

It makes sense, then, to help publicize the issue of the availability of functional vocal training for singers by any available means. If doing the “social media thing” helps the cause, I guess I can learn to deal with “Tweety-Weety” and “MyFace” and “Inmysink”. I don’t have to grin when I do that, but you won’t see me, so it doesn’t matter!

New slogan: Help Functional Vocal Training Go Mainstream! Hooray, Vocal Folds! Go Team Larynx! Hashtag, Rah, Rah Rah!

Used to be we talked about “placing the tone” somewhere “in the mask”. We talked about “vibrating the bones in the face” and “sending the sound forward”. We talked about “diaphragmatic breath support”.

Now, however, people talk about lining up the first formant with the first harmonic and maybe the second formant with the second harmonic or the first harmonic, depending. People talk about using various “resonance strategies”.

Know what? It’s still the same silliness, just dressed up in 21st century clothing.

When Angela Lansbury sang “Gypsy” on Broadway, she just opened her mouth and sang. She didn’t have any lessons. She didn’t study. Neither did Merman or Streisand. How about countless other singers who wouldn’t have known a formant from a harmonic from a hole in the ground like Rosa Ponselle? Think she was busy thinking of resonance when she sang with her sister as a young woman in Connecticut and was heard by Caruso?

Understand, folks, I am a big supporter of voice science (hygiene, research, medicine) and what it teaches us. Discovering something and explaining it after the fact is a vital part of science. We NEED that information. We need to know why things do what they do. But confusing the what with the how is just dumb. Just because you know which ingredients are in your stew doesn’t mean that I will get the same stew if I put those ingredients together in one of my own, but maybe in random order, or in the wrong proportions. Knowing the what won’t help you much with the how. You need a definite recipe.

Science is only useful to us as intellectual information. It cannot substitute for physical coordination and skill. It cannot substitute for excellent ears and eyes. It cannot give us emotional freedom. It isn’t ever going to make us more creative artists. When science becomes the end instead of the means it gets in the way. As I have said here many times, if voice science were the only answer, every one of the people teaching voice science would sing like an angel and that is absolutely not the case. Some of them don’t sing at all or sing very badly.

Beware the people who throw voice science in your face to impress you with what they know. They are hiding behind information, not skill. Beware the people who talk the talk but do not walk the walk. If you can sing and make the audience cry, then it doesn’t matter one bit if you don’t know formants and harmonics and how to “tune them”. It you can command an audience and bring them to their feet, you have something to say and people “get” your communication. If you are very good at bringing the second harmonic to meet the second formant, well, that’s nice. That, and $2.50, will get you on the New York City subway.

Over the decades, in my meetings with other singing teachers, I have been told to my face, twice, “I have a gift from God to teach.” What, exactly, is to be made of a statement like that?

Should I imply that others have that gift or is it unique to the two (unrelated) men who said this? Should I imply that somehow this makes them better than other teachers? (They both think they are the absolute best singing teachers who have ever lived). Should the world give them more credit because they are divinely appointed and are unafraid to say so to anyone who will listen?

In my world, many teachers are in possession of a “gift from God” to teach. They possess a desire to serve, honestly, by putting the welfare of the student and the music over and above any idea of their own personal aggrandizement. I don’t think God is interested in measuring out who gets what in terms of gifts. If you seek to serve, you serve, and you do it with an open mind and heart, to the best of your ability. That’s the gift. Period.

I can never understand why it is that people don’t see through the hubris of characters of this type, the ones in the suits with egos the size of California. Is it so that the average person is never suspect of such grandiosity? In the cases of these particular teachers, who are quick to drop famous names to impress you, do they really believe that such behavior indicates how great they are or does it just point out how shallow their own sense of self really is?

Truly dedicated teachers don’t shout from the housetops about how divinely guided they are because they are too busy meeting the needs of their students, no matter how “lowly”, to care. They aren’t interested in letting you know about their fancy clientele, even if they have one, because they don’t need to capitalize on their famous clients’ reputations to build their own. Still, like Anthony Weiner, they don’t get it in relationship to how that reads to others, because there isn’t much room for others in their consciousness in the first place. How else could they even utter such words directly to another teacher without so much as a blink of an eye?

“I am Oz, the great and powerful.” (Who is that man behind the curtain?) You, too, can try to impress the world with your smoke and mirrors and perhaps be successful because you talk fancy and sell your remedies in a nice bottle with a pretty label. But don’t count on it. Some of us have never bought your particular brand of Un-Kool Aid.

You probably DON’T think since song (blog) is about you, but I surely wish you did!

If a student asks, “Why?” during a lesson and the teacher responds with, “Just trust me”, the student should run away.

Why, indeed, should a student trust you if you can’t answer his questions? On what planet is that a behavior that warrants trust? Trust is based upon loyalty, truthfulness, responsibility, reliability, dedication, and commitment. It doesn’t just show up, it has to be created, even earned. Trusting someone is putting yourself in a vulnerable situation that allows you to expose your deepest self, or, in this case, your voice in all its permutations, and that kind of openness makes a student ripe for abuse.

It is entirely possible, of course, that the teacher has no explanation for the student’s question and that the query has to be deflected because the teacher doesn’t want to look stupid. Guess what? No one has all the answers and there will always be things about singing that don’t fall into a box. A better response, by far, would be for the teacher to say, “I’m interested in why you ask this question. Is there some specific thing that you need to know? Perhaps it will help me give you a better answer.” Then, if the teacher really has no idea how to answer the question she can go out after the lesson and find the answer, somewhere in cyberspace, hopefully from others who have more experience, or maybe even in person. It’s also perfectly fine to simply say, “Gee, I don’t know the answer. Let me find out.” Unless you are divine, you are allowed to not know something, for the rest of your life.

The most frightening thing about the profession is that anyone can put up a sign that says, “Singing Teacher”. Anyone. It is not a licensed profession. If you can’t make a living at Burger King, no problem. You can decide to buy someone’s singing system on line and set yourself up as an “X Method Teacher”. That’s why I am not the latest flavor on the web. You have to have at least minimal contact with me, in person, and listen to me teach, in order to have access to my method.

I’m tired of having people put up with lousy teaching for all the wrong reasons. It seems obvious that you should not stay in any relationship where your needs repeatedly do not get met or even addressed, but people do that every day. The level of competence for teachers of singing has to have a baseline or there are no standards. It isn’t a good thing to be so tolerant that everything is acceptable. Even if there are no rules, there can be guidelines. In a free society all guidelines have to have some degree latitude and will involve group consensus about things that are questionable, but if the majority of people are willing to hold a certain paradigm as being the one that serves the greatest good of the greatest number, and they can hold that paradigm with strength and conviction but not rigidity and force, the welfare of the group will be enhanced. We need standards. I’m going to keep saying that. All the time.

Truly, the vast majority of teachers of singing are doing a good job, and the best they can, all the time, no matter what. They are dedicated to their students, to teaching and to the music, but no one can know everything. Learning is always supposed to be a part of teaching. You have to stay a student if you are going to be a teacher, because if you are not always taking in new information and looking at it with new, beginner’s eyes, you are stagnant and, in short order, you will become useless or, worse, harmful, to your students and, eventually, to yourself. If you are to be trustworthy, you will also stay vulnerable. They go together.

 

 

One of the most deadly things a teacher can say to a student starts with the words “You are…….”

This pronouncement is deadly unless what follows is positive and helpful. The labels given to students by teachers are serious and sometimes stick for life. If they are judgemental (as they typically are) the person can carry around this evaluation as if it were fact for a very long time, sometimes for their entire life.

You like to hold your jaw. Your tongue is too big for your mouth. You have a tight throat. You can’t support properly. You like to listen to yourself too much. You think too much. You are paying too much attention to what you are doing. You don’t release the breath. You are not letting the tone move. You have a poor ear. You are not musical. You don’t have much of a voice. You don’t have a lot of talent for singing.

Endless. Awful. Commonplace.

I have a friend who was told by her truly terrible “therapist” that she had a serious mental disease. Had he been skilled at all, he would have seen how vulnerable and suggestable this person was and how easy it was to influence her. But he was more interested in himself than in helping her and she ended up believing his evaluation of her and became seriously, profoundly worse. She hung on to his diagnosis with tightly grasped hands and proceeded to live by his declaration that she had “X”. I begged her to get another opinion, I begged her to leave therapy with this man, but to no avail. She became, over a period of years, completely unable to have a normal life and now barely manages to get by, even with help. She became his diagnosis, and it was a tragedy to see.

I know someone else who was diagnosed by a medical professional, in fact, several, who was given a dire prognosis for her future. She was unwilling to accept that as her final fate, and through diligent work and persistent determination, she dug her way out of the “incurable” situation until it was just one more thing in her life that she had to attend to, not unlike having your hair cut or your teeth cleaned — not unpleasant tasks, but ones that have to be done whether we like it or not. In fact, I know several people in this category.

Students can easily become what you tell them they are, particularly if they hold you in high esteem and regard you as an expert. Students who desire to sing will pay attention to your opinions moreso than someone else might therefore how you speak to them about themselves, their voices and their capabilities really matters.

Remember that the voice works reflexively and that the conscious mind of the singer isn’t necessarily in charge of what the throat does or the voice manifests for a long time after beginning training. It is always better to speak about the process in the third person, as this allows both the teacher and the student to evaluate what’s going on from an objective place and work to gain greater correspondence between what is desired and what is showing up in terms of the sound.

Your jaw is tight today, let’s stretch it a little. There seems to be some stiffness in your  tongue. Let’s do a straw exercise. I notice you aren’t breathing too deeply. Should we work on that a bit? How do you feel about that sound? Did you like it? Why not?

That kind of language is much more constructive than any other and it isn’t typical of what happens in a singing lesson.

In Somatic Voicework™, we strive to speak with authority based on knowledge and experience but with compassion. We tell the truth but with kindness, and we guide, we don’t demand.

The student could just as well become your diagnosis of something spectacular, but not if you keep telling her about all her faults in every lesson. Be careful.