Various Posts

F. M. Alexander developed a method of working with the body, through spinal alignment, that was once regarded as being “unorthodox” but over the years, because the approach helped so many people, that opinion changed. Now, Alexander Technique is taught, with great enthusiasm, at many colleges and conservatories in the USA and perhaps also abroad. Of course, if Mr. Alexander were still alive, that might not be the case.

Universities are loath to “endorse” a method developed by one individual, regardless of what that method may be or what it offers. I have been told many times, at various universities, that “we can’t endorse one person’s method” because that’s — fill in the blank…..it wouldn’t be fair to our faculty………it is not our policy…….we don’t believe in that……..we have never done that……..it isn’t what we do………it would be bad for us……..we would upset people……??????

Upset people? Upset the status quo? Force people to take a look at what is being offered in case it might present information they perhaps do not have and do not think they need (when that could be entirely wrong). Well, OK, I guess.

Seems to me, however, that the various colleges and universities ought to take a look at what it is that is being offered and see if it has legs to fly, one case at a time. They should investigate the quality of the information being taught and who is teaching it. They should investigate whether or not the person who has compiled the method CAN TEACH and CAN SING. Wouldn’t that be interesting as an approach? Wouldn’t that make more sense?

You have read here many times previously that I have encountered quite some number of people holding master’s and doctoral degrees in vocal performance who could not sing well. Who, in fact, sometimes sang very badly indeed. I have even encountered people who should not have been given a degree in voice anywhere, even at a bachelor’s level. I don’t pretend to understand the mechanics of how doctorates are awarded but I have been around academia long enough to know that some of the doctoral theses I’ve seen have been utterly ridiculous on topics that made no sense and with information that was flawed and faulty. I’m not saying that everyone is in that category, but, really, if the process worked the way it is supposed to work, NO ONE would be in that category ever. If I wrote here the specifics of what I’ve seen and heard, you would also be just plain astonished.

Why is it then, that there is no kerfluffle about these truly unqualified individuals, representing the highest level of training the professional says it has to offer, when they cannot sing or teach? How is it that a teacher holding a DMA has a pronounced jaw wobble and a vibrato to go with it, as a classical singer, and possesses a voice the size of someone who should sing Despina but thinks she should be working on Donna Anna? How? How is it that a DMA vocal professor at a major university sings through his nose and makes all his students do the same and that this person is regarded by many people in academia as being an awful vocalist? I could go on, because there are many other examples.

But, endorsing a method of one person, even if that person can both sing and teach, and bases their method on science and hygiene, life experience and proven results, now THAT would be foolish.

I’m lucky. I have five universities offering my work. I’m one of the unusual ones, but what about the rest?

Draw your own conclusions.

Back in the mid-80s, when we were searching for something to call the first Symposium done by the New York Singing Teachers’ Association at Donnell Library, we tried Music Theater and Popular Music Styles. That was the alternative of choice then to “non-classical”. A lot of people didn’t like it.

Jazz artists don’t think of themselves as folk singers and folk singers don’t think of themselves as R&B artists, and Bluegrass singers don’t think of themselves as Broadway singers. And popular music was found on the top 40s radio stations of the day, and none of that music had anything to do with the other styles, so what was there to do? Why, of course, go back to “non-classical”.

Remember, in the Mirriam Webster dictionary “non” is defined as follows:

1. not: other than : reverse of: absence of  (nontoxic) (nonlinear)

2. of little or no consequence : unimportant : worthless (nonisssues) (nonsystem)

3. lacking the usual especially positive characteristics of the thing specified  (noncelebration) (nonart)

 

So all the styles of “not classical” music were relegated to being absent, of no consequence, unimportant, and lacking especially positive characteristics. Nice.

Fast forward to 2013 where the term “Contemporary Commercial Music” is making slow but steady headway into the minds of the musical world, both in academia and in the marketplace. In both worlds the terminology is still confused. There is still reliance on music theater as the default catch-all category (and it does cover most styles now), but one university has a new “popular music” program and I am sure there are other things floating around, too. The classical word seems truly shaken by the idea of commercial music. Using the world “commercial” makes them nervous. Some people  really do not know what to make of it.

An ad in the current issue (July) of Classical Singer Magazine talks about “Jazz, Broadway, Gospel, Commercial, Hard Rock and Heavy Metal”. Think maybe this person heard about something called “commercial” but didn’t bother to actually find out what that was? Anyone who calls himself “Professor” in an ad but doesn’t site the school at which he is an actual professor is already suspect in my mind. Whatever.

The young man in Australia who wrote an article in the Journal of Singing a while ago has decided that they are to be called “Popular Styles Music”. I suppose he thinks that his new term is needed because it is. He likes the idea of creating something. (“I will create new terms because I can.”) OK, good. But it doesn’t help us, does it? More words to describe what already is. Now what? Do we know anything we didn’t know before? How has that helped the profession at large?

So, let me say again, the term “Contemporary Commercial Music” or CCM is a GENRE description covering all styles formerly referred to as non-classical. It substitutes, if you will, for “non-classical”. It covers Music Theater, Jazz, Rock, Pop, Gospel, R&B, Folk, Country (and all off-shoots of these), rap and alternative styles. There is no “commercial” style per se, unless you are describing music written for TV or radio commercials. All of it is commercial. It makes much more money than any form of classical music. It is far more successful than classical music because it has many more fans. If you do not like this term, don’t use it. There are no “term police”. Understand, however, that the use of all manner of mish mash trying to corral all the styles born of the common people, mostly here in the USA, under one term’s roof is a daunting task. You can continue to call the styles cited “non-classical” and think of them as being less than classical music, or try calling them “popular styles” or maybe the “plaid group”, but sooner or later you will have to admit that there are more and more people leaving your camp and joining that other one. Your choice.

The teachers’ organization is against certifying people. Why? Why should they care?

In point of fact, if any one individual decides that their training, and theirs alone, qualifies a teacher to work with individual voices as an expert, or says that their method precludes any other method, or that their trainees are restricted in what they can and cannot do with their training, then, yes, certification is a thing to think about very carefully. The world does not need anyone producing even more unqualified teachers of singing. We already have a bumper crop.

On the other hand, if the national organization cannot establish any guidelines about what is or is not correct teaching practice, and will not issue any written parameters about what constitutes a qualified teacher of singing, it is inevitable that individuals will step up to the plate to fill this huge gaping void.

Can we have national certification? You bet.

Yes, some people won’t like it one bit to have to be tested on their skills and pass that test in order to prove they can actually teach singing. Yes, some people will be asked to learn things that, left to their own devices, they would just as soon not be bothered to study, and yes, some people might just fail because they don’t know what they are doing, but too bad. You either have standards or you don’t. You either know what you are doing before you take someone else’s voice in your hands or you don’t, and if you don’t, you should have to wait. There should be large mentorship programs (not once a year for 12 people, but all year long for hundreds of people. There should be established expectations regarding healthy singing in ALL styles and reasonable choices of repertoires, done in the appropriate and correct style, whatever that might be.

Someone has to call for it and someone has to stand up and say, do this! I’m standing up and I’m calling for it, now, here. It’s time.

At voice conferences, teachers of singing are regarded as equals to the Speech Language Pathologists, the medical doctors (laryngologists), and voice researchers in related disciplines, but the criteria for all those other professionals are stringent, codified, and have been around for a long time. As long as we have no established protocols or parameters, we have no standards and if we have no standards, then how are we really the equal of the other professions? Because we say so? What kind of criteria is that?

So while we are waiting for any nationally recognized organization to take action on this huge topic, I will continue to certify people to teach my method, Somatic Voicework™, and that will entitle them to say they have been presented with voice science, voice medicine, vocal function based on science and life experience, and real world knowledge of the demands of the vocal music marketplace in all styles. It does not make “magic teachers”, it sets all teachers on the path towards greater knowledge in many related areas and tells them to keep studying, growing, reaching out, meeting the needs of the students, their voices, and the music with integrity and compassion.

The certification is given around the organization of my materials in my format which is my intellectual property. I interfere with no one. I stop no one. I make no fancy claims of any kind for what my work will or will not do, and that’s not true of all the other people out there.

If you are one of the people who is against certification and you have not been to a certification course, I suggest you try one. They are not all the same.

If you are savvy, you know the rest of that title is….a dangerous thing.

If you only know a little bit, is that better or worse than when you know nothing?

I heard recently that someone was asking on a forum about how to work with a singer recovering from polyp surgery. One response was something like, “it’s good they are not recovering from nodules.”  Really?

At the level of the vocal folds, a bump is a bump. One of New York’s most famous ENTs has been heard to say, we should call them all podules and nolyps. Until you get it out and look at the histology (cell composition) you really don’t always know what you have. Retraining the voice that has had compromised vocal fold response is retraining the voice that has had compromised vocal fold response.

First of all, why is someone who has no idea what they are doing working with someone recovering from phonosurgery? Because the likelihood is that the teacher doesn’t know that it’s not a good idea. Secondly, there may be no one else to help the singer go back to singing, and someone is better than no one (maybe). Third, maybe both the teacher and the vocalist were not discouraged from proceeding by the voice surgeon. Who knows?

There should be criteria here about what is correct and a place to turn to for training to address these issues. At least the teacher was reaching out for help. Where is the guidance for the profession over all? Beats me. We can’t all go be Speech Language Pathologists first. There has to be a better way to learn what you need to know.

There is no good reason why, in 2013, we do not have an over-arching organization to set up objective criteria for teachers of singing and special teachers who work with injured voices. Until there is such an organization, senior teachers with experience and training are left to informally mentor new teachers to help them learn what they need to know. Teachers of singing who are afraid of such objective criteria should go hide. It’s long past time.

I certify the people who take my Somatic Voicework™ training as having completed the course to a satisfactory level. This does not make them experts if that is all they have done as teachers. Even Level III graduates are discouraged from doing “rehab” type work until they do extensive training elsewhere.

It’s important that serious, professional teachers of singing have a baseline of what is to be expected of teachers of singing. It has been resisted for two hundred years, but now is the time for that resistance to stop. Now.

Anyone can take piano lessons or tennis lessons. Not everyone is going to be a Horowitz or a Venus Williams. Anyone can learn to do a sport or take lessons on an instrument. Not everyone is going to be a professional or even reach professional calibre.

Does it mean then that only the very talented should be given the option of having lessons? Of course not.

Years ago, however, the philosophy was “you either had talent and a voice and could sing” or you were “not talented, had no voice, and should never sing” and there was very little in between. If, in addition, you could not readily match pitch, then you were deemed hopeless.

Thankfully, this idea is mostly gone now. Most people who teach singing know that anyone can be trained if the teacher has the correct skills to do so and that most people, if they practice and are patient, can learn to sound quite good, even in classical repertoire, over a length of time, usually anywhere from two to five years.

I have had several adult beginners go from sounding pretty bad to sounding quite good just because they were diligent and dedicated and did not give up lessons or practice. This is no miracle, it is skill development. Perhaps they are not naturally inclined to be easily expressive and emotionally powerful, but that isn’t always necessary, as there is repertoire that is less intense to perform and less challenging to communicate effectively.

Talent is a combination of many things. In terms of singing it means that the sound of the voice itself is interesting in some distinct way. It means being musically expressive easily and also means being able to hear music easily and accurately, even if the singer does not have literacy in musicianship. It can include other skills as well, but those listed here seem to be typical in evaluating “natural ability” and they are certainly good things to have if one wishes to sing. However, many people who have careers are not given great assets in any of these categories and succeed anyway.

The goal of training in singing is to create a bridge between physical skill and artistic expression. It is very frustrating if you have a deep desire to express yourself through singing and you have limited ability to do so. It is very challenging to bring enough emotional truth to the singing to make it compelling without also knowing how to get your voice to stand up to that level of expression, although some people do manage. It is difficult to have a lovely voice with a nice delivery but have not much to say in terms of communication. I have worked with quite a few people over the years who had absolutely no depth as artists and, in fact, didn’t at all understand what artistic depth was, yet they had financial resources to go out and hire arrangers, publicists, and back-up singers and create decent careers anyway. Amazing to watch that, really.

Creativity is unbounded. Human beings likewise. Training not so much. Training has to have a goal, a purpose, a direction and it has to have some kind of organization or else it is really just experimentation, trial and error and guesses. That could work well enough but it could take decades to get anywhere consistent and no one really has that much time to spend before getting to a place that does the job well.

If you teach, build a bridge, but know what kind of a bridge you are building.

How many times have I encountered a student who has been told something that isn’t harmful, and isn’t even really wrong, it’s just useless? “Leave your voice alone and it will take care of itself” (except when you do and it doesn’t). “You are grabbing onto your high notes. Don’t do that.” (OK, how do I do something else instead?) “You are not releasing the tone to turn over on the way up.” (I would love to do that. What does it mean and how does it work?) You are not using the breath correctly. If you had better support your sound would release and go into your head. (Really? I am already taking a big breath into my “diaphragm” and tightening my belly a lot for those high notes. It’s not working. Is there a better way to breathe than inhaling and exhaling?)

Inevitably, the student is being told……You are (fill in this blank with something that’s wrong).

When the throat gets tight on the way up and the student is clearly trying to sing as freely as possible and follow the instructions of the teacher, and the throat doesn’t let go, THE STUDENT IS NOT TO BLAME. THE STUDENT IS DOING THE BEST HE CAN. It is the teacher’s job to work the throat until it lets go spontaneously. It is the teacher’s job. 

Throats do all kinds of things on their own that we don’t want them to do and when there are ingrained habits in a singer it can be very hard to retrain the muscle responses to make them let go and move in a new way, but that’s too bad, because it is still the teacher’s job to deal with that, over and over until it changes. The student is not the person who is supposed to do the “figuring it out”, that’s the job of the teacher. The reasons people go to teachers is to fix problems, break bad habits, learn new good habits and feel free while singing. They can usually figure out on their own that there is something wrong. It is frequently the reason they seek training in the first place.

Years ago when I saw two female opera singers present a talk about women composers on Broadway. Their demonstrations of belt, pop, and rock songs, sung in their warbly opera voices, presented all the songs in the same way….. as if they were all written by Schubert. I commented to them at the time that the music wasn’t sung that way professionally. One of the women responded by saying to me that I was stupid and that, of course, the students knew how to sing the songs. I did not say so at the time, although I probably should have, that in that situation the teachers should have been paying the students, since they were educating the ears of the teachers. This mentality, that the students will figure it out, is one of the seriously awful things in the profession, as it not only tolerates genuine ignorance of what teaching singing is, it fosters the idea that this is a good thing, expecting the students to “figure it out”. The students know how to make the sounds………..yes, well, then why are they studying with you at all?

Be very careful about giving your students generic advice.

Just sing forward all the time and you will be fine.

Don’t worry about registers, they really don’t matter.

Be sure to sing as though you never had a jaw. Leave the jaw alone.

On and on. When the student does something like move the jaw in order to get a better sound or make a consonant, the student gets blamed. “There you go again, hanging on to your jaw. You have to stop that!” (Since it is part of speech to move the jaw and part of vocal acoustics to change the jaw opening to move the formant/resonance patterns, you are in big trouble if you don’t have a jaw.)

Generic teaching is kinda sorta teaching and it makes for kinda sorta singing in a kinda sorta vocal technician.

Do us all a favor, don’t go there!

There are a lot of “methods” out there. There are lots of people who teach singing using a method. (I have one).

If the method asks the vocalist to do something that throats do not do, if it teaches a vocalist to attempt to make a sound by doing something that we don’t need to do to produce it, if it says that any kind of maneuver is OK so long as you can manage it, my advice is to go somewhere else.

Many people who teach singing don’t know a thing about vocal function. Some people still (amazingly) do not know that we have a larynx and two vocal folds that vibrate to produce sound. There is all manner of confusion about what happens when we do make sound, particularly sung sound, and all kinds of mis-labeling of same.

It is well established that proprioceptively speaking what we feel and what is actually happening don’t have to agree. Said differently, it means that what we feel individually, subjectively, as we make sound, may have nothing whatsoever to do with what the body is actually doing. If we make up a theory about what is happening and decide that it’s “REAL” because we feel it (common behavior), and then we teach others to “have the same experience” (even though what we are describing is based on wrong assumptions), we can assume that we are “teaching” well. For well over one hundred years, that is exactly where the professional has generally been with few exceptions.

Even very good singers with excellent track records, who know exactly what is going on in their throats and bodies when they are singing, do not necessarily understand that their subjective experiences are not universal, and therefore not directly transferable to anyone else who sings or wishes to sing. Further, people who teach others to “retract the false folds”, “constrict the aryepiglottic sphincter” and “put the larynx down and keep it there” are actually tying their students’ throats in knots, causing them to disconnect from free emotional expression which is only possible in a throat that is vital, alive and moveable.

If you understand what the body can do directly, what it does indirectly (in response to something you are thinking) and what the interface between those two things is, then you can work to effect a change, through exercises, over time, that produces different, authentic, consistent vocal behavior. If you do not understand these things, you will be less than effective, and possibly even harmful. If you don’t know how the vocal mechanism responds to pitch, vowel and volume (and to a certain extent also, to changes in vocal quality) you can waste a lot of time trying to sound the way you want (or the way your teacher wants).

Need help with that? Come to Shenandoah in July. (www.ccminstitute.com)

What is natural singing? Think you know? Ask any two singing teachers and you will absolutely get two different answers. Ask 100 singing teachers and you will get 100 answers. Ask 1000, the same.

Natural singing depends on what you consider to be natural vocal behavior. If you want to measure what is natural, do you look at normal healthy speakers who do not sing? Healthy singers of any style, age and level of experience? Do you look at professionals or those without training? Do you look at the difference between normal and average? Do you decide what a high level professional normal is and use that as a baseline?

Believe me, there would be a thousand arguments on these topics and in the end, no one would be any better off after all the haranguing stopped. So, for the sake of expressing something concrete and perhaps meaningful, let me try here to describe “natural singing”.

Natural singing means that the vowel sounds don’t distort. They sound true to themselves across a person’s range. It means that the mouth and jaw don’t do great huge extended movements all the time, but perhaps they move more on high notes, loud sounds and during exaggerated emotional expression. It implies that there is an easiness to pronunciation and pitch accuracy without fuss. It implies that breathing is solid, consistent and not obvious. It assumes that the sound is clear, not nasal, not noisy, not breathy. It assumes that the sound of the voice is recognizable and unique. It generates resonance (or specific acoustic enhancement) but without seeking to do so in an exaggerated manner. It is smooth and flowing but can also be detached and choppy, as needed. It has vibrato, not too much or too little, except when vibrato is not wanted.  Kids sound like kids, young adults sound like young adults, older adults sound younger than their actual years.

If you want a good example of opera singing that is about as natural as you could ask for it to be, go on YouTube and look for Rosa Ponselle singing Carmen. You won’t have to look hard to find many different mezzo’s singing Carmen with all sorts of over-darkened, weird sounds that have little to do with how we actually communicate. That’s where we have gone in recent years.

The further away we travel from clean simple sound-making, no matter what style we are singing, the further away we get from honest, direct emotional truth and clear communication. If you are someone who really doesn’t care about naturalness, and there are some who think that singing SHOULD be manufactured, you won’t understand any of these arguments.

Everyone who studies with me for any length of time is going to learn to sing as naturally as possible, following the above guidelines. They will always sound like themselves while they increase their freedom, strength, expressiveness and stamina. They will always be the people who decide what kind of sound they want to make and will learn to discern the difference between a distortion for artistic sake and a distortion caused by poor technique. They will expand in every vocal direction without having to sacrifice anything, but they will also understand that all of this takes work and time to learn and dedication to maintain.

Natural singing. Natural expression. Natural communication. Even in a very heightened communication in a big space with a large audience, you don’t have to throw these things away.

Many times in a lesson I ask a singer to describe something. In fact, generally, I ask a lot of questions in lessons. I want to know what the singer knows, what they understand, how they use what they have taken from singing and from lessons with other people.

Sometimes people come in an tell me they have taken lessons for 5, 10 or even 15 years. When they sing, they look and sound like they have never set foot in a voice studio. Some of them sing very poorly. They are all caught up with a certain kind of resonance, or a special way to “place the sound” or some idea they have about how to “vibrate the tone in the masque” or stay on pitch. I want to know what the singer is focused on while trying to create those things while singing.

Other people can come in and say, “I have never studied singing”, but can do a whole lot of things and be very comfortable. They have both freedom and control and they sound very good. They don’t fuss over making sound, but they can make it and comfortably so. Those people are highly skilled vocal technicians, even though they have never studied singing at all.

The folks who don’t do too well sometimes don’t really know what lessons are supposed to give you. They have not been taught what a trained voice is supposed to do or to be, and they don’t have reasons for why they do any exercise. They just do them because someone told them to. If you don’t understand what a vocal exercise is supposed to do for your voice (your sound, your throat, your artistry), and you do it anyway, it can still do you some good, even if you don’t know why, as long as you do it correctly. But when it comes to using it in a song, you may have little success.

The process of taking lessons is supposed to teach your voice to do things that it would never do it on its own. Those things have to be done correctly and for long enough for them to become automatic responses that you don’t have to think about. The exercises should add in things that are “missing” to balance vocal function, they should correct vocal flaws, they should enhance things like range, endurance, power, flexibility, accuracy and, while doing so, bring out the uniqueness of your voice, making it instantly recognizable. It is supposed to get underneath the expression you want to put into the sound so that your communication is given to the audience in a straightforward and powerful manner.

As with any situation in which you are learning new skills, you need to be able to ask questions. Why is always a good thing. Why am I doing this exercises and not that one? Why is this exercise so difficult? Why is this correct, what’s good about it? What is also good. What is the reason for this exercise? What is happening when I do this? Is that going to help me sing the way I want?

After you have studied with a good teacher regularly for about two years you should feel like you have much more control over your singing and much greater ease and satisfaction. You should begin to understand what skilled singers have in their toolbox in order to meet the needs of the music fully and in order to grow as artists. You will begin to glimpse what it means to sing in a healthy way, no matter what kind of music you sing, and you will start to know what deep satisfaction in singing is, even if it isn’t a lasting experience at first.

Mindless singing isn’t for professionals or professional amateurs. Knowing what you want your voice to do and then getting it to do that is a learned skill for most people. If you take lessons and don’t get what you need in a reasonably short period of time, stop. Go someplace else.

 

The further you delve into something the more you understand it broadly and in detail. It’s as if everything has a counterpart to the universe which runs (as far as we now know) from sub-atomic particles to multi-verses of billions of galaxies. It is truly so that the very tiny and the very vast can be reflections of each other.

When you sing with blissful ignorance, thinking of nothing at all except the song, there is a kind of sweet innocence to it that is, in itself, complete and perfect. It asks nothing and needs nothing more than to be what it is. When you listen to a great vocalist who has developed artistry over decades of study and work, and you hear in that singing enormous detail, uniqueness and expression, then you must acknowledge that this, too, is complete and perfect, but in an entirely different manner.

It is easy enough to pit one thing against another. Humanity does that across the board every day. It takes some vision to see opposites as being connected on a continuum, running from one scale to another. Ultra-violet isn’t in opposition to infra-red, it’s just on the other end of the spectrum. Opera isn’t in opposition to rock and roll, commercial music isn’t in opposition to art song, folk music isn’t in opposition to jazz. Each kind of singing has its own dignity, its own parameters, it defining world.

The philosophical discussions about what is good and what isn’t can be useful if they are  used to illuminate rather than denigrate. Maybe I like Madame High Notes more than Madame Loud Voice, but I can still appreciate that both of them are fine artists with something to say. Maybe I would rather listen to Mr. Foggy Throat more than Mr. Squeezy Sound, but I can understand that they are both interesting vocalists with their own unique style.

If we were capable of this kind of discernment, it would be easier to discuss function without blowing a gasket. We can actually agree that something is functional or it isn’t, since we (should) understand how human beings make sound. If, however, we confuse what the voice is doing with what it is, and what the artist is expressing with what the voice is expressing, as if all of it was one big gloppy thing, we are bound not only to be confused in our philosophical discussions, we are also bound to circular arguments that go nowhere useful.

It is absolutely necessary to separate out the ingredients of singing into objective elements, as we would with items in a recipe. A cake isn’t a bunch of ingredients when we eat it, but if we didn’t have the ingredients in good proportion before we starting making the cake, it might never turn out to be edible, let alone delicious. A fully developed vocal artist is a whole bunch of things that ultimately combine to make something yummy. Sometimes those things are deliberately cultivated as skills and choices and sometimes they are blessedly “just there” because they are.

Wisdom is knowledge correctly applied. Knowing something can be useful or not, depending. Making use of that knowledge in a way that makes it better, more available, more abundant, more itself, is always useful.

Let us all strive to be wise in what we discuss and how we discuss it so that everyone can share in the communication. I can still like what I like that’s different than what you like, but I can appreciate that your liking it is just fine.