Various Posts

The other side of multi-disciplinary interchange is that speech language pathologists (who don’t sing), medical doctors, and voice researchers need to be willing to learn from teachers of singing. Many in the community I have been in for nearly four decades do, but not all, and, sadly, many who are not in that community at all, could care less. That’s not a good thing in any way.

If you are an otolaryngologist and you have taken some classical singing lessons, you may think that you have a good grasp of how singing training works, but you could be very wrong. If you do not understand the things that impact vocal production that have nothing whatsoever to do with “classical” singing, you could be operating under an assumption that does not serve you, serving the needs of your patients’ voices, well. It is endlessly frustrating to me that my encounters with ENTs and SLPs is such that they are often no better off than their singing teacher colleagues, in that they think that all vocal training labeled with the mystical and all powerful word “classical” is good, is enough and is useful. That would be equivalent to saying that all ENTS are the same, that the ones who have specialized in working with professional voices are the same as the ones who have not, and that the techniques all ENTs use should be uniformly the same, regardless of the diagnosis of the voice disorder. It would also be like saying that if you correct speech, all singing will automatically be better, no matter how the singing happens, and that would just be absurd.

How to get through to the doctors and speech pathologists who think they know! Those of us in the profession who deal with the ones that are knowledgeable (and, thankfully, there are many excellent experts in the various disciplines who are), don’t have easy answers. We can encourage them to read, to take singing lessons, to attend conferences, to talk to their peers, but that doesn’t mean that they take that advice. At the voice science conferences, there is little “crossover” attendance. That means that the MDs arrive for the medical sections, the researchers arrive for the hard science research sections, the SLPs arrive for their presentations and the singing teachers for the pedagogy. Few of each discipline goes to the other disciplines’ presentations and it is only by doing so that there is REAL multi-disciplinary exchange.

If I can sit in the medical portions, the science/research portions, and the SLP portions and make myself try to understand what is presented, and gain a great deal by doing so, why can’t other people spend the time with the singing teachers, learning from them? I have no answer. I do know, however, that the number of people attending any singing conference who are otolaryngologists, speech language pathologists (who don’t sing), or voice science researchers, is very, very small. If you take a poll by asking people to raise their hands, sometimes there is literally one person who isn’t a singing-based attendee in a room of about 250 people.

If you are an ENT, a SLP, or a voice researcher, and this rings at all true for you, I know of a great course at Shenandoah University that happens every summer…………

We all know that change is very difficult. Most people don’t like it and getting a group of people to agree to make changes can be very challenging. Nevertheless, once in a while that does happen. A group, sometimes a large group, decides to stop the old and begin the new. It can be a painful thing to make changes, but it can also be the best thing, and it takes a lot of vision and courage to be able to know that and act upon it.

That the profession of teaching singing is in the midst of a sea change is a fact. Colleges are scrambling to introduce music theater degrees and include rock and pop styles in their programs. Educators are left to figure out for themselves whether or not they can teach rock and roll styles to their students with only Mozart and Strauss as life experience or training. Some succeed and some don’t. The students who don’t get to develop the vocal skills they needed while in college do not get to go back and complain after the fact that they didn’t learn what was necessary to get a job out in the world. They would be regarded as “spoiled sports” coming in “after the fact”. Too bad. If more of them complained they were not equiped to get work after spending thousands of dollars, even hundreds of thousands of dollars on their vocal education, maybe things at universities would change more rapidly.

In order to recognize the need for change, we have take responsibility for what is, as it is. We have to be willing to look at what works and what does not and decide to do something about what isn’t working. This does not involve blame, it involves evaluation. If you cannot  calmly evaluate what’s what, you cannot address it appropriately. As a profession we are trying to figure this conundrum out right now.

If we admit what is clearly so, that classical singing and CCM singing do not sound the same, we can then admit that it is highly unlikely that training for both styles should be the same. If we recognize that Dianna Damrau would not be a good Mimi in Rent even though she just sang a well respected Violetta in Traviata, then we would also be in a position to recognize that she can’t go back and forth because classical training and classical singing do not prepare you to do other styles just because. If that were true, all good opera singers would automatically be able to sing rock music and sound like rock singers and we all know they can’t do that. Still, the obvious evidence that the sounds made in CCM are different than those made in classical music have been ignored by some pretty big opera singers who have taken it upon themselves to make “rock” albums, “jazz” albums, and even to attempt music theater with mixed results. If you want to record “Some Enchanted Evening” from South Pacific and call yourself a “crossover” singer because that song is from a Broadway musical, I guess you can, but you would be using the SAME VOCAL PRODUCTION in both genres so by my reckoning, you are just singing two different kinds of music in the same way. NOT crossover, from a functional place, in my opinion.

Change takes place slowly if it is in an area where things have been the same for a long  time. When things suddenly “flip”, though, it becomes necessary for people to get on board with the new quickly  because the old is no longer seen as being traditional but rather stodgy or limited. We are close to that tipping point. It won’t be very much longer until the tide finally turns. The young people seem to understand this better than those who have been around a while.

Don’t let change catch you by surprise, unprepared. Don’t let yourself be lulled into a sense of security about what can “never happen”. Take bold steps, do what seems scary, and learn some new things about singing and teaching singing. The times they are a changin’ and you can be part of that change now. If you aren’t, it could be that it will pass you by. Change really can be very good.

For a very long time I stayed away from talking about classical singing using my method, Somatic Voicework™, because I had had so much trouble in that community over the years. I decided it was easier if I just stuck to talking about CCM styles and stayed away from all things classical. It’s time now to own up and tell the truth.

Somatic Voicework™ is just as useful for classical singing as it is for any style. Since I stopped taking technique lesson at 29 and have managed to keep my own classical singing going since then, the thing that kept it going was Somatic Voicework™. I have spoken to numerous classical teachers of singing who have informed me that Somatic Voicework™ has helped their classical singing and teaching immensely. It is based on function and as long as you understand the difference in function between classical music and other kinds of styles you can use it very effectively to work either way.

If you don’t understand the difference between function and style, and many people do not, then you would not be able to tell the difference in how to use the exercises and make them work either way. You will be confused on both sides of the equation. You can’t blame that on Somatic Voicework™.

Good classical singing has specific parameters functionally and clear boundaries musically. It is up to each individual to figure out what they are, through training and life experience and to do something with them such that you meld skill with artistry.

If you are someone who needs a way to anchor your thoughts about voice into a codified, organized approach that does not invalidate traditional classical vocal pedagogy in any way, you would be interested in Somatic Voicework™. If you want to hear good classical singers using these tools to sing in other styles as well, come to Shenandoah in July and join us for our 11th year of Somatic Voicework™ training. You will meet people from all over the country and several foreign countries who will be there to have fun, learn new things, and share in an atmosphere that is open, friendly, and supportive. Go to www.ccminstitute.com for further information.

I recently attended yet another “operatic” master class lead by a noted Metropolitan opera mezzo. At one point she told a young soprano “Don’t act on the high notes, just focus on singing them, and then go back to acting after they are over”. Well, I guess it works for her.

She said some other pithy things like start your support before you begin the note. (huh?) Maybe contract your abdominal muscles before you make sound? Who knows? She was big, as are so many others, on “singing as if you have no jaw”, a comment I detest. First of all, we can’t possible imagine that. Second, the poor people born without jaw bones (there are some) have to have serious surgery, or surgeries, as it is nearly impossible to function without one and third, if you had no jaw you could not articulate or even speak intelligibly. Really, a stupid thing to tell a young singer.

Then she said things like “sing freely” but “don’t move anything”. (Again, huh?) She suggested that the vocalists had to release from the roof of the mouth (the hard palate), and, since this a boney structure, you simply cannot do that. Never mind, she wanted that from several people.

This is what I wrote about a while back about “losing common sense” when it comes to singing. What the instructor has learned to do, she has labeled, probably because she got the labels from her teachers. What she thinks she feels and what she is actually doing may have little to do with each other. Then, she teaches that. OK, right. Master teacher. Master.

I also observed several other less formal master classes and in at least one the master teacher had very little to say to the lovely young soprano other than general platitudes and asking for a lot of repetition of the high phrases. I remember that as a teaching tool……having me sing the high phrases over and over doing a little crescendo here and a little less consonant there. Never taught me a thing, since I could already sing high notes easily and had quite some variability up there, even at 18. I remember singing in a master class with a very famous teacher (big voice) who told me that the soft high notes I was singing were very difficult. She did not ASK me if they were difficult, she told me they were. Since they were not and had never been hard to do in any way, I thought she was giving me very odd instruction. Was there something about what I was doing that was hard but I couldn’t tell that it was hard??????? Perhaps I had not yet learned how to make them hard. I needed more skill!! Crazy making. I actually spent a few minutes thinking maybe she was right. Then I woke up. You would know this woman’s name if I printed it here.

There’s nothing to do about these situations except sit there and be polite but it is galling to think that the young people are not being given real information based on how they sound and how they look or even how they are communicating in such displays. The teachers do mean well, but good intentions are not good teaching.

I have seen some pretty amazing master classes in my day. Scotto, Arroyo, von Stade, Hakegard, Horne, but you could make a long list of the ones I have witnessed that were either useless (Wustman, Curtin) or actually frightening (Schwartzkopf, Kraus). We don’t have too many master classes in other styles, so I can’t comment about them, but it’s likely that they are no better, because it reflects the state of the art of the profession as it is.

As for me, I intend to “act” on the low notes, the high notes, the middle notes and the breaths and the silences. Save me, please, from all things “master” that are not.

It used to be that singing was easy to recognize. Not so much anymore. It used to be that we knew when someone was singing because there were recognizable cues. Not so much anymore. The lines continue to blur.

Why?

I don’t have an answer. All I can say is that it many factors have converged to make the various components in CCM singing looser, freer and less “formalized”.

High rock belters are definitely shrieking, but that’s because rock is often an extreme form now and the capacity to sing this way has evolved along with the style to become, finally, expected. Whether it’s Christina Aquilera or Steven Tyler screaming out some off-the-Richter Scale high note or some other power belter plowing through a gospel song, the sounds no longer shock as they did when we first heard them. Our ears have become used to such shrieking, for better or worse.

This is no different than any of the other extremes our society has come to accept as we drift further away from convention of all kinds and more towards chaos. The backlash from this drift is to become fearful, try to hold on to what is known, go back to what was before, and decide that the old way was better. You can see that in the ideas of the “right wing” conservatives and you can see it in governments. It is stagnant thinking and it is bound to fail.

On the other hand, order isn’t a bad thing and some kinds of structure are necessary in order for us to function in a healthy manner, both in our own lives and in the world at large. Singing only gorgeous, beautiful tones that are always just pleasant and appealing might be nice but it can also be boring and completely inappropriate to some CCM styles.

I tend to think we need all of it, but a measurement has to be there as well and that measurement is vocal health. You can shriek away as long as it doesn’t injure your vocal folds. You can make noise, sound scruffy or breathy, as long as it doesn’t cost you in terms of your ability to continue to sing well. You can avoid sustained tones, vibrato, clear undistorted vowels and have next to no special ideas about breathing and as long as you can still get the job done on a regular basis, you certainly can continue. On the other hand, if you want to invest in your own vocal well being and you have decided to sing for a living (or try to anyway), then you must, whether you like it or not, find a way to make sounds that suit your artistic vision that do not also hurt your voice while you sing. If you can shriek for hours and days on end and have an OK voice after you do, then the choice is yours for the having. If, however, you are like most people and can’t quite get away with such vocal behavior, you must discover what your vocal folds will do and what they won’t and work within that structure.

There are those who think that certain people have voices that are only good in a specific style….sort of a genetic disposition to gospel or rock or country. I don’t believe that at all. There are those who think that any kind of shriek, scream, yell, shout or exclamation is automatically harmful. I don’t believe that either. BUT, I do think that if you constantly shriek you run a high risk of vocal damage, and if you continue to ignore the toll of singing full out, you make that risk even greater.

I never had any desire to sing rock music nor to be a shrieker. I never had any interest in being a gospel belter, but I know many people who did have those desires and some of them were able to see those desires come to pass. I am more personally inclined to like “pretty” singing more than shrieking, but all of these things are just my individual preferences, not “the way it should be”.

If you are going to sing something “shrieky” and you intend to do so repeatedly and for a long period of time, you have to condition your vocal folds to maintain those sounds without injury. If you might also sing something that is warmer and more intimate, you might find that getting that to happen requires you to let go of the shrieking, at least temporarily, and lighten into head. The only way to know is through trial and error. Where does the speaking end and the singing begin? Where does the normal singing end and the exaggerated singing begin? When are you singing and when are you shrieking. Only you can decide.

Some people think they know everything and refuse to learn new information because they strongly believe they already know what they need to know. This idea is deadly but it, sadlly, is not uncommon, in all kinds of areas.

Figuring out that you might have new information to learn would take a sense of humility, particularly if you are someone who has a vested interest in the information you have gathered. Asking questions about what you already know or what you have learned is frightening. What if you discover that something you value highly is wrong? What if something that you have done for decades was never right in the first place? How do you live with that?

Admitting you are wrong or that you don’t know everything seems like a very human thing to do. We were never meant to be perfect and it is folly to think that anyone, no matter how smart, can know all there is to know on any given topic. Life is about discovery, so you have to keep looking in order to keep finding what’s new. If you stay at home and never do anything to shake yourself up, you will rust.

Nevertheless, if you are in a position of power or status, if you are “Dr. Someone Special” and you run a department or program and others look to you as an expert, it can’t be easy to say, I am going to go learn what’s new. I imagine you struggle with thoughts like “What will my colleagues think”? or “What will my students think”? You would have to be very secure as a person to let go of any thoughts that others will judge you negatively, if you live in a world in which that happens as a matter of course, and teachers in schools and universities are judged routinely as part of their jobs.

A private teacher has no such worries. He or she can sit at home in their studio and never be judged by anyone except students, who, after all, are students. If you don’t go to any conferences or belong to any of the professional organizations, you don’t have to confront the evaluations of or comparisons to others who might indeed know more than you and do things you can’t do or have never even thought of doing.

Everybody likes being right. Everyone wants to “look good” and be accepted by others, unless they are a sociopath. Particularly as an artist, it is difficult to do your art alone. We need collaborators most of the time. Being alone a lot is very isolating and not a great environment in which to be creative as a performer. (It’s not impossible, just hard).

We all need to remain open minded and curious, we all need to learn continuously and broadly and we all need to understand that things change as we know more. Keeping your attitude flexible and accepting of new techniques and research ought to be a requisite for any teacher but in a teacher of singing it is vitally important to keep an open mind. New information is brought forth through research every day. You don’t have to be a voice scientist to stay open minded but you do have to be a singing teacher (or singer) who is willing to re-write her beliefs every time new information is proven through research, whether you agree with it or not.

Open-mindedness is the only way to go.

The only way our profession, the one called “singing teaching”, is going to go forward is by paying attention to voice science. We can’t live as if voice research doesn’t matter to what we teach and we can’t hide from what voice science is telling us about how we make sung sounds.

Many people, however, still think that science is science and singing is singing and never the two shall meet. That’s unfortunate. As long as we view things as being unrelated to each other, we will be at a disadvantage. We all have much to learn from each other and the free exchange of information is more important than any other activity we can cultivate.

If you have never been to a voice science conference, you should go. There are many now, all over the world, and they are valuable if you are serious about singing. Not every presentation at every conference is worth while or for everyone but there is generally enough information at them that you can come away with at least one new data point or exercise. It is also a way to meet your peers and share with them as well and that kind of networking grows over time. It is worth the effort to return and return to the conferences you enjoy, as the friendships cultivated this way can be lasting and valuable.

I wouldn’t trade my voice science conference attendance for anything. It is always a high point for me and it is much more interesting than the conferences offered by NATS. I typically find those not very compelling because they have topics that often don’t relate to the musical world I’m in or to the practical application of singing in my studio. It can be expensive to go but I view the expense as part of professional development and yes, even at my age, I am still developing. You are never too old to learn.

If you attend a voice science conference and you see a presentation you don’t understand, be brave enough to go to the presenter and ask some basic questions. You never know what you might discover. And, once you get the lay of the land, do some research yourself and submit it for presentation. You might get invited to stand up there yourself. Then you would be a voice scientist. Don’t raise your eyebrows! It happened to me.

Check out The Voice Foundation and investigate their Symposium: Care of the Professional Voice which takes place next week in Philadelphia. www.voicefoundation.org

 

Somatic Voicework™ The LoVetri Method should have the trademark symbol after the word “Voicework”.

On a Windows computer, it’s Alt+0153 on the number keypad (Make sure Num Lock is on.)

On an Apple computer, it’s Options+2.

For more information, including how to type the symbol on Linux, check out http://fsymbols.com/computer/trademark/

After introducing the full name of the method in an article, you can use the shorter form SVW™, but please include the appropriate symbol. A “(tm)” can suffice, but with a computer, you should be able to use the symbol.

Please note that “Voicework” does not have an s. Lisa Popeil’s Method uses the word “Voiceworks”.

 

 

What happens when you hear these words from a medical doctor or a speech language pathologist? What then? Do you just accept them and go home? How does this up end your life?

There are all kinds of illnesses and vocal fold injuries that can compromise the vocal folds, some have to do with the vocal folds directly and some are caused by disease or surgery that has had a negative impact upon their function.

Many people do not realize that the vocal folds’ primary job is to protect the lungs from foreign objects. If you have ever accidently swallowed something and choked on it, you know that the body will do its best to get it out of your throat by gagging and coughing. You really can’t stop that from happening, even if you are in a quiet, elegant restaurant and you would like to control it! They may also not know that you need the folds to close to climb the stairs, to carry something heavy and even to defecate. If your vocal folds paralyze in an open position, you will have trouble with these activities and with making sound. If they stop moving in a more closed position, you will have also trouble breathing.

You can have conditions which impact the ability of the vocal folds to vibrate along their length and that affects the way we control pitch. If the edges are compromised, you can end up with a weak, breathy sound. If the nerves to the vocal folds are damaged, you can end up with little control over anything vocal. And, if you have one or more vocal folds removed by surgery, you can lose your ability to speak forever, even though you may have saved your life in the process, perhaps by having a cancerous growth removed.

Vocal fold illness and injury is a profoundly powerful scenario to encounter. If you have ever run into the any situation in which this awful experience arises, you will know how distressing it is. Not only to lose normal speech but to lose the ability to do other things is often devastating. While medical science is working to develop new treatments and protocols all the time, there is much that allopathic medicine still cannot do. There only a few limited options that an MD or an SLP can offer and after that, you are on your own.

It has been my experience, however, that singing training can be helpful, perhaps in a way that nothing else can, and it would be great to have some studies done to verify if this is indeed so. Coupled with a positive outlook, a desire to trust and encourage the body, a willingness to do almost any reasonable exercise, and some meditation or visualization, people who have an optimisn about their situation can go much further than we now suppose. The body can respond at a deeper level than we give it credit for and things are not always as bleak as people are told.

Someday the doctors and speech experts may be willing to work with the many tools that are available to a singing teacher with a broad range of experience and knowledge in helping someone return to full vocal function after it is diminished. Right now, the individual has to be lucky enough to find someone to help through referrals or sheer luck. If you are searching for someone like this to help you, don’t give up! There are people out there who do know how to do that. Keep looking until you find one.

All repertoire is not created equal, and that includes music theater songs. I have implied here before that this is the case, but I well remember a conversation I had many years ago with a classical colleague who professed to teach music theater that the really difficult music was classical and the other stuff was, well, less demanding. Oh.

In my experience some music theater songs are very difficult. Sometimes that difficulty is musical, sometimes it is vocal, sometimes it’s emotional but if you have a song with all those factors, you can face some serious challenges.

What kinds of songs am I talking about? Songs that are loud, high, and long  are demanding — songs that are fast, frantic and repetitive are demanding — songs that ask you to be very emotional are hard because they run the risk of pushing the voice.

Are there classical songs that are simple? Of course. Many of the great art songs are not difficult until you begin to interpret them.  They can have simple melodies and lyrics (if you are not singing them in a foreign language), but any good classical singer will tell you that just because they are simple doesn’t mean that to do them well is easy. On the contrary, sometimes the simplicity makes the songs very challenging.

Defying Gravity is difficult, Gethsemane is difficult, Take Me, Baby, Or Leave Me, is difficult, Aldonza‘s song is difficult, I Am What I What I Am, same. There are many more. Rose’s Turn is a killer. Don’t Rain On My Parade, likewise. I could go one, but you get the point.

Of course, if you don’t do them the way they were originally intended by the composer to be sung, and you just sing them however you do, then they could be really easy, but they would be WRONG. Doing the song however you please because you are you doesn’t work. If you are a highly skilled vocalist, the songs might be easy for you, but not for everyone, and that matters.

There are no books of graded songs for music theater like there are for classical repertoire, although some books do give songs for young people. Those books, however, are not looking at the songs as being necessarily easier, just age appropriate. Someone will come up with a book like that one day, and make a lot of money. In the meantime, if you assign songs to students, be sure you understand what’s hard and why, because if you do not you will blame the student for not being good enough or trying hard enough and that would be tragic.