Various Posts

Eleven years ago I did my first Somatic Voicework™ training. At that time I was teaching alone and did not know how my work would be received by others. Since that time it has grown and now many people have participated in the courses, at Shenandoah during the full summer CCM Institute and at the other institutions where Level I training is offered: The University of Michigan Ann Arbor, The University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, The University of Central Oklahoma, Edmond and now at City College of New York this coming weekend. It has been amazing to me to see this work go out into the world and be useful to others. I had no idea that I would ever train teachers nor did I ever envision an Institute of any kind anywhere.

I have found that many of the people who have gone through the certification courses have been interested in deepening their knowledge of the principles of the work and have stayed in touch with me and with the training over time. Some of them have become very knowledgeable about it and are working with it as their primary mode of teaching singing. We have an association of teachers of Somatic Voicework™ now and will be building our community through various other activities over time.

I am now faced with the unfortunate situation of realizing that there are individuals who have gone through the three day Level I course, and only that course, and are using Somatic Voicework™ on their resume and on their websites as a way to tell others that they have been certified (which is true) and that they use the work, but they have had no further contact with me, with anyone else who is secure in the method and have not had any further training beyond that first level. Word has gotten back to me that some of those people are saying things under the banner of Somatic Voicework™ that I would absolutely never say, not to anyone, and would never want anyone else to say, under my banner or not, to a student of singing. This is true of others who have gone through Level II and Level III as well, which is unfortunate.

So, if you are someone who has taken the training and you have not had any contact me with, with the Institute through Post Certificate trainings, with a Somatic Voicework™ faculty teacher anywhere, and do not participate in the chat room, and if you are most particularly only a Level I grad, please know that I want you to finish the levels as soon as possible and stay in touch with me. Very soon, we are going to make that a requirement and in order to keep using the logo and claiming to teach Somatic Voicework™ it will be necessary to stay in touch in some significant but as yet undetermined manner.

If you are someone who reads this blog and you encounter a teacher who is a Somatic Voicework™ teacher, understand that I can’t at this time guarantee that the person is actually teaching Somatic Voicework™ in any recognizable way.

Just generally, if you take someone’s work into your own life and make it your own, in my opinion, you have an obligation to honor that work by following it as closely as you can. Unless you are very very unusual, you won’t know if you are doing that until and unless you check in now and then to find out. That goes not just for me but for anyone’s work.

There really isn’t anything that’s as beautiful as a human voice singing sincerely with no outside help. It is stunning to hear such singing and these days, all too rare.

We hear voices with so much help from electronics that we forget what it’s like to hear someone sing really well, at a professional level, spontaneously, with feeling. But it’s not that such people don’t exist, they do. It’s simply that the people pulling the strings in the music business aren’t much interested in them.

The music business is dominated by men. Producers, musicians, arrangers, managers, music directors are more likely than not to be male. It’s not that there are no women, but they are more likely to be artists and not to be in a position of power. The only exception to that would be those women who have succeeded on their own and have made their own production companies. They call their own shots.

It really isn’t possible to know what this does to the output we see and hear as “music” but I wonder how different things would be if the music business were dominated instead by women. Would pop music still be dominated by young women who are mostly screaming or being breathy and “baby” voiced? Would the dances you see in the big pop singers’ production numbers feature woman dancing in highly suggestive clothing making moves that would have been considered, years ago, as absolutely obscene.

I’m no prude, and I appreciate the young and beautiful just as much as anyone else, but sometimes the line between what is “sexy” and what is disgusting is hard to find. When a woman dances in multiple moves in which she spreads her legs wide apart while directly facing the audience — clothed or not — you have to wonder — would another woman ask for those moves?

I am a product of the 60s and we were the people who went naked at Woodstock, folks.  We were the generation of “let it all hang out”, so I am not hung up on propriety, but I have a problem with how female singers are presented because simple singing in simply talented singers isn’t enough. It could be argued that the men are making suggestive moves, too, since Michael Jackson was famous for, among other things, grabbing his own crotch, but none of these fancy maneuvers have anything to do with singing, and none of the men are dressed in their underwear.

Show business is the business of entertainment, yes. Singing is part of the entertainment industry, yes. But singing, plain and simple, ought to get a bit more attention in show business than it does.

If you go to YouTube and you look up any old TV variety show where singers came out and sang with some kind of musical accompaniment, and there are lots of examples of that, you will see that the vocalists sang and then left. There might have been a simple set, maybe there was some kind of back-up group, but not much else. You got to hear the voice, you got to see the face, you got to hear the song. I sometimes crave this and I don’t think it’s what you get in the auditions of American Idol, since the germ of what it means to sing simply is so much missing in the young people who are the auditioners. I don’t think Aretha Franklin or Barbra Streisand would ever have been able, or would have wanted, to do the things that Rihanna, Beyonce or Jennifer Lopez do in their shows, and if they were on the scene today, would they have careers at all if that were the case? And who are we missing now because they might object to the things I’m mentioning here?

We can’t go back. We can’t capture what we might once have had. I don’t know what will happen in the future as we go forward but I do hope that we find a way to leave singers alone and let women go back to being woman and not sex toys on stage. I know, don’t hold my breath, but I can dream, can’t I?

We talk about the singing voice and the speaking voice as if they are separate when we realize that we only have one larynx, one set of vocal folds and one throat. Why? Because we do not experience singing in the same way that we experience speech and that has to do with what happens in the brain.

The musical part of the brain is in a different location than the part that houses the lyrics. That’s why you can end up with “doo bee doo bee doo” while the melody just keeps going. Scientists are just beginning to address what goes on between these two sections in the brain (Oliver Sacks’ book, “Musicophilia” is fascinating on this topic*).

It is possible, over time, to develop a great deal of awareness over the process of singing in very precise detail. It is possible to develop a capacity to feel things that are not supposed to be easily felt and to perceive things at a level of awareness that most people could not imagine. This kind of perception actually becomes quite possible in skilled singers who are looking to develop it. It does not just “arrive” because you sing, however, no matter how long you do.

There are probably infinite ways to perceive things like singing, given that the mind is not limited. In addition to gross movements like how much the jaw is open or how the lips are shaped, it is possible to perceive small changes in kinesthetic things and also in the sounds as they are emerging. It is also possible to be aware of the body and what it is doing while singing and of your emotions as you are experiencing them while performing a song. It is possible to be aware of all these things and more simultaneously but without self-consciousness. It is possible to “ride on top of them” with just a mere wisp of awareness, knowing they are there but leaving them alone to be as they are.

Given that most training is externally driven…that is, goal oriented, it isn’t common for the training process to produce deep awareness of any kind. In Somatic Voicework™, however, we strive for a unity of the throat, the body, and the mind, because without that it is impossible to be an artist who can freely create through her singing. Somatic Voicework™ is a process-oriented teaching method. It gets to the goals through presenting a process. Learning this way is slower, but more effective in the long haul because once you learn it, whatever it is, you never forget what you’ve learned and that’s because it is taken in through so many senses and with so much perception that the complete experience is vivid, clear and accessible.

*musicophilia.com/

In order to learn to sing the person studying needs to grapple with the process in a large way. Some people have trouble doing that. They can’t connect the dots.

I have encountered this several times over the decades. The person seems only able to hang on to what happens in the lesson during the lesson. They are unable to go home and practice, keeping current skills while adding new ones. It’s as if they forget as fast as they learn.

Being able to relate one thing to another and make a “personal grid” for vocal training is necessary if the technical work is to be meaningful. If all the student does is run through the exercises, like a robot, then any exercises that aren’t flat out ridiculous, presented by anyone in any way, would be the same. It’s as if they view learning to sing in a literal way like going to the gym and running through the machines there. But at the gym, they tell you which machines do what. Then, if you just work it, it will do its job and you will get more muscle tone. Singing works that way too, but it doesn’t make the singing conscious or deliberate and your singing will be as mindless as your  use of some musical patterns on vowels.

Even talented, professional people can’t grasp the system as a system. They cannot relate one mechanical function or response to another. They are willing to be guided around, they are willing for the teacher to “fix” them in a lesson, they are willing to be “corrected” and even to record the session, but if you ask them to warm up on their own with some semblance of order, they can’t. The either can’t or won’t try to understand how things relate to each other, or how the voice works overall.

I’m not talking about beginners here. Obviously a beginner is going to be confused for a while. I’m talking about people who are working professionals with decent ability and a reasonable amount of time (a couple of years, minimum) of more or less consistent training. Couple this with an explanation given by the teacher of what the exercise is for, what it is doing and why, and you would think the mind of the student could track things more cohesively, but it’s not so uncommon for the student to be unable to do that well.

If you have a student that calls forth from you over and over again the same correction of the same problem, and you can correct it in the lesson but they cannot correct it on their own away from your studio, you have encountered someone who can’t connect the dots. Worse, even if you connect the dots for them in the lesson, often, when they leave, they don’t remember what you’ve said, even if they have recorded it.

This kind of person, after a while, needs to be confronted with becoming an adult in terms of taking responsibility for his or her own vocal capacities. Some people just plain resist that step and spent their whole entire professional life going from teacher to teacher looking for the one that will give them the “magic bullet”. That is easier for them to do than actually figuring things out for themselves, step by step, over time.

If you have a student like this, and you have worked with them consistently for at least two years, and they keep going over the same information with you, either you have to confront this with them or you will end up being frustrated. Don’t waste your time on people who refuse to integrate what you are teaching.

The point of understanding vocal function is to also understand how to apply it in a useful, simple, easy and precise way to vocal production. Otherwise it is just more words that are no better than “place the tone in your eyebrows” or “support the sound from your diaphragm”.

In order to apply functional exercises you have to hear vocal function and see physical behavior (unless you are a medical doctor who has a scope to look inside the throat). That means that your ears have to become very sharp and that you have to have a specific intention for your listening as you listen.

Anchoring listening in registration is the first place to begin to perceive function. Beginning teachers have to learn to listen this way. Register quality is generally very discernible but only after you are used to it. In rare cases it can be camouflaged by the vowel sound or by volume extremes, but the more experience you have as a skilled listener, the better you will become in distinguishing the register quality for itself.

Further, when you can do that, it will be much simpler to hear what is not registration and that allows you to figure out where and how vowels become distorted, pitch goes astray, breathing isn’t grounded in the body and a host of other things. When you get a balance of registration across the break (see previous posts) and the vowels are not distorted, the volume is regulated by steady exhalation pressure and you still have “problems”, you can start to assume that the issues might be at the level of the vocal folds. In other words you will hear possible vocal pathology as being distinct from vocal mechanics. If you get that far as a teacher, you can consider that your skills are becoming more expert.

However, if all you can do it hear what’s wrong and you do not know what to do about addressing it, then you have only gone 50% of the way to helping the student improve her singing. You must know how to configure a vocal (music) exercise, choosing a pitch range, a volume (from pp to ff), and a vowel sound on a musical pattern in order to get from point A to point B. If you only guess at these exercises, you can be in the right ballpark but waste a lot of time. If you have a pretty good idea of what you want to  impact and a pretty good idea at what kind of exercise will get you there, you can save time and help the student experience results without excess struggle or effort, at least most of the time.

These skills, needed by every teacher of singing, are not easy to acquire and some people never develop them. They gather a lot of intellectual information, they learn a bunch of things about music, voice and science, but they fail when it comes to the art of teaching and the bridge between that which is grounded in physical function and that which comes from the heart. The point of vocal technique skills is to marry the response of the voice and body to the imagination of the mind and the feelings of the singer. A teacher who can do that is a true teacher, and an artist. The first desire you must have if you would reach this goal is to get there.

I have configured Level II to give you tools to do this work. If you want to get better, please use them.

Is a mezzo-soprano automatically a belter?

You would think so, since many times the words are used interchangeably. It is possible that someone who is a classical mezzo soprano could also belt. But it is even more likely that a classical mezzo would have no clue about how to belt. You wouldn’t know unless you asked the individual woman.

Yet these two terms are used interchangebly by teachers because the only thing being considered when examining the role is pitch range. If it’s not too high, it is thought to be “mezzo” territory. This kind of fuzzy headed thinking is the result of being outside the community of people in the real world who are actually either mezzos, or belters, or belters who are also mezzos — three different categories.

Lack of specificity of terminology is a chronic weakness in the profession of teaching singing. It has been so since the beginning of organized pedagogy and does not seem to be diminishing as we have more science to support us, which is disheartening. Words are created, tossed around, used carelessly and without any anchoring to an objective base from which there can be general agreement. Words based upon subjective imagery and personal experience alone do not help communicate anything to others unless they are accompanied by many other words and, usually, an out-loud demonstration.

No profession that is a serious one uses terminology with such abandon. Medicine, law, hard science like chemistry and biology, architecture, nursing, speech language pathology, and many more, all have agreed upon terminology (at least in a basic sense) that are used in the profession by all members in it. No so for teachers of singing. It says a lot about our own fears, lack of willingness to give up our personal ego territory and our incapability to organize ourselves in a powerful, useful way. NATS, after all, is a completely toothless organization that does nothing but offer workshops and conferences, some competitions, and publish a journal. It certainly a long ways away from the AMA or the Bar Association or even from ASHA.

If you present or write about music theater, be careful how you present your materials. It’s true that the belter role and the mezzo role in “Most Happy Fella” are both designated as mezzo sopranos but one was a belter and one was a classical singer. You needed to know the show to know that. If you do not know the show and were to go only by the pitch range, you might assume the roles could be sung by the same singer and you would be wrong.

In singing there are the people who care and those who don’t. Believe it or not, some of the singers themselves are in the category of not caring. I remember hearing that Grace Slick of Jefferson Starship had at least 7 operations to remove vocal nodules and thought that was just fine. This was just a rumor, no proof, but I always wondered. Could someone actually feel that way?

I have heard that some vocalists like having nodules, because it gives their voices “character”. If they can sing well anyway, I guess it’s a personal choice. Not one I would make, however.

There are people who feel that being continuously hoarse and scratchy is some kind of badge of honor. It shows that they are “honest” singers who “feel deeply”. Well, maybe to them.

There are the singers who don’t want to pay attention to “technique” lest it interfere with their “uniqueness”. Too bad. That is just an ignorant idea. There are others who don’t even know what technique is, since they have never encountered any kind of training.

If we look at the people who interface with singers, then we encounter an entire new group of people who have different versions of not caring. There are coaches who don’t understand vocal production and ask for stupid or even dangerous things from singers. This is awful if the singer is a novice. There are producers who want a “certain effect” in the recording studio and don’t care how the singer gets it. This would typically be men who “think they know” but actually don’t. (Simon Cowell and Randy Jackson, are you listening?) There are musicians who work with singers who just don’t like singers and have a condescending attitude towards them. They can play too loudly, or play in a key the vocalist may not be able to manage (but won’t object to if she needs the job). They make nasty remarks about the singing creating a lousy atmosphere for the artist in which to sing.

And, sadly, there are the singing teachers who only care about their own egos. I know of a well known teacher here in New York City who insists that his students call him “professor” even though he isn’t one and has never been one…..at a college, in a bona fide program. This is a man who has never belted or sung any kind of CCM but teaches people who do and I can only imagine what that’s like. There are the teachers who only care that the student learn their version of things, no matter whether it fits their needs or not. All sorts of people involved with singers and singing don’t care about either.

Of course, thankfully, there are many people who DO care, and we must be very grateful for them. These are the people who, in each discipline, are doing whatever they can to help singers from beginners to advanced professionals stay healthy and safe, be happy with their singing and be able to sing whatever they need to perform. There are singers who care about their voices and their vocal health, about their artistic output and about their long term artistic development as vocal artists. There are musicians, coaches, producers and many others who are interested in the highest and best values of all things that support singers in every area of their lives.

If you are a singer, look for the people that care, and in your own singing, care about your voice, your artistic product and your long term vocal well-being. Care about your colleagues and about the music you sing. Act as if it all mattered because it does. Live those values every day and much of what you need in your singing will come to you. Don’t settle for less.