Various Posts

Western thought is geared towards getting results, frequently at any cost. There’s something to be said for that, of course. Eastern thought, however, teaches us that getting the process right produces the result anyway, sometimes in a much better manner than “going for the goal”.

It’s quite hard for Americans, in particular, to wrap their heads around waiting for something. We always want everything right now. A physical skill, however, takes time to develop and singing is a physical skill before it is an art. You simply cannot rush the process, however much you would like it to go fast.

This can be an obstacle in the young because the tech world does operate at a fast clip and they are used to one second or less visual stimulus on the computer and in other media. They understand getting things done in a hurry. They often have trouble with going slow and being patient.

Learning to sing is a complex process when done well. It requires all manner of coordination and awareness, knowledge and information and even talented people need to find things out for themselves over time. Rushing to get to a certain kind of sound before you even have a chance to see if that sound is right or good for your voice is a mistake, but it is typical of the training process here in the USA.

Observation of results is a typical method of study. What result did we get in this process? If we get this result, then we will be OK. Or not. If I observe that classical singers seem to sing with the position of the larynx slightly dropped in the throat, particularly on softer higher notes, then this must be the best position and, if I make my larynx go to and stay in this position, then I will be ahead of the game by doing so. Right? Not right.

If I notice that certain singers are able to go up very high and loud and really wail away and I see that they sound shouty and piercing and maybe their necks bulge out, then it stands to reason that if I can get may own throat to look like that and my sound to be like that too, then I will be doing the right thing and get the best result, the one I want. Nope.

And if I know that I have to make a lot of sound in order to carry over a big fat orchestra conducted by someone who doesn’t much like singers so he lets the musicians play as loud as they want all the time, then the best way for me to get my voice to do a good job would be to push like crazy on my belly muscles while singing and drive the sound towards my nose. That way, I wouldn’t have to worry about them drowning me out. Well, kinda.

If I gave you more examples, they would be the same. Just because we observe something doesn’t mean it’s right or true or best. It doesn’t really mean anything because the context in which the activity takes place matters. Maybe the person singing has a different voice than you do or a different kind of body. Maybe the person grew up singing the sounds you like but you’ve never made them, or anything like them, before. Maybe the behavior that you observe in the singing is second nature to that person but it is far away from second nature to you.

If you understand the mechanics of singing, that is, how we make sound in the first place, you can learn to observe yourself as you study and see what works and what doesn’t. If you have a good teacher, she will acknowledge what gifts you have (the easy things) and point out the work you have to do on the things that don’t come just naturally. It might be that those things are really different than what they were for her when she was studying and if she had a broad knowledge of singing, then she would know what you need and not just teach you what she had needed whether it applied to you or not.

Process oriented training takes longer and maybe isn’t as glamorous in the moments when it seems like you aren’t really “getting there” but if you don’t rush, if you take time to absorb, experiment, listen, explore, examine, question, try and maybe even fail a bit here and there, what you learn will stick. It will be yours forever and it will be appropriate. You do need to know what the goal is and you have to want to get to it, but you don’t need to put the goal over the process of getting there. If you do that, in the end you will pay a much dearer price than you need to reach your desired end, and take it from me, it’s never worth it.

Did you know the music business is shrinking? You wouldn’t think so from watching the Grammy’s, Glee, Smash, American Idol, X Factor, The Voice, and the Ted Mack’s Amateur Hour, would you?

The truth is, the music business is not what it was for all sorts of reasons. People don’t need to buy CDs anymore, so they don’t. The people who would buy them (old folks) can’t, because the stores that sell them are, for all intensive purposes, gone. The machines that you play CDs on are also no longer available. What you have has to last because when it goes, good luck trying to replace it. It is soon to go the way of the cassette player. (Dad, what’s a cassette?)

If you want music you can go to Amazon or iTunes and purchase it for a price much cheaper than the CDs had gotten to be in their heyday. The artists don’t get much money (unless they produce their own music, in which case they are pretty much unknowns and don’t have many sales), even though the big fuss a decade ago was how Napster was “robbing” all the artists of their “livelihoods”. Sony, break my heart! Even touring is getting very costly, except for the dozen or so megastars who can sell out huge houses at high prices. Mostly, folks don’t tour because it doesn’t make much money.

Young people are exposed to very little by way of music if all they listen to is the top 40 stations and the internet. Without musically literate parents who have some influence over their children’s exposure to and interest in the kind of music they hear (how likely is that?) the only music the kids hear is pop, R&B, rock, rap and maybe some alternative stuff. No folk music, certainly not of the protest variety, no show tunes, no jazz, no classical, no comedy songs (if you are old enough to remember “Purple People Eater” you will know what I mean).

Classical music is struggling. Opera stays alive because of the deep pockets of the few people who donate money to keep it going. The idea that you can pull in young people by featuring modern works and modern approaches isn’t doing very well. The idea that you pull in directors from TV, Hollywood and theater, whether they know opera or not, and you commission all manner of composers, even if they have never written a classical song in their lives, to “freshen up” opera, has been a failure, for the most part. The people at the top do not want to hear that people DON’T LIKE this stuff. They keep waiting for the magic bullet of “newness” that never comes. This problem, after all, is 30 years old and counting. Hello, Met Opera? Are you listening? Get people who sing really well, with emotional conviction, and keep the productions in the realm of SANITY. Spend oodles of money on audience education and get into the schools. Hello, NY Phil? Find some WOMEN composers, find some people who like to write using MELODIES and HARMONIES, like, you know, in the old days. How bad would that be, really? If it filled all your subscription seats? Tunes, Mr. Gilbert. Hummable tunes.

How does all this effect the number of students turned out every year with bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral programs in music or voice in the colleges each year? Not at all. They don’t do a “market watch”. A lot of the time the kids are interested in fame, not in skill, and in glamour, not in artistry. There are enough of them out there that at least a few of them get hired and succeed. Over time, it pulls whatever expectations there may have been about quality down. Sadly, there’s hardly anyone in the audience to notice!

The further away we get from singing in day to day life, for fun, for personal enjoyment, for communion with others, the more we forget what it’s like to sing from a natural, spontaneous, joyful place. In return for this loss, we look outside to others in the world to do our singing for us. We want singing to be special, exciting, different, amazing, stupendous, spectacular. In order for it to live there, it has to be enhanced, manufactured, produced, manipulated, stretched, squeezed and doctored up and the  people who sing it have to do the same things to their own voices in order to have “star quality”. Doesn’t have much to do with being human or with the human condition? Doesn’t have much to do with the power of music to heal us when we make it with our own bodies.

All this is killing the music business, whether we admit it or not. It’s also killing us.

The people who believe that “it’s all the same”, you just sing however you do in whatever style you are in are still out there. The people who say that it doesn’t matter if you have ever sung, good or bad, you can still teach are out there as well. The folks who say that singing is all about breathing or all about placement/resonance  are around as well. Those who would simplify everything are not new to this world.

We also have the people who teach who make singing so complicated that you can barely manage it. They have so many “things to do” and so many “ways to make sound” that it can take decades just to figure out their approach. To some, there is a glamour in learning a method that is extremely complicated, even if it doesn’t always make sense.

Of course, there are people who give the entire process no thought at all. There are people who relegate singing to the back burner. If they sing professionally (and they do) they only think about singing when they are in trouble and then only long enough for someone to give them help enough to get back to what they were doing. Hopefully, they don’t teach.

There are the people who have a very fixed idea of what’s right and good and what kind of sounds are “allowed” versus those that are not. There are people who only like a certain kind of voice category or only want to listen to one kind of style. They base these categories on their personal taste and nothing else.

There are the folks with lots of “merchandize” who will sell you their tapes, CDs, books, exercises, T-shirts, coffee cups and pens. They will give you “the keys to vocal success” in six, eight, or maybe 10 sessions. They will teach you to sing via osmosis, since they never hear you or watch you sing. That’s really magic.

If you wish to be in one of the groups described above, you probably don’t want to read this blog. The purpose of this blog is to write for those who love singing and who respect it. It is for those who understand it and who want to dig into it deeply. It is for people who are interested in all kinds of music and a wide range of vocal behaviors. It is written to provoke thought about the entire process from every aspect from mechanics to spiritual implications.

In relationship to singing, there are many roads to Rome but the roads need to get you there, not keep you wandering around. This is not, actually, an idea that everyone shares.

Young people are still in a situation where they must gather information about singing slowly, since there are no guidebooks or maps that give you a good overview. Each singer is still pretty much on his or her own in finding a way to be with singing that works for him or her in life.

It’s only through open discussion of ideas and exchange of information that singing will become more available in a viable and practical manner to those who seek it and who wish to remain comfortable with it for all of their lives.

In a perfect world, we would all care about each other and the earth. We would all help each other and live in peace. In a perfect world, no one would be mean or selfish, greedy or arrogant, stupid or cowardly.

Guess we don’t live in a perfect world yet.

It takes an enormous amount of energy to think of others before you think of yourself, but many people are taught to do that and spend some considerable amount of time trying to make it happen. The rest of the world, however, may never have had even an inkling of that philosophy, and is quite happy to take care of number one first last and always. In fact, they often come to rule the world, those folks.

Mohammed Ali, the boxer, used to say, “I’m the greatest. I’m the greatest.” Initially, it turned a lot of people off, as in those days, people didn’t dare say things like that about themselves, at least in public. In the end, he was voted “Athlete of the Century” by the sports editors of the world in 2000. After so  many years, he convinced people he was correct all along. Unfortunately, he is now suffering from decades of being beaten in the head, and is limited in his ability to function normally.

Maybe if Mr. Ali had known all those years ago that being the greatest was going to cost him in the end, he might have thought differently about it. Sometimes not knowing the price you will have to pay down the road is a burden in hiding. It jumps out and bites you when you think you have finally gotten to a place of safety and rest.

The people in this world who strive to be “great”, who strive to do things as excellently as they can, who seek out the pinnacle rather than accept the ordinary, often pay a high price for their success or even their attempts at it. Singers who work hard to develop excellent technique, to keep it up, to choose repertoire and gigs carefully, to maintain their physical and vocal health and pace themselves for decades might still end up with vocal health problems, simply because of all the attention their voice has  demanded and received. Teachers who work within the professional associations for free, who dedicate a portion of their time to conferences and congresses, who take positions on Boards of Directors or as officers of the associations, are trying to do things that benefit the professional at large. They do this for free, on their own free time, and often get no recognition for it at all. Why bother, we could wonder. Is it for the good of the group or just a way to spend time? Hard to say.

It can be very tiring to take care of a career or of the fruits of a career. It can be draining just to keep on keeping on. Office workers can retire. Artists just keep going and going and going until they drop. It gets even more wearying if there are outside obstacles that intefere with other aspects of your life. That there are singers who have been able to keep singing for 25, 30, 40 or even 50 years, at a high level, is utterly amazing.

That’s why it’s a good thing to rest along the way. It’s a good thing to stop once in a while and take time out to smell the flowers. It is a beneficial thing to say “no” to gigs now and then and to stop performing or practicing and just be a person. Remember that your singing and your art are supposed to fill you up and give you energy not drain it all away. If that happens, you are not taking good care of yourself or of your voice and sooner or later that will catch up with you. You don’t have to strive to be “the greatest”, or even the “greatest you”. You can rest, you can wait, you can take it easy, you can be ordinary.

Just because we don’t live in a perfect world doesn’t mean you have to let it beat you down. Don’t worry about being “the greatest”. Wonder instead what will happen if you get there and it turns out not  to be at all what it was supposed to be.

I want to ask the folks who read this blog, how often do you get out to see and hear live vocalists? If you are in a small town, are there performances that you can attend of different kinds of singing? Do you ever hear anyone sing who is not amplified? Have you ever been to the Metropolitan Opera or a major Broadway show in New York?

I think sometimes that people who teach singing and people who sing or aspire to have only heard music from the Top 40 radio stations for most of their lives. They listen to music through headphones or in the car. If they go to church they might hear a good soloist, but not necessarily, and these days all church music is amplified, so that’s a specific kind of sound.

A few years ago a young woman came to me for lessons. She said she had a degree in music theater from a local college. She said she was thinking of applying to Juilliard for her master’s degree.

Her vocal technique was a mess. She had no real idea of how to sing traditional music theater songs nor the contemporary pop/rock ones. She did have a very nice voice and had a sort of “legit-ish” head register on her high notes. What she knew about vocal production and breathing you could write on the proverbial head of a pin.

When I asked her what classical music she had studied in college she said “Ave Maria” and that she had also once sung “My Favorite Things” from Sound of Music. She had never sung an art song and did not know what an art song was. She had no language skills and was not able to execute a consistent classical sound in any pitch range on any vowel at any volume. Nevertheless, she was going to apply to Juilliard.

I had to wonder what she did in her four years at college working on “music theater”. Was there anyone on faculty who even had a clue? The entire event reminded me of how little actual music education most people have and how the consequences of that are a complete lack of musical sophistication. The bar falls lower and lower as fewer people are taught music education in schools and as teachers are further and further away from any grounding in classical vocal repertoire. This is true also of music theater, particularly American music theater. Except for doing a “school musical” my guess is that no musicals are studied in any curriculum of K-12 school, unless it is a special one with unique programs. It makes sense then that no one really knows what’s good or bad, what should be there and what should not, what makes up certain kinds of musical and vocal criteria and what does not.

We live in a time when there are greater resources available to audiences than at any other time in history. One no longer has to go to a live performance to hear singing or to the library to borrow an LP or to the record store to purchase one. We can find any kind of singing or music on the internet and purchase most of it within minutes. We can see and hear just about anything if we look hard enough. The one thing that we can’t do is create more opportunities to attend live performances of high quality. If you almost never see a high level vocalist in live performance you can’t substitute a recorded version and think that it is the same.

It’s up to us to be sure we not only attend live performances of vocal music but that we keep up the pressure on communities to make sure that venues for live singing are available. It’s up to us to be sure that our schools have music education and that the teachers in our school have something valid to teach.  If we do not do this then we must bear some responsbility for universities allowing young people to graduate with a degree in something without having any credible information to back up the piece of paper.

The medical profession is bound by all kinds of legalities and protocol. Doctors have to be very careful in how they treat patients and how they record that treatment. They have to operate under the possiblity that anything could go wrong and that they might have to justify their treatments in a law suit, perhaps years after the fact of seeing the patient. They have to take care with what they say and how they say it and know what the medication they administer can do. There are so many restrictions, it’s amazing that doctors have room to function.

Often, they don’t spend a lot of time with patients. If they are busy, they need to see as many people as possible who need their care. It costs a lot to run a medical practice and you need patients to help pay the bills. Also, you want to help the most people you can, so seeing each person for less time would help you do that.

After a certain amount of years in practice, most doctors have seen the typical problems hundreds, maybe thousands of times. They dispense their care with integrity but they do not necessarily need to dwell upon their diagnoses for lengthy amounts of time. Occasionally, when something unusual shows up, or when the situation presented is complex, their attention and their interest might increase. It can be a challenge to address things that you don’t see every day.

So, in a difficult case, is it ethical to keep probing to get an answer to a patient’s problem by ordering test after test after test, even when the tests do not reveal anything definitive? Is it the best policy to tell the patient to get a second opinion or to undergo exploratory procedures which may be dangerous or even life threatening? Is it in the patient’s best interest to probe and poke until you find something that can be described, no matter what the cost in dollars and in discomfort, disruption and pain?

I wouldn’t presume to answer these questions as I do not know about medical ethics. I see that these issues are challenging and the medical profession has its own strict guidelines about what is and is not accepted protocol. From a moral point of view, there is perhaps leeway to discuss an individual doctor’s choice about how to best serve the patient, and certainly there is descretion in what kinds of treatments to offer, depending on the expertise and experience of any individual expert. Again, the overarching protocol of the profession itself helps shape these choices.

If you attempt to look at teaching singing as if it might relate to the medical profession (or any other licensed profession) seeking guidelines, you will find the principles do not align easily.  All of the three American singing teaching organizations (NATS, NYSTA, AATS) have a “Code of Ethics” but no one pays any attention to them and no one ever gets called out for a breach of ethics, so these codes are effectively useless. There are no boards to enforce ethics, no watchdog groups to advise or judge the behavior of teachers. In fact, there isn’t one single thing about teaching singing that could relate to the principles that guide doctors (or almost any other profession).

There are no “consumer rights organizations” for students of singing at a college or in a private practice, either. There is no one to say “Be careful, this teacher has been sanctioned for harming a student’s voice”. There are no groups to do the sanctioning. There is no one to tell you what to expect in singing lessons. The only way to know is to take some and see what happens when you do.

There are no discussions at national conferences about what kind of behavior on the part of a teacher of singing is considered ethical. There are no panels about what should be manitory in singing lessons. There are no clear cut ideas about what during the process of studying singing would be useful or good.

I find this, still, after all these years, utterly amazing.

I recently saw a master class in which a famous classical teacher was working with a young mezzo soprano. This man has doctoral degree and a university position.

It was clear that he wanted the student to make a specific sound in a specific way. She was expected to get this sound and was doing her best to get there. He was pulling her along very energetically.

To me, however, it seemed like he had her on a road that had no turns, swerves, upgrades or valleys. It seemed like the destination was already on the map and that he was taking her there because he takes all his students to this same base of operations. It struck me that the sound he wanted wasn’t the sound that matched up with her very pleasant speaking voice.

I asked him, “Do you have in your mind beforehand an expectation of what your student should sound like?” His reply was “Yes. Absolutely. I consider it my responsibility.”

Oh.

I don’t have that attitude at all. I have the attitude that my students’ voices should operate from a functionally free place, in balance, going towards personal expression and uniqueness, communicaton and authenticity. Typically it takes not less than two years of consistent hard work by me and the student to begin to get there. This is in concert with experts like Vennard and Brown and has strong roots in classical vocal pedagogy from the earliest pedagogues as well. Never, at any point, do I decide ahead of time how a person “should” sound. We discover as time passes how they do sound and sometimes the changes that emerge are dramatic, dynamic, exciting and very surprising. I wouldn’t dare to presume that I “knew what was best” for the student’s voice before the singer even had a change to find out what the instrument wants to do or can do.

An open-ended system, in which there is no set goal, flies in the face of Western thinking. It is process-oriented rather than goal oriented and supposes the result will emerge in good time if you have as an intention a desire for it to do so. If the intention is to “see what the voice will do” in any given set of circumstances, that is often enough. Given enough time and diligent work, the singer’s heart will lead her towards the music she wants to sing and the ability to sing it, without sacrificing anything along the way.

For a singing teacher, having in mind the requisite requirements of musical styles is important, but that is different than having in mind how the student “should” sound. If you are in a college program that makes you train students to do art songs and arias in a juried context you really are under the gun to get a student to sing “professionally” as quickly as possible, particularly  if all you have is four years or perhaps six. This might necessitate “shaping” the voice to go where you think it probably ought to go as an educated guess. It might be so that most of the time these educated guesses are good and useful, but in the cases where they are not, the teacher runs the risk of “making” a young vocalist fit into a box that she might never leave. Inside, if she feels that her real voice is struggling to get out of that box, she could end up very depressed and unhappy, even if, “on the outside” she sounds completely acceptable and musically viable in her repertoire.

Asking questions, probing, exploring, playing, experimenting and waiting for growth is vital when working with someone who has a clear idea that he or she wants to be a professional singer. Trying things, technically, that stretch both the throat and the person, allows the singing psyche to grow and develop alongside the vocal mechanism, and gives the emerging artist time to evolve. While it may occasionally be possible to coax a prodigy into a high level performance mode in very little time, the vast majority of people who sing are not prodigies. Even very talented people need time and patience to  allow the full measure of their vocal artistry to flower.

“I Know What’s Best” is a very patriarchal attitude (if you are old enough, you will remember the 50s TV show, “Father Knows Best” which pointed out every week that he did not). We are not mini-gods knowing what’s best for everyone else. “Let’s See What Happens” is a much less domineering attitude and one that gives the student room to stop and look around during the training process.

Who you teach, where you teach, what you teach and how you view teaching is important. It makes up your world experience, your point of view about all things vocal and how you interact with it.

If you have only taught kids, or if you have only taught college students or if you only see adult beginners and non-professionals as students, you might draw certain conclusions about “singers” or “singing” based on that population. If you do not sing yourself, but teach some form of singing, what you see and hear, how you interpret those things and what you do with what you deduce will be filtered through that specific framework.

Many of the people who are at the top of the profession have only one kind of student as their primary clientele. If you are a college professor and you do not teach professional singers with lengthy careers, what you conclude about “singers” might be very different than what you would observe if all you taught was adult professionals at a place like the Met or on Broadway.

And, if you believe your teaching is representative of the expectations and standards of the profession but you don’t know any high level working singers to check on that belief, how do you know if you are correct in your assumption, particularly if you work alone?

It’s not unusual for a human being to (sometimes unconsciously) assume he or she is the center of the world. Particularly if you are an artist, this is a common reality. The artistic ego has to be big enough to withstand a huge amount of criticism, competition and condemnation not just at the beginning of a career but throughout it. Most average people have three, four, maybe five job interviews in a career and a few dozen “evaluations” in a job. A performer can have five auditions in only one day and hundreds or even thousands of “evaluations” (of all kinds) in a career. It takes a lot of self-esteem to stand up to that constant onslaught of having to prove or change oneself over and over.

An egocentric person will assume that she knows everything and that she is always right “because”. Teachers who assume they know everything because they have life experience or training are harboring a deadly attitude. It’s fine to believe in yourself, in fact, it’s necessary, and you have to have a solid center in your approach to teaching if you are to be effective, but you can never allow yourself to assume you are incapable of improvement, of being better, of making adjustments and changes or of being ineffective or just flat out wrong. You can never allow yourself to be the center of the universe.

If you teach in a small studio in your home in a small town, your population of students will be quite different than someone who teaches in a rented studio in a large city with many different kinds of singers, of all ages, most of whom are professionals. If you have a job at a university or conservatory you can have any kind of student from novice to very talented, but you will still be teaching primarily young people. You may not see a student for more than a semester or you may have the same student for several years. You may be able to choose repertoire for the student, but you might have requirements to deal with as well. If you have a student who is required to take your course you may have someone to teach who would rather be somewhere else, but if you are a private teacher you can be fairly certain the student wants to be there because if they do not they can leave and never return. There are so many differences. There are so many influences.

Each of these states of being of teaching singing has an impact on who we are as teachers and how we operate with our students. It shapes us and we react to that shaping. The students inform not just the teacher but the teaching and it is crucial for every teacher to know this and deal with it as long as the teaching happens.

As a profession, we never speak about any of these things. They are completely invisible. Why should that be so? I think it’s because people would have to ask these kinds of questions just to get the conversation started.

Our expectations, whether we are in the city or the country, are fed by our experiences and our experiences are colored by our expectations and our past history. They feed each other. If we don’t look at the underlying attitudes, beliefs, thoughts, viewpoints and assumptions we have, both individually and collectively, it’s nearly impossible to make objective assessment of how effective we are. Whether you are a city mouse or a country mouse makes a difference in your teaching and you need to know that and take responsibility for it as you teach.

Non-classical styles. That term existed since the get-go until 2000 when I called for its end. The new term I suggested, Contemporary Commercial Music, was meant to call all of those styles together under one umbrella. They all come from the USA and have their roots in the common person. Classical music came from European aristocracy and nobility and from the church. Huge difference. Most of the CCM styles are about 100 to 125 years old or less. Classical music goes back to the 16th century or earlier, depending on when you start counting.

When we speak of “commercial theater” we are speaking of professional level theaters (as determined by the unions), that do professional shows, on Broadway and elsewhere. Producers, directors, music directors and others in show business (the business of doing shows) understand that they work in commercial theater. They consider themselves to be part of an artistic business. That has always been true.

Classical music can be “commercial”, too. Certainly when the first Three Tenors came along, they were very commercially successful. Opera on TV is a commercial success. It can certainly be that it makes money in the right circumstances. I suppose you could call it Commercial Classical Music. How’s that for making things even more contentious???

There are far fewer jobs for singers in classical music. The jobs for vocalists are to be found in the CCM styles…..many more of them. The educational system unfortunately turns out a new crop of classical singers every year. There are more graduates of classical vocal programs than there are jobs for even one graduating class.

What happens to all those young people with degrees in “applied voice”? Do they all get cast in operas or concerts? Do they all get to sing professionally as classical singers? I don’t have statistics, but my guess is that very few of them actually end up with careers as classical singers such that they can earn a decent living from singing. I imagine quite a few of them go back to school to get higher degrees or to enter another, perhaps related field, like teaching, conducting, composing or arranging.

We don’t have control over creating singing jobs. The marketplace isn’t really interested in promoting anything other than rock, pop, country and maybe R&B or gospel. We don’t really have major folk singers like Dylan or Baez coming down the pike anymore and we don’t have major vocalists in other fields like jazz becoming “household names” (although some few people do make it to a certain level of fame in the general public’s awareness). I don’t know if it’s lack of music education in the public schools (a lot of it is gone completely and what’s left is diminished in quantity and quality), or if it just lack of exposure (there are no sources on mainstream TV of other styles). It is certainly true that at a grass roots level there are just no paying jobs for musicians who are not well known. Wedding gigs, corporate gigs, maybe playing at the local bar, do pay, sometimes well, but even getting these kinds of jobs isn’t always easy. In the big cities there is a lot of competition. In the rural areas, there isn’t a lot of interest.

Looking at the divergence of the music business over the last century, CCM singers were part of the changing cultural landscape of the USA and of the world. Classical singing changed but by comparison, those changes were much smaller and less obvious. La Boheme sounds pretty much the same now as it did when it was first performed. The productions may change but what Puccini wrote does not.

The world has gone on. I would say that most of the classical vocal programs at the college level are operating out of the old model, expecting that singing will continue to remain the same as it has. The few universities that are addressing CCM styles understand that this isn’t true, but they have not yet let go of their need to prove their “validity” by hanging on to at least some vestige of classical training, even though no one really knows what classical training is or should be, anyway. In any case, the discrepancy between the number of jobs available anywhere in the marketplace for singers and the number of students who are prepared in college to go out and get them is enormous. That this is ignored by everyone is very interesting.

If anyone ever creates a school (not a university) that lets people get all the skills they need to become successful singers without having to bother taking other things they don’t need, that person could get very wealthy. Some day it might happen, and wouldn’t that shake things up!

What happens if you spend thousands of dollars and many years or decades training your voice only to discover that the training process you have invested in doesn’t work? What do you do?

Can you “untrain” yourself? (Yes, many have). Do you blame your teachers? (Maybe, it depends). Do you find yet another teacher or school? (Maybe). Do you train yourself? Do you stop singing? What do you do?

No one can tell you what to do if you find yourself in such circumstances but it certainly would be possible to feel totally disgusted about such a state of affairs. It could make you feel depressed, angry, despairing, frustrated, afraid, lost and confused or any number of other things.

Along the way it’s possible to go down a path that looked good initially but somehow went wrong when you weren’t paying attention. It can be that you had problems with your voice that were undiagnosed as functional issues at the beginning and that they got worse as the training got more intense. It can be that you developed problems by training to do things that were vocally too difficult too soon. It could be that you were asked to pay attention to things that were not important until they became dominant in your singing with negative results. There are all sorts of possibilities of how things can go wrong. Worse, you could be blamed for all these issues and you could believe those accusations.

As I have written here many times, there are no rules about singing, about training for singing, about performance, about vocal ability- no rules anywhere. There are expectations in each section of the profession (out in the world) and sometimes a completely different set of expectations in academia. Academia can be very removed from real world music marketplace values and parameters. It takes a long time to know what you don’t know, what the profession knows, how it works, where to look for what you need, and how to assess what you are “purchasing” in terms of vocal education. One of the reasons I write this blog is to help make more information about the profession available to people who seek it.

Voice science is very important. It should prevent people from going too far afield in terms of what they teach, but unfortunately, it is no protection. I know some teachers of singing who are very big names in the world of voice science/vocal pedagogy who do not themselves sing well, and do not know how to make the science apply to themselves in a way that serves their singing well. This does not bode well for their students. So, sadly, science doesn’t automatically help us. You have to know how to apply the principles of vocal function to singing such that it helps you sound good and feel good. It’s not automatic.

Singing with your thyroid cartilage tilted and your vocal folds stiff might give you a good sound, if you knew how to tilt your TC and stiffen your vocal folds. Me? I don’t know how to do that. I just know how to sing a firm head dominant tone. It might help you to sing with your larynx in a certain place (down, up, held, or position #2, or #3) and good for you if it does. Me? I don’t know where to put my larynx, I just know if the sound I’m singing is the sound I want and the sound that feels good and belongs in the music I’m singing. You might like singing with your arms hanging limply at your sides like wet spaghetti. Me? I move my arms, my body, and anything else that allows me to be honestly expressive. I don’t think about it, I just do what seems natural.

If you had training for singing that did not serve you well, regardless of what it was or where it took place, and you want to keep singing, dump the old habits and behaviors and give your throat a chance to find itself. If you aren’t happy with your singing for any reason at all, go out and find a way to recapture your happiness. It’s worth the search. If you don’t know what’s good or bad, right or wrong, and you feel lost, know that there is a community of people that will be there supporting you as you fix that. It’s the community of teachers and singers who use Somatic Voicework™. We welcome you. We know how you feel. Let go of that old, not so good training and find what makes you happy. It exists. All you have to do is reach out.