Various Posts

All of us who have been trained to sing, particularly in a university setting, were trained in some form of “classical pedagogy” because, until very very recently, that’s all there was. That classical training is very broad and uncodified is a topic I have addressed many times on this blog. Nevertheless, vocal training that was created hundreds of years ago to help people sing music written in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries may or may not have any useful bearing on rock, pop, jazz, folk, gospel, country or any other CCM style.

Still, I find over and over that those who have invested many years in learning German, French, Spanish, Russian, Italian and English art songs and numerous operatic, oratorio, and orchestral works are not, understandably, eager to just let that training sit on a bench while they examine other philosophies of vocal function and vocal training. It typically rankles those who have invested thousands of dollars and years of effort to be told that, now, they have to learn something brand new. The most common reaction is simply to add on the new ideas to the old ones, even if you have to bend the new ideas into an unrecognizable shape to do so.

It is for this reason that we are now hearing about “resonance strategies” and “formant tuning”. These are 21st century words to substitute for “placement” and “forward resonance”, which are rapidly becoming dinosaur descriptors. The new words deal with the exact same concepts, however, with scientists talking about how a certain tenor or mezzo will “move the second harmonic to come closer to the second formant”, as if that were something deliberate.

You will also hear people talking about “appoggia” in terms of breathing, as if this set of physical behaviors was a universal behavior that all singers should know. Do you think Kate Smith (who was an amazing vocalist) thought about using appoggia when she sang “God Bless America” and belted out that last “home”?

You will find teachers talking about belting as if it sourced out of classical singing. Since one of the roots of belting was the singing of slaves in their homeland and then later, here, in the USA, in the fields while they picked cotton, do these teachers think the singers were thinking of “masque resonance” or did they just find a sound that allowed them to be heard by their colleagues without wearing out their voices?

Why is it that we insist (and insist and insist) that CCM vocal pedagogy has to fit into classical pedagogy in order to give it validity? Why? It doesn’t need classical anything to be valid. It has validity on its own because it does.

Folk art and modern/pop art finally came into their own in the last 50 years. We have museums for modern art and for folk art here in New York City. Folk art is found in many cultures and is created by artisans who do not necessarily have formal training. It can be passed down from one person or one generation to another as tradition or developed as a form of self expression. Pop art, particularly as created by Andy Warhol and his contemporaries, was originally denigrated. Now, it’s worth millions of dollars and is found all over the world in collections of both private individuals and museums.

We do not need to make CCM vocal pedagogy fit into a classical mold. Doing so causes problems and muddies the water. We need to pay attention to things like language (how we explain things), accuracy of terminology (basing things, as much as possible, on voice science), how we work with a singer’s individual physical and vocal behavior (both learned patterns and unconscious responses).  We need to distinguish between what people need to do in order to sing music the way the music was (or is) meant to be sung and what they would do if they could sing in the way which was best for their own vocal well being and artistic authenticity. These are different things.

Enough. Let CCM styles alone. Leave the pedagogy developed to address CCM styles alone, letting it be whatever it is without negative judgement or need for justification. Enough.

I saw “The Hobbit” tonight at the movies. OK, as those kinds of movies go. Prior to it there were five trailers of upcoming films. All of them were full of violence, even in the short time of these teasers. There is a Disney film called “Jack The Giant Killer” which is just about as violent as the two films called “Oblivion” and “After Earth” both of which concern the remnants of the human race surviving some future doom and gloom. There is a new movie about “The Lone Ranger” coming with Johnny Depp as Tonto, but it surely doesn’t look anything like the 50s TV I grew up with! Of course, there was a ton of violence portrayed in the Hobbit, most of it computer generated. I would have been hard not to  notice that all of these films use violence and the portrayal of killing as a form of entertainment.

We all have come to accept violence in entertainment and in the media in general as being normal. We dare not question its presence lest we seem prudish or “up-tight”. No matter how graphic the violence, or how it is created (realistically or through computer animation) we think “that’s how it is”. We even purchase games that feature all manner of violent killing to while away our free time.

I, for one, do not go along with the idea that accepting any and all kinds of depiction of violence is just fine and dandy and that it has no effect on those who view it or participate in it. It isn’t great to watch mainstream TV for several hours and lose count of how many murders I’ve seen. Most of the cop shows feature serial killers who torture and rape their female victims and then murder them. Now, mostly, when I encounter these awful scenarios, many being very gruesomely enacted, I have to turn them off.

The old feminist in me doesn’t like this one bit. I can’t imagine that these shows are predominantly written, directed, produced or sponsored by other women. Perhaps they are involved, but when I can catch the credits, which fly by, I see a lot of male sounding first names. Perhaps this is coincidence. Perhaps. But then, that’s a different, although related, topic.

How has this to do with singing, you ask?

A lot of singing these days is violent. Women screaming at the top of their lungs in the loudest possible sound is a form of violence. It doesn’t represent the archetype of “feminine” in any way. The quintessential “female” quality of the voice and of singing is probably most commonly represented by what is called “celtic singing”. It could possibly also be found in Early Music but not a whole lot of other styles. Loud singing for loud singing’s sake is the name of the game in most styles, including classical. It has been true for several decades now that the singers with the “biggest” classical voices have the best chance at having a career. Angela Meade is a good example of someone with a truly beautiful voice who has no clue about emotional connection whatsoever to the music. Hasn’t hurt her career a bit.

Screamy singing, up to and including losing your voice as a badge of honor, is absolutely an aggressive  act. Singing in a raspy, ragged sound can be taken by both the vocalist and the audience as a sign that the singer is “giving it her all” or “not holding back in any way”. It would be very unusual for anyone to think “This kind of singing shouldn’t be necessary. It violates the integrity of the vocal folds and therefore the body, and therefore of my own being”. That would be a very odd thought indeed even though it is true.

It is so that strong emotional singing is possible in all voices, males and females. Woman can sing as powerfully as men and, conversely, men can sing as delicately and sweetly as women, when they choose to. Philosophically, however, as we live with more and more violence and justify its existence through many arguments, sooner or later singing will become part of the equation.

The next time you hear someone singing as loud, as high and as long as possible and you admire it, remember that the cost of such singing can be vocal fatigue, vocal strain and vocal injury. If this becomes the accepted daily cost of being a singer, something is wrong with the system and the people in the system who willingly go along with that cost.

I think quite often about the statements, “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.” It always makes me cringe, because I believe there is some truth there. How might this be so?

A lot depends on how you look at the statements and what your interpretation is.

If we speak of singing as a career, not many people get to become singers at a high enough professional level to make a decent and consistent living by singing. Many people try but not many people succeed. Those who do not achieve this goal might end up teaching because it is a way to stay in touch with singing rather than give it up entirely. That’s not so bad.

Another way of configuring these statements would be to imply that the people who sing in any public venue are successful, regardless of whether they make a living from singing or not. It’s possible to be successful at a local level and be highly regarded  as a vocalist, even if you are not paid to sing. However, you may not be much able to expand upon this success, or you may not be really interested in doing so. I would say that such singing still counts as “doing”.

It could also be possible that there are people who aren’t really very good at singing but who think they are and through shear force of will and determination, forge their way into the music business and somehow create a viable career. There are quite a few of these even at high professional levels. Some last, some don’t, but it is certainly true that they are “doing” some kind of singing.

What about the people who choose for various reasons to teach knowing that a life on the road, a life that is transient, isn’t for them? Are they not also people who are doing? If you like to sing and get good at singing, does it mean that you have to have a career as a singer? I actually don’t know the answer to this question. It seems to me that without any professional (level) experience you miss out on some of the key ingredients that can only be learned on the job and not in a school environment. It seems to me that the kind of thing one learns singing, no matter what the venue, is only learned in front of an audience and not in front of a student or a class.

The truth is somewhere in all of this. Some people sing well and succeed at having a career. Some people sing well and don’t bother with a career. Some people sing well but don’t succeed at having a career, even though they try and would like one. Some people don’t sing well but succeed at having a career anyway. Some people don’t sing well and don’t try to have a career, but still sing at a local level here and there.

None of this has anything whatsoever to do with teaching. Any of the above people could or could not have a clue about how to teach someone else to do what they do or what they think others do when they are singing. The two skills are not the same, although it is often assumed that those who sing well can teach. That’s not the case. Some people who don’t sing well could be very good at helping others learn to sing, but those people would still have had to spend some considerable amount of time thinking about and working with singing as a concept and art. Some people who are magnificent singers who have had an easy time with singing from the outset don’t really understand what they are doing, because it is nearly effortless. They generally don’t teach well unless perhaps they encounter a student who is as gifted as they.

The assumptions we have about teaching are many. Some of them seem reasonable, but they may not be. Generally speaking, teaching something you don’t do to someone who wants to do it isn’t a good idea, because you can’t really teach from direct personal experience. But it can be argued that direct personal experience is a vastly different thing for each human being and understanding what you do isn’t going to help you understand what someone else is doing or could do.

Finding a teacher that is the “right match” for you is very important. It isn’t so that those who can, do, and those who can’t teach, but it might be true. You have to go slowly and see.

If each person, of their own free will, chooses to let go of violence, and to burn their personal weapons (in thought, word and deed, whatever they may be) and turn them into plowshares or peaceful gestures, the world will transform in an eyeblink. No one can make another person choose to be peaceful. Each must come to this choice in their own time and in their own way. That the vast majority of people in the world must choose this soon is a dire necessity — lest we kill ourselves, one way or another, and the planet as well.

Love is God and God is Love. That love can best be described as acceptance. It is in universal acceptance of the good and the bad, the horribly ugly and the sublimely beautiful, and the knowledge that all we can ever be is flawed, that there is release. Love that goes beyond all understanding requires that we not meet deed with deed in kind, but that we see what is and let it go, for our own sakes, if not for that of others. For our own sakes, we give and forgive, and in this, we become love itself.

This simple truth lies underneath the dogma of all religions and many philosophies. It is deceptively easy and frightfully hard, both to understand and to live. Each of us carries within us the entire world, all of what there is to experience. This reality is beyond what most people understand. It is nevertheless so that what we perceive builds our view of reality and effects how we act on a day by day, hour by hour basis. We may not choose what happens to us but we can choose how we react to it.

Throughout the day, each person must make choices and accept responsibility for who they are, how they operate and what their actions produce in the world. While we might not know ahead of time what those consequences will be, we must accept responsibility for them when they occur. Whenever we act with love, with compassion, with acceptance, with tolerance, with forgiveness, we are helping to liberate human kind from bondage that is as old as the history of our own origins. Transformation comes when each person realizes that, moment by moment, behaving in the most loving way possible is all there is to do.

Each of us has in our own small universe things that need to be liberated and transformed. We all have places within us that are small, ugly, nasty, sour, selfish and repellant. Those who refuse to look at themselves in an honest way will avoid those places, thinking they can “expunge” them through various means, or worse, that they are perfect, with no such flaws. Others perhaps follow the opposite path, dwelling on their human failings so much they are overtaken by them, and in so doing, lose their way and their will. The rest of us struggle to go past our own foibles and to strive with open hearts to be trusting, willing, vulnerable, fallible, joyous, grateful and loving. This takes both courage and perseverance and yet it is all there is to do.

As artists, as singers and teachers of singing, we strive to allow art to be our pathway, our way to be in the world as creative souls, uplifting our world through the gift of song. We offer what we do and what we know to the world as a vehicle for inspiration, for joy, for healing and ultimately, for peace. We may not ever see the actual fruits of our labors played out on a grand scale, but we toil on, against obstacles both personal and global, remembering that each adds to the whole, plus or minus.

The kingdom of God is within each of us. It isn’t “out there somewhere”, not even in “heaven”. At the end of this year, 2012, will you commit in your heart to the intention of creating “peace on earth”? The only person who can make that pledge is you.

On this, the shortest/longest day of the year, depending where you are on the earth, we mark the end of darkness and the beginning of return to the light. The ritual celebrating the Solitice is very old, and has similarities to lighting the candles of the days of Hanukah and to the symbolism of Christmas, which celebrates the birth of Jesus Christ, often called “the light of the world”.

We have long associated ignorance with “living in darkness” and education with “illumination”, of bringing light into an area of darkness. We “light the way” when we lead others, and we “lighten up” when we make the mood merrier, allowing others to feel less burdened by the sorrows we all bear from time to time. The idea that learning brings us to a better place is in many cultures and many fields of endeavor. There are, however, those who do not want to be illuminated. They do not want to be “lifted up out of the darkness into the light”. They want to remain in the dark.

Darkness can be comforting. Darkness as we imagine it in a womb is benign. It can be a place to find solitude and peace. Light is usually thought of as being a good thing but if there were no darkness we would not be able to know that it exists. We need the darkness in order to know about light.

Such it is with all things. When we look at singing, we can look at it in the darkness or in the light. If we keep the topic in the darkness, it means that we don’t look at it at all. If we bring it out into the light, we must examine it in comparison to the darkness or what we didn’t know, because that is the only way we understand what it is and is not.

The potential for singing of any kind is only limited by our imaginations and by our abilities to make sung sounds. Singing, when fully revealed in all its glory and magnificence encompasses the messy, the awful and the not in any way “good”. We need every kind of singing in order for it to be fully what it is.

The value that singing has for us has to do with what we know about it. If we know little and care little, singing has little impact upon us in our lives. If we live with singing, spend time with it, listen to it, look at it, and generally think about it a good deal of the time, it increases in value. The more we embrace all it’s extremes, the more value it has for us and the more it can have an impact on who we are and how we live. To deeply and fully embrace singing — the good, the bad and the in between — is to become unafraid and non-judgemental. In this calmly accepting state, we can really decide what kind of singing matters to each one of us, personally, and why that would be. We can decide for ourselves if we want to engage with singing, our own or others’, and in what way we would do that. We can totally commit to whatever singing is or becomes but we do not risk losing our way, because we understand that singing is just singing, and not life.

No matter what kind of singing you do or teach, embrace all of it. Get to know all of its forms, styles and espressions, it’s history and it’s conventions. Every time you learn something about one part of it, it makes what you know about the rest of it richer. Don’t hide in the darkness, in fear or in denial, because   singing is a big, broad topic that asks a great deal of you if you are to be its master. Step into the light. Put your feet on the yellow brick road and follow it. You will know when you arrive in Oz.

It broke my heart yesterday when I read in the NY Times that one of the teachers who survived the Newtown horror shepherded her kindergarden students into the closet where, to keep them calm, she had them quietly sing Christmas carols. These children were not harmed, since the gunman died before he could get to their class, but it struck me how much we turn to music when we are in pain.

Every religion has some kind of music intertwined into its rituals. The larger and wealthier Christian church often have “music ministers” who can be very well trained and paid, and who lead the congregation in the services.  Even in the smaller, poorer churches where the “music person”is often drawn from the congregation and might do music for free, they try not to leave music out completely.

I am not as familiar with other traditions, but I have enough general knowledge to know that singing, chanting, intoning and reciting are frequently part of services and that there are times when everyone sings and times when only the “special” person or leader gets to sing. In such circumstances, when people join their voices together in simultaneous sounds, they can discover a feeling of unity that is unlike any other. In experiencing such moments of coming together with others in a peaceful and beautiful activity, there is the opportunity to draw comfort from that closeness, which often lasts long after the singing is over.

The power of music is still  largely untapped in our society. The only way any individual can sing is to seek out singing. You can sing at home, maybe in the shower. You can sing in the car. You can sing in a house of worship. You can sing in a choir in your community. You can perhaps sing with your family, if they also sing. Most people don’t sing any other time or place. Some people go through their entire life not singing one single note. In fact, I once gave a lesson to a student who “didn’t know music” meaning that she did not know music in any way at all. She grew up in a household where there was never any music at any time at all. She said her family didn’t like it. I found that astounding. It was like being told that someone didn’t like dessert. In our society, perhaps unusual, but certainly possible.

What singers have that most other people don’t have is an on-going relationship to singing and to song. The songs make us sing and singing needs us to live the song as a pathway. The music comes from within, goes out, lifts us up, filling us with emotion, and then repeats. A very nice positive re-enforcing cycle.

At this time of the year when we can hear carolers strolling and music fills the stores with the same familiar songs, take the time to really hear them. Let yourself hum along. Let the music transport you to a good, warm happy place. Let it fill your heart, even if you don’t honor Christmas as part of your tradition. Let the sounds of the songs, in all their many varieties, carry you off. As you do, know that many others are doing the same thing. Music has the power to heal us as individuals and in its largest sense, it has the power to heal our world. Those of us who know that music is magic understand the healing power of song is a gift available to all who seek it. It’s free, it’s always there and it works best when you give it away.

It often strikes me that there is very little by way of common sense in the singing teaching community. So much has been handed down through word of mouth experience, one to one, that the general expectations of the community are largely resting on hearsay. Common sense says to question things that are not proven, but we lose common sense when we get to singing and that’s a shame.

Without common sense, there’s bound to be a disconnect between what people say about singing and what people do when they sing that goes unquestioned, especially in the academic community.

If we accept that “classical singing” is not anything real, and that is absolutely so, then the first and most widely accepted premise about it, which says that being “classically trained” is necessary in order to sing well, is a bogus assumption. In order for it to be real, it would have to be codified, organized and accepted with a set of general specifications agreed upon by an objective organizing body of some kind, and it would have to be verifiable within a large group of individuals displaying the specifications consistently and broadly under a wide range of singing circumstances. Tennis is real. It has rules, the international community agrees upon those rules. The players abide by those rules. The audience knows what the rules are. Both professionals and amateurs have criteria upon which to base their evaluations of who is a good tennis player and who is not.

Any conversation with a group of singing teachers will reveal within minutes that even those who are deemed “very successful” teachers who have had great careers in opera and who have produced many students who in turn have gone on to become working professional singers, do not agree on even the smallest point about what “classical training” is or is not. The ideas about breathing (“support”) and resonance (“placement”) run through as wide a range of possibilities as can be imagined. Skill acquisition comes along “as it does” with no special order or sequence to be expected in anyone. There are no rules, there are no uniform guidelines, there are no completely accepted goals. In fact, the idea that anyone actually manages to end up singing classical repertoire well at all is something of a miracle. In the end, people who are smart and talented somehow figure it out on their own, perhaps with the assistance of others who are also smart and talented, and garner enough group recognition to know that what they do is considered acceptable to others who do something similar. Somehow or other.

If you doubt this, listen to a Met broadcast sometime. Many times, you will hear sublime singing and dreadful singing in the same cast. Same with Broadway.

THINK ABOUT THAT.

If you send a student to study with a teacher who may or may not know what she is doing, and who may or may not have had a high level career as a classical singer, and who may or may not be capable of  communicating the ideas that she has learned (whatever they are) to another human being in a meaningful way, and you also don’t have a criteria for what the training is supposed to help the student learn to do as a mechanical skill, wouldn’t you think that someone along the way would have noticed this pattern and brought it up for discussion in the community at large? Nope. This is the syndrome called “The Emperor Has No Clothes”.

And, if you further assume that this mystical thing called “classical training” has magic qualities such that it allows you to also sing the sounds found in rock, gospel, blues, country and rap styles, simply by singing the sounds you’ve been taught in your lesson regardless of what they are, you would also be drawing conclusions where there is no evidence that they should be drawn. Oops.

Finally, if you were to observe many professional singers who have had long lasting careers in any style and draw up a chart of their vocal and musical abilities to see if there are any universal behaviors or characteristics that they share, you could perhaps come up with a large grid to show where each style of singing falls and where each individual singer fits into the grid of each style. We are far away from anything that resembles this in even the tiniest way.

I recently heard of someone who has written a book discussing the pros and cons of allowing boys to sing through voice change. She believes that all young men should stop singing while the voice changes because it will cause damage, because that has been her experience as a choral teacher. Since there are clearly men who sang through voice change without issue and could continue to sing after the voice had stopped changing, this would seem to be a shaky assumption upon which to write a book. There isn’t any way to stop her from writing whatever she thinks. There isn’t any empowered authority or organization to stand up and say, “this is only one possibility of many.” This information will join all the rest of the books, articles and videos already in existence that are based only on one individual’s personal experience. Why question a woman writing a book about boys’ voice changes? Because, typically, we don’t challenge even the most unsubstantiated notions as there isn’t as yet any scientific data upon which to base those challenges. I know someone else who wrote a biography of Ethel Merman in which it says she was not a belter. He knows this because he works within the opera world as a writer (doesn’t sing himself) — a great way to understand belting, right? He has decided (and he isn’t alone) that Merman wasn’t belting. Too bad nobody told her.

The thought process is this: If you experienced it personally yourself, either in your singing or in your training, then it must be true, and if it’s true for you then you can extrapolate that it must also be true for all others and if it’s true for all others, then it must be real. Carried further, if you decide something, and you find at least one other person who has also decided the same thing, your opinion must be real.

Cyclical thinking here, people. Defining a word by itself isn’t allowed in the dictionary.

Yes, I exaggerate. There is research and there is some consensus about what happens in classical singing, but it’s still a very small amount of data and there isn’t anyone verifying it. That is left up to those who read the articles and the books that quote them. There is next to no information on children’s singing, on CCM styles and on the marketplace and it’s demands. You are on your own with all of it. People kinda sorta know what good classical singing sounds like, but maybe not. See above.

I never ask anyone who works with me to “trust” me, believe me, or accept what I say. I always tell them to go out, read, research, study, experiment and stay away from making up rules. There are no rules.

In the meanwhile, if someone offers you a course of training for singing and provides you with a series of syllables on a series of pitch patterns and tells you that, by singing these syllables and patterns, you will learn to sing well, question that. If they also tell you that “if you know how to breathe, you can sing anything”, question that, too. If they tell you that you have to sing in X way or place because that’s how all good singing happens, question that as well. If they tell you to constrict something or move something you’ve never heard of and can’t feel, ask lots of questions. Never give away your common sense!!!!

You might end up being a pain in the neck, but you won’t get sold a bill of goods. Cavaet emptor — let the buyer beware!!!!!!

The idea that we should have smooth transitions between registers is an old one. Most classical pedagogies espoused the idea that smooth transitions were a sign of “good” technique and a mark of skill.

In the pedagogies that say you should only sing in one register or that there are no registers or that each note is its own register, you can have trouble with the smooth transition idea. What are you transitioning into and out of?

Simply put, if you don’t understand register function and so many singers don’t, you can get into trouble, you can end up trying to do something with “resonance” that belongs in the category called “register” and you can be truly lost in terms of understanding what you hear and feel while you sing or, even worse, while you teach singing.

Ethel Merman sang in one register most of the time. She could transition into a light heady mix in her high pitch range when she was young, but she lost that over time. Her vibrato widened as she got older and she ended up sounding like a parody of herself at the end of her career. Lily Pons sang primarily in head register for most of her range and it served her well to do so for decades. Most pop singers sing in some kind of chest mix and they can manage that for an entire career as long as they are careful.

Why the big deal, then, about “smooth register transitions”? Who cares?

The answer is that the vocal mechanism works best when it is free to move. Restriction of any kind limits what you can sing and how you can sing it. Currently, there are a great number of very popular pedagogical approaches in various styles of CCM that advocate pushing, forcing, holding, squeezing, constricting, and retracting all manner of muscles in the throat and body as a goal. AS A GOAL, folks. No smooth register transitions for them…..uh uh. They can just sing — high to low — in the same hamburger mash of whatever sound they can manage.

The idea that the voice can carry honest, heart-felt emotion makes some people angry. They have been taught that they have to portray emotion or portray feelings while singing. (Sing “like as if” they are angry or sad, rather than actually feeling sad, if the song is actually sad.) They have a vested interest in keeping the voice in a particular “place” that is deemed “correct” and anyone who suggests that this is not the case is suspect. But if you read the pedagogical literature, you will see that the old teachers, from Garcia and Lamperti to the more modern ones like Brown and Bunch Dayme do not advocate manipulation (the direct movement of any musculature in the throat), but rather advocate changing the sound quality or intention. They also advocate finding “pure” vowels, ones that do not distort. Many of today’s singers don’t even know what a pure vowel is and wouldn’t know if they were singing one if they were. Too bad.

Of course, you can get by without smooth register transitions. You can yodel from one register to another like Joan Baez or the young Joni Mitchell, or the 50s doo-wop singers who would flip into falsetto on high notes. Many people have had big careers with a big break right there in the middle of their range. Others have paid no attention to this vocal “smooth transition” response at all. Surely Peggy Lee didn’t think about singing through all her registers smoothly. She sang in a breathy mix for her whole life and it was just fine. If, however, you learn to hear register change as register change and not glom it onto other things, you will find that the singers with the widest range, the broadest change of dynamics and the most expressive colors are also the ones that change registration. This implies that they are also managing how they use their breath and that, in turn, implies that they are able to manage the body as needed as well.

If this makes you angry, you should ask yourself why.

Many years ago, when I was about 16, my mother attended some kind of “women’s gathering” at which she sat next to someone she did not know. Inevitably, they started to talk about their children and the topic of singing came up. My mother mentioned to the woman that her daughter was studying voice. The other woman said to her, “Oh, that’s too bad. My daughter sings too, but she is so talented she doesn’t need lessons”. Much to her credit, my mother didn’t reply with anything except a smile.

This mentality is still out there.

In August, a woman who fancies herself to be a jazz vocalist called me to have a lesson. She had been to see me three years prior, for one lesson. She informed me that she had been practicing with that lesson (for THREE YEARS!!!!) and that she had discerned that the exercises I had given her were “pretty helpful” and she thought maybe one more would be “good”. She had the session, she disappeared.

There was another woman, trained originally as a classical soprano, who also moved into singing jazz, who had been taught that “chest register” was harmful and that it should always be avoided. That’s a tough attitude to cling to when you want to sing jazz. She had three lessons with me in which we touched on her suppressed chest register and, bingo, that solved her problem! Magic! We barely scratched the surface of making significant changes in her technique, but she didn’t seem to notice or care. When I ran into her three years later she told me she was still practicing with the last lesson every day. [Hokey Smoke, Bullwinkle!]

The idea that you should practice every single day of your life with the same exercises, done in the same sequence is popular in some circles. In my former apartment building, a classical mezzo soprano who had a very viable career lived directly over me. She would always start her day with her vocal practice, which I eventually learned, unfortunately, by heart, but not by choice. She sang the same awful exercises in the same awful way, every single day, sounding covered, swallowed and loud, but consistent. By golly, she was consistent. I went to see her once in a performance of “The Creation” at Carnegie Hall and when she got up to sing the song about “frogs, frogs, frogs” in her croaky swallowed sound, I nearly imploded, keeping myself quiet.

There is a difference between rote learning and conscious awareness that facilitates transformation. Repeating anything mindlessly isn’t particularly useful but it can still produce a result, if you know how to do whatever it is correctly. Singing a pattern of notes and pitches in a certain sequence because someone told you to is better than singing nothing, especially if while you sing you are singing freely and without issue. Singing a different pattern of notes and pitches in a certain different sequence might be good, but not necessarily. Doing rote practice, however, doesn’t give you much except muscle patterns and sound making behaviors.

Actual learning must involve awareness, particularly when dealing with a highly complex physical skill. Although not much happens initially, and practice at that point can be more or less rote, it can’t stay that way for long. The person practicing needs to know why the exercises are being done, what they will do for the voice over time, how to do them, and when. The vocalist needs to learn to pay attention to the various feedback loops of sound, feeling and sensation but also to understand what to do with that gathered sensory information when it is obtained. If it can’t be used, why bother to collect it?

Absolutely no one who has reached any level of expertise has no training at all. Even if they have natural ability, they have to study with someone who will advise and guide them. Mozart and Picasso studied with their fathers, as did Pavarotti and Marilyn Horne. Joan Sutherland studied with her mother. Beverly Sills, who was a child soprano of great skill before she became an international opera sensation  as an adult began studying as a child with her one and only teacher, Estelle Liebling, herself a student of Mathilde Marchesi, who studied with Garcia. Illustrious artists and teachers in that lineage!

The idea that you can gain expertise or mastery by singing along with the same limited, specific group of CDs or a DVD every day for years is simply ridiculous. The thought that a talented person doesn’t need private lessons is equally so. The beliefs that there is one way to sing or use the voice or one pattern of exercise that “keeps you in good shape” or one approach that will never fail, are all based on very limited vision and understanding.

Even the most talented students need lessons. Sometimes the more talented you are, the more you need the lessons to help you clarify, deepen, define and own your talent. The people who manage to get by without lessons are doing just that.

I wish I had a crystal ball to look 200 or 250 years into the future. I would love to know what singing will be like then.

I often wonder, if we continue as a society (and sometimes I doubt that) what will endure? When we look art and music history we see many works that have endured. The most important artists who left a lasting mark are revered for their gifts.

If we look at our current world as if from the future, it will surely look like a very chaotic time. Degradation to the earth being ignored. Turbulence in the USA and Europe economically that effects the day to day life of so many millions. Warfare in many places, and religious zealotry all over the world, making extreme beliefs popular with a vast number of people regardless of the cost.  Leadership floundering globally.

If we looked at the musical world, we could see that the works of past masters like Gluck, Monteverdi, Purcell, Bach, Handel  Mozart and Beethoven were appreciated alongside works by Verdi, Brahms, Chopin, Liszt, and Rachmanioff. We might see that music aficionados were also listening to John Adams, Phillip Glass, Tan Dunn, John Cage, and Nico Muhly. We could notice that there were few  female composers, even in the late 20th and 21st centuries, and that they were not given the same recognition and appreciation as men. We might notice that most of the conductors were male, and most of the people running large opera and musical companies were also male. We would see that women, when they did have works published and performed were always in the minority. We would also see that classical music was dominated by caucasian males except in countries where the population was not also mostly caucasian. We would also see that a very small percentage of the music was classical in nature and that the average person who was listening to music was not listening to classical music, most especially not to vocal classical music, which was the smallest segment of that genre.

We would also know that the popular music of the late 20th and early 21st centuries was heavily homogeneous, and that it was difficult to discern one vocalist from another in terms of style, in any style. Unless I was an music history expert in 2212, how would I know the difference between Maria Carey and Beyoncé, or Nora Jones and Diana Krall, or any of the younger country stars between each other? The rockers who stayed around for several decades will surely go down in history: The Stones, McCartney, Elton John, Madonna. But who knows? Maybe people like Tony Bennett, Barbara Cook, and Ella Fitzgerald will be remembered along with Elvis and Bruce Springsteen as “singers”?

What they may have that is recordings and visual media, if it survives in a form they can reference. Who will listen to ancient musty 33 rpm records or cassette tapes in 2212? Will there be archival YouTube videos then?

The point is that while you are living in an era, you can’t know what will last — ending up in the history books — and what will be forgotten. Today, with all the hype, PR, media spin and the like, and with a total lack of music education having become the norm for the average person, what we see and hear is remarkably similar from person to person and style to style. If you watch “The Voice” or “American Idol” even if the singers are very talented (and some of the winners surely are), they certainly aren’t changing anything or creating something new and different. They are preened, prompted, packaged and promoted along with the music they sing so that they are marketable to the broadest possible audience, so that a lot of money can be made. The driving force behind what is put forth is an economic one. Only well after an artist is established and has made plenty of money is she free to set up her own company and call the shots for her own work. How often does that happen?

If you graduate thousands of students from college every year who have degrees in voice or music theater or jazz, and there are not thousands of  available jobs for them to fill such that they can have viable careers, where are they to go except back to school to educate more people who will do the same thing, in a self-perpetuating cycle? It cannot be that all of these graduates are highly talented and deserve to be heard, nor can it be that all of these graduates are doing work that is unique and will be lasting. Standardized education serves the masses but it does not serve great art. If we are to find great singing in the museums of the future, we have to do a better job in the present moment of discovering and nurturing real genius. Is that happening in your area? If so, you are very unusual.