Various Posts

Over the last 100+ years, music has changed an enormous amount. What someone would have heard in 1912 bears very little resemblance to what he would hear in 2012. Going back even further, what someone would have heard in 1712 is enormously different than what we hear today.

Yes, music has definitely changed. What about the larynx? Think maybe it has evolved some new behaviors or responses in the last three hundred years? Do we have many many singers who routinely sing 7 octaves or who can sing at 120 dB? Do we have lots of people who can sing off the low end or high end of the piano on a regular basis?

Seems like the things we do with the vocal folds now are probably closer to, rather than farther away from, what we did in times past. The one thing that might be more variable is the vocal quality being used by a singer. That has changed quite a bit and is reflective of what has gone on in the music business.

So, how do you put these two things together effectively? Do you decide that you can do “wild and crazy things” with your vocal folds because you are “far out and cool” (or whatever today’s version of those words would be. Sorry, I’m old.) Do you decide that you can make sounds that no one else has ever made because you have vocal folds unlike those of anyone else on earth? Some people act as if they believe that’s true. It’s much more likely that you will encounter health issues in your vocal folds if you don’t know what they do and how to produce sound efficiently. Do you bury your head and say, “I will only do what was done in 1875 or 1929, because that’s what’s right. My teacher told me to so it has to be true.”

Young people, in particular, may not have any interest in or experience with traditional vocal pedagogy. Reading the books and articles published by experts ought to inform us, but many do not read at all. Some few have read a bare minimum of the giants in the field, and their lack of knowledge about the field always shows. Singing experts such as Garcia, Lamperti,  Bunch Dayme, Miller, Vennard, Reid, Brown and speech experts such as Berry, Turner, Linklater, Fitzmaurice, Houseman, Melton, Rubin and speech pathologists such as Boone, Verdolini,  Murry, Behlau, and medical specialists such as Brewer, Gould, von Laden, Brodnitz, Grabscheid, Sataloff, Leanderson, Woo, Korovin, Zeitels, and those who do pure science, like Sundberg, Hirano, Titze, Scherer, Ternstrom, Howard, and many, many others provide everyone with a broad base of knowledge that effects clear thinking regarding the behavior of the larynx and the acoustics of the singing voice. Since several of these people were my mentors, informally, and a few were my teachers, formally, and the ones who have lived in recent times were my colleagues, I have been blessed to have them in my life. As a person with a keen interest in the voice, I am humbled that this is so.

It is not my experience that human physiology has changed in any meaningful way, except maybe that we in the West are generally larger in frame than we were 150 years ago, nor is it so that the acoustics have changed much either. What has changed is the music and the demands it makes on the vocalists which are much greater than they were years ago and are not likely to decrease.

Whether or not it is intelligent, useful, healthy, or even good to sing in ways that our forebears never dreamed of, is a discussion that might be intellectually stimulating but is nevertheless useless when it comes to the marketplace. Just as extreme sports might be highly dangerous they are also very exciting and are more accepted than ever before. If there were to be an injunction again them, they would not go away, they would just go underground. There will always be people who are excited by testing their own limits whether it be by climbing Mt. Everest for the first time or going to Antarctica for the first time, running a mile in less than 4 minutes for the first time, or jumping from the outer limits of the atmosphere, higher than has ever been done before by another human being. There will be the people who push all of our limits by pushing their own.

Teachers of singing, then, as well as researchers, speech experts (both pathologists and trainers), medical doctors and performers need to know what’s going on in the world of the music marketplace. Not to address what is happening in the musical world while working with singers is folly — one that puts the health of the vocalist at even more risk than is necessary. While the larynx remains the larynx, music is ever shifting. It’s up to you to know the difference.

Very occasionally, I encounter someone who “wants a few lessons” to (a) get a gig, (b) go to an audition, (c) get into college, (d) help with their high notes, (e) help with their “breath support” or (f) help them with their break.

I decline to work with such people. They think that they can fix functional issues in a few lessons but 99.9% of the time you can’t do that.

People who are content to be “pretty good” and want to get to their goal in a hurry are looking at the surface of singing without any desire to gain mastery of it at a substantial, deep level. Those people are not the kind of people I have in my studio. The people who come to work with me work on their voices every day, year in and year out, after having achieved career success, because they value their art and have something meaningful to say through it as they sing. This is not the vast majority of singers and it is not the vast majority of teachers of singing either.

Asking the why, how and what questions, probing for their answers whatever the topic, involves self-confrontation. It involves facing your flaws, foibles, weaknesses, hang-ups, neuroses, and lacks. It isn’t an easy direction to take and most people aren’t the least bit interested in such inner dialog. A real artist, however, knows well that in order to create lasting and profound works that touch the souls of those who come into contact with them, the artist has no choice but to plum his or her own inner labyrinth. Doing so is one scary journey and not one to be taken lightly, especially because it has to be walked alone.

Creativity comes out of self-exploration, self-discovery, and the release of pain, suffering, and finally the expression of joy and self- knowledge. It is not a substitute for skill, nor is it easily coalesced into a meaningful work without a form of some kind.

Anyone can sound nice. Anyone can hum a tune. Enjoying your voice as you use it in life is a wonderful gift. Feeling confident enough about your voice to think that others should hear it, and in fact should pay to hear it, requires more than thinking it is “nice”. You have to have a deep belief that you are really a very good singer who really wants to sing. If you ever get to do that, sing professionally, you will encounter others who will point out to you how your singing is not yet adequate and how to make it better. If you don’t deal with that, you could end up on the outside looking in. A serious vocal artist has to be willing to take constructive criticism, listen to others’ opinions, change how they do what they do and remain open without losing self-confidence. Not everyone can manage that.

The people who want to “dabble” in singing can do that, as there are many teachers who will give them “a few lessons” and make suggestions or offer advice. The teachers who are typically dealing with artists who have a deep and meaningful message to convey are aware that this kind of artist is always looking for external guidance, inner understanding and the balance between them. Fame has nothing whatsoever to do with these kinds of artists. Some are famous, some will never be, but they are the ones who are the most inspiring to teach, as they bring something with them that the other kind of students do not have to offer…….substance. The surface is only impressive to those who do not have the awareness to look deeply within.

Singing training is never finished. Like life, it goes on.

When you are very young, you begin by learning the basics. You have to study for quite a while before you know what you don’t know. It doesn’t come with rules (although that would be nice). You have to keep going to find out if what you are being taught is what you need to learn. (Very often, it isn’t.) You have to have a high level of drive and commitment to the entire process unless you are very talented or very lucky and get by on your higher than average gifts and blessings.

When you are older, you have to contend with “higher education”. That has been addressed here many times. College training for singing runs the gamut from soup to nuts (not a pun) and the risk is real. After college, you must decide “what you will do with your training”. After all, you spent a lot of money and some considerable amount of time learning to be a very good singer, should you waste your efforts and stay at home? Another big decision.

Some go into education, some into choral conducting, maybe with an additional degree or two, some try to become professional singers locally and some few come to the big cities, maybe even to NYC or LA, and see if they can “break into” the music industry in one of its forms. Music Theater, opera, jazz, or rock music. There isn’t much by way of a folk scene at the highest levels or of country music other than that coming out of Nashville. There is a very big Christian music industry, but the standards aren’t very different there than outside the religious based world, and it isn’t really located in just one city.

Some people do get started and become professional singers, making their livings by standing up in front of audiences and singing. Mostly, they are invisible but respected. It could be that they are in the Ensemble on Broadway, or have professional “ringer” jobs as classical vocalists, or do “studio sessions” or go out on tours as back-up vocalists or some combination of all of these. Generally, even though there are jobs in these areas the number of people who only sing for a living is very very small. Again, if you have enough money to work for little or no pay you might have a career but not one that pays the rent. How many people are in that category?

The people who don’t make it or get tired of the hard work involved in keeping a career going without fame eventually have to face stopping. Where do they go? Back to school? To teaching? To another kind of work altogether? Yes to all of these options.

If you persevere, you might end up in middle age finding a way to get all of this to work and being content with your choices. You will still have to think about “upkeep” of your voice, though, because you need to sound at least decent in order to have some kind of credibility, if not with your students than with your colleagues. As the body ages, the voice follows. No longer are you striving to build your vocal skills, you are working to keep the ones you have so they do not deteriorate.

And, if you continue until you are in the category we kindly call “senior citizen” what you once took for granted is now a daily challenge. You return to wondering what this thing called singing really is, day to day, and what the overall outcome of your vocal decline will be when it finally catches up to you enough to take over. You remember well that you had to answer some of the same questions about “vocal skills” when you were a kid. The familiarity isn’t comforting.

And when you are in your “golden years” and you have lived a good long life, your voice will still be your traveling companion. How it works and what you can do with it could vary day by day or even hour by hour. You, your body and your voice, as lifetime partners, will be submersed in the adventure of discovering what works and how it works to sing in any form at all.

Your work with your voice is never finished until you are. When you are gone from this earth and your voice is silenced the sojourn will be over, but while you are alive your voice should never, can never be finished. It is always being its creative self. Don’t ever give up on it and it won’t give up on you!

When a singer says to me “I can’t” I believe her.

If I go to a dance class, and I tell the dance teacher, “I can’t lift my leg high enough to put it on the bar,” and she tells me, “Oh yes you can, you’re just not trying. Here, let me show you how much it can move,” and she grabs my leg and tries to lift it up and put it on the bar, I will definitely yell, “Ouch! You are hurting me!” If I were to run in a race and not be able to finish (I am much overweight and out of shape) and the running coach were to tell me, “You should be able to finish this race, you are a quitter!” I would look at the coach and say, “Are you kidding me? I should never have been in this race in the first place! I didn’t have enough training or conditioning to even participate. Why did I listen to you?” I wasn’t always this self-confident.

But if I were a singer, I could be in a session with a teacher, a coach, a conductor or even a friend, and say, “I can’t sing that phrase. The notes are just too high.” I could be told, “You absolutely should be able to sing that note. You are a soprano, for heaven’s sake. You aren’t using enough/correct breath support!” or maybe, “You can definitely sing that phrase, but you will have to bring your resonance more forward to do it,” or perhaps, “You are just being resistant and blocked. You need to let go more and stop holding back.”And, if I insisted that my throat was just closing and that I couldn’t get the notes out, I might just be told that I can’t sing and should give up. I could walk away thinking “What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I do what they say?”

The game of blaming the singer is real. So many singers are blamed for what they can’t do, yet the purpose of lessons is to learn to go beyond what you can’t do until you can do it. The way to get past your limitations is not to be browbeaten by your teacher, or to force your throat, or manipulate some other body part or intellectualize the process, but that is what a lot of people think and that is what they are taught. The instructors know only that singing is about “doing something” and if that something doesn’t work, then it doesn’t work because the singer is just too untalented or too stupid or too resistant (or all of those) to make it work.

Yes, there are times when the student is really at fault. There are people who cannot learn, don’t really want to change and would prefer to do whatever it is they already do even if they think they want to study with or consult a voice expert. I have written about them here. It is not my experience, however, in more than 40 years of teaching, that this is how the majority of singers are. It is my experience that people who pay for lessons want to learn something in those lessons and will try to apply what is being taught to the best of their ability.

In a system in which the teacher can never be wrong, never be questioned, and the student can never ask the teacher why something is not working (without fear), there can be no true learning. The teacher has to be willing to be vulnerable so that the student can also be, and the teacher has to be able to own what she knows and what she does not know, equally. Unless that situation exists all the time, the atmosphere in which the session takes place will not really be safe and all that will take place is that both individuals will do their best not to screw up in front of the other. In that environment, no learning can take place, no education is possible.

If I asked the singer, “When your throat closes, what do you experience? Can you describe your discomfort in more detail?” and actually listened to her answer, I might understand better what technical or functional issue was at the root of her problem. If I asked her “When do you experience this difficulty? Is it all the time, just on certain pieces, or just in certain kinds of repertoire?” I might also get some clues as to the source of her problems. If I approached her as if her experience was real and also valid, I might be able to say, “Oh, I’m sorry. That must be so frustrating. I know how hard it can be when things in your voice aren’t going the way you would like them to. Let’s see if we can investigate a bit and find out what’s going on in there,” I would at least be providing some support and reassurance for the idea that indeed, things can go wrong unintentionally, and that there are remedies that can help, once the problem is dissected and investigated.

I stopped taking lessons at 29, after 14 years of training, because the teacher I had had for 7 years insisted that I was “just being temperamental” when I told him that I could not sing the high notes as he had requested. High notes had always been easy for me but in my work with him my voice got heavier and fuller and heavier and fuller until I could barely sing above the staff. It was an absolute fact that I could not sing high notes easily but he could not and would not listen to me, nor believe me. I stopped studying because no one, ever, had inquired as to how I felt, what I felt or what I heard when I sang, and no one had ever asked me if I felt good about what I was doing. Consequently, I never asked myself those same questions, until that day when I just could not sing up high. When he insisted that I was wrong and he was right, I somehow found the courage not only to leave his studio but to never return to anyone’s studio for technical training. It was, after all, MY throat and my experience and I was telling the truth.

Thankfully, this was a great part of the impetus for me to investigate voice science, without which I would surely have given up singing and gone to find a job in a completely different line of work.

Learning to listen to what a singer has to say, and take it to heart as the truth, is a requirement of a teacher of singing or any other related support profession (coach, conductor, speech pathologist, voice doctor). It is the starting point of transformation, of growth and of compassionate service to another human being who is struggling and striving to be an artist.

If there is an “I can’t,” in a session, and you are a service provider, consider it a gift and handle it with care and deep sincerity. It will tell you how to find the pathway back to “I can.”

It might be hard to believe but it was way back in 1983 when the New York Singing Teachers’ Association presented the first workshop on Broadway and Popular Singing: How To Sing Without Hurting Your Voice at Donnell Library (which is long gone) to a sell out crowd. Two weeks later, because this event was highly successful, half of the Board of Directors resigned in protest because we (the Music Theater Committee, of which I was a founding member) were “dragging the organization down into the gutter” with that “awful music”. Fortunately, I was able to coax them all to stay, but it was a daunting experience, to be maligned for doing something that was a big hit. I should have known then that it was only the beginning of a long, not very nice battle.

In spite of the fact that most universities are now very interested in offering music theater programs, the vast majority of the singing teachers being asked to teach MT styles are classically trained. Since most universities ask for a master’s degree or even a doctorate, it is nearly impossible to arrive at a job interview with the proper training for pop, rock, jazz, folk, country, gospel or rap music since there are no degree programs in these styles. There are a few music theater master’s degrees in the USA, but I believe that most of them are offered through drama departments, not music departments. That means they may have little or no formal vocal music training in the degree. ALL the doctoral programs are classical and will likely continue to be until this generation gets to be in the leadership positions of departments and that will take a couple more decades.

The universities understand that there is money to be made by offering music theater. Some schools have a music theater “emphasis”, some actually have a degree in music theater, and some have a classical degree that allows for a little music theater (usually legit) as part of that degree. The system, country-wide, is in a state of flux, maybe even chaos, and no one seems to know how to proceed.

The universities rely on the faculty to have higher degrees in order to be sure they are well trained, but if they are well trained in something they do not teach, what’s the point? The saddest thing is that neither parents nor students understand this situation until a student is already enrolled in a program. You could be assigned to a teacher who has literally no clue about belting or rock style but who is going to teach you anyway, or you could be assigned to a teacher who actually has a very good idea of what’s needed and has a way to give you what you should be getting. It’s typically just a role of the dice.

For my money, if I was a student, I would feel pretty bad about those odds. I would like to know that the person with whom I entrust my voice actually had the skills to teach me what I was paying to learn. It seems reasonable to me to expect that out of a college degree program.

And, if the university is big enough, you can have a drama department and a voice department and never the two shall meet. The drama students might have to study with the classical teachers in the voice department and the voice students might have to take acting lessons in the drama department, or not. Again, a roll of the dice. If the two departments do interact, the two approaches to singing are so different, there is frequently discord between them. The classical teachers are interested in resonance, legato line, even vibrato, beautiful tone, musical accuracy, and, of course, good breath support. The drama department people are interested in authentic delivery of the lyrics with a good understanding of their depth and implication, with emotional intensity, clarity of diction and connectedness to the physical expression of the music and text as a whole. Guess they don’t see eye to eye or hear ear to ear. Who suffers from this? (Are you thinking — the students?) Who gets blamed when things don’t work? (Are you thinking the same thing?) Good.

Many decades have elapsed since 1983 and the NY Singing Teachers’ Association now considers music theater an important ingredient in what it addresses in its activities. There are no arguments about its being “awful”. The National Association of Teachers of Singing now devotes a good deal of its time in its national conferences to music theater, at least in its somewhat straightforward traditional styles. That’s progress. The organization still favors classical “training”as a basis to sing anything, but sooner or later the wisdom of that assumption will be seen for what it is, which is silly. It can help, but it can also get in the way or even cause trouble. Since there are no standards for voice teachers, “classical training” can mean anything to anyone at any time.

The idea that America should be the home of excellent training for whatever style of singing a person wants to sing, no matter what it entails, is still a dream that is just beginning to emerge into reality. 1983 was a long time ago, but there is a light at the end of the tunnel.

I recently attended a concert that presented a range of art songs and CCM music. It was sung by very good classically trained singers and covered R&B, blues, jazz, and opera arias. The presentation of the 10 singers was well done, in terms of staging of the material, and the jazz musicians (piano and bass guitar) who alternated with the classical pianist were very good. Still, the program was a hodge podge. The four women were much worse off than the six men. All of their songs were too high. They were stuck in head register and classical “resonance” and most of the songs suffered badly due to that.

Clearly, the singers were left to their own devices. This was a poor choice on the part of the producers. Classical singers doing material that isn’t classical often carry their classical production with them when they leave that repertoire. If you are singing a song that was written to be a belt piece by taking it up a fourth and turning it into an aria, you are not only not honoring the music, you are making yourself seem highly ignorant of correct style.

That this still happens isn’t news. That it isn’t news says how far we have yet to go. The double standard of the classical vocalists, upheld largely through obliviousness, is unacceptable but they don’t even know that there is anything wrong. I have said here that until things are really equal on each side of the bar, I will campaign to make sure that all the CCM styles, most of which originated here in the USA, are honored by singing them in the way the composers intended, including using the correct vocal quality. Doing this typically requires adjusting the keys, and with women those adjustments can be as much as a fifth up or down, in order to help the song stay in a “speech oriented mode”.

If I am a rock singer and I only sing in a rock sound and you put me in a concert and assign to me the song “Caro Mio Ben” and I sing it like a rock song because that’s how I sing, would you take that as being valid and acceptable, or would you tell me that it needs to be sung in an entirely different manner, using different sounds and feelings? Would you think that the song was OK no matter what I did with it or would you wonder if I knew that it was a classical song and typically done in a classical manner? Would you just let it go and present it alongside other songs as being equal?

Woman are at the greatest disadvantage here because men, singing mostly in chest register, can adjust the songs by simply lightening up, changing vowel sound shape and paying attention to the words. Women classical singers are going to be very head dominant in mid-range and have to do a much bigger gear switch than their male counterparts.

A few people have taken classical pieces and turned them into jazz pieces or folk songs, singing them in a chest register dominant, speech oriented sound. They have been successful with their performances in these new arrangements. But if you leave the song pretty much as written and try singing it as if it were something else, you are not totally in either a CCM or a classical world. You look and sound like you are at sea.

Leave the arias in classical music. If you sing a Kander and Ebb piece, don’t turn it into something by Strauss. If you like words, be careful that you aren’t sustaining up high (because it doesn’t work to do the words easily if you do). It’s hard to go to a performance like that, where the performers are singing in a sound that doesn’t suit the music. I want to say “NO!!” but, really, what would be the point?

Each of us can help this situation. If you are a classical singer and you are asked to sing a CCM song, find out about the style and do your best to follow that style authentically in your own way. If you do not know how to get the right vocal quality, you must learn. Notice the key, and volume and the tempo and stick closely to those things until and unless you have a very good reason not to. Learn to use a microphone, amplifier and speaker. Learn what style the piece you want to sing has been done in by others in the past.

Many singers can sing all over the keyboard comfortably. They can be very loud or very soft and can be very expressive if they choose to and they can do a wide variety of styles authentically. If you are not one of those people, please be very careful about what you sing and how you sing it. Don’t just assume your way is the right way…..find out!

Here’s a post of someone who should have known better. Great artist, awful rendition of the song.
Go to YouTube and put in: Kiri Te Kanawa I Dreamed a Dream.

Once you get someone into a new default position, which can take a lot of work and time, it’s important to emphasize the idea that you have to do maintenance to keep it going. Particularly if the default is not the most natural position for the person, it’s essential to do regular practice.

If someone has been singing only in chest register for a long time and thinks of himself as a baritone, only to discover after two or three years of vocalizing in a strong head register dominant sound that he is, after all, a baritenor or even a tenor, that can be really liberating and freeing. Nevertheless, even if the new sound is the more natural sound for the voice, it isn’t the one with the longest history and that matters. That can’t be taken for granted, even if it sounds and functions better than the old position, simply because it is new. It might be more “natural” but it isn’t “more habitual”.

Muscle memory is real. Muscles remember what they do, sometimes long after you stop doing it. Even if you haven’t ridden a bicycle in years, once you get on again, after a moment or so, you can ride just fine. Perhaps you wouldn’t pick up the violin and play a concerto at first touch, but if you had played well for a long time, years after you stopped you would probably be able to play a simple melody in short order.

First in, first out, they say about jobs. The most recent hires are the most likely people to get layed off. So it is, too, with muscle patterns. What you have done for the longest time and most frequently, is the deepest pattern. New patterns that are more comfortable may be better but they have emerged only recently and will be susceptible to falling apart if you stop practicing for a while.

If you have gotten into a new default, perhaps for a role in a show, and you know you have to keep yourself there for the an open-ended run, you will need to include regular practice along with activities like taking a shower and brushing your teeth. Not to do so is to ask for problems. And, if you know that the role is a couple of tones too high for your easy comfort but that you can get through it as long as you are practicing your vocal exercises, you might also need to put into the equation exercises that allow for relaxation and calibration of your voice every now and then to help it remember its normal default, so you don’t completely lose it.

As someone who is in recovery from a left vocal fold paresis (since May), I can tell you that I am now having to work hard to stay in what was my normal sound. This default, the one where I lived effortlessly for my entire life, is now only there when I practice and practice vigorously. I am grateful that I have come back to a much better response, sometimes seeming as if my singing was totally normal, but I can testify that when I don’t practice, it rapidly begins to fall apart and go back to its errant ways!

Remember, the default position is the position from which you would sing, without warming up or preparing in any way, coming straight out of your typical speech patterns. If you don’t know how to authentically change your default, without manipulation or immitation, this entire post won’t make any sense, but if you are curious to understand more, you are welcome to come to my Level I training in January at UMass Dartmouth.

The idea that the larynx should stay down at all times is incorrect. The idea that laryngeal stability is produced by keeping the larynx from moving is wrong. The idea that the larynx should be held down is dangerous. Yet, these ideas are very popular in current classical vocal pedagogy circles. They even show up in CCM circles.

Why would they have become so prominent? Because when voice science came along it was possible to observe that classical singers seem to be singing consistently with the larynx resting rather low in the throat. This observation was accurate. Mostly, that’s what they do. The problem was that the result was viewed as a cause and the response was viewed as deliberate rather than indirect.

Perhaps this was also influenced by the influx of teachers of singing from Germany and Austria to New York during World War II. These teachers brought their Germany vowels with them and the influence of them would have been to have the larynx be more down than not. There were a lot of them on the faculties of Juilliard and Manhattan School of Music and perhaps also other university conservatories in the USA. This is just a guess and could be wrong, but clearly, this observed phenomenon seemed significant and became a very popular idea.

A low larynx makes the vocal tract long. The length makes it larger and the largeness gives the lower frequencies a boost, making any vowel “darker”, “warmer” and “fuller”. That would seem to be a good thing, in classical singing at least. The problem with a low larynx, however, is that it can get to be too low (Vennard called it depressed). This causes all sorts of problems, both functional and musical.

The first rule of singing training is FREEDOM. If you can’t sing freely, something is wrong. Tones that do not allow natural movement in the mechanism are not optimal. There are times when stability is in order but when that stability becomes rigidity, then there is trouble. The larynx, after all, is a sinovial joint and what joint functions well when it can’t move? Keeping the larynx in a depressed position shuts off expression, makes for a wooden sound, causes tension on high notes up to and including them closing off entirely, and generally makes for poor pronunciation. It makes brilliance in the tone nearly impossible.

At first, especially if the voice is organized to be very “forward” and “ringy” a lowered laryngeal position might be good. It would warm up the tone and make it seem to be “rounder”, but after a while, if freedom is not emphasized at all times, the freedom would go away. It would also promote a certain amount of volume, but it could become fatiguing and can absolutely cause the pitches to be slightly flat or even very flat, despite the vocalist’s desire to remain on pitch.

The vowels that come out of the Italian language seem to be the ones that lend themselves to classical singing most readily. They are bright, and they carry well without effort. The language, Italian, sits very differently in the throat, and it doesn’t take as much work to produce sounds that are clear and vibrant.

When Luciano Pavarotti arrived on the opera scene in New York decades ago, one of the most common criticisms of his still young voice was that it was “too bright”. Clearly, his voice was certainly  bright, but not too bright. It was thrilling, and free, and strong, and consistent, and highly expressive. I seriously doubt he was striving to keep his larynx down on purpose. The kind of sound made by Corelli and Tebaldi is hard to find now in classical singing, even in Italians. The late Salvatore Licitra’s voice bordered on woofy and had problems while he was still in the prime of his life and career. If you want to know what this is like, go to the link here. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yyz75uHNHeI

Ms. Ponselle’s larynx is “low” but she isn’t keeping it down on purpose. It’s also not low when it needs to be and I am certain she never thought about any of that. The larynx remains low because the vowels are consistent and the air pressure is steady and because the registration is balanced. The position of the larynx is adjusted by the tone quality and the volume and nothing else. It tilts a bit and perhaps rises slightly on high notes, and that allows the vocal tract to shorten and widen, and the tongue to adjust in the back of the mouth, for the purposes of both comfort and expressiveness.

If you have been taught to “keep your larynx down” or “never allow the larynx to move”, remember that we don’t feel the larynx nor the vocal folds. If you are busy trying to feel the larynx, you are causing yourself trouble. If you have to work hard to sing high notes, especially if they are soft; if you have to struggle to get the consonants to be articulate; if you can’t easily brighten the sound, if you have to open your mouth very wide and drop the jaw way down to sing a sustained loud tone, be aware, you may be singing with your larynx down too far and have too much pressure on it. If you also go flat, if you have been told that your sound is “muffled” or “too far back”, be suspicious! What you want is to sing with natural sound, vibrantly free and unique, and with great EXPRESSIVITY. Keeping your larynx down (or way up, equally problematic) isn’t good and you can’t fix it by deciding that you are going to just stop. You have to work it free until it finds a balanced place on its own.

Remember, the proof is in the singing. If your teacher sounds woofy, stuck, and boringly the same, change teachers. Keeping your larynx down on purpose is just simply a bad idea.

In order to get somewhere with functional training, a teacher has to pull in two opposing directions and that is confusing to the student. It is very well stated in William Vennard’s book Singing: The Mechanism and the Technique. The teacher has to get the singer to be both flexible and strong, and the mechanism to be sturdy and malleable. The sound needs to be “bright” but also have some “warmth”. This is usually described as being “chiaroscuro”or clear and obscure at the same time.

If you work only in one direction, sooner or later you will dead-end. You need to get the voice to have a strong healthy chest register response but if you only work on chest register you will find that the voice gets stiff and starts to have various problems like flatting and constriction. If you work to develop and strengthen head register to make it stronger you will find the high notes flying out with little effort and the soft tones easier to do, but you might also get weak on the bottom and end up without warmth in the tone in the middle. Either way, you pay a price for not being balanced in both registers.

The work in the voice is always in the middle. It is in the middle that mechanics matter. If you do not know how to mechanically adjust in mid-range, you will never sing easily in a wide range of pitches. And, if all you can do is sing in mid-range, you will never have a strong bottom and easy top. Either way, you will be limited.

If you expect the middle range to take care of itself through random vocal exercises, you will waste a lot of time waiting for it to “arrive” in a finished state. It is only through deliberate cultivation of various vowel and register responses that the middle voice can come into its own and that takes both time and practice.

If you study with a teacher who asks you to do something to “get lighter” and then, a few weeks later, she asks you to sing with “more fullness”, that might sound contradictory, but it would mean that she is a good teacher, who is seeking to strike a balance between two seemingly opposite behaviors. Somehow or other, they can coexist, and in fact must coexist, if the singing is to be secure.

And, while working on the typical things like “breath support”, “resonance” and “placement” could be useful, they could also be useless, depending on how they are approached. The teacher has to have a good deal of knowledge about how to cultivate a balance of registers and vowel sound configurations in order for things to be coordinated with breathing.

Functional training is hard to do in many ways because it asks for a wide variety of abilities that take time to absorb. It can be confusing to a student to be told to “do this” and then “do that”, but in the long run, that’s the only way to go.