Various Posts

“You don’t need to understand physiology to sing well.”

“You don’t need to understand voice science to sing well.”

“You don’t need to understand vocal function to sing well.”

These statements are all true. If they were not true, there would be no singers without formal training in physiology, science or function, singing in any style, who have had big careers. Since most singers are in CCM styles, with classical singers being in the minority of money-earning vocalists, and since it is highly probably that many more CCM vocalists don’t have any knowledge of these subjects (no stats to refer to here, just life experience), it is self-evident that a majority of CCM singers have sung without any knowledge of physiology, voice science or vocal function. A lot of them do very well without this knowledge — until there is a problem.

Then, when the voice decides to go south, they get “motivated”. Suddenly, it might seem like a good idea to learn about anything, all things, that have to do with making a voiced sound. Why? Is that going to bring the voice back? The answer is, it just might.

If the alternative is doing what you’ve always done (nothing much) it might be that a vocalist would conclude that being blithely innocent isn’t any longer a good idea and that probably she needs to understand the machine and what makes it go if she wants to keep using it to earn a living.

So why not learn these things in the first place? Why would any singers want to sing without this knowledge? Because it isn’t expected and because it isn’t really life and death necessary until there is a problem. And, if they should seek out some kind of instruction, there is a good chance that they will either encounter people teaching singing who don’t know these topics or know them but don’t understand how to apply the information gleaned from them to improve their work. That’s a big deal.

Knowing that the vocal folds vibrate and the air comes from the lungs isn’t going to make you a great singer but understanding that every sound you make starts in your throat in your vocal folds is a much better piece of information to have than not. It is also useful in case some “vocal expert” should tell you that your voice has to come “from your diaphragm” or that you need it to be “in your masque”, because it would allow you to know that such statements have nothing to do with what actually happens when you make a sound, and that the person dispensing this advice is not going to do you much good.

Knowing where your carburetor is won’t help you drive the car. Neither will knowing that the gas tank is inside the car if you run out of gas, but if you thought the car ran on fumes from the carbon dioxide of people’s exhalations, or if you believed that the car had a little man inside who was running really hard to make the engine work, that wouldn’t be so good, would it? Better to have an idea of what actually happens even if you think it has nothing to do with your driving. If your car stops running or has problems, at least you would take it to a garage looking for a reliable mechanic and not to the place that feeds the little man a better dinner.

Just because you don’t have to know something doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t know it because you choose to know it. Having information that has to do with whatever you are doing can only be a good thing, even if at first you don’t know exactly how to use it. If you run into trouble singing, having information about physiology, voice science and vocal function could help you choose a good “repair person” or “garage”, but not having it could lead you to run around, lost, not knowing what to look for, or even give up looking, thinking there was no help to be had.

If you sing, take the time to learn about your instrument. Go to workshops, take classes and seminars, read articles and books. It will protect you in the moments when things aren’t going along nicely all by themselves, and there will be such times. Be pro-active. Learn before you have to.

Singing well requires strength. You have to have strength in your core muscles, which includes the muscles in your back from the sacrum to the shoulders. You need strength in the intercostal muscles and you don’t get that unless you have done something that stretches and strengthens your upper body like volleyball, basketball, gymnastics, swimming or tennis. Dance would qualify but there are so many variables in dance training it’s hard to make a blanket statement.

You also need strength in the vocal folds, and in the muscles of the pharynx, and in the muscles in the back of the mouth (the soft palate muscles) and stretch and flexibility in the muscles of the jaw and face, including those on the inside and on the outside.

Relaxation is a favorite word of teachers of singing and it can be useful in someone who has a relatively inflexible throat and “stuck” sound, but relaxation alone can’t make a voice strong enough to handle professional demands, even if the singer’s general sound is typically soft and easy (as in some CCM styles). The system has to stand up to vigorous use and if you are not a strong, sturdy person being able to generate a clear firm sound can be quite difficult. The tendency would be to push, to shout, to over do, and that can cost you in lots of way.

Many people who end up having careers in classical music start out with stronger than average voices and develop them to be even bigger and sturdier over years and decades. When they begin to teach, the distance between them (and their sound) and a 100 pound soprano with a delicate sweet sound can be a Grand Canyon. No matter how much talent, determination, and hard work a student who is 18 or 19 has, if he or she is not a strong person with a strong body, making a “full” sound that has “resonance” or acoustic efficiency can take a long time.

I would say that it takes about two years, minimum, of regular lessons (not less than twice a month) and regular practice (half hour five times a week) on technique (separate from songs) to begin to get a sense of what kind of a voice the person has (assuming they are young or beginners) and getting it to a kind of technical balance. That might seems like a very long time, but it’s just the beginning. It takes five years to get really solid and free and ten years to be a real vocal master. Less time is possible but very very rare. More is also possible, but that would be slow for someone who is aiming at a high level professional career.

People who do not have formal classical training (who come to teaching from CCM styles) may not realize that this time frame is normal. If you are new to teaching or to singing training, please keep this in mind. Your body needs time even if your brain doesn’t. Understanding what you need to do is not the same as being able to execute it with ease and reliability.

How do you know what kind of vocal boundaries you should have? In fact, what are functional boundaries and what, exactly, is functional training anyway? Isn’t all vocal training functionally based?

Hot and heavy questions and few would dare to respond to them with answers, but that, of course, won’t stop me. (OK, stop laughing).

A boundary has to do with how the voice responds to exercise. It should respond within certain parameters. What parameters, you ask?

The vibrato should remain normal (if one is there and is desired), not slow and wide or fast and small. The breathing should not be physically draining to do. The neck muscles should remain relaxed, not involved. The mouth opening should be moderate except for very high, low, or very loud pitches when it can be more open and exaggerated. The vowels should be UNDISTORTED, that is, recognizable. Vowel modification on high notes should not make the vowels muddled or skewed, just pleasant and comfortable both to do and to hear. Consonants should be easy to manage, again with the exception of very high pitches where they may be less distinct, particularly for sopranos. The jaw should never shake and the tongue should be quiet as well. Comfortable volume changes over 3/4 of your range should not be impossible to do. The tone should be clear, neither nasal or breathy, unless those things are desired as stylistic gestures as they are in certain styles.

If your voice has these things as responses to any exercise, you are still within functional boundaries that are working for your voice. If any of them go away for any length of time, you need to ask why. They might be temporarily absent in the short term as you learn something new, but they should never disappear entirely. If they do, you have gone past a functional boundary and you need to understand that and know why.

And, of course, if the sound is unpleasant and you don’t want it to be, you need to understand that the exercises should be helping you get it to sound pleasing, not causing it to be unpleasant.

Anytime functional boundaries are passed without awareness or explanation, the voice will let you know. If you don’t pay attention to it, as can happen when you are young, you can miss things and you can be pushed into making sound that, down the road, your throat will pay dearly to continue. Your singing teacher should know what the appropriate boundaries are but many do not, so you could be on your own to find the range of responses your voice can tolerate while you are being trained. That’s not easy to manage without help.

Functional training is supposed to take your voice past its own natural predilections into new territory. In fact, if it does not, you are not learning anything. You are simply singing with more control and awareness of what your throat would do anyway, all by itself. That’s not giving you abilities you wouldn’t have anyway. Functional training teaches deliberate development of the various responses all human voices can have, particularly those that are not typical in any given voice, and makes those responses eventually become second nature. Without boundaries, any time your voice fails to respond in an expected manner, you will assume that something is wrong with it, or with you, and misinterpret those problems as something that has to do with “flaws” in your voice instead of functional issues that were either not properly addressed or even caused by your training.

If your singing training is goal oriented, that is, if it is focused on getting the sound out in a certain way as a goal, you can miss what’s happening in the process of making sound and not notice or dismiss the experience of being a vocal sound maker in a moment-to-moment manner. If you are busy trying to produce a certain kind of “resonance” by using “better breath support” you can misconstrue what happens while you are singing assigning the wrong cause to a vocal response. That makes it harder to correct problems. Training which is aimed at music, without much regard to how the sound is being made in the throat and body, is not functional, (although it could be very musical). Training which is based upon finding various “resonance strategies” in the throat is not functional, although some people might think that it is. It is still a way of trying to manipulate a result, not a cause. Training which emphasizes a specific use of the breath, is not functional if it is not also connected to the knowledge that the vocal folds control the airflow, and not the other way around. It also has to be connected to specific and personalized information about how you use the ribs, the abdominal muscles and the rest of the body while breathing as you make sound, including how you inhale before you make sound.

Training which says you can only sing well if you learn classical repertoire first as a “good grounding” is misplaced. Learning classical repertoire is good if you want to sing classical repertoire. It is useless if you want to sing something else, UNLESS, “classical” is a substitute word for functional in which case   the training would work for the voice and body regardless of what repertoire you would sing because the functional exercises would be aimed at the needs of the repertoire as if they mattered.

Finally, functional training allows the voice to be both strong and free, variable and reliable, sturdy and adjustable, consistent and spontaneous. It is not a compromise between two things, it is a combination of two things, physical coordination done in a deliberate manner, and artistic freedom of choice, used in response to various kinds of music. It may or may not have to do with “resonance” but it always has to do with personal satisfaction and ownership.

This is a lot to think about. I hope you will.

In Italian the word “spinto” when applied to singing voices means “pushed”.

Every singing teacher worth his or her salt is against pushing the voice, so what’s up with that?

You have to know classical singing to understand this term. Jerry Hadley was a light lyric tenor. He studied for a long time with a teacher who “beefed up” his sound until it had more “heft”. Mirella Freni started her career singing Susanna and ended it singing Elisabeth in “Don Carlo”…….some change! Both of these singers made these changes gradually, over a period of years, and ended up singing well as they grew older. There are many examples of singers whose voices gradually got sturdier or fuller or more capable of sustaining sound at a loud volume for longer periods of time who move from one “fach” to another, or, (for those who don’t know this world), from one kind of singing to another. They sing one kind of operatic role in various works but finally move into another one. Rarely does a voice get lighter throughout a career (although it can go higher or lower).

Most people who survive singing loudly for a long period of time without losing their vocal chops manage to develop the ability to sustain the sound without hurting the voice. We don’t know why some people can manage this and others can’t, but it probably has to do with anatomy and with the kind of singing and training (if any) for singing the person has.

There is something to be said for 10, 15, 20, or more years of doing something that produces a result which simply cannot be had in 5 years. A mature adult who has been doing anything for decades is simply not the same as someone who is in his 20s and has been singing as an adult for a brief period of time. The old (meaning centuries ago) teachers understood this and understood that taking on a really big, heavy role too soon could do things to the voice (that were not necessarily vocal health issues) that were hard to undo, functionally. Many a career has been ruined by singing material that was too taxing and demanding on a body that was too young to manage it well.

This is true in dance as well. Although 30 is old for a ballet dancer, the role of the Swan Queen in Swan Lake is not done by a very young dancer because it is so demanding. It takes enormous stamina to sustain that role. That’s also typical of the role of “Norma” in the opera of the same name. Only Rosa Ponselle was able to do it while young (28), but she took a year off to work on the role, during which time she sang nothing else. No one would do that today, but she did and she was not harmed by doing just that. When Laurence Olivier prepared to do “Othello” for the first time he took two full years to lower his voice by two steps so it would sound authentic rather than imitative. Imagine that — two years!

Why would people do this? Isn’t it foolish? Isn’t it a waste? Why not just change?

Because the voice doesn’t work that way and the body doesn’t either. Things in the body, like all things in nature, take the time they take. You don’t grow a garden in a week and you don’t develop the stamina or strength to do a marathon in a month. Singing is no different.

Yet, in the world of vocal training, few have an understanding of this and almost no one has any reference to in CCM material at all. Why should belting be an automatic thing? Shouting is immediate. Singing loudly in a sustained sound that is freely produced is not. It is not a natural activity unless you have a loud voice and you talk incessantly, and even then, that’s not a musical function, so it isn’t exactly the same.

The singers of the world should pay attention to and understand why the things that were observed many long years ago made sense and why they should not be thrown away blithely just because we live in a very different era today. Bodies may be quite different now than they were then but not THAT different. Going slowly worked then and it works now.

If we let go of repertoire entirely for the moment and looked at singing training strictly as a physical activity like a sport or like dance we can talk about what it takes to develop an Olympic quality vocalist (which is related to, but not the same as, an artist who sings).

Gymnastics requires greater and greater physical skill, pushing the body to its limits. Its combination of enormous flexibility and great strength are found most aptly in the young and the diminutive. Long lanky people don’t do well in gymnastics, mostly for reasons that have to do with physics. The long lanky folk do well in basketball and volleyball and the sturdy, wide and densely muscled seem to do well in weight lifting and football. Other sports may have other physical parameters that make it easier for individuals with certain kinds of bodies to do better at them than others. Ballet dancers tend to be long like volleyball players although not quite so tall. The women, particularly, do better with smaller breasts (whether natural or decreased through surgery).

No one has ever looked at singing in exactly this way, except through the externals of the sounds they make. We do have “dramatic voices” (ones that seem to be quite loud and rich) and “lyric voices” (ones that seem sweeter and not quite so powerful) and a range in between. We describe voices with descriptive words like “warm” and “earthy” and “cutting” or “creamy”or “delicate” and “shimmery” but those words only mean something to the people that use them. They aren’t objective terms.

We don’t know if a certain size larynx or a certain thickness of vocal folds makes for a certain kind of sound, or if a certain thickness of neck or length of throat gives certain harmonics a boost. We do know that longer throats tend to be lower pitched voices, and small ones higher pitched voices, but that’s about it. It stands to reason, though, that anatomy has to have something to do with what we call the voice itself.

Nevertheless, the vocal ligament is part of a complex muscular system. Only the hyoid bone in the tongue is an actual bone. Everything else is either cartilage or muscle, meaning it is soft or malleable. That being so, why would it not respond to development, at least in the muscles? The muscles of the pharynx and velo-pharyngeal port (the throat and the back of the mouth) can change shape by contracting. The more they learn to contract, they more they develop strength and flexibility. Even the vocal folds themselves can learn to contract more firmly and resiliently, closing more firmly to resist great air pressure from the lungs. The muscles of the chest (intercostals) and the abdominals (all four layers) can become very strong.

The predominant method of training for singing, developed in the 1600 and 1700s, passed down mostly one person to one person for all these centuries has evolved and changed along with the music being written and sung during that time. By the mid-1800s when orchestras became large and loud, voices really needed to have a certain kind of “oomph” in order to be heard, since there was no amplification other than that which could be created within the singer’s own physical body. At that time it became imperative to find a kind of “carrying power” that allowed a vocalist to compete with an 80 piece orchestra in an opera without ending up with a severe case of laryngitis. The “singer’s ring” seemed to help the sound soar over the orchestra and seemed like the “golden answer” to operatic vocal production. That end product, that special resonance, became the goal. Problem is, it never was the source of the sound and it isn’t possible to “do resonance” deliberately.

In observing the ingredients of those who had succeeded in this endeavor, singing over the orchestra loudly enough to be heard and sound good, but also not lose their voices, it was clear that it had something to do with breathing and with that “golden answer” in the sound. The breathing and the resonance became the pathway to this answer and today, hundreds of years later, it still is. The goal became the pathway, and the pathway became less important that getting to the goal however one could.

We know that winning in gymnastics means that you have to have all the various maneuvers mastered to perfection but that you must also look a certain way (comfortable) while you do them. We know that even small infractions of the movement parameters or the execution of them in terms of their smoothness and ease can make or break winning a medal. We understand that executing the maneuvers takes a lot of practice but I don’t think the athletes or their coaches confuse doing a routine on the uneven parallel bars as something that “just happens”. Clearly, they understand that a very complex kind of training has to happen every day for hours and hours for many years to make that routine into an Olympic one. They also understand that the gymnast has to have certain physical requisites and a certain mindset in order to make the possibility of success greater than it would be for an “average” person.

If we applied that to singing, every singing student would have a lesson every day and practice under the watchful eye of the teacher for 10 years before the student would be skilled enough to equate with a gymnast of the same age and kind of training. Imagine what that would mean to the level of singing that young people could address by the time they were 17 or 18! But, with the attitude that training can only begin after puberty, and with the attitude that one lesson for one hour once a week is sufficient to teach someone to sing well, there is no realistic possibility that at the same age the singer could ever be to singing what the gymnast is to gymnastics.

I am asking here, why not? It isn’t because it would be impossible, just that it hasn’t been done in a long long time or maybe it has never been done at all.

And what does this have to do with learning songs in foreign languages that were written in 1650 or 1720 or 1805 if you intend to become a professional singer in some style that has nothing to do with classical singing? The answer, obviously, is nothing at all. The training process, for its own sake, is about learning to make the desired sound, comfortably, easily and freely, in whatever quality one needs,  on demand, over and over again, in a way that is expressive and satisfying. The training process is about discovering what you have, in terms of the voice and the body, while being guided by a trained expert who encourages experimenting with various kinds of sounds in many different directions until finally the process itself produces the results almost without effort.

If you are an artist, if you have a desire to create and to express, if you have something special to say about how you view the world and life, if you want that expression to come through your voice in music, then, you must have a strong vocal and physical scaffolding as a secure platform to do all of these things and to make the world a better place by doing so. When that scaffolding is in place you can rest upon it with confidence, without giving it more than a passing thought, and express that which only you have to say.

So many people who would sing from the heart are robbed of this experience by poor or inadequate training. They have the artist within killed by teachers who lack skill, life experience, and high level singing ability of their own. Many singers stop singing altogether because someone who was teaching without a clue said or did something that went to the core of their soul and silenced them forever.

The way out of this dilemma is through solid functional training, grounded in science, and applied with care and kindness.

There are a lot of people whose idea of singing is based on making the voice do something. They have never, not once, sung a free, unmanipulated sound that arose without interference. From the get-go they have been taught to “find resonance” and “open the throat” or “keep the larynx down” or any number of a million other things. They have accepted this behavior and allowed it to become their default, without any deep investigation of any kind.

People with big loud voices who can make a lot of sound and still sound halfway decent can manage that way. They can certainly fill the big houses of the world with sound and they can absolutely make an impression, sometimes even while singing without an ounce of real feeling or expression. They incorrectly believe that manipulation is good, it’s necessary, it is desirable. Many of them have careers, particularly in opera houses.

No accepted pedagogy book, however, agrees that deliberate manipulations of any kind is desireable. All of the books that are considered important in vocal pedagogy (for classical singing, as mostly those books are the ones that have any widely accepted credibility) all say that freedom is paramount. Above and beyond all other capacities, freedom has to be affirmed first and often.

Sounds that are squeezed, tight, pushed, swallowed, rigid, and immobilized ultimately don’t express much of anything and certainly don’t sound attractive and very often end up causing both musical and physical (vocal) problems. Yes, there are people singing like this in every walk of professional music, and there are people teaching in various situations who rest their entire approach on these ideas. There are even some people who think that singing freely is a hoax and that there is, really, no such thing. If they do hear someone who seems to be singing freely, they think that the person is a freak of nature. I have even been told that singing with deliberate tension is the only way to really know what you are doing. Yikes.

You cannot sing freely and also at the same time “hold your larynx down” or “put your larynx in a certain place” (up, down, back, etc.), you cannot “make your mask resonate” any more than you can “make your food digest” because both functions are by-products of other things the body does. They are not causes, they are effects. You can eat and you can make a sound, but you cannot deliberately digest or resonate anything.

Somewhere along the way, people never hear about the fact that the voice is a reflexive instrument. It reacts to the messages of the mind. It reacts to the intentions we have to make sound in a specific way (words or music). It produces sound and the sound is modified by the vocal tract in myriad ways before it emerges out into the world as a vibratory movement of air molecules. You can decide to sing, but you cannot decide to produce “resonance”. It just shows up or not.

In order to “come home to your own voice” you have to spend quite some time exploring all of its potentials and letting it do its own thing, even while you are learning to harness it. If you stop its natural movements or responses, it will push back and let you know it’s not happy by giving you a hard time and it can be pretty creative about how it does that. If you learn to partner it, with awareness and sensitivity, it will let you know clearly, in good time, what it likes to do and what it would rather not do. It will allow you coax it into new places that wouldn’t show up without coaxing and if you give it permission to react spontaneously it will show you places you didn’t know it could go. When the sound you make is the sound you want to make and the sound that gives you pleasure, believe me you will absolutely recognize it and you will know that you have found something that you were always seeking…something that you deeply knew was in there somewhere but that you had not yet been able to discover. Finding that sound is absolutely coming home to both your heart and your voice and there is no other experience that compares to that one. It is unique in its joy and its comfort.

Anthony Tommasini, the classical reviewer of the New York Times, recently reviewed 85 year old Barbara Cook and had the nerve to say [my words, paraphrasing] that she wasn’t quite up to singing really hard music, the way classical singers do, since she is so old. What nerve. The Times (another reviewer) said something similar about Streisand last week, too. At 70 she sounded great. Not like her 30 year old self, but why should she sound like that? Why should anyone? Yet, they make those comments. PLEASE.

Mr. T particularly is so unbelievably clueless. He lives in the world where classical singing is “elevated” and “great” and other styles are well, “something less”. That he gets away with this attitude is always obvious in his reviews as he manages to say something unconscious or deliberately snarky, thinking, it seems, that this is the “correct” view.

American music of all styles is not lesser than classical music, it’s just different. It is just as hard to sing “Take Me, Baby, Or Leave Me” from Rent as it is to sing Mozart’s “Non So Piu”, maybe in some ways much harder, especially if you have to sing it 8 times a week. There isn’t much difference between singing “An Die Musik” and singing “In The Still Of The Night” in terms of vocal use. What is different is the style and that matters, but the level of difficulty for the voice is low in both songs if the singers are skilled and experienced.

If it were up to me I would make the large institutions change what they think today. In the future, opera houses will have musicals running alongside operas as regular fare and it may be, if training continues along functional lines, that we could even see Rent running along side Lulu or Carmen. You never know. The point is, just because opera has been around longer, it isn’t any more valuable than other styles.

Art has caught up with this idea in every are except singing. Andy Warhol and Alexander Calder are not considered “lesser” artists than Monet or Degas, at least in terms of what they cost and how they are regarded by museums and critics. I don’t think anyone would say that Balanchine’s choreography was more valuable than that of the choreographers working in the major ballet houses and companies of this present moment. We have Twyla Tharp creating dances for ballet companies and Broadway shows. No one makes “remarks” about that. She’s not alone, either.

But, when it comes to singing, the Times major critic has only one point of view — classical is harder, classical is better. This attitude continues to feed the people who also share it all the other places of the world, most particularly, and unfortunately, in this country where all but a few CCM styles were born.

If we really respected this music there would be requirements that people who wrote about it or taught it or had to deal with it in any other public arena would understand each style, each world, on its own terms and treat it with dignity and integrity. You cannot write about music theater with a classical mindset. Yes, there are a few places where the viewpoints overlap, but they are less every day.

Classical singing requires singers to generate a “singer’s formant cluster” in order to be heard unamplified over an orchestra, (all but the very high sopranos, who can rely on the pitches) and you need to be able to generate a good amount of volume. You need consistent vibrato, consistent production, and a distinctive voice. You need to understand languages, and you need to be an OK actor. You had better have some clear way of using your breathing mechanism, too, or you won’t have enough volume or stamina to keep going. You need at least an octave and a half to two octaves of range.

Music theater is driven by lyrics and communication of their meaning. It asks for specific vocal qualities and various styles. It is concerned with clarity most of the time, both of word and of intention. A good voice is always nice but I have heard so many not so good voices over the years….some of them have actually won Tony awards. Range depends on the role.

Jazz is concerned with phrasing, intonation, musical variation and rhythmic freedom and consistency. It may or may not be concerned with the lyrics in a literal sense, because sometimes there are no lyrics, just syllables or humming. Sometimes words are “bent” on purpose. You don’t need a certain kind of vocal quality, or range, or vibrato, or power.

Each of the other styles has its own parameters. Some artists can go in and out of several styles comfortably, some not. If they were all equally easy everyone would sing everything and nothing would be its own distinct style at all.

One of these days the Times will have reason to replace Mr. T. When they do, I hope they get a reviewer who isn’t stuck in classical snobbery.

You can blink, swallow, cough, and breathe on purpose but when you are not doing so, those things happen on their own through the wiring of the nervous system. We can intervene, but we cannot stop ourselves from doing these things.

The “fight/flight” mechanism, which connects to the old limbic brain, kicks in when we are stressed. It makes the breath shallow, it brings the circulation to the central organs deep within the body, it makes the limbs cold and makes us clammy and sweaty if the “threatening” situation continues. Since most of us live with a low level of stress all the time (if there is anyone who does not, I haven’t yet met them) we all encounter a certain amount of activity from this biological reaction. If it becomes chronic, it can effect how we breathe and even how we stand.

If the throat constricts to restrict air (which it does in the case of this F/F response) the larynx can rise in the throat. If the constriction continues, the larynx can continue to stay in a raised position and that, in turn, can make the head project out over the body, forcing it forward. It’s hard to breathe with chronic constriction so the body tries to relieve this strain by pushing the head out. It isn’t efficient, but it does have some effect. This tension will also creep up into the back of the base of the tongue, making it tight and immobile. The voice becomes “pinched” and “strained” and can sound squeezed and choked off or muffled.

Another factor that effects us in a similar way is emotion. “All choked up”, “Cat got my tongue”, “Can’t spit it out”, “Swallowed my words”, “Speechless”. These phrases exist because if we are in certain emotionally powerful situations, the throat can literally close, making it almost impossible to breathe or speak. If you are in a constantly volatile emotional situation but can’t or won’t express what those emotions are, you can end up with chronic constriction in your throat with all of the same effects on your voice as described above.

In fact, keeping the throat free and open is, in our society, something of a miracle. We have so many reasons why we have to suppress what we feel or what we are experiencing. Some people probably do manage. Perhaps these expressive souls are more uninhibited than the majority of us. Perhaps they just don’t let things get to them!

If you sing, however, you have to address these patterns, whether you want to or not, because if you allow them to remain your singing will be compromised. If you begin training without allowing the throat to relax and unwind, the training will sit on top of constriction that may have been buried in your throat for decades, perhaps since childhood. You might still sing but your freedom will be compromised and your authentic vocal personality will be too.

Of course, most singing training addresses these issues from the outset because all teachers of singing realize that these conditions exist and are impediments.

RIGHT.

Find me a teacher who understands these biological and psychological response patterns and knows how to undo the long-term consequences of same. One in a thousand, maybe.

If you begin training by telling a student to “bring the sound forward” and you insist upon “good breath support” in a young inexperienced student and that person has chronic throat constriction which they do not realize they have you will tie the student in a vocal knot and get absolutely nowhere, no matter what exercises you use. Then you will blame the student for not trying hard enough or being resistant.

On the other hand, if you do know about these patterns, you will allow the person to slowly relax, learn to move the muscles of the tongue, neck and eventually the throat, and let the musculature soften so that it can let go and release the tension and accompanying anxiety that is held there. It takes time and requires great patience but it can be done. In the end, the person will not only sound better, she will feel better, both physically and psychologically. They go together, particularly in those who sing.

You cannot fight the body. You cannot work against the nervous system. You must learn to make friends with it and ride on it so that you can sing freely. There really is no other way.

Sooner or later, you come to a place where you think, “That’s it. I don’t need to learn anything more about this topic. I’m an expert and that’s the end”. Then, as time passes, you just rest on your laurels, you do what you’ve always done, you know what you’ve always known and you preach your own gospel of knowledge from that platform.

Or, you confront yourself and look in the mirror and wonder, “Is there anything new out there? Have I really found out all there is to know on this topic even though I haven’t investigated it in over 5 (10, 15, 20, 25) years?”

I strive to learn something new every day. I strive to be open to change and new information about singing, coming from all directions. I assume I never know when the latest, hottest new discovery will open up my world to excitingly fresh possibilities. I naively assumed that most teachers would have that viewpoint as well. I was very wrong.

I have encountered many, many teachers of singing who have found their own way to teach and are not in the least interested in changing anything about it, mostly because they feel it’s just fine the way it is. They are well satisfied with themselves and their work and make no bones about letting others know that they feel that way. It’s kind of stunning, but it’s not an uncommon attitude.

How is it possible to think that you have a perfect way to do anything? How is it that you do what you do and never adjust or change it or what you think about it? How is it so that you aren’t even curious to see what someone else is doing?

Licensed professions are required to keep up their skills by attending educational courses that keep them abreast of the newest trends. Speech Language Pathologists need to get CEU’s in order to keep their credentials current. That is certainly not true of singing teachers. They don’t have to have any skills in the first place……a plumber could put out a shingle and say he was teaching singing and no one could stop him. In fact, I know a very well known singing teacher who was a piano tuner before he became a recognized faculty member at a college conservatory.

This holds true for other professions who deal with us as singing teachers. Most of the laryngologists I have met think they know what good singing teachers do. Some of them have taken singing lessons but most have not. Some of them have observed a teacher of singing over a period of time, but most of them have not. Some of them have read about vocal pedagogy (from a classical point of view, since that’s all there is), but most have not. Yet, they do not attend voice conferences. There are no ENTS at a NATS national conference unless they are invited there. I have been to medical conferences as a singing teacher (just to watch), but I have never seen a medical doctor attend a singing teacher conference. Why not? Because they think they don’t need to learn from us even though they could benefit enormously from what we have to share. I have spent time observing in several doctors offices and seen more than a few SLPs working. I don’t intend to become an ENT or an SLP, but watching them work was very beneficial to my overall knowledge of the voice. And I always enjoy watching them present research because I always learn something. Why should that be only a one-way path?

It’s very hard telling people who think they know that maybe they do not know. It’s very hard pointing out to someone that curiosity about what others do or know is a good thing, not a harmful one. It’s quite challenging to let another person know that you would like to share your knowledge if that other person has never even thought that there could be something new to learn from anyone.

There will always be people who are content with themselves but when that contentment contains the seeds of complacency, it isn’t a wonderful thing. Self-satisfaction can be lethal or wonderful, depending on the circumstances. If you already know everything you need to know, do yourself a favor, and think about it again.

This blog has addressed the changing atmosphere of teaching singing int he 21st century numerous times. It is slowly but surely moving towards changes that will be truly seismic once they are instituted.

The biggest and most significant change will be when college students are no longer required to learn “An Die Musik”,”Caro Mio Ben” or “Apres Un Rêve” in order to prove they are “well trained” and have “good technique” even if you have no interest in or desire to sing classical music.

Good technique is being able to sing whatever you want in whatever way you want all the time. Period. It has nothing to do with art songs or classical music. It isn’t about “good taste” it is about good function.

Learning about the great composers of the western world is a hugely valuable thing to do. Human beings need to know and appreciate the great classical music of the last 400 years. Learning about the composers and their works, however, has zero to do with learning to sing functionally. They are separate, now more than ever. As I frequently say, singing “Les Berceaux” will not help you one bit to sing “Out Tonight” from Rent.

Functional training is the same as any training for a physical skill. It is more like a sport or dance than not. Being musical, expressive, and singing in foreign languages are three separate things that may relate to functional training after the training has helped established healthy, reliable vocal behavior, but they are not interdependent.

If you want to play basketball and you go to learn how and the instructor says, first you have to be a good swimmer because that will develop your entire body and make you stronger, that might make sense but being stronger and more developed won’t make you good at basketball. Only playing basketball will make you better at playing basketball.

Currently, talented young singers take classical lessons and use them to figure out on their own how to adapt their sound to other styles. Some succeed and some don’t. This has been true for 50 years. Some teachers understand how to teach belt and mix because they have learned to sing in these qualities but some don’t sing in them or have not studied them and teach them anyway (that’s backed up by research published in the Journal of Voice in 2003 and 2006).

When we get to the place where students who want to sing Elton John songs can do so alongside of songs by Rodgers and Hammerstein and Jonathan Larson, then we will have crested this big wave and will be on the down side of its energy. We aren’t there yet but we are closer by a long way than we used to be.