Various Posts

Many organizations have vocal competitions. They offer prizes, fame, concert dates and other perks. There are small competitions (just a few dollars or a small performance) and there are things like “The Voice” and “American Idol” that offer the moon and then some. There are competitions of all kinds in between.

There are classical competitions for opera singers who also do art songs. The Met Opera has a competition. There are international competitions. They have been around for a long time.

What happens in a competition and why are they needed?

Someone has to decide that it would be good idea to have a vocal competition. It could be a large group or small but it is rarely, if ever, just one person, although if the person were very rich, I imagine it wouldn’t be impossible. The group has to have someone to run the competition. It could be one person or a committee. The committee has to decide who is going to be allowed to sing, what kinds of things they can sing, and who will judge. They will have to decide how many winners there are and what the prizes will be. They will have to decide what the criteria are for judges and judging.

Then, they have to pick the judges.

NATS, the national association that many singing teachers belong to, has local, regional and national competitions for both classical and music theater singers. There are rules and regulations and requirements and the competitions are not free to the students. There is almost always a registration fee for these things and that is true for these contests as well. Teachers of singing who belong to NATS are allowed to submit their students in various musical and age categories but they cannot judge their own students. The students sing without telling the judges who their teachers are.

Since we are still in a time when almost all teachers of singing have classical training as their primary background, particularly if they teach in a university or school (other than at a jazz or commercial music academy) there are many times when there is no one to judge the music theater contestants other than a classical teacher, who often has no knowledge of music theater style or vocal production. In fact, this is not uncommon. As one can imagine, this scenario is hardly a good one. If you have several classically oriented judges listening to a student who is a very good belter, the judges wouldn’t know that, and might “mark the student down” (lower her score) because the sound isn’t “classical enough”. Why have a competition to “help” young singers be recognized and supported if you have to rely on judges who have NO CLUE what the singing is about? Doesn’t that seem ridiculous? It certainly does to me.

And, how would it be if we make the contestant carry all the books of music that contain the songs they have chosen to sing for the contest. How would it be if they arrive with literally a suitcase of books of music? Why not make photocopies and take those in a notebook instead? Doesn’t that make the most sense for all concerned?

It does, but making sense is not something that teaching organizations are known for. They are known for making rules and regulations, regardless of what is involved in upholding them.

NATS requires that students NOT photocopy music due to copyright laws. Trouble is, the students are using the material for the contest, not to make money. It is an educational opportunity most of the time and certainly isn’t about them selling the music to make a profit. NATS could go to the publishers and negotiate some kind of “rights agreement” with the publishers and charge a small fee to the students, acting as a collection agency, or make arrangements for paid downloads of music, to be sure that those who own the copyright are properly compensated. The publishers are very likely to agree as they would make some small amount of money on every song. The way it is now, kids are forced to borrow scores from friends, from the library or hope that the accompanist can play from memory, without music. If they have to purchase a $20, $30 or $40 dollar book of songs in order to sing just one, the attitude of the organization is: too bad for you. How do you suppose that works for poor students? Forcing students to lug an entire suitcase of music books to a competition is surely ridiculous but it is required. Sometimes students are disqualified for bringing a photocopy to the piano (for convenience of the accompanist) even though the original music is in the room with them and belongs to them because they bought it. How’s that for stupid? What do you think the student contestant learns about singing from that rule? How does this help him or her understand the art of making song? And, since the publishers are the ones who are making the money, does this help them get rich? Hardly. It is a remarkably stupid procedure that puts the burden on the student instead of the association, where it belongs. Here is the word again: STUPID.

And, if you manage to win a competition to which you have lugged a suitcase of music books, judged by people who may or may not have a clue about what you are singing and how it is supposed to sound, what do you win? Does this contest help you get a better shot at having a career? Answer is, who knows? The only sure bet is if you are a finalist on one of the big TV shows or at the Met. Otherwise, it does hardly anything.

Competitions to find the next biggest singing star will never go away. Hearing someone with a really thrilling voice is so special that we will always seek those individuals who can put all the ingredients together to make something truly thrilling happen. Competitions, however, can easily be a dreadful experience for the singers. Ask someone who has been in one sometime and see for yourself what kind of horror stories you will hear about what can and does happen at them.

Here are a few from someone who was not singing, just organizing:

Years ago I ran a small competition for classical singers for one of the teaching associations. We had two rounds, a preliminary and a final. The singers were all young. There were requirements for what kinds of material they had to sing. The decision was made by totaling the scores of the judges and all the comments were available afterwards (without the judges’ names) to assist the student by providing feedback. At the end of about 22 singers and an entire day of judging, I collected the sheets to begin tabulating the results. One of the judges had drawn little diagrams and squiggles on the sheets. It seems that she had Alzheimer’s, back in the day when people didn’t admit they had it, and she had not remembered why she was there. Nice little surprise. We ended up throwing out the entire day and using the finals as if we had not had a preliminary.

I also ran another competition in which there were criteria for the singers that were totally ignored by the judges. There was a tie for first place and the judges decided the best way to break it was to choose the person who had the nicest outfit (I kid you not). They threw the person whose clothes they did not like completely out of the competition because she was “so good” they knew she would be OK even if she didn’t win. It was horrifying to watch, not just because it was insane behavior but also because this singer was my own student and I couldn’t say so.

Here’s another one to raise the hair on your head.

The competition (a different one) was long over. The competition committee, of which I was chair, gathered to talk about how things went and what could be done to improve things next time. One of the committee members stated that the student he had submitted was just completely distraught, miserable and would never sing again. She was going to quit singing because she didn’t come in as one of the winners (1st, 2nd or 3rd place). He said he personally was insulted. I said that these things happen and that, in life, people don’t always get the job or the gig or the role and that we all knew it was painful to lose but there was nothing to be done. He then said he wanted his student to get an honorable mention, to cheer her up. I told him that was impossible, since the judges were long gone, that the competition was over and that there had not been an honorable mention category in the competition. BUT, to my utter amazement, the five other people in the room who were part of the committee, told me they were going to vote this young woman her Honorable Mention and give it to her. I was astounded but that’s just what they did. No one outside the committee ever knew, but I knew, and it blew and still blows my mind. If you are someone who thinks this story is “nice”, please do not ever judge or participate in any kind of competition.

There are more stories, but these few will give you an inkling.

The purpose of competitions is to find talented young singers and help them get started in careers where they can become professionals, earn a living, or maybe even become stars. There may be other purposes, like receiving feedback from the judges, learning what it’s like to stand up in front of someone and sing while being judged, or being able to handle the nerves involved. It might also be about learning repertoire, being able to express the music in a strong way or other possible things. What it should not be is about learning things that have absolutely nothing to do with these criteria.

Think twice before you pays your money and sings your songs.

Most people teach “the ends” as if it was “the means”.

Most people do not understand that what is a result cannot also be a cause.

This comes from the very old (and more or less correct) idea that you “should never feel your throat”. This old idea arose because it was understood that direct manipulation in the throat is never going to produce a free sound.

The conclusion, then, was that finding a different result would automatically mean that you had also caused a good new way to produce that result. This evolved into the idea that “getting different resonance” or “placement” automatically meant that you had come up with a viable vocal production mode to get it. But that conclusion could absolutely be wrong. The problem is that
“resonance” is a by-product of producing sound, not a cause. If you teach the by-product as if it were cause, you have the process backward.

There are lots of problems here. One is that it forces the singer to deal with “vibratory feedback” as the key ingredient in tracking vocal production. That might be fine if you have a big voice or if you can generate a lot of sound without too much strain. It’s my experience, however, that such voices are truly rare. Most people have ordinary voices with ordinary volume and they do not “feel” vibration until they have been studying for a long time. And, if you sing jazz or folk music, you might not ever feel enough “vibration” to track it in a useful manner.

Further, if you do figure out how to make a sound that vibrates a certain spot in your head (pick one: masque, eyebrows, forehead, top of the head, back of the head, sinuses, back of the nose, hard palate, front teeth, cheekbones, etc.), that may or may not be helpful. You can do that unfortunately by squeezing, forcing and pushing your throat to do things that it should not be doing. Therefore, it does not necessarily mean that you have “discovered” the “right” place or the “right” way to sing if you get the targeted “vibration”. It doesn’t mean anything. Whether or not you “vibrate” any of these “places”, by the way, has NOTHING to do with how you use your breathing mechanism.

And, if you are busy “tracking” vibration so you can “remember” it, you will never be fully able to sing by concentrating on the meaning of the words, as we really do not do two deliberate things well if we do them simultaneously. When a behavior becomes habitual, and you can forget about it, you can do it “effortlessly”, then, and only then, will a person be able to do something else at the same time. I have a great example of this:

I attended a wedding at which the bride was (deliberately) 45 minutes late. No one seemed surprised by this (except me) and the full church sat contentedly waiting as the organist played hymn after hymn. While she did so, she had a continuous and animated conversation with the woman sitting next to her, laughing and chatting away, although she never missed a note, song after song. If your singing becomes that ingrained, you can really focus on what you are singing about. You do not ever have to “remember” any “place” that “vibrates”.

What a singer should desire is to have the voice automatically respond to pitch, vowel and volume, and intention, period. In order to get the vocal production to change you have to have a stimulus (vocal exercise) to provoke that change. If you have any kind of tension (or imbalance) the throat will not respond freely. Training should correct those imbalances. If it does not, it isn’t doing you any good. If your sound does not get easier, nicer, better, more under your control and freer (at the same time), you are not learning anything. If you keep doing the squeezing, pushing, forcing or whatever, you will some day have to unlearn all of that in order to sing well…..if you can.

Your voice is reflexive. You can’t change that. You have to understand this in order to train it and to sing well. If you do not understand this, you must learn what it means. Your body is like all other bodies. The fact that you sing does not make it different than others who are not singers. No matter who your teacher is, no matter what his or her methods are, if they do not make functional sense and help you make functional changes, they are not working (at least for you) and if they do not teach you to make the sounds that you want to use while you sing — WHILE YOU SING — you should ask yourself why that is the case.

What happens when someone gets a “nodule”? What is a “polyp”? How can your voice be “ruined”? What happens when someone’s voice gets “damaged”?

There has been much ado lately about injured singers. Adele, age 23, is currently more successful than Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga combined. She is expected to sweep the Grammy’s and has recently become famous for her cancellation of her tour due to her vocal problems. She had surgery, I believe in Boston, and is now about to go on live TV at the Grammy Broadcast so we can all hear how her vocal folds have healed up.

Since this young woman seems very talented and has a great instrument, how is it that she got into such trouble?

One likely reason is that she taught herself to sing. She may have had absolutely no idea about vocal production or vocal ability, which is not at all unusual in someone who is abundantly talented and can “just do it”. Since she was not alone in this, and since other famous singers have recently had vocal problems that were well publicized, one can only hope that vocalists of all persuasions finally understand that training is a necessity if you intend to have a high-level, high-pressure career. AND, you need to have management that understands what healthy singing is, and what it takes to maintain it because if you do not the way your career is handled can be as much of a problem to overcome as is the actual singing.

As singing has become more and more demanding over the years, with expectations rising along with the glamour and the money, singers have been pressed to keep up with all sorts of things that can impact performance. The things that can derail a young vocalist who has not yet learned how to pace herself are many. Too much rehearsal, too much loud or full-out singing, poor acoustics, too much volume from the band, a bad monitor, an unskilled sound technician, not enough fluids, too much acid food, eating too late at night, allergies, environmental factors like dust and dryness, chemicals in the air, and physical fatigue or lack of sleep. Prescription drugs for other conditions one might have, and, first and foremost, lack of training and skill to sing with the least amount of stress possible.

If the music is too high or too low, if it is very emotionally wrenching, if it is complex, if it is poorly arranged, if it has many repetitive phrases or if it is just plain demanding, or if the vocalist has to dance while singing, it can cause vocal problems. If the vocalist is also talking a lot in between performances (to the musicians, the tour management people, family members, the press and fans) or has little down time to be quiet, vocal problems are more likely.

If singers could see what really severe damage does to the vocal folds and understand that not all vocal fold issues “just go away” even with the highest level of care and attention from medical and clinical professionals, or singing teachers, they might be frightened enough to be careful. They may not realize that in addition to allowing them to speak and sing, the vocal folds are responsible for protecting their lungs from foreign bodies and for helping the body do strenuous tasks. If the vocal folds do not close firmly, it is hard to lift something heavy, to do vigorous exercise or to climb the stairs.

The vocal folds are VERY small. Every sound we ever make has to come from these two small ligaments stretched across the trachea in the larynx, which is cartilage and can be damaged in an accident, can become arthritic, can become dislocated or can gradually be squeezed or immobilized over time from various causes. There are all kinds of ways the vocal folds can become “unhealthy” and many illnesses that can effect them including throat cancer and thyroid illnesses, pulmonary diseases, and various kinds of partial or full paralysis of one or both folds.

A voice that does not have healthy vocal folds is damaged. If the damage is severe enough and cannot be remedied the voice can be ruined. A nodule is usually from wrong use, and often affects both folds so that there are two nodules. A polyp can occur from a “one time only” event like a severe sneeze or cough or from many other causes. There are cysts and other growths that can be biological and hormonal changes can effect the folds as well. All of these things interfere with normal vocal fold function. The voice just doesn’t do what it needs to do. It feels and sounds “off” or “bad”.

In fact it is miraculous that most of the time, most people’s voices work well for their entire lives and do the things that voices need to do without problem or issue. When one sings professionally, however, the ante goes up radically and the responsibility for the artist to know what’s what goes up just as much. If you teach singing and you do not yourself really know what vocal health is and how healthy vocal folds operate, you must educate yourself. You owe your students nothing less. There may come a time when you are the first person to hear “something wrong” in someone’s sound and sending them for evaluation by a qualified throat specialist could even save their life.

Recently Betty Buckley, great diva of much Broadway fame, slammed Randy Jackson of Idol about his use of “you sound too Broadway” as a putdown. She was, rightly, outraged that this man should assume that “sounding Broadway” was in any way bad.

Broadway includes all styles and has for quite some time now. A great many of today’s shows are rock oriented and it takes a lot of skill and experience to sing rock music, full out, eight times and week, while being someone else. You have to sing it in the keys the production allows, you have to do it with an orchestra and a conductor, so there isn’t much room for improvisational change. You must sing with a body mike, not a hand held mike, and there are no monitors. You must make all your “marks” for staging on time and you have to wear what the character wears, not clothes that suit your fancy (al la Lady Gaga or Madonna). There aren’t too many of the singers on Idol who could go into a Broadway show and not self-destruct unless it was someone who had already been in a musical or had had training to deal with those parameters as a performer.

What makes Idol so awful (and yes, it is awful) is that it is SO limited and that there are no judges there that actually understand SINGING. This is a reflection of the lack of cultural education across the board now for several generations of Americans, but it is fed by the judges who seem to be just about as uneducated and unsophisticated about vocal expression as the audience. Maybe they know what “sells” but that’s not the same as understanding the capacity to sing.

If we lived in a culture that wasn’t built on “he who makes the most money wins” as a mentality, and had some clue as to what makes life worth living (certainly, getting rich and having a lot of stuff isn’t high on that list), we would have respect for a wide variety of singers and singing, representing a broad appreciation for music and culture. That our most popular form of vocal music has been reduced down to a limited number of elements is just sad. I truly believe that Aretha Franklin would not have a career if she were starting out today. She was overweight, plain and unsexy and had little “PR” spin to her. She was only good at one thing, and she was better at it than anyone else has been for a very long time. She could dance but she wasn’t a dancer. She could capture and audience but it wasn’t by wearing next to no clothing. She just stood there (or sat, if she played the piano) and SANG. She still does that all these decades later.

The few current pop singers who have something substantial to offer are truly wonderful in many ways, but even these people do not understand what it takes to be in live theater, without electronic modification (except for volume) depending on your throat and body alone. I wonder what Beyonce or Rihanna would be like in Rent, Jesus Christ Superstar or Next to Normal?

I stand with Betty Buckley on this one. The world might be a better place if more people appreciated the singers on Broadway just exactly because they are who they are, doing what they do.

I know of quite a few people who have taken a course, a workshop, a class, a seminar or attended a conference. They get some “new exercises” and hear a few “lectures” or “demonstrations” and then go home, assured that what they were doing all along was great.

I once taught a workshop in London at which I discussed at length and demonstrated with students the differences between chest, mix and head, both technically and in a song. Afterwards, a very famous London teacher who is mostly a coach and works very little with technique, came up to say to me “Oh, Jeanie, I loved your lecture. I do exactly the same thing. All my students sing in that ‘chesty, mixy, heady thing’ you showed.” My response was to stand there and stammer some dumb response. I didn’t know what to say. She made what I said into something that was the opposite of what I said. I have had that happen over and over again. I have. I find this frightening.

There are scientific tests that prove that people will turn anything they hear into a justification for what they already believe rather than change their minds and “be wrong”.

Currently, there are all sorts of mom and pops in middle America fighting hard against anything “green” because they have been told that this is a United Nations conspiracy to curtail their rights and prevent them from “developing” their property. These are good decent people who are being LIED TO and motivated to do things that are against their own long-term health and well-being, and that of their children and grandchildren, but they are easily manipulated by people who are truly dangerous. Nevertheless, no one is forcing them to accept these stupid ideas, they do it willingly. Why? You would have to ask them, but my guess is because the have the idea that “those liberals” are ruining everything. That has been around for about 75 years now. Scares me to death.

The “liberals” of voice training have always been around, too. They have been doing their best to make people understand singing in a grounded, real way, offering information based on what has been known about vocal production and behavior all the way back to the work of Garcia and his hand held mirror that allowed him to see the vocal folds for the first time. Do people actually make use of the information being offered? Sadly, many do not and of those who say they do, many do not really understand how little they have understood what they have encountered because they never bother to find out.

So, if you are one of those people who has taken a course, a workshop, a seminar, or read 5 articles or gone to 5 conferences and the rest of the time you stay home and do what you’ve always done, you are not helping anyone. Not yourself, surely not your students and not the profession. If you assume that you are “right” because you are or because you believe you are doing what you were taught, you could be very dangerous as a teacher of singing.

YOU HAVE AN OBLIGATION to see if the information you heard was taken in correctly. You have an obligation to see if how you are using what you gathered at the course is being used the way it was intended to be used. You have an obligation to test your new theories and see if what you think you know and what you actually know match up. You have an obligation to teach in front of someone who is more experienced than you and ask if what you are doing MAKES SENSE. You have an obligation to check in with whomsoever you have watched, read, or studied with to see if what you are doing is what they would like you to do. Seriously, people, you can’t just assume that what you are doing is OK. You CANNOT.

Stay in touch with the people who teach, the people who do research, the people who have been successful in other professions as reliable colleagues, the people who have been published and whose work has achieved broad acceptability in the world.

A little information is a bad and even dangerous thing.

Let’s take a look at what we know about the wiring of the brain (its neurologic pathways) and how it connects with the throat.

We can move the front and outside of the face, head and neck (and shoulders) at will. I can ask you to smile, to frown, to open your mouth, close your mouth and to purse your lips. I can ask you to wiggle your jaw side to side and draw it a little bit down and back. I can ask you to stick your tongue out, and if I give you a mirror, you can make it roll up towards your top teeth without too much effort. I can ask you to look up, to look down, and to pull your head out in front of your body. I can ask you to raise your shoulders, to draw them slightly forward and round them backwards in a curved shape. If I include the belly as being part of the system because of its influence over exhalation, then I can ask you to make your stomach contract in and out (although if you are very out of shape you might have trouble with that).

There are variations of these movements, but mostly, that’s about all we can deliberately do. We can raise the eyebrows and bring them down in a frown. Some people can wiggle their ears or the end of their noses (that is a hoot to watch), and some people can make a groove in the tongue or turn it over (but that is genetic).

So, if I ask you to do any of these things on purpose, or more than one of them, and keep doing it continuously, you may or may not be able to, depending on all sorts of things. If I ask you to sing while doing them, that could make it harder. Nevertheless, sooner or later, if you kept trying, somehow most of these things would begin to be deliberately do-able and sustainable, even while singing.

But, if I ask you to raise your soft palate on purpose, could you? Would you know if you had or had not? I can say that it’s my experience that inexperienced, non-trained singers cannot do this, or, if they can, by accident, they can’t feel it as a response. That’s normal. NORMAL, people. You can’t lift the back of your tongue, either, or make your soft palate into a dome. You can’t widen your pharynx (throat) or even know what “open” feels like. If your throat ever totally closes, you will either be dying in short order or you will already be dead! Open just feels like nothing special. Sorry.

And, if I ask you to drop the back of your tongue, close the vocal folds with more firmness, to move your false folds, to constrict your aryepiglottic sphincter, or make your larynx go up and/or down deliberately, you either have to deliberately squeeze something in your throat and hope that the squeeze does whatever it is I have asked you to do, or think of some other reaction that might cause your throat to respond (vomit? gag? cough?) Basically, there is NO way to do any of these things deliberately without something else happening that you should not be doing.

YET. There are a lot, I mean A LOT, of singing training methods that teach people to do all manner of things that are not directly possible. THINK ABOUT THAT. People are paying money to learn how to squeeze their throats on purpose. They are paying money to make sounds that resemble retching, being in pain, and swallowing a potato, not as a means to an end (which would be not great but perhaps at least remotely understandable) but as an end in themselves. The people who teach these things DO NOT UNDERSTAND the autonomous and semi-autonomous nervous systems and how they work. Some of them are, sadly, getting rich anyway.

Your body has one primary response. You cannot override it, you cannot get rid of it. Your brain’s central cortex is geared to get oxygen in and carbon dioxide out, through your vocal folds, period. It is not possible to commit suicide by holding your breath. And, if you get something in your throat, your body is going to do its very best to get it out by coughing it up, and you can’t make that reflex go away either.

Therefore, any successful training approach has to work IN CONJUNCTION WITH the responses of the central cortex if the throat is to remain maximally functional. BIG STATEMENT HERE, and I know that, but I can’t make the nerves in my body or anyone else’s body do other than what they do and neither can anyone else.

This instruction was given to me by Dr. Daniel R. Boone, great-grand nephew of the original Daniel Boone of our country’s history, and one of the founding fathers of Speech Language Pathology research in America. Dr. Boone generously taught two workshops with me in the 90s — “Voice, Lies and Videotape” and “Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Speaking or Singing But Were Afraid to Ask”. He generously said that I was the only singing teacher he ever understood. That was partly because I had him as a mentor and he was a master.

If you study singing (or professional level speech) long enough, it is my belief (and I can’t prove it) that you eventually do develop neural pathways that are not in “average” non-singing people and that you can indeed learn to feel and move the soft palate or other structures that are inside the back of the mouth. I think you can learn to perceive movements in the back of the tongue and deep within the throat as well. I also think that making any of these structures do something deliberately while singing is a mark of desperation to be used by professionals only because they are out of shape and can only sing in a certain kind of sound (temporarily) by giving the vocal production some “help”. A really well trained, in shape singer, DOES NOT MAKE THE THROAT DO ANYTHING SPECIAL. He or she controls THE SOUND, not the throat, no matter what style is being sung.

The last time I was examined with a fiberoptic scope, I was able to do all kinds of things in my throat by looking at the monitor. This was not news to me. Things do move. They do so because there is no constriction and because I can make all kinds of sounds on all kinds of pitches, not because I am moving my larynx or making my vocal folds do something on purpose.

The distinction here is CRUCIAL. C.R.U.C.I.A.L. People who teach you to put your larynx someplace or do something to your false folds are causing you problems, not helping you learn how to sing. People who teach you to make your gut like a stone wall or scream as if you were in pain are causing you problems, not helping you learn how to sing. People who tell you to send the sound into your masque, or your nasal passages, or your eyebrown or cheekbones or sing from your diaphragm ARE NOT HELPING YOU LEARN TO SING. They are causing you problems. Run away.

You cannot change the way your brain is wired. Work with it, not against it.

Performers have to be willing to criticized on a regular basis. We start being criticized as young students and it continues straight through until we retire or die.

The criticism comes not only from teachers but later from others if we go on to be in the profession. We get feedback from acting, language and repertoire coaches, from accompanists, conductors, from stage directors and maybe from our colleagues. We get it from the press, maybe also from our managers or agents and from our significant others. No matter how much you do not like being criticized, it never goes away. You can resist it but you cannot avoid it unless you stay in your living room.

It takes a special kind of person who has to develop a special kind of mindset to take in all the critical evaluation and make of it something positive. Of course, it depends as well on how the criticism is presented. It is a lot easier to deal with it if it is given in a fair and considerate way that is honest but kind. If the evaluation is just plain nasty and mean, it takes a lot more “inner strength” to see the value in it (if there is) and make it useful.

Everyone is criticized or evaluated, it’s true, but critical evaluation doesn’t necessarily come at average people in average jobs every single day, and hopefully doesn’t last year after year. And, if the person being criticized is lucky, what is being evaluated is the work being done, not necessarily the person who is doing the work. Personal criticism is much worse to face than criticism about the product itself, unless that product and the person creating the product are one and the same.

It’s hard to separate out who is the singer and what is being sung and that gets even worse if the person singing is doing a song of their own composition and also playing the accompaniment. It takes an extraordinary individual to be able to “step outside” their own experience and see it as if from “outside” in an objective way. The video camera has helped us all to do that in a better way, but not every artist records and watches their artistic endeavors to do self-analysis.

Being a vocal performer (or any kind of performing artist) is, by definition, a vulnerable thing. It takes real guts to stand up in front of an audience and depend on two tiny pieces of gristle, buried deep inside your throat, that you can’t feel and never see, and open your mouth in a song. It puts everything you have on the line, as you present something that you care deeply about and in which you have invested a lot of money, time and energy, and which you are hoping will be acceptable to others. If it is not, you can’t do much about it while you are still up there singing, so you can end up truly embarrassed. Of course, if you are successful, you can be thrilled, and, in some really rare cases, you can end up rich and famous.

AND, one of the worst things about being criticized is having to deal with the criticism that we aim at ourselves. Artists are notoriously hard on themselves. Some truly talented and well prepared people are so harsh on themselves and so unable to allow themselves to think they are acceptable, they never even attempt performing. I have had students who were genuinely talented and ready to take themselves out into the world as performers argue with me about how awful they were. Usually, those people don’t stay in the studio because if they can’t accept my opinion, why should I take their money?

Once in a while (and it is really rare), I run into someone who is the opposite, meaning the person thinks they are much better than they actually are. They stand up in front of others to sing (or perform in some other way) and are just terrible. Sometimes they know and don’t care. They just want to do it and do. Most of the time, though, they don’t know and if someone were to tell them, they don’t believe it. Lizzy Grant seems to be the “in the moment” example of someone who is making Lana Del Rey (her stage name) a success based entirely on how lousy she is. We live in an unbelievable country, folks!

I don’t know a single singer who really likes being criticized but most of them who are good are smart enough to know that the criticism is a necessary evil and that going on entirely without it would be a mistake. Allowing others to criticize you so you can improve automatically keeps you humble. It also allows you to change, to learn, to grow and to discover new things that are very exciting. It keeps you in touch with your humanity and with your art. In the end, it’s a pretty good trade off.

We have had about five decades of good research on vocal production. Most of the early research was on classical singing. More recently there has been investigation of belting and belters. Not much else has been studied.

Think about that. No one has seriously studied successful professional singers. There is NO data on them that applies to any of them in a general manner.

Since I have been teaching for over 40 years, I have seen with my own eyes and heard with my own ears the consistency within each style. Many of my jazz vocalists favor a certain kind of vocal production. No, they don’t copy others, but they do not generally sound like rock singers or Broadway belters.

On the other hand, the Broadway belters have a certain consistency, too. Men and women, kids and teens. A real “legit” sound is going away and a strong “mix belt” is right there along with the belters, but they don’t sound the same as the pop belters.

The pop belters make a different kind of sound, but are also consistent to their style, too. Mind you, the differences are not huge between some of the vocalists in one style and another, and some singers cross from style to style. Still there is a “certain something” that distinguishes each style.

I can’t think of a single other profession in which successful individuals have not been studied to find out about the parameters of the success. We have all kinds of statistics about swimmers, golfers, baseball players, and tennis stars. We know about politicians, chefs, lawyers and doctors. We can find data about housewives, factory workers, the elderly and kids of all ages. Where — WHERE–is the data about singers or singing?

We have information about vocal production but it is not aimed at the outside, just the inside. We know a bit about the vocal folds and the air flow parameters, but we do not know how people think when they sustain a high note. The books interviewing classical singers by Jerome Hines and others were interesting but certainly not “scientific”. Other books on individual singers may mention the singing in some specific way, but not in a way that objectively compares any data about singing to some other data.

We have sent scientists out to live with apes and elephants. We have sent them out to look into volcanoes and at the ocean floor. We have sent them to investigate the shopping habits of Walmart customers and the long term effects of sustained exercise or medication on various demographic populations. Indeed, we have studied all kinds of things animal, vegetable and mineral. I am waiting, as I said a few posts ago, for studies on singing — not on vocal production per se but on other parameters.

Remember, we teach people to sing in all kinds of ways. What we teach them is largely personal, subjective and often passed down from one person to another as folklore without any validation of any kind.

Isn’t it time that we go look at the people with thirty, forty, or even fifty years of successful professional singing in their lives and find out what that’s about?

If you study classical singing you will be taught to breathe (in any of dozens of ways), you will be taught to “vibrate something” in your head (take your pick — forehead, eyebrows, eye sockets, back of the nose, cheekbones, face bones, front teeth). You might be taught to “relax” (in some vague manner), you might be taught to “make the sound (fill in any of the following – float, spin, ring, buzz, point, focus, lift, open, widen, deepen, fill out, go forward, fly across the street, or just “project”). You might be taught to never move your larynx, your jaw, your face, your head or your ribs (everyone likes the upper body to be quiet. That’s the only thing that is agreed upon by everyone). You might be told to make your consonants “soft” or to clearly pronounce all consonants. You might be told to “sing on the breath” to “create a legato line” but not to be breathy or slur the pitches (good luck). You might be told to grip your belly muscles all the time, to use them only on high notes or loud notes or to leave them alone so they stay “relaxed”. You might be told to use your back muscles when you breathe (good luck again), or to feel like you are defecating while you sing loudly. You might be told that you should “act like you don’t have a (tongue, jaw, mouth, head)” or that you should never ever pay attention to what you feel or hear, lest it distract you. Of course, you should do this while noticing the vibration in your head, which you feel but do not notice. You might be taught to speak or sing from your diaphragm or your belly (which would be easy if the vocal folds were in either location). You might be taught that “you listen too much”, “you think too much”, or “you try too hard”.

You will be taught that the music has to be learned accurately. There will be a great deal of emphasis on the pitches and rhythms so that they are sung exactly as written (most of the time). You will be taught several foreign languages in various songs and hopefully will learn to speak them at least minimally, although if you never get there, probably no one will worry about it a whole lot. You will be taught about the great European classical composers of the last 400 years and you will learn to sight sing and train your ear. You might be taught to play piano a bit, and to take musical dictation. You will probably also be taught to evaluate music in terms of harmony and theory, at least enough to analyze a score.

You may be taught some kind of acting. What kind and how much is anyone’s guess. You might be taught “stage deportment” and I would not presume for a minute to say what that would be. You might be taught some kind of dance or movement, but you might not.

What you almost certainly will not be taught is to ask yourself, “How would this person, if she were a live, breathing human being and not someone in an opera, sound if they were experiencing this situation?” You will not be asked to find a sound that is as close to that as possible, without sacrificing your own vocal production. You will not be taught how to bring together your vocal production, your emotional understanding of the communication of the song or aria and what it means to the character, and make them all become one. You might want to make that happen on your own, but you would have to have a strong desire and have a great deal of natural ability if you were to succeed.

How do I know this? Because I have been traveling all over the country (and the world) for the last 25 years doing master classes (both CCM and classical) and I RARELY find this at any level. Not undergrads, not grads, sometimes not even in young professionals (although by then, it frequently has finally arrived because if it had not, they would not be working).

Is it any wonder then that most average people do not like classical singing or music when they hear it? What is there to draw them in? Is it any surprise that those few artists who have somehow combined excellent vocal skills with a great instrument with deep emotional communication often end up with international careers?

What human beings respond to is emotion. Garcia said that in the early 1800s. Human beings are drawn in by powerful emotions in every circumstance. What we remember in life are the moments that are full of emotional power. Yes, intellectual stimulation is important and new ways to think are also fascinating, but not anywhere nearly as compelling as raw gut emotion.

If you want to succeed as a singer, no matter what you sing, find a way to get at your own emotional life and hook it to your best vocal expression. It always works.

Want to know what commodity is truly rare in singing these days? Emotion. Honest, simple, un-messed around with emotion.

What we get is most either faked or not there at all. Breathy insipid singing does not allow for genuine emotional expressiveness, but it is very popular now, thanks mostly to the popularity of Norah Jones. Screaming is also very popular, thanks to our pop rock divas. Screaming can be dynamic but it isn’t the only way to be emotional. In fact, it can get in the way of subtle emotions.

Have you ever paid attention to someone who is actually overcome with emotion? Have you heard what it does to the voice? Someone who is crying, or angry, or frightened has a certain quality of sound that is hard to imitate. Most music today is written by people who do not know much about singing or singers. They just write whatever they do and, if they make money, and many do, then they are validated for that.

The older composers knew how to make it easy for a singer to show emotion in a song and allow that to carry the song along in making it memorable. Now idiots like Simon Cowell, who wouldn’t know actual emotions in a song if they bit him on the leg, think that being emotional is somehow “not professional”. Hello? Just shows you that success and knowledge often do not have anything to do with each other.

You don’t have to literally cry when you are feeling sad in a sad song to convey that sadness. You don’t have to turn red with anger in an angry song either. You do have to allow the song to have an effect on you and some people don’t ever have that experience. The people who are highly reactive to music (who get emotional just listening to a piece of music or a song) don’t try to do that, it just happens. Sometimes the music can be powerful enough so as to be overwhelming.

If you are not one of those sensitive souls (and they are rather rare) it doesn’t mean that you don’t feel anything but it might mean that the depth of what you feel isn’t so strong as it is for those for whom music is a remarkably vivid personal experience.
If you sing and you are not physically strong, conditioned to stand up to this onslaught of energy, you can break down sobbing or begin to get so angry that you lose control of how your body is making sound. That doesn’t work. That’s the reason it’s necessary to have technique, so you can control the flow of feelings that runs across your body, and harness them to your sound in a positive way. Mostly, out there in the marketplace, there is no honest emotionality and so much deadness or hyperness, (as in screaming), there isn’t a lot of anything that really touches the audience.

Genuine emotion will also give you authentic communication with its own set of personal parameters regarding a song. No one will feel that song the same way you do. If you do not have that experience, you will be forced to intellectualize the song, deciding from a purely rational purpose what you want it to be about.

I remember a performance of “Tosca” at NY City Opera (may it rest in peace) in which the Tosca came out on stage yelling “Mario! Mario!” in a loud, shrill, hooty, wobbly screech. If I had been Mario, I would have run away – FAST! I had a similar experience at the Met once, watching Aida and Radames in the tomb where they would die, singing as if it was a discussion about what they had had for lunch. I doubt very seriously that dying people are that bland. Yes, it had to carry, but it would have if the sound had been infused with feeling. Somehow, my guess is that what these two characters were feeling, if they had been real live human beings, had never been discussed or approached by anyone…not the singers, the coaches, or the director.

You can still encounter emotion in a Broadway show because actors are encouraged to connect body, voice and emotion, but not as much as you might have heard before rock became such a big influence in theater. It varies, but sometimes you hear intensity and it’s up to you to figure out for yourself why that intensity is there. Sometimes loud is just loud for loud’s sake.

If you sing, ask yourself, if you were crying and singing at the same time, what would that be like? Your throat would close up, most likely, but even if it did not, could you sing in the same sound with the same kind of behavior in your throat and body while you were crying or would you have to stop crying in order to sing? Try to find a way to experience the emotion and the sound at the same time and a way to express them as partners that is full with feeling and free in production. It’s not all that easy to marry the two, but it is possible. The freer and stronger the vocal production the more it can stand up to vigorous emotional communication without issue.

You shouldn’t have to compromise between the two. Both are possible in equal measure as long as the body has been prepared in advance.