Various Posts

If you teach in a college, or even in a middle school or high school, sooner or later, you will be faced with having to compromise. If you teach in a private studio, this may be the case less often, but sometimes, even there, you may have to do something that isn’t what you would ideally like to do.

What is the way to compromise without feeling like you give away your integrity or do something you don’t feel OK about? Where do you go to find out the professional answer to this conundrum?

Beats me.

The professional singing teaching organizations do not address this very real issue. The topics presented at the national conferences or regional workshops never go near anything like this. Too bad.

Guess you will have to use me as a resource. I might be better than nothing at all.

My advice is:

Always put the long-term well being of the student first and tell the truth. Always do what is in the best interest of the student’s vocal health at the top of the list and let the artistic things be less important. Always EXPLAIN every aspect of whatever adjustments you must make to the student and give a rationale for accepting a situation that isn’t ideal along with a plan to address it later, if possible. Always tell the student why the compromise is necessary and what the solution is on a temporary basis. Then, do what has to be done.

Example: You have a student at a college who needs to do four songs for a jury at the end of the fall semester (which is short). The student has multiple issues caused by poor technique and is also dealing with outside issues that are impeding vocal progress. It could be that the student is on a work-study scholarship and has to put in a certain number of hours at a tiring job in addition to attending classes. She finds it hard to practice and is only able to make very small changes in her sound. You must be sure that she has the requisite four songs, in correct keys, perhaps also in foreign languages she does not speak or understand. She has to make the songs sound as good as possible, even though she does not yet have much ability to do them in a deliberate, well executed manner.

You have to give as much time as you can in each lesson to the development of the voice itself. You should choose the easiest songs you can find, with the minimum level of difficulty in terms of the musical structure, pitch range, lyrics, phrasing and dynamics. You should stay away from French and German unless the student has studied them and stick to Italian or Spanish because they are easier to pronounce. You should choose repertoire that does not expose the student’s weaknesses and make sure the student truly understands what the song is about and how to communicate that.

It’s better to allow breathiness than constriction. It’s better to allow for a freer sound than worry about any particular resonances. It’s better to go for a good tonal quality than to worry about the consonants. It’s better to have some energy in the sound but avoid excessive volume or extreme softness. It’s better to have the student stand up straight and tall than to worry about whether or not the breathing is “low enough”. It’s better to accept anything that gets the student to sing on pitch than not, no matter what that might be. It is better to have the student look relaxed and comfortable than to insist the student “breathe correctly”. It’s better to do two verses well than four verses badly.

Tell the student why you are allowing her to make adjustments for the sake of the jury performance but explain that the issues being “camouflaged” must be addressed as soon as the jury is over. Tell her why you are approaching things the way you are and make sure she understands why that is important.

If it is a professional singer and you are a private practice teacher, you may run into similar issues if the singer has a gig or a recording date coming up and there isn’t enough time to get all the various issues into ideal shape before the pending deadline. In this case, however, you have to be sure to let the artist have a say in what choice is made, especially if there is more than one way to adjust. The artist might decide it’s more important to get the lyrics across than to worry about the sound. She might decide that the breathing isn’t important but the pitch accuracy is.

After this is clarified, you should work with whatever exercises you know to get to the short term goal. You should also tell the vocalist what to do as soon as the jury or gig is over in order to get back to working on general technical and vocal improvement.

If you have a student (in a school situation) that is going to fall way below expected standards, be sure, for your own sake, that you communicate that to your department chair or principal as soon as possible. Alert him to the situation and explain that you are doing all that can be done to meet the school’s expectations or standards but that, for the sake of the student’s long term vocal health, you are having to compromise on X things. It might be risky, but not nearly as risky as pushing the student to go to someplace that is physically or vocally damaging, and not as risky as having the people in charge find out at the jury that you have not done a good job. By then it’s too late. If it is a pro, you must be sure the manager, agent or other parties know the deal, too, or you could end up risking your reputation.

It’s rare that you have everything in place just exactly as you would want it to be. There are always time constraints, performance demands and everything else in life that just shows up. Know that you can address these things and settle for something that is less than perfect while still being completely professional as a teacher. Your integrity depends mostly on telling the truth, doing the best you can with what you have to work with, and making sure your student knows what is going on.

In reading about “out of body” experiences, and I have read as much as I can on that topic, one thing that almost always shows up is that the person having this kind of experience sees him or herself “floating above their body”. They are watching their bodies while they are hovering above them.

Can we “leave” the body while it is still alive? What would that be about?

People who have been in accidents or have had other sudden trauma occur often report they are watching the entire experience as if in slow motion from the outside, as if the event were a movie. During this time, it is as if they are not “in their bodies”.

Now, either you believe this is possible or you don’t. If you don’t, and I don’t want to convince you as it really doesn’t matter, you can think of the entire episode as a dream. Most people seem to accept the idea that we dream. The reaction, whether it be literal and real or a dream, is frequently caused by a strong stimulus. It could be possible, in some kind of “altered” state, to be alive but not really connected to the body in the usual sense. It would be the opposite of what I wrote about a few posts ago — being “in touch” with the body and its sensations. It would be a state in which you are not in your body, you are in some way watching it from a distance. It is as if “you” are “out of your body”. (Don’t ask me to explain who is doing the watching, since someone obviously is).

As a performer, you do not want to be “out of your body” in any sense of the phrase. You do not want to watch yourself go through the motions of singing or hear yourself as if you were someone else. You do not want to feel removed from the experience as if you were floating above your body while it sings. You want to be fully present, awake and aware of your body and its responses to the music and the words.

And, if there are parts of your body that you cannot feel, or don’t much pay attention to, you would be benefitted by knowing that and changing it. If you can’t feel a part of your body, it will “die” in your consciousness and eventually it will be so far away from your own awareness as to be effectively not there.

You need to be in touch with and IN your body to sing. You need to experience being alive while you are singing, and you need to know when you are not present and why.

A lot to contemplate.

If you are not conversant with psychology you may not be conversant with some of the terms used in that profession.

“Secondary gain”, which has come up before on previous blogs, happens when someone seems to have the same negative things happen over and over again or just never stop. When someone is living with chronic conditions or situations that are not beneficial and those conditions could be changed but aren’t, it could suspected that there is a reason why. Something is a positive payoff to all the negativity. Example: You get sick a lot. When you are sick you get lots of attention, you don’t have to go to work, your family gives you special treatment and others are kinder to you than usual. If you find that you are getting sicker and sicker more and more often and that it is getting harder to stay well, it may be that you have a feeling that being sick isn’t so bad after all. That’s secondary gain. Until you know you have it and you acknowledge that to yourself, nothing happens. There are all kinds of possible ways that a chronic and apparently negative situation can have a hidden secondary gain.

I am not speaking here of a situation which is really outside personal control, such as being wrongfully in jail, or having a permanent injury that you got by accident and that will not ever heal, or being caught in a situation as a child or teenager that you cannot leave due to your age. I am speaking here of situations that adults find themselves in that they would like to change but somehow fail to do so.

For instance, if I am sick with a “diagnosed condition” and I allow that condition to become the dominant factor of my life, when other people who have the same condition do not routinely do that, there is a secondary gain that makes it worthwhile for me to stay sick and unable to function optimally. I have known people whose lives were always in great distress. One crisis ceases and another one quickly follows. There are always problems, troubles, issues, crises, and stress. Life is absolutely never quiet or calm or joyful or enriching. I have known others who go from illness to illness, (different ones) only getting better long enough to regroup before a new one comes along. (My mother was one of those people). Or people who go from job to job. Or relationship to relationship. The people who have lives like this never see the patterns and never imagine that they have anything at all to do with the patterns. It all seems to come from the outside. They are victims of their circumstances.

I have also known people who have had genuinely terrible things happen to them who just deal with whatever it is and go on. I have known people who have been injured in ways that could easily have stopped them in their tracks but fought hard to come back and succeeded, and these same people barely talked about what it took to do that. They do not feel victimized, they do not feel defeated, they do not feel “why me”? They understand that it’s always best to think, “Why not me?” and go forward.

My own husband had emergency open heart surgery four and a half years ago. From the moment he learned he was going to have his chest sawed open and receive a cow valve that would save his life, he was certain he would be fine and grateful that he was getting a second chance at life. He never had one second of feeling sorry for himself or sad at what happened. (I was a wreck, of course, but I dealt with it, too, as best I could, also grateful for his surgeon and his hospital care and for him and his attitude). Now, at 72, he is in great shape.

So few of us are taught to discipline our thinking. We do not understand how to take responsibility for what we tell ourselves in our own mental talk all day long. If you do not really, diligently, notice the chatter in your head, you are at its mercy. If you constantly think of all the things that could happen, that might happen, that have happened in the past that are bad, you will make yourself sick, just through that. If you do not “hear” your fear, or anger, or sadness, underneath that mental monologue, you will not understand why it is that the very things you are wanting to avoid will keep showing up in various forms.

In the Bible it says, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was made flesh.” There is a similar passage in the Hindu scriptures using the word sound instead of word. Most Christians interpret this to mean that Jesus was the person who came to spread the Word of God. That’s not my take, however.

The “word” applies equally to all of us. The words we tell ourselves both out loud and in our heads literally create the life we live day by day. It’s like the Little Engine That Could……I THINK I can, I THINK I can. If you think you can’t, you can’t, even if you try. If you think you can, you might still fail, but you would be much more likely to go try again. Glass half full, not empty.

The people who argue with this are the ones who say, “That’s ridiculous. I can’t control everything. It has nothing to do with me or how I think or behave, except that I always have to deal with the X that comes at me.” Yep. If you are afraid of being poor and don’t want to be generous with money because you haven’t got it to share, you are creating poverty because by not giving you tell yourself, I’m broke. Self-replicating cycle. If you are afraid to commit to a relationship because it might be a mistake, or the wrong person, but you want to feel deeply connected to someone so you won’t be afraid to commit, you will continue to be with people who are also afraid that you are not the right person and are afraid, or you will create someone who is passionately committed to you, and that will scare you to death and you will drive the person away. The fear drives the whole pattern as long as you don’t call it by its right name.

So, be very careful with what you say and how you say it, both to yourself and to others. If you sing, your voice carries “extra power” in it, as it is supposed to be deeply connected to your emotions. That, coupled with a clear intention, has the same seed of power as the one that is mentioned in the Bible. In the beginning, there was what I said I would do. Who I said I was, who I say I am, what I say I will do, how I say I will do it. And how I will sing.

Tell the truth, to the best of your ability, and be scrupulous about how you form your phrases and choose your words in your head and out loud. Do not ignore the things you dare not utter, you desire never to speak, or things you wanted to say but never had the chance. Don’t forget to look at the things that were said to you that you did not acknowledge, the things you wish someone had said to you but you never heard, the things you long to say but are afraid to or have not had the opportunity to. All of this can contribute to negative programming and a consequent secondary gain. It also could contribute to vocal problems, speech issues, throat illnesses of various kinds, and a general inability to trust your own word in your life.

No, it isn’t always this way. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. But it is more this way than most people realize. To “wake up” means that you understand that you are the driving force of your own life. The sooner you take that as a literal statement, the sooner you will move toward self-satisfaction and fulfillment. If you are a singer, be careful with what you sing, where you sing and how you sing. Be careful about who you sing with, and what they say. It matters.

The power to create is in each of us. Use it wisely.

What does it mean to be “in touch” with your body? If you are alive, aren’t you “in touch”? Does it mean that you can reach down and touch your hand to your knee? Why would anyone not be “in touch” with their own physical presence?

Being in touch, in the sense that I usually use those words, means being able to sense, with keen awareness, the body as a whole and also specific parts of the body as feeling and sensation. It means that you have some ability to put your concentration on that part of the body and hold it there, using your mind to quietly sense what is going on.

If you are not used to focusing your awareness on your body in this way, you might conclude that all you were doing is closing your eyes and getting a quiet, vague idea that you do, for instance, have a stomach in your middle torso. If you are practiced and willing, however, there is no limit to the kind of consciousness you can develop in such an exercise and no limit to what you will “get” as a response to “inner listening”.

The body is an amazing thing. It can feel deeply and powerfully any and all emotions. It can move in all kinds of ways from simple, everyday movements that we generally take for granted, to unusual movements that most people could never attempt. And, it is always moving, 24/7, because we breathe. The air moving in and out of our lungs 24/7 creates definite movements that are always changing. We mostly don’t notice them but they don’t ever completely cease until we die.

People who learn to cultivate a strong partnership with their bodies are unusual in our society. Mostly we are taught, either by word or example, to just ignore the body until it gets sick or can’t function, or to push its functions to the very back of our awareness. This works most of the time, but then the body fails us and we try to fix it. We are not guided to stay aware of what it feels during the day as we go through our activities while it functions normally, which is a shame. By the time something is wrong, it can be too late to do anything that is effective as healing.

Particularly in our American society, learning to pay attention to the body’s wisdom and honor it can be hard. Those who do manage, however, have something special and useful that many others lack. If you do not develop the capacity to “check in” with what the body is perceiving (and it does perceive whether or not you realize it), you can get lost. Sometimes people who have certain “conditions” or illnesses or people who have physical challenges develop sharper awareness about their bodies — what works for them and what does not. Ask someone with a food allergy how they are when they eat the wrong food and you will get a detailed answer.

Singers are known to have a much more heightened sense of the throat and the voice than average people do. There have been studies about that. I have seen in my experience that singers can be very sensitive to small changes in their voices that are important but nearly unnoticeable to others. It is my job to honor such information and help my singers reconcile what they know about their throats and their voices with what they perceive as being “wrong” and rebalance it. Someone who has been singing for 20 years certainly knows when her voice is “OK” and when it isn’t, even if there is nothing wrong with it biologically and that diagnosis has been confirmed by an MD.

Being in touch with your body is not just about being in “good shape” or being physical fit. Being in shape might be a way to notice what’s taking place in your physical self, but it can also be a way to “stay out of touch” with the body, depending on what your mental attitude towards being “in shape” is. If you push your body too hard because you have been taught to ignore pain and discomfort thinking it is somehow “better” to do that, and you can cause yourself a lot of trouble. If you have been encouraged to be the other way, however, thinking that every small little gurgle or blip is a cause for alarm and that you cannot eat regular food or drink regular water without being sick, that’s just as problematic. If you are taught to suppress unhappy experiences and emotions because you should always only “feel good” or because “no one should ever show their true feelings in public”, then you can learn, very well, to blot out both sensation and emotion, and this is downright dangerous to both your body and your mental health. Unfortunately, this is a situation that happens all the time.

Being in touch with your body allows you to realize that sensations and emotions flow through us all the time, sometimes strongly but sometimes just as slight waves of something that is hard to define in words. Allowing what is going on to just be there, with quiet attention and peaceful awareness, can be challenging, but it keeps us in the present moment, breathing, and knowing that life goes on around us even as we “go within”. If you have ever been asked, “How do you feel?” and your answer begins with the words, I think I feel……” I would say to you, “Do you mean, “I’m not sure what I feel? If so, please go deeper into your body until you can find out”. The body always knows. Try it sometime. You may surprise yourself.

Ever wonder what would be best for the profession of teaching singing and for professional or professional-level amateur singers?

I do all the time.

What would be best would be that we would all use the same terminology in the same way and that it would be based in function.

What would be best would be that we would all put the student’s needs above our own all the time.

What would be best would be that we would respect all styles of music on their own terms and teach them appropriately.

What would be best would be that everyone who teaches someone else to sing understood vocal function, vocal health and basic voice science.

What would be best would be that all teachers of singing could share their ideas about vocal success with their colleagues without rancor or suspicion.

What would be best would be for all of us to find a way to take those who do vocal or psychological harm out of the profession and prevent them from returning.

What would be best would be that all teachers would think of what is for the greatest good of all by being unselfish, generous, caring and open.

What would be best would be that all teachers would realize that many different approaches to teaching singing can work but that they must make functional sense. You cannot learn to sing by thinking about “the pink mist in the back of your throat” unless you are a very talented singer who would eventually learn on your own.

What would be best would be for us to study successful singers who have had long lasting careers and vocal health to learn from them about what they do.

What would be best would be that we train our singers with an eye to the marketplace to help them get work as singers.

What would be best would be for the younger teachers to have a mentor to guide them through the first five years of teaching.

Did I also say that I spend a lot of time in fantasyland?

Did you know that all singing teachers are the same?

To our fellow professions, that’s how we appear.

Think about it. Until you know an MD personally, all you know is that the individual is a doctor. Most of us have an idea of what a doctor is because there are very very few people who have not seen a doctor quite a few times, at least in a first world country. That’s probably also true about a dentist, a teacher, a nurse, a fire fighter, a police officer, and several other professions. However, if you have never sung yourself, and many people have not, or if you have not ever had a singing lesson, and lots of people have not, then you wouldn’t really know much about a teacher of singing except that it was a person who taught other people to sing. Period. If I claim to be a singing teacher then I am.

Is it any wonder, then, that those who are in the medical or clinical professions do not readily distinguish singing teachers one from the other easily? We who teach singing do not even have ourselves organized such that there is a licensing body or a regulating agency to give us “papers”. If you take NYSTA’s PDP course, (which you should), or Dr. Ingo Titze’s Vocology course (which you should if you want to know voice science), or if you take my courses (Somatic Voicework™ – which I would like you to do, of course), then you can put those certifications after your name, alongside whatever degrees you hold, if you do.

If, like me, you are not a college graduate, you have nothing to distinguish you to your medical or clinical colleagues at all except maybe your website, your writings (if they are published), or your visibility (if you have a lot of PR or fame). None of these things will say, sadly, whether or not you are good at what you do.

There are well known and successful teachers of singing here in New York City and all over the world who (a) do not sing at all, (b) sing badly, (c) never sang well in the first place, (d) never really had any kind of performing career, (e) have few professional credentials, (f) sang well at one point but stopped quite some time ago and don’t sing anymore (g), never have had professional singers in their studio (h) will never have professional students in their studio [assuming you would like that population] (i) have never joined a professional teaching organization (j) will never join a professional teaching organization, (k) do not care to keep up their skills in either teaching or singing through any kind of continuing education, (l) do not know that there are teaching skills to have in the first place, (m) don’t know vocal function or vocal health or the difference between them and don’t want to know, (n) do not attend any professional congresses or meetings, (o) do not read professional journals or books on singing (p) do not measure themselves against any other teachers of singing, (q) have poor musicianship skills, (r) do not understand performing skills, (s) have a very limited scope or focus on what they teach and how they teach it, (t) cannot sing what they teach, (u) assume that only the talented can sing, (v) blame the students when they fail, consistently, to make progress, (w) cannot speak intelligently to an otolaryngologist or speech language pathologist, (x) put all singing into one big category, usually “classical”, (y) regard singing as something you learn strictly by singing songs and (z) charge a lot of money for any combination of things on this alphabetical listing.

Still, all singing teachers are the same, especially to the doctors who don’t know the difference. If you hold a PhD or a DMA and you are teaching at a well-known college, and you have some course certifications after your name, they figure you know what you are doing. You may not know how to work with voices effectively, but they can’t know that unless someone tells them, and who would do that? Only a singer who has had a negative experience and that can be a long slow way to gather information, one person at a time.

If you teach singing and write a brochure that blows your own horn, you can be seen as being “suspect”. There is still an aura of “only those who are desperate advertise”. I know a number of teachers who boldly advertise themselves and they are not desperate in any way. If you teach singing and advertise your own method, other people who teach singing who do not have their own “method” can find yours suspect because you advertise it and for that reason only. If you “make a name for yourself” by teaching at conferences and congresses (always for free) you can be resented by others who were not asked to do so themselves. If you are successful as a teacher of singing because many high level professional singers work with you, you can be maligned by those who do not create this kind of success (assuming they want that) because they are jealous.

Still, all singing teachers are the same unless they succeed in bringing themselves to the attention of the outside world and the other voice care professions.

A first order conundrum.

Are there any Voice Police?

I wish there were. They would write tickets for singing violations and make sure that all the singers are obeying the law (of vocal function). Wouldn’t that be good?

No, probably not. We need diversity in this world and we need the messed up, the troubled, the difficult and the truly shoddy in order to appreciate the really beautiful and amazing. This is a world of dualities and we need contrast in order to understand things. We learn often by comparison……what we like, what we don’t.

I am so critical as a person. Those who know me know that I am too talkative, too opinionated, too over-extended, too bossy, and too much most of the time. That’s how it is with people who are Alpha Dogs: driven, passionate, forceful, overbearing……I have been accused of being a bulldozer, but no one has ever described me as being “laid back”. We are the people who shake things up, get them to change, make a difference and we always encounter resistance, difficulty, retribution, and sometimes direct attacks. But if you know you want to be a revolutionary you have to also know that by being a catalyst for change you will also be a target for the wrath of those who don’t want to change, especially those who do not want to be WRONG.

I gripe about a lot of things and I have a clear picture of how they should be, most particularly in relation to singing. I hold my beliefs strongly and am not afraid to say what’s on my mind. I understand, however, that no matter how strongly I feel, the feelings are, in the end, just mine, just emotion, just energy, and not any more “right” or “significant” than what time I had lunch or whether it’s raining outside. I am not my opinions, I have them but they do not have me.

So, even when I write or speak about the things that need to be improved overall in the profession, or of things that are out of line in any particular vocalist or performance, and when I sound like I think I am the “voice police”, I know that the world is the world and that nothing ever stays still or remains balanced. That would not be in keeping with the cycles of life.

My desire is to have our profession, that of singing and of teaching singing, particularly for CCM styles, but for any style, be all that it can be. I want it to serve the needs of singers, of teachers, of the music, of the public who listen, and the larger world where music and singing can be a healing force for good. I want teachers to seek what’s serves the student’s well-being, and I want singers to seek the truth that resides within until it can be expressed in the way that most satisfies them.

I would like to ask, again, for a large-scale, in-the-field study of professionally successful, vocally healthy singers that would examine their vocal patterns and parameters.

The study would look at those in musical styles that generally have loud volume requirements which would be:

1) opera/traditional music theater, 2) rock/pop/contemporary music theater, 3)gospel/R&B

It would include only those vocalists who had been at the top of their profession for not less than 10 years with no injuries caused by performance.

It would look at the following:

Vocal range in pitches, highest to lowest or vice versa

Decibels range, soft to loud, and vice versa

Vocal quality: clear, noisy, nasal, breathy

Vowel sound quality: 1) literal undistorted, 2) literal modified deliberately, 3) distorted, but not deliberately, 4) distorted for artistic purposes as a choice

Length and type of training for singing or speech, if any

Type of practice or vocal warm-up

Physical habits including diet, exercise and rest

Awareness of and use of muscles effecting breathing, both inhalation and exhalation

Knowledge of “vocal function” (what do they know about how human beings make sound?)

The purpose of this research would be to establish norms for professionals. If possible, people who have sung for 25 years or more would be studied in greater detail.

Data evaluation would include looking for similarities anywhere in any category, similarities by men and by women, similarities between singers in any given style, and similarities in approaches to vocal maintenance. Differences would also been noted.

There are have never been any studies like this. Therefore there are no norms for those who teach. Nothing to use as reference. If you have been around as long as I have, you have your own life experience as a resource, but that leaves out a great big bunch of people who are teaching who are just beginning. Where do they go for help? Right now, the only guidance they get is finding someone like me to be a mentor. Not helpful for the majority of teachers. There are studies on opera singers and other elite singers but they were very small and were done for other reasons.

I know the argument against this has always been, “Where do we get these singers? Will they let us study them?” My answer is, you have to go to them, you have to explain why you want them, you have to ask them to participate and you have to give the results of the research and help them see what they have given the world. You must ask them to do the research. Also, if you want money to do the research, you have to first find the singers who will do the study. If you get the top people, there will be money. How could there not be?

Someone out there, this research is just waiting for you. Give it a shot. We need it.

Over the last two decades singing teachers have worked to be able to understand medical terminology, vocal health, medical treatment of singers with illnesses, and of what happens in surgery. We have educated ourselves about ailments like reflux and learned how allergies effect the vocal folds and sinuses. We have looked at photos of throats and vocal folds and we have become familiar with anatomy and physiology of the throat and neck.

In return, some doctors have learned about singing. A few. A little.

Very few doctors, however, come to voice conferences unless they are invited as guest speakers. Even at the Voice Foundation Symposium: Care of the Professional Voice, which was started by a doctor and is currently run by a doctor, almost no doctors attend the sessions presented by teachers of singing or speech.

Why should this be a problem?

I attend medical conferences (I’m an invited guest). The presentations are done by doctors sometimes with the assistance of Speech Language Pathologists. The singing teachers are few and can comment but not too many do.

Here is an example of what I heard at one conference a while back.

The young doctor, from Florida, had a man present to him in his office with the complaint of his voice not being strong enough. He was a minister and he found he could not do his sermons effectively because his voice was too weak. The doctor decided to do some surgery on his throat to “tighten up” (my words) his vocal folds so they could close more firmly. The surgery was successful and the man ended up feeling like his voice was “better”.

Why had the doctor not thought to send the man to a speech teacher or a singing teacher? Why would his only resort have been surgery? Doesn’t that seem like using a shovel to kill a fly?

No other doctor in the room made the suggestion that some kind of training would have done the same, or an even better, job. Not one of the SLPs said a word. I didn’t speak up. (It wasn’t like I could have said anything as a comment when I was just a guest.) Still, I thought it was very interesting to note that the doctor seemed pleased enough with his treatment outcome to present it to his colleagues in New York City. I am sure he was absolutely clueless that any kind of applied intervention would have helped or even that it was in existence.

Medical school doesn’t teach young ENTs about singing or the teaching thereof. It does not inform them what experienced teachers can do for a voice, or even what singing training (based on function) can do to help both speech and song. The ENTs in training do not have an opportunity to develop awareness of what can be done for an injured voice either through non-medical, non-surgical intervention.

Here’s another case, also presented by a young doctor, this time from NY City.

His patient was a young vocalist who was performing R&B but also teaching and working in a non-music job. She had vocal fold problems, reflux and other issues. She had therapy, but because she was paying out of pocket, not a lot of it, and she kept using her voice while she was trying to heal and re-train it, which is never optimal. She had several surgical interventions from this doctor but never really got better. Her problems would go away but then return. He felt there was nothing else he could do for her as a surgeon and was despairing of her ever returning to normal, thinking she would not be able to sing professionally again.

One of the other “senior” (well-known) singing teachers in the room did speak up. He said that expert teachers of singing work often with “ruined” voices (or ones that are badly damaged and not likely to return to normal function) and help the performers do a very decent job working professionally in whatever style they choose to sing. The other teachers in the room seconded that opinion. The MD seemed surprised and doubtful. I felt sorry for the singer. Perhaps if she had had less surgery and more training she would have avoided all the trauma that even simple surgery causes.

Why would it be that an otolaryngologist would not seek out information about singing teachers who work with professional rock singers or gospel singers or any CCM singer and find out what, exactly, they do so they can help their patients get appropriate care? Even if we assume they have the patient’s well-being upper most in their mind, how can the doctors understand what is possible if they don’t go find out? It would take some motivation to do so and, believe me, there is far less motivation on the medical side of the fence to find out about singing teachers and what we have to offer than there is on the pedagogical side of the fence to learn about medicine.

We hold doctors in a place of esteem in our society. We do not necessarily have that same kind of respect for any other profession. While things are different than they were decades ago in that they are slightly less formal than they used to be, we still tend to think of doctors as having a certain kind of power or authority that can be intimidating. There’s nothing wrong with this, necessarily, but if it gives them the impression that they do not have anything to learn from the other related professions, it can be a problem. The evidence is strong that it is this attitude that prevails. If it were not so, then all the voice or singing related conferences would have lots of voice specialists in attendance (as audience, not presenters), and all the medical conferences would have singing teachers presenting information about how they work with all kinds of vocal issues in singers or professional speakers.

I don’t like the imbalance. I would be happier if those of us who teach singing and have decades of experience working with singers of all levels in all areas of the profession would be given a level platform on which to interact with their medical colleagues. I don’t see this happening any time soon. Perhaps it is because the medical profession is still largely dominated by men. (I can think of only four female ENTS in NYC but I know at least a dozen men). Perhaps it is because the motivation just isn’t there without a financial incentive. By that I mean, if not knowing about singing teachers would make a doctor look less skilled or less than knowledgeable about vocal health and therefore make him less competitive in the medical marketplace, then maybe there would be incentive to become informed. This, sadly, is absolutely not the case. Therefore, the only reason an MD might want to learn about singing or the teaching of singing is personal. Some have but most have not. It won’t change until and unless singing teachers can find a way to raise their visibility or one of the teachers is able to write or publish about this particular issue in the journals doctors read.

What do you think? Is this something that can be changed?

If I could make “the rules” I would pass one that said: NO MORE NEW TERMINOLOGY ALLOWED!

The need to name things run deeply in our collective consciousness. Oliver Sacks explained this beautifully in an essay long ago in which he stated that by naming things we make them real to ourselves. We distinguish that one thing is not another thing, or said another way, that this is not that. We name things generically first; man/woman, tree/flower, dog/bird. Then, later, we name them specifically; Al/Alice, pine/rose, terrier/thrush. Maybe after that, we name them further; Albert Anthony/Alice Marie, blue spruce/miniature rose, West Highland terrier/American robin. Each level of naming makes things more specific. It clarifies things for ourselves and others.

It’s said in the Bible that Adam went around the Garden of Eden naming the animals. I take that as a metaphor. We all name the new things we discover. Scientists are often the ones who get to pick names for new species or new stars but people who invent new products or services (laptops, search engines) can do that, too.

What we have in voice, however, is really quite awful in terms of “naming” things. There are so many words, used so many ways by so many people, that it causes great consternation to those of us who are in voice-related fields. We are moving towards more scientific terminology, thankfully, and that is the best thing to happen in a long time, but we are not going there quickly and there are still far more people who do not use scientific terminology than those that do. Further, even in teaching singing, where subjective words have been the mainstay for hundreds of years, those individuals who have created a “method” of teaching have found it necessary to add their own new words or phrases to the already overcrowded stew that we have. Everyone, that is, but me.

I stuck to the words generated by the profession (words that were used primarily on Broadway) and those that were accepted in the pedagogical community going back at least to the time of Garcia. I did not make up or add one word of my own, although I did create the phrase “Contemporary Commercial Music” to cover those styles. [That seems to be working.] I use scientific words as much as possible and plain English words, not “voice teacher jargon”. In other words, if the waitress at the diner wouldn’t understand my words, I don’t use them.

I don’t use: spin, focus, float, project, anchor, compress, resonate (as a verb), release (as a verb), “mask”, or vibrate. I do not tell people to retract the false folds, constrict the aryepiglottic sphincter, or go to Larynx Position No. 3. I do not ask them to make their heads or faces vibrate, or to manipulate anything (except temporarily during an exercise). Except for CCM, I have not added one word or term to the lexicon that didn’t already exist long before I came along.

I recently heard that someone who teaches rock singing in Europe has declared that we no longer use the word belt. Now it’s called “edge”. Says she.

My response is, “Oh, really?” Perhaps she should take out a full page ad in Back Stage or Billboard or Variety so the musical and theatrical communities can know that she has decided the language they have been using and still use is “out of date”.

Guess what, the MARKETPLACE couldn’t care less. Casting directors and producers do not care what we call the sounds. They make up their own terms anyway and they don’t check with us first to see if they are acceptable. The are only interested in the sound themselves, not what they are called or who made up the descriptions.

Further, what’s even worse, as I explained a couple of posts ago, is the misuse of a term that was already in existence and had a history, usurping it and applying it to something else that, also, was already labeled. Calling belting “twang” when belting was already associated with “brassiness” was a disaster and that mess still continues. Country/western singing already had its own credentials that were quite valid. Using “twang” for Broadway instead of the music that comes out of Nashville was a big mistake. It confuses what people should be listening for in music theater and country music both.

The word hamburger is well known. Millions of people know what it is and use it to define a specific food. If I decide the best way for me to distinguish myself as a maker of a new way to cook hamburgers is by calling my food a “fried ground beef pancake”, have I added anything to the world of cuisine? Am I making this phrase up to clarify the way people cook hamburgers or am I just making up something to show how clever I am? Am I making a contribution to the field that benefits everyone (including the people who eat hamburgers no matter how they are cooked) or am I just trying to get you to see me as being better than everyone else?

There are very few options when it comes to making sound. We all have vocal folds and a vocal tract. We all have an air supply in our lungs. We can configure things inside to produce certain kinds of categories of sound within the acoustic spectrum available to us as human beings. You can imagine that you have discovered something that no one else has ever discovered, but that is very unlikely and hubris of the highest sort. The most you can have found is a new way to explain it or communicate it to others. Making up terminology isn’t necessary unless you have a really small vocabulary or a very limited sense of self.

I don’t need to be a “voice-ologist” or a “functional singing educator”, or “sound facilitator”. I am content with being a singing teacher, or, in some circumstances, a singing voice specialist (not a term I invented). If you study singing, and you run into someone who has made up a new vocal term or has decided to call him or herself something that didn’t exist before, but what they are doing is just another version of what has been done for hundreds of years — teach singing — RUN AWAY!