Various Posts

If we were really interested in teaching people to sing, we would entirely reorganize the way they are taught, from the ground up.

Most people take one weekly voice lesson lasting an hour. Of course, it’s possible to take more, but now, since they are generally expensive, many people come less than that, maybe twice a month or once a month. If the person is diligent and can practice, it’s not impossible to make progress coming that infrequently, but it is very slow. Sometimes, especially at schools, lessons are 30 or 45 minutes long. Not a lot of time for people to learn. Sometimes there are just 12 or 13 lessons in a semester. Sometimes it is in a voice class that people get vocal training, so that means even less personal time with the teacher. In a choral setting there may be only general information about singing or perhaps none at all. The rehearsals are devoted to learning music however the singers can, with no personal help at all.

If you went to the gym once a week for a half an hour, it wouldn’t do you much good. If you went for an hour a week, that would be better, but not much. If you were serious about getting into shape, I would think that at least 45 minutes of exercise three or four times a week would be a minimum requirement if you were to get any results especially if you wouldn’t be doing too much in between that was also getting you shaped up. If you were actually going to work out, it would be best if you had a personal trainer every day, at least 5 days a week, for not less than an hour, but maybe 90 minutes or even two hours. Then, you would really see results. You would also have someone making sure you weren’t doing anything wrong that might injure you, you would have someone to tell you when to make things harder or do things differently. You would have an outside observer giving you feedback about how to proceed. And, you would know what to do when not at the gym to make sure you stayed on the path to meet your goal through diet and rest, etc.

If we really want people to learn to sing, we should be giving all voice majors or serious singers lessons not less than three times a week, or ideally, every day five days a week. Then, they would have a chance to get somewhere before they were lost in the process, floundering around, wondering which way to proceed.

We should begin by giving all voice students a short course in vocal function. Where is the larynx and what does it do? How does vocal sound happen? What do you need to teach your body to do if it is going to learn to sing? What kinds of singing are there and how do they differ in demand and response? What would be a good way to know if your voice was healthy? How does a healthy voice sound and function?

Then, we would begin with physical training that would strengthen the core muscles, the postural muscles of the ribs, upper back and torso and we would work on physical flexibility and coordination. After that, we would investigate speech. Where and how do you speak? What can you do with your speaking voice? How can you get it to do things it wouldn’t do in conversational use? What should you feel or hear? Why?

Then we could begin to teach breathing beginning with postural work for alignment and then work with the action of the ribs and abs for singing, including separating rib cage position from abdominal muscle movement, until these areas work independently. Then we could begin to increase inhalation function and extend exhalation duration. Finally we could work on modulating exhalation pressure over time.

Next, we would begin to train for singing based solely on function. No music. How even is your sound on various vowels? How much range do you have? How easy is it for you to get loud or soft, high and low? Is your sound clear, nasal or noisy? How do your vowels sound? Is it easy for you to sustain slow sounds? How quickly can you go? How accurate are the pitch changes and the vowel sounds in fast singing? Can you add consonants? What does your voice sound like when it is relaxed? Where does it tense up? How does that feel? What can you do to avoid excess tension? How long should you sing? What kinds of things should you practice and how? What should you expect from the practice? How do you know if you are making reasonable progress? What criteria should you use? How do you know if what you are doing is wrong? How does that sound or feel?

Then, we could approach simple songs, applying specific approaches towards specific goals. Different music would ask for different things. What kinds of ideas apply to all songs? What kinds of ideas apply to songs from a specific style, period, composer, country, era? What kinds of things are important but not necessarily vocal, but rather musical or about the lyrics?

Then, can you read music? What are the basic ingredients of music theory? Do you need to learn everything or are there some musical ingredients you could skip or just know in a very cursory manner? If so, what are those ingredients? Do you need to be able to read music to sing well? If not, why not? If so, why? What does it do for you if you read music well when you are learning a song?

Finally, how do you sing in a way that has to do with being expressive? What does it mean to “interpret” a song? How do you convey the meaning of the lyrics, the melody line, the rhythm, the accompaniment? How can you be true to the song and true to yourself at the same time? What does it mean to remain within a style or to fall out of it? Should you alter the song? If so, in what way and how? If not, why not? How can you stay within a style without being stuck? How do you know if a song is too hard for you? How do you know if the song “fits” you? How do you know if the song should be in a different key?

It is amazing that youngsters learn to sing at all given the system we have now, and that we have had for hundreds of years. What is not amazing is that a master artist takes 10 years to attain that mastery. With this much to learn (and there is, of course, more), why do we teach only one lesson once a week and expect students to learn anything of consequence in a four year college program? Or during two or three years of graduate school?

And, if you spend years in classical vocal training and repertoire, how are you supposed to learn about the parameters of music theater or jazz or rock or gospel or country at the same time, especially when there is no guidance for that in most college (or high school or junior high school) music programs or private lessons?

We need to rethink the entire process as a profession. It really doesn’t serve well the way it is (one lesson at a time, every so often). It leaves too much to novice singers to do on their own. It makes the likelihood that only those with high aptitude ever learn to sing well. It makes the incidences of confusion, frustration and discouragement for those of modest ability much higher. It makes the process drawn out, tedious, and takes a very long time to get consistent results, both in physical coordination and in sound making. It makes singing freely, enjoyably and well, very elusive for a long time.

We can do much better by those who wish to learn to sing. Tear down the house so we can build back up on higher ground. Think about it.

I have heard many times, “That person is so musical!” This is always a complement.

I have also heard, “That woman is such a good musician.” You would think these two things would always go together.

They do not.

I know quite a few people who are excellent musicians. They can read or play very difficult, complex music easily. They are knowledgeable about their particular skill (conducting, orchestrating or arranging, playing an instrument or singing). They can analyze difficult pieces with complex ingredients. They can talk about music in highly sophisticated terms. These people, certainly, are excellent musicians. Unfortunately, some of them, when it comes to making music, aren’t too good.

What does it mean to make music, to be musical? There is no universal scale as to what musicality is or should be. Some people probably don’t really value it as they don’t understand it well. This is a big problem because the good musicians are often the ones who get the jobs, the important jobs, because they have quantifiable skills. It doesn’t mean they deserve the jobs, but if they have them, they don’t necessarily value or reward the people who work with or under them who have equal musicianship but are also musical.

You can also be very musical and not a great musician. An example of that would be Luciano Pavarotti, who, I am told was not really a trained musician and learned most of what he performed by rote or by ear. Perhaps this isn’t true, but he wasn’t known for being able to sing all kinds of material. He mostly stuck to Italian Romantic repertoire, going only occasionally outside to other languages and composers. He was, we can suppose, not a fabulous musician, but he was so incredibly musical, no one really cared. I wonder, too, if Barbra Streisand reads music. My guess is that she does not. If not, it certainly would not have mattered there, either.

Someone who is musical automatically responds fully, easily and deeply to music. A musical person doesn’t need to wonder about the relationship between music and emotion, as they are completely the same. A musical person “just knows” how to express the music and doesn’t have to ponder how that is done. Each artist is different in how he or she expresses a piece, but there is no doubt as to “the way it goes” when the music is being performed, and it’s not about the black blobs on the page.

It is very hard, then, for a musical person to work with or under someone who is just a good musician. They wonder, always, “What is WRONG with this person, do they not hear that this is not how the music should go?” It seems impossible to a very musical person that the obvious emotional meaning of the music isn’t as plain as day to others and it can be very frustrating to hear music performed in a manner that is dry, static, flat, mechanical, dull, predictable or shaky.

Audiences will always respond to musicality, but they might not realize that this is what they are doing. Emotion is always what people want to hear and will respond to and remember. You cannot substitute this for a performance that is not also good in terms of the musicianship, but without it, the accuracy or the complexity of the music alone will only impress others who are also good musicians.

I was told that a famous composer, perhaps Stravinsky or Copland, said there was no such thing as emotion in music, and I suspect that perhaps John Cage thought so, too. I think Balanchine said that about dance and perhaps also Merce Cunningham. I have not done the work to see if these statements are facts or just rumors I have heard, so don’t hold me to them, but I wonder then, if they did have that opinion, how is it that others find emotional meaning in their work? How does such an attitude contrast with the work of someone like Martha Graham, who said that all movement had universal expression, including emotional meaning.

Is this a male/female thing? Do women feel more than men and express more as well? Is expressing emotion taboo? Is it just “being sentimental?” (a very bad thing in a lot of artistic circles) Many of the arts are controlled by men, although there are many women artists who are not in decision-making jobs. If you look at who conducts operas and orchestras, who is being commissioned to write operas and new orchestral works, if you look at who is running the companies, orchestras, and who is doing the hiring, pretty much you will find that the predominant group is male. Hmmmmmmm.

I don’t know if any of this has to do with the ability to be musical, to find in music an authentic emotional landscape that is revealed as movement, and expressed as sound through pitches, rhythm and sometimes words. I do know that I am always going to be more interested in hearing someone perform a piece that is musically expressive and will pass up the one that is intellectually intricate, accurate and really forgettable.

How can something be both bad and good at the same time?

Very easy. The something has lots of the things that are valued and quite a few of the things that shouldn’t be there at the same time.

You could say that that was true of many singers over the years. Sometimes the proportion varied. If the balance tips too far, in that you get too much bad and not enough good, it spells doom. Maybe a slow doom, but doom.

The first singer who comes to mind who was in this category was Maria Callas. You can hear at the beginning of her career how fabulous she was vocally, and how much capacity she had to sing. It was as if it was exploding out of her like a volcano. But she tackled every possible role type from lyric coloratura to mezzo, from the lightest roles to the heaviest, and early on, she began to have an “odd” vocal quality (constriction in the back of her throat), that gradually caught up with her. There are many theories about what was going on and why (weight loss, divorce, heart-break, depression, temperament, health issues, maybe all of those). There is even a pretty decent theory that she had a physical illness that was causing her soft tissue to harden rapidly. The only thing we know is that, in the end, at what was still a relatively early age, her singing got so technically bad that even her enormous talent for expressiveness and musicality could not tip the balance enough to save her career. The bad got bigger than the good.

There were others who got into trouble. Even Ethel Merman became a parody of singing in her later years. I was shocked to hear a recording of her when she was young because the voice was fresh, steady, clear and penetrating. By the time I heard her sing live, in the 50s on TV, she sounded ridiculous. The bad got at least as big as the good. Perhaps Merman didn’t know she was declining or care, perhaps she knew but couldn’t do anything about it. We’ll never know.

Then there have been the people who have had to take time off from a career in full tilt because something goes wrong. I believe this is what happened to Sherrill Milnes. He reportedly had a vocal fold problem that derailed his career while his friend and colleague, Placido Domingo, had no such issues and continues to sing to this moment. Lots of bad and not much good, at least in terms of luck.

There is no “voice jury” out there in the marketplace. One person’s “awful” is someone else’s “just fine”, but the idea is that there is some kind of mental parameter each of us has in our mind, our inner ear, that guides us to evaluate and decide, is this an OK balance or is this bad getting to overwhelm the good? Sometimes the artist is unable to tell and goes on sounding less than wonderful. Sometimes sounding less than wonderful was the point. You have to have a wide and broad scope of knowledge to understand all the different styles and the parameters that are accepted and those that are not. You might also want to measure the “industry standard” against your own “personal standard”, and, if you teach or sing, by golly, you had better know the difference. Many people do not. They not only do not, they don’t know that there is anything to know. Aiee!

If you are teaching, you either uphold the standard the student has to follow or you have recordings of others that do. You teach why these standards are the ones that deserve being upheld because if you do not, your students have to guess and waste a lot of time figuring out what they need to know. You can either tolerate what’s not so good for a reason, short term, or you can explain why you accept it permanently for artistic reasons, because if you do not, you force the student to guess at what your standards are, and how you got them. You force the student to come to his or her own conclusions with limited and possibly even incorrect information, which is asking them to pay a price for your ignorance, stubbornness or arrogance.

The sound that Mick Jagger makes now and has made for 40 years is bad, but many people like it and it has held up relatively well over the years. A lot of people would say that makes it good, or good for what it was and needed to do. Decent argument, reasonable conclusion. For me, it’s bad, and there isn’t enough good in it to make me like it or want to listen to it, but I realize that this is just my opinion, and certainly the world does not agree.

I very much liked Perry Como, but a lot of people would say that he was bad. Same position as the previous paragraph, in reverse.

The bad and the good will always co-exist. Be sure that you understand them as being friend and foe, and be sure you use what you know to find the balance between them.

Watching teachers of singing in master classes, one of the most interesting things is how many times you hear the word “it”. You hear “you are………” as a feedback a lot, too. Of course, the student always nods after each correction. Good students do, right?

“You are hooking it too much. Use the solar plexis more”. “Get the jaw out of the way, you are hooking it”. “It needs to mix more on top”. “It’s too off the voice, connect more”. “Find the low in the high”. “Keep it going more through the middle”.

What, folks, do any of these phrases mean? What is the “it” that we hear about all the time? The sound, the vowel, the tone?

“Find the breath in the higher place”. “Don’t take the weight up”.”Use the breath”. “Where are you breathing?” (Vague response from the student…”In the diaphragm?”)

What is weight, exactly, in a sound? What does it sound like, look like, how does it feel? How do you know if you have too much “weight” in your sound? It’s not good to sing with too much weight, right? Lose the weight but keep the connection.

“Keep the jaw completely out of it”. “The jaw is useless”. “Open the cheekbones when you breath in, but don’t drop too much”.

“Mix the middle”.

“Hey!!!!!!” “Hey, Taxi!!” “Ey-o-ey-o”. “Let go more”. “Stop hooking, release as you go up”. “Hey!”

Lots of head nodding.

“The resonators have to adjust so that the mix stays connected so you can feel the breath. The shape changes in the mix and you want the vowels to be clean to the top (without moving your jaw, which should not be there)”. Of course.

Does being a classically trained tenor make a difference when the student is a baritone?

Does being able to manage “a connection” when you are 40 and the student is 20 matter?

How do you “keep the richness of the bottom” and “stay connected” through the break without dropping your jaw, and not having “too much” weight in “it”, when NONE of this makes any sense? You have to know what the words mean by osmosis. How can they mean anything until and unless you already know what they mean through experience? If you have not already made the sounds, how do you learn from this kind of teaching how to make the sounds? How does this teach you to do what you need to do if you don’t already know what to do? Is this any better than trial and error on your own?

Let me help here. In English:

Your chest register isn’t strong enough. Let’s sing on a low pitch at a comfortable volume until you can sing louder there without extra pressure on anything other than your belly muscles, and without distorting the vowel in any way. Now that you can do this, can you take this same sound and vowel up higher in pitch at the same volume, gliding up on a slide. Now that you can do that, can you change the shape of your face and mouth so that it more closely resembles a smile? And can you do all of this keeping your posture strong (aligned over your feet) and your head over your torso, allowing it to tilt slightly up but not jut forward.

Do you realize that your jaw comes forward because there is a great deal of inner constriction on the back of your tongue which is locking your larynx in a raised position and that forces your jaw out? Your tongue is tight because of that, and it makes both your jaw and your tongue less able to move freely. It also causes your neck muscles to stretch which is another factor that prevents your larynx from moving freely. Rather than forcing yourself to keep your head in a level position, allow your head to lift so that you can relax the back of your throat and let your tongue rest gently on the floor of your mouth, even if the tone goes slightly breathy that way. Can you feel that this allows you to take some of the pressure off the back of your tongue? As that happens, it will allow your throat to relax enough to allow the back of the tongue to release slightly up. Once we get that response, let your head go back to normal, allowing yourself to really bounce and move your jaw and face, keeping the sound soft, while you sing easily, gli-ki-da on an arpeggio. There, now that you’ve been doing that up and down through almost two octaves, the break between chest and head is nearly gone and you can sing smoothly without getting any funny responses from either your head or your tongue. Did you notice that you are breathing both deeper and easier now? That’s because the larynx is more or less at rest, making the inhalation much easier. We have helped the back of your tongue to release, the constrictors to relax, and the larynx move and adjust all by itself, without you doing anything special directly. This, in turn, releases the jaw to move easily and allows the head to remain easily in a comfortable position, and encourages the neck muscles to let go as well.

Go practice that for a week or so and we will continue balancing and correcting until everything lines up and does what you need it to do.

If you force the “new” information (about belting, about your limited comprehension of voice science) to fit through the “resonance” and “breath support” model (and EVERYONE does that), then you MUST make the information fit what you have been taught and already know and experience. The fact that the sound emerged from UNTRAINED voices seems to have no bearing on those who insist that the way to learn it or know about it is to fit the approaches to developing it through what is known about CLASSICAL training, aimed at CLASSICAL repertoire. One of the greatest belters of our times is Barbara Streisand, who in the NY Times last year, said she had one voice lesson in her life. She doesn’t think about breathing, breath support, posture, resonance, placement, space or anything else, she JUST SINGS. Garland the same. Merman the same. They all considered themselves belters, by their own words. I guess they should know. It was their sound, their voices, their singing.

Learn something from these people, folks. LEARN. Do not drag something that doesn’t belong there into classical pedagogy.

Forget “it”, forget the other voice teacher jargon that means something only to YOU. Speak English. Ask, don’t tell.

I need an aspirin.

If you teach beginners of any age, but most particularly youngsters, start with head register development. Make sure they have a head register, that it is strong and CLEAR and that the vowel sounds are true and undistorted. Make sure the posture is straight, the jaw is loose enough to move and open, the face is alive, and the body is POISED, not slack. Make sure they can inhale without a lot of extraneous movement, especially in the upper body.

If you do this for quite some time and are successful, bring in some chest register on the bottom notes, using speech as the bridge. Make sure the sound is firm, not pushed, loud, but not forced, and bright without distortion into the nose.

Across the middle range pitches (depending on the voice type) sing in both a head dominant and a chest dominant sound, but keep the chest register light and easy and the head register strong and firm. Do this on a variety of vowels and musical exercises. Vary the volume from quite soft to comfortably loud. Then, expand up and down in range. Add in some consonants.

Come back to head register frequently to make sure it stays strong.

If you not know what isolated registration sounds like or how it functions, learn. If you do not know how to mix registers (and it has to be you, not the student who creates the mix), or are not familiar with these concepts, become familiar. They will save you and your student a great deal of grief and time.

Choose music that is simple and easy until the student can sing music that is simple and easy, simply and easily. Then, choose songs that are slightly harder in terms of range and power. Choose songs that are lyric-appropriate for youngsters. Do not let them sing songs about broken relationships, the sands of time, or being depressed. Stay away from extremes.

AND

If you have a natural child belter, still teach head register, but do it as a protection so that the chest sound doesn’t get too tight. Do not assume the child will be better off learning “Caro Mio Ben”, in fact, assume the reverse. If you don’t know that belting can be done comfortably, and can’t hear what is correct (and that is understandable if you were not, yourself, a child belter or have not worked with one), go find a colleague who is and can help you learn how to listen. If you mess around with the sound and take it away, you might kill the child’s love of singing and he or she might never sing again. BE CAREFUL!!!!

Forget about the diaphragm. Forget about resonance in the cheekbones, eyebrows, nasal cavities, forehead, front teeth, or hard palate and forget about “singing on the breath” (it is the only thing you can sing on unless you are dead).

If you do not understand this, find out why.

www.ccminstitute.com

Do you think that a Wagnarian sorpano is an expert at teaching or singing in a belt vocal quality? Do you think that being a vocal coach at the Met automatically gives you great skill at describing and teaching belting? Do you think that a tenor who is an expert at voice science but has no high notes and terrible vocal production is someone who possesses the ability to teach belting, a vocal experience he has never had?

I hope not. Unfortunately, I can tell you, that each of the individuals described above do think so. YEP. Promise.

Why not? After all, it’s just belting. You know, that loud, yelly sound that they do on Broadway and in rock songs. You know, that ugly sound that real singers hate. You know, the sound that uneducated unsophisticated singers have to use now and then.

Of course, if I, on the other hand, were to teach Wagnerian sopranos, because, it’s “just Wagner”, after all, even though I know very little about that literature, what harm would be done? I realize that the sounds have to be big and loud to carry over Wagner’s heavy orchestrations. I understand that you have to convey the music dramatically so the audience doesn’t fall asleep. I know enough about pronouncing German to realize if the words are sung appropriately. That’s enough. I’d be just fine. In fact, I assume I would be terrific or better than that, even.

Recently someone sent me a link to a “master teacher” who was clearly American, teaching in Switzerland, about “bel canto”. She had a bowl full of raw and hard boiled eggs. She actually put a hard boiled egg inside some poor singer’s mouth (after telling her that the inside of her mouth was “very small”) and then proceeded to talk and talk, while the unfortunate woman held the egg in her mouth, about “loosening the plates in your skull”. She did this in a New York nasal speaking voice and when one of the other participants commented about using her chest voice, the teacher said, “oh no, there is no such thing”, except in the teacher’s speech, which, obviously didn’t count since she didn’t realize she herself was using it.

How about being told that belting happens when “the column stands as witness, but doesn’t participate in the sound” (from the Met coach, I think). How about “dropping the diaphragm” to “clip the consonants”? How about “opening the lower chamber in the back” as ways to be a better belter?

What about the people that write biographies that actually think they know more about the singer than the singer herself? What about the idea that Ethel Merman and Barbra Steisand were not belters (although THEY thought they were and said so)? Do the biographers suppose the vocalists, with major careers, were so stupid as to not recognize what kind of singers they were? YEP. Promise.

What about the idea that people singing R&B material, in Germany, in front of German agents, were told they could not sustain a vocal line, and were, therefore, poor vocalists. How about the German agents didn’t realize that melismas are part of R&B style and that not having them indicates you can’t sing the style? How about they never bothered to find out what the style was or how it works? YEP. Promise.

For every person who has the integrity to tell the truth and say, “I don’t know about this topic, therefore, I won’t teach it or talk about it until I do”, there are a dozen who go ahead and teach or write about what they think they know with impunity, since, either they need the job and the money, or they could care less about whether or not the singer actually learns something healthy and useful, or they don’t know there is something to know. I can’t say which is worse but I know that all three attitudes are alive and well out there and that they will be until people who know better stand up, speak out, and stop the nonsense.

Are you one of them?

Teaching in any kind of school system requires standardization. Standardization requires that things be put in a box, labeled, measured, codified, and remain fixed.

Art is about uniqueness. An artist is someone who sees the world uniquely and expresses his or her point of view about it in some new fashion. Art should illuminate life, shedding light on the human condition, making us shift our awareness and discover something about living that we would not on our own encounter.

These two things do not go together easily or well.

The easy way to make things coalesce is to make the art stop being about uniqueness and make it be about sameness. That solves all the problems except it kills the art.

You do not have to think hard about the consequences of such actions nor of the commonality of them. We live with them every day.

If you go to a performance of an opera, a new opera, written by a living composer, I defy you to come away with any sense at all of the music. It is never there. No traditional harmony, no cadences, and certainly no repetitive themes or melodies. No tunes, no actual identifiable characteristics except that, of course, it’s not atonal, exactly. It’s just that, well, it’s not really recognizable as anything that’s tonal, either. It certainly might impress other composers. It might impress the people who give money who work in finance, or real estate, or maybe who have nothing else to do but give money to arts organizations to get a tax write-off. What it does not do is go to the heart. It does not move you. It does not make you want to ever hear it again. Even if, really, you had hoped you would like it and that you would find in it something of lasting value.

The people who criticize this non-music music are disregarded by the arts world in spite of the fact that opera as we know it has been dying as an art form for decades. The average age of the audiences at an opera sits in the middle of the baby boomers who are now in their late 50s and early 60s. There are all kinds of reasons why the arts people think this is so. There are all kinds of ways they hope to increase the audiences again. You have to “entice them in” by making the operas “relevant”. Dress up the old operas in present moment situations? Sure! Go ahead. Put Rembrandt in leather pants, give those Night Watch dudes clothes by Ralph Lauren and make one of them a drug dealer. Young people don’t have to scratch their heads…..they get it! Wrong. They stay away. How about — write new pieces that young people can claim as their own? That’s cool! Except the music, when they finally get around to going, puts you to sleep or makes you itchy in your seat.

That’s a good combination, sleepy and itchy. You really want to come back to have another go at that experience. Or, if you are very sophisticated, and can relate to the “interesting” musical elements (guitar and Chinese gong, South American bamboo flute and tin whistle, conga drums and tomato cans on a string), perhaps you would experience a performance more in the “deep intellectual investigation” mode. You listen to complex density and unusual overtones of all the music banging into itself….to see if you can find something you like. To see if you can find something. Anything.

And, of course, there’s the singing. The calling card of the professional opera singer who is “rising” or, perhaps, has gone about as far as he or she can go, is BE LOUD. BE VERY VERY LOUD. Loud shows you are emotionally communicative. Loud shows how good your technique is. Loud is about commitment. Loud says you have a big, strong voice. Loud is good. Loud.

No one is supposed to notice, however, that your face turns blue, your jaw is down so far your entire face looks like you are on the rack only standing up, your lips look like some kind of large fish going for the bait on a hook, your neck muscles are bulging and your pronunciation of the words is so distorted as to be completely unrelated to anything recognizable as communication. The vibrato is wide enough to contain at least three semi-tones, and the vocal line, if the music had one, is like a snake winding its way across the mud, leaving behind it a wake of significant proportions. If you are a man and can sing softly, you do so in a kind of weak falsetto whether or not that vocal production has anything to do with the emotion or communication of the lyrics. It at least lets you sing the notes that the composer gave you that are entirely out of your normal range.

On the other hand, however, if you have a nice, even vocal production with none of the above problems, you leave it alone, lest by disturbing it, it would go away. You sing every single word with the same nice, not too anything vocal approach, although you know that loud on the high notes is effective when you can sustain it for a bunch of measures. You do not change the quality of the vowels, the color of the tone, the pronunciation of the consonants, or the use of your physical anatomy, because, well, why would you anyway? Don’t we all stay the same in what we do all day every day no matter what? Might as well reflect life as it is, since that’s the point of the singing, right?

There is a remarkable availability of such experiences if you, as an audience member, would like to have one. You don’t have to look very far. Just go to something new or something old that is being “re-interpreted”. I’m sure you can find one in your own town, wherever you are. And, if, like me, you wonder how it is that we are in such a place, I will share with you what I came to after I asked myself this question for the 9,000th time.

Schools. Every year you have a bumper crop of people who graduate with degrees in performing, or orchestration, or composing, or conducting. They put in the time, they get the piece of paper. They may have no talent, no inspiration and no actual insight as to what, uniquely, they feel about life or art, but by golly, they went to school and they are READY. You might also have a degree in voice, maybe a masters’ or even a doctorate. But, if you are a regular reader of this blog, you already well know that does not mean you can sing. It does not mean you can sing in any way at all. Your singing might be just dreadful, but you did the required work, you studied with the chairperson of the voice department, and no one was willing to be the person to say “This person can’t sing”, because, well, they all have to keep their jobs and feed their families.

So you get an opera written by someone who writes by formula. You get an opera that has singers who scream or can’t change anything. You get an opera that is directed by someone who thinks that both of these things have something to do with music and/or communication. You get an opera that is orchestrated for some odd hodge-podge of instruments in a score with abrupt, haphazard, multiple meter changes and two or maybe even three simultaneous keys. You get an opera that, perhaps, tells an interesting story, but maybe not so interesting as the version that came out first as the newspaper article or the book.

You get standardized art, you get an oxymoron. You get MEDIOCRITY. You can find it every day at your local 7-11 or concert hall.

There is a point of view that says you should use songs to teach vocal technique. I do not agree with this.

Vocal exercises are the correct means of developing vocal technique. It is the exercises that allow you to develop all the capacities of vocal skills that are necessary to creating vocal mastery. The list of things that a well developed voice does is specific and rather long. I have written about it here in the past and won’t repeat it now.

Most teachers of singing choose songs to help the student master singing problems. This is bound to cause problems. Generally, songs lag behind vocal exercises by quite a bit, weeks or months. Therefore, teachers of singing should make sure that the song is easier than the exercises, well within the scope of the vocalists “cruising” ability. This is the only way to teach performance. If you can’t get through the phrase because it is too loud, too long, too high or low, or because it is musically very hard or has lots of words sung quickly, working on the song will only cause you frustration. It will also interfere with your ability to feel and express the meaning of the lyrics or poetry. You will not be able to concentrate on what the songs means to you if you have to concentrate very hard on making your throat do something it does not yet, on its own, do. This is sad, a very typical situation, and it causes great confusion because, inevitably, the student is blamed.

If you want a student to “learn” mix and you choose a song that is mostly mid-range in terms of pitch you MIGHT get the student to be better at mix but you might also wonder why the student just keeps flipping from chest to head, over and over, and never seems to get any better. It would be because you have not yet gotten the student’s vocal mechanism to be established strongly enough in mix for mix to do its job automatically. If you pick a belty song with the idea that this is somehow likely to help the student develop mix, asking the student to sing in a vocal quality that he or she will not find in a professional recording (as an aural reference), you will simply confuse the student. Of course, if you do not even know the song is meant to be belty because you didn’t bother to listen to it first yourself, you should be boiled in oil, but you already know that if you read my posts.

Teach technique to develop technique. Use exercises to develop vocal and breathing coordination and skills. Teach performance in songs (acting, movement, stance, etc.). Do not confuse the two.

There is a point of view that says you should use songs to teach vocal technique. I do not agree with this.

Vocal exercises are the correct means of developing vocal technique. It is the exercises that allow you to develop all the capacities of vocal skills that are necessary to creating vocal mastery. The list of things that a well developed voice does is specific and rather long. I have written about it here in the past and won’t repeat it now.

Most teachers of singing choose songs to help the student master singing problems. This is bound to cause problems. Generally, songs lag behind vocal exercises by quite a bit, weeks or months. Therefore, teachers of singing should make sure that the song is easier than the exercises, well within the scope of the vocalists “cruising” ability. This is the only way to teach performance. If you can’t get through the phrase because it is too loud, too long, too high or low, or because it is musically very hard or has lots of words sung quickly, working on the song will only cause you frustration. It will also interfere with your ability to feel and express the meaning of the lyrics or poetry. You will not be able to concentrate on what the songs means to you if you have to concentrate very hard on making your throat do something it does not yet, on its own, do. This is sad, a very typical situation, and it causes great confusion because, inevitably, the student is blamed.

If you want a student to “learn” mix and you choose a song that is mostly mid-range in terms of pitch you MIGHT get the student to be better at mix but you might also wonder why the student just keeps flipping from chest to head, over and over, and never seems to get any better. It would be because you have not yet gotten the student’s vocal mechanism to be established strongly enough in mix for mix to do its job automatically. If you pick a belty song with the idea that this is somehow likely to help the student develop mix, asking the student to sing in a vocal quality that he or she will not find in a professional recording (as an aural reference), you will simply confuse the student. Of course, if you do not even know the song is meant to be belty because you didn’t bother to listen to it first yourself, you should be boiled in oil, but you already know that if you read my posts.

Teach technique to develop technique. Use exercises to develop vocal and breathing coordination and skills. Teach performance in songs (acting, movement, stance, etc.). Do not confuse the two.

There is a point of view that says you should use songs to teach vocal technique. I do not agree with this.

Vocal exercises are the correct means of developing vocal technique. It is the exercises that allow you to develop all the capacities of vocal skills that are necessary to creating vocal mastery. The list of things that a well developed voice does is specific and rather long. I have written about it here in the past and won’t repeat it now.

Most teachers of singing choose songs to help the student master various vocal behaviors. This is bound to cause problems. Generally, songs lag behind vocal exercises by quite a bit, weeks or months. Therefore, teachers of singing should make sure that the song is easier than the exercises, well within the scope of the vocalists “cruising” ability. This is the only way to teach performance. If you can’t get through the phrase because it is too loud, too long, too high or low, or because it is musically very hard or has lots of words sung quickly, working on the song will only cause you frustration. It will also interfere with your ability to feel and express the meaning of the lyrics or poetry. You will not be able to concentrate on what the songs means to you if you have to concentrate very hard on making your throat do something it does not yet, on its own, do. This is sad, and is a very typical situation which causes great confusion because, inevitably, the student is blamed.

If you want a student to “learn” mix and you choose a song that is mostly mid-range in terms of pitch you MIGHT get the student to be better at mix but you might also wonder why the student just keeps flipping from chest to head, over and over, and never seems to get any better. It would be because you have not yet gotten the student’s vocal mechanism to be established strongly enough in mix for mix to do its job automatically. If you pick a belty song with the idea that this is somehow likely to help the student develop mix, asking the student to sing in a vocal quality that he or she will not find in a professional recording (as an aural reference), you will simply confuse the student. Of course, if you do not even know the song is meant to be belty because you didn’t bother to listen to it first yourself, you should be boiled in oil, but you already know that if you read my posts.

Teach technique to develop technique. Use exercises to develop vocal and breathing coordination and skills. Teach performance in songs (acting, movement, stance, etc.). Do not confuse the two.