Various Posts

No one gets paid for low notes unless maybe he is Amonastro or a Russian Bass.

People like high notes. Over the decades the fascination with high notes has grown. Higher and higher. No note is too high. No upper limit. We like to hear that “excitement”. My late colleague and nemesis, Elizabeth Howell, used to call it “bullfight singing”. In some ways, she was correct. The public only knows that the sound is thrilling (like a scream), they don’t know if it is costing the performer to make that sound. Can you scream over and over and over and not hurt your voice? It seems like you can’t but really, no one knows for sure.

Common sense says this is a bad idea but there are famous people who specialize in extreme vocal sounds who do things that would scare most singers to death and they survive, even thrive, doing so. I don’t know how they manage, as it would certainly kill my little silvery soprano, but in my years of dealing with singing, I have seen and heard all kinds of things that would raise the hair on your head and not all of them were easy to explain, but they exist and people do them.

Since I still have an easy high voice, my students usually end up singing higher as they work with me, often quite a bit higher. I teach them to do what I do. Since most of them want to work, having their voice extend into a higher range gives them more options and allows them to get those jobs and be healthy in them. This is part of what they pay for. This is crucial in rock shows, as rock music doesn’t generally consider SATB at all. You just sing and you go up and get loud, and then go up some more, as needed. The “rock scream” is a necessary reality in many styles and, since we have just acknowledged that most humans don’t go around screaming for hours every day, this in itself is a very outside the box vocal behavior.

Most of the youngsters who come in are trained at school to fit into the soprano, mezzo, contralto, tenor, baritone, bass mold, regardless. There is little formal training to become a “baritenor”, even though that is the most common category for a male voice on Broadway at the moment. [A baritenor is a high, light baritone or a chesty, full tenor]. Same with the women — there are few roles for very high soprano [Christine in Phantom was probably the last one]. And there were never a lot of roles for mezzos or contraltos, so that hasn’t changed. [I guess “Gary Coleman” in Avenue Q is a contralto, but s/he is a belter, so that’s not the same thing]. The young people are relieved to have training that is geared towards making the sounds they hear on recordings but they also like the idea of keeping some of their more formal vocal production (just in case). Why not? It isn’t necessary to choose until and unless you get a role in a show that asks you for a specific sound, and even then, you can vocalize one way in the morning and a different way in the afternoon before the show, and survive very well. Life experience talking there, not theory.

There are also people who want to sound bad. It is, to them, some kind of a signature sound. There are people who have no choice but to sound “bad” as they have vocal injuries that are permanent. There are people who can sing high but don’t because they don’t like it. (Beats me, but true).

The current necessity for most singers, male and female alike, is to belt and belt high. It is absolutely possible to train someone to do that, most especially a student who has a good sturdy voice in the first place and who also has a nice sturdy body to go with it. Other people can learn but they are the easiest ones to teach. How high is high? What is the correct range? What is appropriate? The answer is, whatever the person can manage.

High notes always were money notes. They still are. It’s just that mostly, they sound a whole lot different than they did 50 years ago.

It’s very hard to be kinda sorta good at something and also kinda sorta good at something else.

At some point, it is easier to be good at just one thing. Really good. If you accomplish this, then, maybe you can also learn to get very good at something else. Being good at several things at once slows down learning both things and makes maintaining the two skill sets harder.

But, maybe not.

Maybe if you learn the two things as a kid, slowly, over time, and you don’t get told that doing so is hard, perhaps it is quite possible to be good at more than one, maybe even more than two.

Here in NYC, on Broadway, we have some of the finest dancers in the world. In the current production of “How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying” which stars Daniel Radcliffe and opens next weekend, the dancers are called upon to do several ballet sequences, some pop/rock jazz, tap and traditional theatrical dancing. All of it is beautifully choreographed. Most of the dancers are young. How did they get to be so good at so many kinds of dance? I’m sure it was because they were exposed to them early on and worked at each of them for years. When you get here, and you go to auditions, you find out quickly, they want you to bring your jazz shoes, your character shoes and your ballet shoes to the same audition. If you don’t do all of those styles, you go to classes and learn to do them, or you go home.

Our choristers in the Brooklyn Youth Chorus (www.brooklynyouthchorus.org) sing in a classical head dominant sound (with the Philharmonic and other groups), they sing in a mixy sound (with people like Brandy, Michael Jackson and The Grizzly Bears) and they sing a kind of belty mix with Elton John and other rockers. We train them to do this by teaching them to do various register balances in mid range on purpose. We have not had any health problems and we have not have anyone develop vocal pathology in 20 years. That’s a lot of kids. We don’t tell them this kind of versatility in singing is hard or potentially damaging, we just make sure they learn correct physical and aural patterning and we make sure they get the best information about vocal production they can understand. It seems to be working.

The people who sort of sing classical music and who sort of sing other styles don’t sing any of them well. Perhaps that’s OK, especially if it is just for their own enjoyment. If, however, the person has professional aspirations and they come here to NYC (or go anywhere else where there is high level professional music) they find out quickly what kind of standards singers are expected to have. It’s a kind of school, the world of professional singing, but not one that has books or grades, just opportunities to succeed or fail.

If you want to dabble, that’s fine, but don’t come here thinking that will be enough to give you a career.

The natural condition of head register is that it is weak, most particularly in the lowest pitches. This means that it is typically also breathy.

Since classical singing requires a high degree of head register dominance, it takes quite a while to be able to accomplish singing in a “head mix” in mid-range in most people. Why? Because in mid-range most adults are still speaking in a chest dominant sound and because head is weak there.

If you understand that there are but two groups of vocal exercises: ones that relax the throat and allow the larynx to descend, making the voice more relaxed and pleasant, bringing out its “beauty”, but also allowing the vocal folds to close less firmly; and ones that strengthen the mechanism in several ways, but which do not sound very “nice”, all of which involve resistance or “tightening” of various muscular groups, then you will also understand that developing strength in a head dominant middle range sound isn’t something you “just do”. It takes time.

The “bad” exercises, the ones that make the voice stronger or “tighten it up” in a good way are generally closed sounds, sometimes “ugly” ones. Since singing teachers never ever want to talk about the throat being tight (heaven forbid) they made up all these euphemisms like “pointed”, “focused”, “forward”, “ringy”, “in the masque” and a bijillion others, which would have been OK had they understood why the euphemisms were necessary, but mostly, they did not. The whole idea was not to ever think of your throat. By-pass the throat. Sing as if you went from your belly to your eyeballs. (:(

Most singers (and teachers of singing) have various musical exercises that they do on various musical patterns, sometimes in the same sequence, sometimes a random sequence. I have never, in all these years, encountered a singer who “warmed-up” with the same kind of exercises as another one. Sometimes the person has a specific idea in mind when warming up (“first the high voice, then the middle, then the low”, or, “first the masque, then the top of the head, then the diaphragm”, [whatever], or, occasionally, “first head register, then chest register, then mix”). Why would things be so varied? There are many reasons but I think the main one is that no one really knows what exercises do what. You do them because someone told you to or a bunch of different someones told you to and you put some of each of those people’s exercises together on your own. Sometimes the exercises go back several generations (“My teacher’s teacher did these and they were really good”). Sometimes you could just as well warm up to the names in the phone book or Happy Birthday. If you are singing, you are warming up. ☝

You need to understand what vocal function is in order to use exercises effectively. You need to understand what the voice is doing before you can determine whether or not that function is useful, correct, healthy or good. You need to understand what is MISSING if you are going to develop it and you need to know what kind of exercises will make that behavior happen. Then, you need to know how long to do the exercise and how vigorously. Then you need to know what to do to counter that exercise to be sure the rest of the voice stays in equilibrium.

So what exercises develop strength in head register down low? How would you know if it was stronger? (You need to know this if you are going to determine whether or not the exercise is working). How would you know that what you were doing was effective? Would you know the exercise was the correct choice or would you blame the student if it “didn’t work”.

Do you get head register to be stronger by thinking of your face? your nose? your eyebrows? your forehead? your cheekbones? your nasal passages? your sinuses? your soft palate? the “Singer’s Formant”? the high overtones? the tree across the street? your diaphragm???????????????????????? Do you get it to be stronger by thinking?

What happens when the head register is stronger? Is the sound prettier? sweeter? more fluid? more bouncy? more purple? more pingy/ringy? Is the voice more “open”? more “pointed”? more “forward”? chirpy-er? squeakier? Do you get it to be stronger by thinking it is stronger?

You see the problem. Until we, as a profession, can work on these things, we are still very lost.

And, if you want the answers, you need the Solution Sequence®, which you can only get by taking Somatic Voicework™ Level II at Shenandoah Conservatory in July. www.ccminstitute.com

There is currently a new, and somewhat deadly, trend amongst teachers of singing who are open to the idea that belting is not harmful. It is this: if you want to belt, just sing loudly all the time, or sing in your nose. It is sounds bad, that’s OK, because that is what it is supposed to do.

This idea, surprisingly, throws away not only what has been solid vocal technique knowledge for a few hundred years, it also flies in the face of speech language pathology, yet there are many SLPs who have latched onto approaches that teach a screechy squawky belt sound as being just fine. You have to wonder where the common sense goes.

You also must know that I have discussed this topic at length with all of the top voice scientists in our field and they still do not understand or really know what belting is and who belters are. This is probably more scary to me than anything else. If these men (and we are talking about men only) do not know, then all whom they mentor are not going to know either. Think about that. When I told one of them that Connie Francis was a wonderful belter, he told me she was not a belter at all. What was she then, a classical singer? a folk singer? a gospel singer? A music theater singer? No, she was a warm, wonderful belter who sang with freedom and ease, same as Mimi Hines (same era). We think of belting as screaming because, in 2011, that’s what it has become in many styles, but that is a present moment phenomenon and doesn’t discount what belting was in the 1950s or even in the 1910s, 20s, and 30s when it was Ethel Merman, Bessie Smith and Ethel Waters who were doing the singing.

If you also consider that almost none of the research on professional singers has been conducted in the field, what do we have, really, in terms of research that reliably reflects the marketplace’s actual working conditions for these singers? Yes, people who have participated in some of the tests (including me) are professional (but not working at the moment professionals — rather, they are people who have been paid pros in the past) but many of the studies have been conducted either on students or faculty, because they are done at colleges as required papers. Some of the subjects of these papers should have never been considered professionals of any kind because they were not yet or had never been singers working in a well-known or accepted venue (particularly in CCM styles). There is no CV provided to say exactly what the credentials of the subjects were in terms of experience. You have to take the word of the researchers that the subjects were “professionals”.

If you base your teaching of belting on what you have read or what you have picked up at a workshop or two, then you will be lost when it comes to intelligent application, because any research you find may or may not help you, and little has been written about belting that makes any kind of sense with what is known about vocal function in a scientific manner.

So, is it any wonder then, that students are given belty material that is completely wrong for them? Some belted songs are simple and can be sung by anyone who has a strong sturdy speaking voice that carries over to singing without issue as long as the song isn’t too high in range. “Day by Day” from Godspell is the easiest “belty” song to start with. Almost anyone can sing it as printed, in that key. All one has to do is cut the endless repeats.

If, however, you give a student learn “Bye Bye, Mein Liebe Herr” from Cabaret, you had better know that the female is a good solid belter with a good wide range who is comfortable with sustained belt sounds and can also be provocative while singing. In other words, it’s not a song for a beginning belter or actress. Same, in my opinion, with “Maybe This Time”, “Don’t Rain On My Parade” and “Defying Gravity”. These are not songs for people who haven’t been belting, and belting well, for many years.

Classical singers are supposed to understand how to assign material that is suited to both voice type and weight. Younger voices do material that is not “too” anything (high, loud, sustained, complex, etc.) for a reason. If you assign “Adelaide” (Beethoven) to a first year voice student, it should be a very very unusual, exceptionally capable student, otherwise, the student is going to struggle.

This happens EVERY DAY all over the place and guess who gets blamed for having problems with intonation, breath control, resonance, legato, articulation and expressivity? Do you suppose it’s the teacher???????????

And, when you have to listen to someone screaming their way through a belt song, or singing a piece that was meant to be belted in a hooty soprano because she has been taught that “this is the correct way to use the voice in all music”, you have to feel sorry for the singer (the student). Teaching of this sort is not education. In a perfect world it wouldn’t exist or be tolerated.

If you assign a song to a student, young or old, know what kind of a song it is, what it takes in order to sing it well in terms of vocal technique and ability, and what it takes in terms of performance BEFORE you assign it. If you do not know, go find out. This is the day of Google and it isn’t hard to do the research. If you can’t assess what you are listening to and do not have a context to appreciate the criteria as I have described it here previously many times on this blog, then stay away from the material altogether until you learn how to handle it appropriately. Have the integrity to teach only what you know you know and do not guess. It doesn’t help you or the student, it disrespects the music, and it brings the profession down across the board.

Bad choices are bad. Learn what you need to in order to make all your choices good ones.

You can’t sing fully if your voice isn’t strong. Yelling is not a good way to develop true vocal strength.

Loudness alone is not a sign of enduring, sustained strength. Strong voices can be loud, or not. A strong voice can do things a weak voice just can’t manage.

A strong voice can handle a lot of exhalation pressure without being breathy (due to firm closure of the vocal folds) and a strong voice can express a great deal of powerful emotion without being overwhelmed. A strong voice can get quiet easily without falling apart.

Generally one can’t develop full energized vocal strength without training. Strength is what allows a voice to be undistorted, unconstricted and unmanipulated. It is rare that such strength can be cultivated by self-training alone. Natural talent can take a person a long way, but it will never do what training does. Training makes up for the lacks that are inherent in all voices. Just as someone who is a very good, coordinated natural dancer is not capable of being a prima ballerina without years of diligent training, someone with a nice voice who is a good natural singer, who has had no formal vocal training, will never be capable of doing the things that someone with years of training does.

And, someone with a great deal of training may not sound like they have training, which, in a certain way, is the point. They might have certain vocal skills but only use them when they choose to, and at other times, keep them “under cover”.

A well-trained cultivated voice has many characteristics. What are they? You would be surprised to know that many people, even those who teach, have no clue.

A well-trained cultivated voice spans at least an octave and a half, but more likely at least two octaves. It can be that it covers more than three, or maybe even four. It can go from pianissimo to fortissimo through at least 3/4 of that range. It produces undistorted OR modified vowels (as needed) and clear consonants. It has (or can have) even vibrato or produce a straight tone (as needed). It can also be breathy or nasal for expressive purposes (as needed in some styles). It is recognizable as being itself (unique) but is consistent, even and under control, all the while being free (not constricted or strained). It is generally pleasant but can make “unpleasant” sounds (as needed). It is not consistently distorted, swallowed, strangled, nasal, harsh, caught, pinched, stiff, grating, muddy or any of a thousand other not nice descriptions. It expresses true, deeply felt emotion without unnecessary effort and it handles various kinds of stressors (that means mild illness, environmental disturbances, and professional demands) without undue problems under most circumstances. The vocalist does not need to make any strange faces or movements, aside from moving the mouth, jaw and face. And, the person singing belongs to, likes and is happy with the sound.

It may also be that the voice can sing comfortably in many styles. That is an asset, not a requirement.

I have not ever met anyone in almost 40 years of teaching singing who could do all of these things equally and easily without training. The list above does not include any of the other factors that a trained voice is supposed to handle that have to do with performance such as knowing how to do ornaments, melismas, colorations, and things that require musical virtuosity like rapid scales, staccati, arpeggios, crescendo to descrescendo, etc. It does not include linguistic things, or factors involving the use of microphones and amplifiers, or being on a stage in various kinds of venues. There are many things that are not included that have an impact on vocal capacity and ability that are not, on their own, vocal skills, but they matter, too.

You can sing and have a career if your voice doesn’t fit into this description and you can, of course, be a very good vocalist without having all these capabilities. That is a different subject. Singing does not fit into only one box, but, if you do not understand the purpose of training (and many people do not) you certainly cannot understand why, regardless of what you want to do with your voice (including professional speech), it would be necessary.

Many years ago, while I was still in high school, my mother attended a social function at which she sat near another woman whom she did not know. They ended up speaking, as mothers do, about their daughters. My mother was very proud that my father was paying for expensive singing lessons (a true sacrifice on their part). When the topic of singing came up my mother mentioned that I was studying singing. The other woman replied “Oh, that’s too bad. My daughter is so good she doesn’t need training”. My mother just smiled.

The basic principles of vocal function in The LoVetri Method, Somatic Voicework™ are very simple. They are: isolation, development and combination of chest and head registers to create a balanced mix, undistorted vowels, and strong, aligned posture which facilitates deep and easy inhalation and exhalation. If you learned and understood only this about vocal production, and you applied these principles to a wide range of pitches and volumes, and added consonants, you wouldn’t need anything else to become a good vocal technician.

If you do not understand register function as an auditory phenomenon, and you do not understand that this is a vocal fold behavior as well, you can waste a lot of time on “resonance” (something you can’t control until you have a good deal of skill and power), and you can confuse vocal quality with vowel sound quality (a very bad mistake) which will make you spin your heels. If you believe that everything comes from the breathing, then you can waste a lot of time, years or maybe even decades, developing your ability to breath, but if you do not also work on your sound, all you will get from doing this is to be a really excellent breather. I have some of those folks show up in my studio. One man had worked on breathing for 12 years with his previous teacher and had made little progress. He got better working with me in about 4 sessions by strengthening his chest register, something he had never heard of.

If you have been taught that everything is “placement” and “breath support” and that breathing has something to do with inhaling into the diaphragm, (and who hasn’t been taught those things?) you can spend much much too long trying to get a person’s sound to improve, develop, grow, adjust or change to no avail.

If you can get a good strong undistorted unmanipulated free open /a/ (as in Father) on a low note at a loud vowel, you can assume that you have a healthy chest register response. If you can get a clear, light, easy undistorted /u/ (true) on a high pitch at a moderate to loud volume, you can assume that you have access to a healthy head register function (doesn’t mean you can sing a whole song there, however). If you can sing an /e/ or an /ae/ on a middle pitch at moderate volume, you probably have some kind of balance or mix. Probably is the operating word.

You have to know what kind of sound is good in order to get it. You have to know what you want before you open your mouth and you have to know that you are going to get that sound before you try to make it. Being able to do that, on demand, every time, is having “secure vocal technique”. If you do not know what “good” sounds like, especially in yourself, you have to learn. If you do not know what comfortable is, you have to learn that too. If you do not have control over all the dimensions of your voice (pitch, vowel, volume, consonants, duration, pressure (volume) and vibrato (some/none)), you don’t really have “vocal technique” at all, you just sing however you do.

The purpose of training the voice is to give you skills you wouldn’t have if you didn’t seek them. That includes expanding your range both up and down, expanding your dynamic expression (both louder and softer), being able to lengthen the time you can easily exhale during a sustained phrase, and being able to control the volume while you extend it, up to and including getting louder at the end or when you go up or both. You need to feel that you are singing easily and freely and that the sound responds well and that you can feel emotional while singing and that the emotion is reflected in the sound without you having to “make it emotional”. You need to be able to go very quickly or very slowly without issue. You need to be able to sing in a variety of tone qualities and colors in order to be effective in various contrasting styles. You need to look and feel congruent with the words and music while you sing. Trying to control your diaphragm isn’t going to help you do any of these things.

Somatic Voicework™ is functional training based on practical application, one person at a time. Everyone is the same and everyone is different. All voices are unique and all people are distinctively themselves but everyone has two vocal folds and a larynx, a pair of lungs, ribs and abdominal muscles. Vocal function is the same for any human being but vocal output is unique to the person, the age, the background, the training, the music, the interests and many other things.

There are a lot of people out there calling themselves singers who have no clue about the above. Some of these people also teach. (Unfortunately.) If you do not understand what I have written here, and you either sing or teach, you have, in my opinion, a moral obligation to learn about these things.

What if you like to play piano or sing? What if you aren’t particularly good at other things, are shy and don’t really know what to do with yourself? What if you are from a middle class family of people who “have money” and are all college graduates? What if they expect you to go to school and get a job when you are done with college? What if, basically, you don’t have much in the way of direction or motivation, but you understand you don’t really want to be a bum and you don’t have a trust fund to support you for the rest of your life? What if you just keep taking music or voice lessons because they can afford it and you end up being “OK” in one or both of those skills?

What if, indeed.

Many many people are in such circumstances. Many people with a modicum of talent take lessons of various kinds and develop enough skill to be “pretty good”. If the skills are artistic ones, like playing an instrument, acting, dancing, painting, or singing, you can probably find a school that offers you a college degree in your favorite discipline. There are many kinds of programs and many kinds of colleges. Some of them are very competitive, large, located in cities and aimed at those who have a clear shot at having a professional career in their chosen discipline. Others are middle sized with programs or degrees that are respected and have students of moderate to excellent ability who may or may not go on to performance or activity as a professional. Some schools are small, have students who are not likely to be accepted by other schools but who offer decent general education in various artistic areas. These graduates are not the ones who will go on to become famous, but they may have professional engagements in small venues, smaller cities or rural locations. There is nothing wrong with any of this, in theory at least.

If you know that you are only modestly talented and that you are not competitive and that you would like to avoid being a “starving artist” for 10 years, and you also know that you like stability and would like to have a “nice middle class” life with all its various trimmings (two or three TVs, a new car now and then, clothes, travel, etc.) you might also confront early on that you are better off not entering the marketplace and, in fact, staying home and building whatever you can there. That’s fine. It’s better to know who you are and what you want then flail around being miserable. There is nothing wrong with going through school to get a doctorate, finding a job at some college you like, and making your life there for 30, 40 or even 50 years. In fact, I imagine that is what the majority of people in “the arts” end up doing or trying to do because, obviously, there are more people who want to perform (or create) than there are jobs that pay a decent amount of money upon which to build a life.

The problems arise when someone in such a situation can’t stay at a school because the department gets phased out, or the head of the department wants to hire a friend who will take your job, or because your partner or spouse gets a better job in another place and you want to stay together so you move, or your partner or spouse gets sick and you have to move for health reasons. Really, the list, as we all know, is endless. Rarely does life work out that smoothly. It could even be that after 15 years you are just bored and want a change. Anything can happen.

If you have not done anything to “keep up your skills” or stay on top of the latest developments in your field, as would be required if you were in a licensed profession like medical doctor, speech language pathologist, lawyer or any of a dozen other fields, you might only know what you learned while still in school. If you haven’t done due diligence, you could have no awareness whatsoever of the standards of your profession as they are held at the highest levels (even in the colleges) of the any part of the profession.

What does a classical vocalist need to know and be able to do in order to have a career in opera (as really, there is no possibility of having a career doing recitals unless you are already famous), or oratorios, orchestral works or recordings? What does a music theater performer need to be able to do in order to have a chance at a career in New York, LA, London, Toronto, Sydney or any other major venue or in a national tour? What does a dancer need to be able to do to get into a dance company, whether it be a ballet company, a modern dance troupe, or some other kind of dance (Latin, tango, African, etc.), or to be able to get into a music theater show?

What kind of life experience and exposure do you have to any of the arts at the highest professional levels if you have not yourself been in them, seen them, worked with those artists, dealt with that aspect of the business or had contact with the marketplace in any way? There are some things you just cannot learn in school.

There is one more possibility.

You don’t have much talent yourself but you come from a talented, famous or wealthy family that has “connections”. You maybe learned to play piano or an instrument, or dance, or have done some acting, but, because of your station in life, you “hang out” with other people who are successful at a very high level. Eventually, for the same reasons as I discussed at the beginning of this post, you can kinda sorta do some stuff with one of your skills and you get invited to do something with it with one of your friends who just happens to be the daughter, son or protege of “Mr. Big” or “Ms. Famous”. Low and behold, you get noticed, you have some success, and you begin to get offers from other people who either (1) don’t know the difference between good and bad or (2) don’t care or (3) are themselves equally clueless as to their own lack of ability. [Of course this is true everywhere. Could be that dad is a big lawyer and you get to be a partner even though your own legal skills are dreadful. You could be the son of a President in a family from the highest part of society and you find yourself running for office and…..oops, sorry.] Next thing you know, you (the mediocre one) is now touted as being “successful” or “important” and your career begins to grow. Sooner or later someone is going to ask you to TEACH.

You know the rest. If you don’t, just read some of my old posts.

I talk a lot about “classical” vocal training. Singing teachers generally talk about classical vocal training, with the implied understanding that this is “one thing”, that it is in some way a known entity, an organized commodity that is readily available consistently if you seek it out.

That is simply not true. “Classical” vocal training can mean almost anything. There is no consensus about what it is, how it works, who should teach it, what it should cover, or how long it will take. There is no organizing body that agrees what classical vocal training allows one to do while singing and no clear direction regarding the singing as it combines with other things like acting, “performing”, musicianship, language or anything else.

If you study “classical” vocal training in a university or college, someone will be in charge of your school’s particular curriculum and its particular criteria for students and perhaps also criteria for teachers. Regulating bodies will provide guidelines that schools must follow in order to become or remain accredited, but they do not establish which individual teachers can help students do what things or which departments can accomplish specific vocal goals. That, typically, is left to each department or school. There are educational organizations, locally and nationally, but they do not provide specific vocal training requirements.

Classical vocal training is many different things. Recognizing that is a first step to organizing it into a coherent philosophy that has defined ingredients. If you are singing early music (Pre-Baroque), the current consensus about what is correct vocal production for those styles is different than it was 35 years ago. If you are singing contemporary classical music, written by living or recently deceased composers, almost anything could be part of making the sounds required in the various works. If you sing mainstream music from “standard” repertoire (Mozart, Schubert, Faure, Verdi, Puccini, Britten), the sounds you need to make might vary by vocal category (fach), or by venue (concert hall, opera house, church, recital stage) or by accompaniment (piano, small ensemble, orchestra, electronic amplification). Thoughts about vibrato, mouth shape, vowel sound colors, linguistic considerations (separate from but related to spoken languages), legato, accuracy of melismatic lines, and control over volume for expressive purposes, depend on the most prevalent or predominant ideas about style as accepted in the general classical musical marketplace. What the Met does makes a difference everywhere. What the Philharmonic does, ditto. What is done in venues like Carnegie and Philharmonic Hall by other groups matters. What has received attention in the media and acceptance from the music buying public matters. What agents and managers think impresarios want to hire matters. What college voice departments want does not, except within each department at each school.

What ought to be part of the discussion in classical performance would be technical problems that are audible. If a person sounds squawky, swallowed, wobbly, muffled, shrill, or just generally like they are struggling, it would good if the industry at large realized that something mechanical is off and should be adjusted. If your car has a knock in it, you know to take it to the garage because if you don’t the car might break down completely. If it applies to a car, it should also apply to a voice. But, since we still do not recognize technical problems as things that just happen, even to very highly skilled, excellent singers, and since there is “embarrassment” about such things (Stupid, really. Should you be embarrassed if your car has a knock?) many times such problems are ignored, lest it negatively effect a career. (Which it will anyway, when it gets really bad.) If functional training was the norm, instead of still being the exception, things that were “not quite right” could simply be addressed and fixed.

Before I can tolerate anyone criticizing CCM styles, I would have to know that all of the above was being addressed by my classical colleagues and worked out to the satisfaction of MOST teachers of singing and singers. I would need to know that all of these issues had been addressed and it was clear what standards applied to what vocal behavior in which music at what venue. If you think this is going to happen in our lifetime, I know a great bridge in Brooklyn that would great in your backyard and I can get it for you cheap.

I am not a big fan of being different because you can. I always want reasons and I want them to make sense. Consequently, it took me a long time to appreciate abstract art, although I finally did decide that I enjoy some of it very much, however I am still someone who loves an artist who can reach out through simple, even mundane, means and create something that is more than its parts. I am very found of folk art, things made from found objects and hand made crafts.

Yes, I know, John Cage once came out to do a piano recital and sat at the bench in total silence for 30 minutes and called his performance “Silence” (this may not be accurate, but it was something like that). Then he got up and left. It was his idea that music was anything you defined it to be. The same argument has been running around the art world for decades. A completely blank canvas, framed and hung in a gallery or museum entitled “Openness” is the same kind of thing.

I am the person to suggest that people are only interested in things that they react to emotionally. If a blob of dried dog poop sitting in the middle of a big white room with a child’s toy bike in the corner is at a museum and the artist calls this “installation” “Eternal Red”, some people will be very impressed and maybe even spend $50,000 to purchase the poop, the bike and some paint, to take it home, especially if the artist provides his or her “inner reflections”. The art shows that the purchasers have good taste, that they are “with it”, that they are open to being adventurous, to being collectors of the new and innovative. It speaks to them, they relate to its message, they are incredibly impressed by the genius artist’s great vision.

I am not one of those people. I imagine in my mind the discussion that goes on in the mind of the artist.

“I think the dog poop will be a grounding influence, something that represents the smelly grungy side of life. The bike, of course, represents the light heartedness of childhood and the freedom that kids feel when they play. The bike is in the corner because it is on the sidelines in life. You walk and run more than you ride. The room is white because white represents terror at the level of the soul — the blinding light that overwhelms you in life and ends up making you feel like you live in a box. This is the Eternal Redness of being alive. I think that will be very powerful.”

Take a look at this: http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/15/a-mountain-of-ai-wei-weis-sunflower-seeds-sells-for-560000/?ref=arts. Half a million dollars is a lot of money. Wonder what it would have meant to starving children or people who need clean water.

My general reaction to this kind of stuff is always the same: Oh PULEEZE.

When someone comes out on a stage in front of the public who has paid money to be in the seats and who is offering the performer their time (something for which there is no value), I expect the person out there to have something of import to say or do. I am not interested in people wearing weird outfits because they can, because it will be “outrageous”, because it is over the top. I am interested in whether or not the person who is up there singing, can. I do not think it takes any talent to put on an ugly costume, stand up and make unremarkable sounds over four chords with loud amplification. Even if you have great musicians, if all you can do is stand up there and squawk in some outfit, why bother? The answer is because you can as long as you have enough money to do what you want. If you have convinced others of your “incredible talent” and your “vision” because you look weird and sound bad, but you have the nerve to stand up there oblivious to your own complete lack of capacity, I guess that makes you at the very least a good con. Some people would say that’s an art, perhaps even the greater one.

If the art consuming public is too ignorant to know when they are being played, then they are.

As you can imagine from all this, last night I was at a performance in which two people who should have stayed home and watched TV had the unbelievable gaul to get up in front of a large audience and try to sing. The music they were attempting to make was banal and their appearance was, in the case of the female, clown-ish, and in the case of the male, straight off the run-down farm. They were surrounded by more talented people who partially camouflaged this paltry lack of actual ability but it was still insulting to have to sit there, knowing how many individuals who have oodles of actual talent never get the opportunity to do something of scale or importance, such as this venue provided.

I saw Blythe Danner last week on a talk show discussing how her daughter, Gwyneth Paltrow, went into show business on her own because she wanted to. She said the fact that she and her husband were both huge stars in show business had nothing what so ever to do with Gwyneth’s rise as a star. I’ve heard that argument so many times. The sons and daughters of the rich and famous also becoming rich and famous and yet the parents have nothing to do with it. Especially at the start of their careers. If you believe that, there’s this bridge in Brooklyn that I could sell you. It has lots of artistic value and will look great in your backyard.

In college, you can get a degree in music education or music performance. If the degree is in performance, it is an “applied” degree. This means that your school is giving you job preparation, that is, training to get a job as a singer. Theoretically, you are going to be given the skills that you would need in order to do a good professional job in whatever kind of music you want to do.

If you are a classical singer, you will get courses in music theory, sight-singing, dictation, music analysis, music history and possibly basic composition. You will learn at least the basics of languages such as Italian, French and German, and you will have vocal training to develop control over your sound. You might also get movement or dance, acting or stage “deportment” and probably will be asked to do some kind of performance, such as juries, recitals or roles in a music, oratorio or opera.

If you are looking to be in music theater you might get some of the above courses and perhaps also be asked to perform in a musical or review. You might get much more acting training, more dance training, and less languages, less music theory and fewer or shorter voice lessons. But you might still get the same kind of training as a classical singer at your lessons. It varies a lot.

If you are looking to be in rock music and you are at a school that considers that a viable path for academic training then you might be asked to study jazz and jazz related topics such as jazz history, jazz theory (scales, chords, rhythms) and perhaps also be asked to perform in ensembles or in solo recitals.

If you wish to do anything else in a school (country, gospel, R&B, rap, folk) you would either have to go to a jazz program and hope the other style was included or just get some other kind of a degree (composition, theory, music history, ethnomusicology, etc.) and study your vocal music on the side.

In an applied program, outsiders from the world in which you wish to perform might be brought to your school to work with students. This could be through lectures with Q & A from the students at the end, in workshops, clinics, courses or master classes. It could involve singing for these individuals to be guided or critiqued, but the idea is that you would be singing for professionals to get support and advice because you would theoretically be attempting to follow in their footsteps when you graduate.

People who teach in the applied program would be those who knew what was needed in order to be able to perform in any given style. They would have life experience in that style themselves and understand how they and their colleagues’ careers functioned. They would know the rough realities of being a working singing, with all that that entails, and be able to speak from personal knowledge about what that life is like for the average person (not a superstar) who works, is successful, but is not famous to the general public.

If you have been a regular reader of this blog, you will know that this is often not what I encounter as I travel all over the USA and the world, doing master classes, dealing with both students and teachers. You will know that I see all manner of things that do not line up with the espoused values of various colleges, programs and degrees, and that frequently what you see is not what you get.

I work with individuals on Broadway, in jazz, in pop/rock and folk, in experimental music, classical music, cabaret performance, and who are entertainers for children. I work with adult beginners once in a while, with people recovering from vocal injury, and with those who teach. I work with instrumentalists, with choral conductors, with dancers and actors. I work with old and young and all ages in between. When I go to a university or college, I bring with me a first-hand view of what it takes to work here in NYC as a vocalist and what each style of music has as its criteria in order for a vocalist to be good enough to get started at a basic level and succeed (although no one can guarantee that anyone WILL succeed). I have no vested in interest in any given program so when I observe how it runs, it really is just that, an observation. Sometimes those involved in the program can’t see it from outside and inside at the same time.

If you are seeking to go to college to get an applied degree in voice, you will have to look into all the facets I’ve mentioned here, and others as well. Be sure to ask questions and be prepared to deal with required courses that have no direct impact upon the music you wish to sing, on your voice, or on you. You could even be told that your applied degree program “does not teach to the marketplace” even though the department brings in outside experts from the marketplace to talk to you about the marketplace. No kidding.

Gook luck.