Various Posts

Awareness is what you pay attention to or what you notice. It can be something you do deliberately or something that you discover spontaneously.

In our society we spend a lot of time thinking. Some people think that thinking is all there is. (I think therefore I am). Those who have delved into other perspectives, however, do not regard thinking as anything other than something the mind does. Very frequently, it is something the mind does constantly and with little oversight. It is also something that can be silenced while still awake and functioning.

Learning anything requires that the mind be still and concentration be focused. It could be focused on looking, listening, feeling, or doing, or some combination of those. If you cannot get your mind to concentrate, it’s hard to do anything well. Keeping the mind directed towards some specific task can be a tricky thing in itself to master. One of the big problems with teaching unskilled beginning singers who have never tackled a skill that requires a high level of neuromuscular ability is that they get distracted or bored too quickly with what they are trying to learn to do.

If you are not used to directing your awareness towards what you feel, what you hear or what you see, you may not be able to do that easily. Even if you can manage this, you may not easily understand what you are perceiving while you are being aware. You must learn to “watch” what is happening, without judgement and without intervention (at least while you are being aware), and analyze it later. Most people don’t function that because life in our society has no requirement for such an ability.

Cultivation of awareness is a key ingredient in helping someone learn to sing well. A person has to be guided to pay attention to what is going on the in body, very specifically. The mind can learn to focus on various parts of the body, first individually and then, gradually, in a more coordinated manner, particularly noticing those areas that have a direct impact upon the sound as it is being produced. It can take quite a while before the person who is singing has any capacity to analyze her awareness, capturing it in words, so that she can recreate the same behavior at some later time.

Remarkably, it does seem that awareness has no end. No matter how acute one’s awareness becomes, there is always another level available that makes the awareness keener, sharper, more finite, more universal and more dynamic, all the while it remains quiet, still and concentrated.

This is where the idea of moving versus manipulating a vocal tone matters. The very subtle differences between guiding something to happen through awareness and making something happen through deliberate muscle contraction are two very different things.

If all you observe is the end product, you might suppose that any way of getting to that end product would be OK. That would not be a correct observation. There many paths to the same end. You could have two cars driving along the same road at the same speed but one car is new, fancy and takes the road smoothly and the other car is old, beat-up and bumps along the entire way. Both of them will get you to your destination but you will enjoy both the ride and the scenery better in the nicer car. How you get there is just as important, if not more, than your destination.

So, paying attention to what you are doing while you sing, how you are doing it, where it is happening and in what manner, is part of being consciously aware of the process of singing. In each moment aural and kinesthetic perceptions are feeding back to the brain how the vocal and breathing muscles are responding to what the brain is asking for. Learning to perfect those responses while they are happening is called “developing vocal technique”. If you are lucky, you will develop vocal skills, musical skills and perceptual skills of equal capacity and understand that while you do. You will be more conscious, more aware and more able to sing than if you had never learned to concentrate, direct your mind, and organize the sensory data into a workable method.

You can make yourself take a breath, but you cannot stop breathing volitionally. That’s because the Central Nervous System is hardwired to get oxygen in and carbon dioxide out. In fact, it is it’s overriding charge. You cannot decide to digest your food faster or slower, or to digest only some things and not others. You cannot decide to sleep, close your eyes, and do it, in a few seconds. You cannot decide to beat your own heart. You cannot decide not to urinate, even though you can develop a good deal of control about when, but ultimately your body will overpower your mind. If you gotta go, you gotta go.

The idea that you are never ever supposed to move anything in the throat if you are to sing well is an old one. The idea behind this makes sense. If your throat is comfortable, you do not feel anything happening in the throat, you just make sound. You might be able to sense the vibration of the sound as you make it, but that’s not always the case. Soft sounds don’t make much vibration, and are therefore harder to feel or perceive as vibration or movement.

You cannot decide to vibrate the bones in your face as a direct thing. You have to make a specific kind of sound, in a specific way, and hope that that sound will make the bones in your face vibrate. You can try to get that sound by thinking of the vibration before you make it, but if you do not have a long history of this type of sound-making, it might be quite hard to imagine what kind of a sound would do that. Then, you are stuck between a rock and a hard place.

Currently, because more is known about how sound is produced, a few key people have decided to go the other way, and teach deliberate movement of the muscles deep within the throat, including the larynx itself, as well as other structures near or around the larynx, as a part of their vocal technique method. This could make sense, if you observed, as some have, that the vocal folds or the larynx do certain things under some circumstances, but assuming you can replicate those things deliberately in a volitional manner is very dangerous and incorrect assumption.

The way we control the musculature in the throat is through control of the sound itself. The way we control the sound, is by understanding the components of vocal sound and learning how to expand those components without sacrificing freedom and spontaneity. Teaching someone to maneuver the larynx into various positions, as if the larynx was an arm or a foot, is foolhardy. Teaching someone to squeeze the throat or pull the larynx down is just about the same. Bad ideas.

Generally, you begin vocal training by learning to control the things on the outside of the body that you can touch and see. That would include the jaw, the face, the mouth/lips, the head and neck, and the upper chest/ribs and the abdominals. These are areas that have an effect upon a vocal sound and getting them to do specific things oriented towards singing is a learned behavior, but it is one of the simplest and most accessible ones. After a time, through aural stimulation, as well as cultivation of various types of sounds (textures and vowels on various pitches at various volumes), it is sometimes possible to provoke responses in the muscles in the back of the mouth and the back of the tongue. These changes show up, not so much as “feelings” or “sensations” in the face, but in the sound itself. Done well, there is not much to feel in terms of kinesthetics.

Over many years, it becomes often possible to gain control over the deep musculature of the back of the mouth, the tongue and the throat itself, but the “feedback system” that would track such control would, in most cases, be vague at best. You really can’t open your throat, actively, unless you are quite unusual, by thinking “I want to open my throat”, as it isn’t the same as telling yourself “I want to open my mouth”. That, of course, you can do.

One of the biggest problems with singing training is that people teaching it just do not understand what is deliberate, what can become deliberate through training, and what was meant to be left alone and works best when it is free to function without any kind of intervention or interface. More singing students have been tied into knots trying to do things that are not doable than those who have been set free.

You must understand the difference between “I am singing a warm dark tone”. “I am singing with my larynx down low in my throat”. and “I am moving my larynx into a low position and deliberately holding it there while I sing, so I can feel my face vibrating”. Don’t get them confused!!!

In ancient cultures the power of the spoken word was taken very seriously. When people gave “their word” they were giving a very powerful bond, a commitment. “Keeping one’s word” was a contract and it meant that you had created a vow that was important and that you intended to do what you said you would.

Of course, now, words fly around so much, in the various media, that very little can be taken seriously. Politicians say whatever they think people want to hear. People lie, exaggerate, manipulate, deny, malign and attack. There is little in anything that pundits say that makes an impact. It’s all a bunch of blah, blah, blah.

The voice, however, was the first instrument and it is still the most powerful means of communication available to most of us. Once something is verbalized, it cannot be taken back. There is no “delete” key over words that have already been uttered. You must express additional words to explain, apologize, correct, amend or fix whatever is said, if it was harmful or if it was taken in the wrong way.

Here is a curious thought: Everyone is responsible for what they say and also what the people listening hear. Each individual has to take responsibility for the words that were spoken and how the other person heard them. It goes in reverse, too. We each have to take responsibility for what we hear but also what the other person said, or what we believe she said. Each person, on both sides of any communication, is %100 responsible for the entire thing, no matter what you’ve said.

Sometimes we speak without having an intention, or a clear idea about what we are saying or want to say. Sometimes we only find out by saying something out loud that we felt or thought a certain way.

When we teach, we have to be really careful about not only what we say, but how we say, and when we say, whatever it is we are communicating. Teachers have a position of authority when speaking directly to students, and the “weight” of their words carries a greater possibility of impact than do words of a stranger or of someone who is another student. Teachers must think of the clearest way to express to a student what is desired and how to go towards that desire, but the instruction must not be pejorative, condescending, or demeaning.

And, in our day to day lives, we have to pay attention to what we tell ourselves, in our minds, as this is the most powerful kind of “speech” of all. If we tell ourselves to do things and then never do them, we are ultimately not keeping our word to ourselves, and without that, it is almost impossible to keep a verbal commitment to others.

If you learn to pay close attention to your words and sounds, your world will radically change. Your word, in your universe, is inviolate.

Just as an exercise, pick a day and watch carefully what you say to yourself in your mind throughout the day. Watch what and how you speak when you are with others. Watch what you hear. Watch how you choose your words and watch how others react to what you say. Then, take a look at the sound of your voice in the words that you speak. Ask yourself if you are deeply breathing in and out while you speak, if you are speaking in a tone that is unpressured and comfortable. Ask yourself if the sound of what you said actually matched what you were feeling emotionally when you said it. See if you can spend the day acting as if the very sound you were uttering was, in itself, the most powerful force in the universe, because it is.

It is important for professionals to be able to disagree with each other in a courteous but straightforward manner.

Singing teachers sometimes seem unable to do just that.

While in school, medical doctors are prodded to engage in vigorous debates so that diagnoses, surgery protocols, medication recommendations and treatment plans can be investigated from many angles. Medicine encourages doctors to examine and re-examine how they work and, at least theoretically, encourages them to always be open to new ideas and pathways, especially since they are, at times, dealing with life and death.

In scientific conferences, experts readily disagree, sometimes very strongly, on various points of research or investigation, even having heated arguments — frequently followed by a cordial collegial lunch or dinner. In a recent program on the History Channel, two men who were anthropologists who had been close friends and colleagues for more than 40 years held strongly disparate viewpoints on important discoveries, and clearly were just fine with that situation. I have had occasion to vigorously argue with my scientist or voice teaching colleagues, only to go out to dinner afterwards and have a grand time.

If one can say, “I respectfully disagree with my esteemed colleague”, most especially to that colleague’s face, then everyone benefits. Those who are listening to the discourse have the opportunity to look at what is said and make their own decisions, and the profession (whatever it may be) gains the benefits of having both viewpoints to serve for further investigation by others.

In teaching singing, however, because there has been so much “mystery” (read that as “ignorance”) that was, by necessity, covered up, criticizing someone was seen as being a personal affront, even when the critique is couched in appropriate terms. This is a sad situation, as it prevents people from actually investigating a valid difference and it cloaks the process of learning to sing in intrigue that is unwarranted. It also greatly increases the possibility that people will gossip behind the backs of their colleagues, spreading unfounded rumors, and get away with it. A person being thus maligned has no chance to present an objective defense if the attack is terroristic rather than straightforward.

In order to debate the worthiness of anyone’s viewpoint or philosophy, it is necessary, ABSOLUTELY necessary, to do that in the light of day, stating whatever the criticism one has in a respectful manner, no matter how strongly the debaters disagree. It implies that both parties are experts, comfortable in their own skin, and able to handle someone else’s querying them about their chosen direction. That is, in fact, what peer review journals do, if they are well done, and what a PhD defense is about. If you are not strong enough to defend your position, you do not receive your recognition from your peers which is given as a doctoral degree. It is the reason that I publish a blog which is available to anyone to read, and to comment upon. I do not expect everyone to agree with me nor accept what I say just because I say it, even though I take care to be thoughtful and careful in everything I write upon these pages.

I believe that it is incumbent upon me as a recognized expert in my field to state clearly when I disagree with someone, with reasons for doing so, in a way that is clear and honest, without making a personal attack. That I make a public statement allows those who seek information from other recognized experts to understand that there are many roads to Rome and that no one has “the” answer. It also allows my own point of view to be counterpointed against someone else’s, which is often a way to discover interesting and diverse solutions to the same issues.

When I disagree with anyone, I often tell that individual directly, and say to them what I would say to others. “I respectfully disagree with you, my esteemed colleague,” and I accept that you disagree with me as well.

The profession of teaching singing does not much understand these dynamics.

Unfortunately, those who speak about me critically still hide, making their accusations without having the integrity to state their objections to me or at least in a forum that I can locate. Who knows, perhaps, if I heard what they had to say, I might change something about what I think or do. Behind my back, or behind anyone’s back, however, collegial criticism becomes tainted and undermines confident, trusting, and dynamic exchanges between equals. It is hurtful and small.

This profession would do well to instill in its participants the same high regard for vigorous debate that other professions have, and remind teachers of singing not to be afraid to disagree, as long as that disagreement follows respectful and collegial guidelines.

“All You Really Need Is A Good Set Of Ears”. This is a common sentiment. If that were true, however, learning to sing would involve having your ears tested, listening to good singers, and away you go, getting jobs on Broadway or at the Met.

No. In addition to a good set of ears, you need an informed intellect and the ability to communicate, in plain simple English, what it is that you hear, and how it needs to adjust or change if you are teaching someone to sing.

Having a “good set of ears” means a lot of things. It means that you have a context in which to evaluate the sounds you are listening to. This, in itself, is a big deal. It takes a long time to understand what the criteria are in any given style. Classical singers who listen to rock belters hear an ugly screech, a pressured sound, and usually think it is awful. If you teach them to listen with a different point of view, a new context, however, they can hear the very same sound without the same judgements. They might even grow to like it. Some people hear operatic voices as being phoney and ridiculous, but if you have the “ears to hear” you can tell the difference between the wobblers and screamers and the ones who give you chills.

If you hear something you do not yourself do, you do not have a kinesthetic awareness to go along with the sound. In fact, if you tried to make the same sound yourself, you might do it in a way that felt and sounded very bad. How you feel effects how you hear.

If you do not understand what vocal pathology sounds like, you might think the person “has a husky sound”, not that the person has a “possible pathology”. If you do not know what constriction sounds like, you might think that the person has “a tight voice” instead of thinking the person has “tremendous tension in the tongue and throat”. If you do not know what good belting sounds like you might think that someone making a nasal sound is belting. And, if you hear something you like, and what you like happens to be skewed because your own voice is skewed and you don’t know that, you might be hearing something from a level of profound ignorance that is both musically and vocally far away from a professional level of acceptability.

If all you needed to do was hear something, and you did not need to analyze it, you did not need to understand how it is happening, you did not need to relate what is happening to a mental possibility of what could or should be happening, you cannot possibly have a broad enough context in how you listen to do a student much good. A teacher needs to hear from a functional point of view, with musical standards in mind, and with an awareness of the difference between what the voice is and what it is doing.

It reminds me of the people who constantly told me “MacIntosh is so INTUITIVE!” Well, not to me. What is intuitive to me is to sing. Imagine if I taught my students by saying, “Just sing. It’s easy. Just follow your intuition!” Good luck if you are to singing what I am to my iBook.

If you have a profile in the world, no matter who you are or why you have it, someone will dislike you for it. Someone will decide that you shouldn’t be there because.

That stops a lot of people. Fear is a real factor in speaking up, speaking out and taking a stand. The squeaky wheel does get the oil but sometimes not right away and sometimes the oil comes in buckets, not drops. It isn’t for the faint of heart to raise objections, challenge long and dearly held assumptions and disturb the status quo.

Of course, almost all of the people throughout history who came along and made significant changes in anything, faced the wrath of those who liked things fine they way they had been and were. Sometimes the innovators were actually threatened up to and including being physically hurt or killed. If the “keepers” were rich and powerful and the “changers” were poor and weak — you know the rest.

I wrote a while ago about the need for those who keep the traditions going. We need people to do that and to honor heritage, keep remembrance, remain true to the origins of things. We also need people to break with the past, to go in brand new directions and to seek the future, the unknown, with vigor. These two things do not need to be seen as conflicting behaviors. I very much respect the past, especially of our American CCM styles, but I also like new music, new works, and things that are creatively unusual. If we did not have people to hold on to the past, we wouldn’t have much in our museums or archives. If we didn’t have people who seek out new things, there would be no internet and no cell phones.

When someone speaks out and points out problems in how things are, seeing that there is a need for a new point of view, and that someone has the courage to bring the emerging point of view into a public venue (think Martin Luther nailing his manifesto on the church door), the person has to be able to deal with the reactions of those who do not want to be challenged. They won’t be happy. If you don’t speak out because people “won’t like you” or because you might “upset someone”, yet you realize that going along with things as they have always been isn’t really making you happy either, you are faced with a genuine dilemma. If you hide, keeping quiet, you become part of the problem. If you step up to the plate, take on the new ideas yourself and say so out loud, you become a possible target.

Classical training for singing has to change. We can’t hang on to the idea that it prepares you to sing anything anywhere at any time. We have to separate the training process out from the material. Functional training is functional training. Learning Italian or German songs has nothing to do with functional training, but they can merge at some point. Not all vocal training is functional (in fact, most is not). Learning repertoire teaches a specific set of skills but it may not be useful in addressing vocal technique problems in any way.

Contemporary Commercial Music, our styles which started mostly in the USA but have now traveled the world, deserves our respect. We need to know what the parameters of each style are and how to achieve those parameters. We need to base applied vocal training on the expectations of the marketplace, not academia, and we need to understand what does and does not interface in terms of vocal technique and function if the vocalists want to sing in more than one style.

That I have said some version of this for the past forty years is not news. It is a risk that I have to take. That I still get clobbered for doing so is not pleasant. BUT, I’m not going away. Just because other people don’t like the message doesn’t mean the message is wrong. In fact, the reaction I get is partly because my pointing out what other people refuse to admit but know is true is a guarantee for causing anger.

Before there was education, there was life.

The way you learned anything was to do it. You didn’t go to school, you went to life.

Now, if you want to be a farmer, you can get a degree in agriculture. If you want to be an artist, you can get a degree in applied fine art. If you want to be a landscaper, you can get a degree in horticulture. If you want to be a shop owner, you can get a degree in retail marketing.

But before you could get a degree in any of these things, there were people doing them — just doing them — learning along the way through trial and error alone. In time, as things got worked out and others saw that these various activities or pathways were things of worth, there was a need, a reason, to transfer the information gleaned through hard-knocks experience to others who wished to benefit from that same experience, hoping to shorten their own path to the same good goals.

What if, however, what you want isn’t yet organized into some kind of a degree program? You cannot as yet, as far as I know, get a bachelor’s degree in basketball, baseball, soccer or swimming. You cannot get a degree in housekeeping, you cannot get a degree in shrimp fishing, you cannot get a degree in motorcycle building or car repair or micro-brewing beer.

What makes some things worth organizing into formal school-based training programs, and some not? Why are some endeavors in life things that can be sanctioned by a university and shaped into a multi-year structured way to learn a particular life lesson and others not?

And, what is the reason for doing such a thing — creating a degree program in a certain special field or discipline?

If formal university-based learning is a guide to shortening trial and error when pursuing a particular goal, then, when you begin applying your school-earned experience, it should make reaching your goal clearer, simpler, and more accessible than it would have been had you not gotten your piece of paper. If the purpose of education is to give you a “heads up” in the world, then it is imperative that we not lose sight of that fact.

You can go to school and stay in school for your entire life. You can learn something and then learn some more about that something, and keep learning about that something, and then teach what you have learned, all in a school environment, and if you have been learning something that has very real roots in the world as an activity, and you have not actually gone out into the world and DONE that activity, then what you are teaching is second-hand information. This cannot be, will never be, a substitute for going away from school and facing life.

Therefore, when someone has done anything in life successfully for a long time, and when that success has been recognized by a verifiable means, is this not only the equivalent of a piece of paper given by a university, but actually something far more valuable? If I run a successful dress store for 30 years, and I have satisfied customers who have been loyal for all that time, and I am contributing to my community, and I have treated my employees well, and I have made more than enough money, and I have developed a reputation for being honest and reliable, is this not as valuable as a degree in retailing? Even a master’s degree in marketing? How about a PhD in business management? Is it not true that having the degree is only that, having a degree? It is NOT a substitute for life experience nor for success.

Yet, we hear repeatedly that you cannot get a job at a university teaching singing without a doctorate. How could that be so? If you have had a career as a singer, and a career as a teacher, and your students have gone on to work successfully and healthfully for many years as professional singers, and you have participated in your professional associations, and you have a good solid reputation, and have a busy studio, is this not JUST AS GOOD, as having a doctorate?

When people lose sight of the purpose of education, when they forget that “educare” (the root of the word) means to “draw out” or to “illuminate”, they get caught thinking the means are the ends. Education is a stepping stone, it is a short-cut, it is a preparation, it is a doorway, but it is NOT the goal, especially if you are educated to DO something that happens with your body. You can have lots of pieces of paper and still sing badly. You can get lots of degrees and still be lousy at communicating effectively. You can pass tests and write theses and still not understand what happens in those who sing freely and fully because you yourself do not do that. Schools, when they are hiring teachers, should remember that.

Education, especially in singing, is only as good as the doing and the transference of that ability to do. Otherwise, what’s the point?

There is no definition of what makes a good teacher of singing. There are no singing organizations that have “rules” or “regulations”, no set of principles, no guidelines at all to help someone seeking a singing teacher to know what to look for or what is important. It really is a case of “buyer beware”. Even if the singing student were to find someone with a doctoral degree, it doesn’t mean the person will be a good teacher or even a teacher who can teach what the student seeks to learn.

Further, no one sets out any guidelines as to what “good” singing is. It takes a long time to understand what the “big picture” is and while you are trying to find out you can waste a lot of time……years and years.

A good singing teacher understands vocal function. This means that he or she will understand how the vocal folds work, where they are located, what happens above the vocal folds in the vocal tract, how to track vocal acoustics (resonance) and how the body is structured and works so that breathing is efficient and deliberate. A teacher will also understand how all the many things that need to happen in order for singing to be freely done should occur.

A good singing teacher will take into consideration the age of the pupil, personal background and training in related skills, (such as playing an instrument or dancing), and what kind of music the person will sing. The teacher will also understand how to hear the signs of vocal health problems that interfere with vocal performance and well-being. The teacher will understand how vocal exercises work, how to teach them in an appropriate manner (so that they are not too hard or too easy) and what to expect from each person in terms of progress if they are practicing the given exercises effectively. The teacher will understand what various kinds of music do to a performer’s voice in terms of the effects the style produces on vocal behavior if the person is singing on a regular basis. The teacher will take into consideration the amount of time and type of speaking the pupil must do.

A good singing teacher will also know a great deal about whatever style of music he or she teaches. If it is classical music, the teacher should know songs in English, Italian, French and German, of various levels of difficulty and of various historical eras, written by various composers from many countries. The teacher will understand the nuance of each style, the correct SINGING pronunciation of the language, and the appropriate songs for each voice category and type. The teacher will understand how to teach dramatic communication of text and will also be a well-trained musician. A good classical singing teacher will understand that classical singers must generate high decibel levels, clear tones, consistent resonance in the 2800=3200 Hz frequency range and will know how to teach all of this on an individual basis. A good singing teacher will also understand the differences between classical music and those styles which are now called Contemporary Commercial Music (see previous posts if you don’t know this term). The teacher will understand what distinguishes a country song from a Broadway song and a jazz song from a rock song, including how the vocal quality changes, the way the music is expressed and what happens with the presentation, so that the pupil sounds appropriate and good in any style.

A good singing teacher will understand human nature. He or she will not teach through embarrassment, harassment, fear, humiliation, intimidation, or arrogance. The teacher will understand how to be honest while being compassionate, clear without being rigid, and adjustable without being vague.

A good singing teacher will understand the professional criteria each style demands if the persons they teach have expectations of going out into the world as singers (not teachers). This means that they understand what the profession wants here in New York City, or in London, or LA, or Nashville, and that they teach with those standards in mind. The teacher will not decide that he or she has the only REAL standards and that those people “out there” in the marketplace are all “just wrong”.

The teacher will put the needs of the student first, over and above all else. The teacher will seek to always improve, stay in touch with the latest developments of the profession of singing teaching and interact with colleagues to be sure they are not isolated.

The teacher will sing well. (Please see previous posts if you don’t know what that means). If the teacher sounds bad, the pupil should be highly skeptical. If the person is not motivated to sing well herself, and cannot find a way to apply what she is teaching to her own instrument, it calls into question whether the person can do for someone else what they cannot or will not do for themselves. I think not.

There are more ingredients, but not less. I wish someone had told me this when I was 15.

Someone once said to me “you can’t really hear what’s beautiful, since everyone’s perception of beauty is so personal”. I think that could certainly be true, but I also think that the average person would say that a donkey bray is not as “pretty” as the sound of a songbird. I think that people know when something is abrasive or harsh it isn’t as nice to hear as when it is soothing and smooth. If you make the criteria too intellectual or abstract, you can get quite confused. If you keep it simple, then it isn’t rocket science.

Human beings react to emotion. We like what feels good. We don’t like what feels bad. There are more emotions that are unpleasant (fear, anger, sadness) than pleasant (happiness, peace). The stronger the emotion being expressed, the more likely it is to get an emotional response from someone else. Could be the same feeling (rapport) could be the opposite (discord). Sounds that are happy, joyful, contented, loving, sweet, grateful, satisfied, or peaceful, connected to lyrics that express those sentiments, would be expected to be more or less pleasant in vocal quality. We all know that a lullaby sounds soothing and we all know that it sounds different than the barking calls of an Army drill sargeant. Sounds that are angry, sorrowful, fearful, hopeless, painful, distressed or agitated, when also connected to lyrics of the same intention, are probably not going to sound pleasant, and could actually sound very unpleasant. They could, however, also be very communicative, on either side of the argument.

So one of the primary ingredients of “real” singing is that it is always connected to authentic emotional expression. It is not machine-like. Of course, people can choose to sing in a mechanical manner, imitating a computer, but it would be unlikely that such singing would appeal to a mass audience. To an educated elite audience, maybe, but to the average person, probably not. That’s one of the reasons the 20th Century classical music did not find a large and new audience. People can only relate to it if they have music education and sometimes not even then.

The other driver is that the sound is freely produced, which means that the emotional expression is unlabored. Even the “unhappy” emotions are delivered without a struggle. Feeling what you feel as you feel it, while you are singing, and sounding unlabored while you sing, will resonate with others as long as the musical ingredients are also there. They would include singing with pitch accuracy and good intonation, singing the words clearly, singing with control over volume, and in many cases, singing with vibrato, but not always.

Real singing is very direct. It hits you somewhere that you cannot forget. It can be small and sweet, as in a child or an untrained adult, or it can be big, powerful and highly trained, as in an operatic vocalist, or it could be anything in between. One absolute is that it is unique, memorable, and distinctive. Real singing allows the uniqueness of the individual voice, the intention of the lyrics as emotion and communication, and the musical components of melody, rhythm, tempo, key and accompaniment to meld into one cohesive whole that is more than the sum of its parts. Singing loudly may be impressive but that’s all it is. Singing something that sounds ugly, without having a reason for it to sound ugly, is just plain stupid and sad.

There is a lot of fake singing in the world. What is that?

Fake singing is what happens when people who aren’t very talented connect to other people who can “put some spin” on what they do and market them successfully. That means that they rely on technology to make them sound “good” and that they don’t really have much by way of a vocal instrument or musical expression on their own.

Sometimes other things are involved, too. These days young pop/rock singers are greatly benefited by being very physically attractive. It is much more important now than it was in the days when Barbra Streisand or Aretha Franklin were young. Beyoncé is a good example of someone who sings very well but who is also very beautiful. Stunning beauty really does help get those merchandizing deals where being a good vocalist is the “extra added attraction”. I don’t remember Babs or Lady Soul ever selling lipstick.

Another kind of fake singing happens in the opera house. I have been to the Met enough times to hear all manner of people who shouldn’t have been up on that stage woofing, bellowing, wobbling and just generally screeching, to have some some pretty strong impressions left in my ears. Loud is very popular at a house the size of the Met (around 4000 seats). Loud comes at a price when it is all you do and you do it a lot. Loud pretty is much harder to come by than loud ugly. Loud pretty is found in very few people with very unusual equipment. Loud ugly is much easier to find and if it comes with other things like knowledge of an obscure role, a cheap fee or an available schedule, it is also relatively easy to ignore.

You can get fake singing in a Broadway show, too. I vividly remember the production of “Carousel” that gave Audra McDonald her first Tony award. She was wonderful but Michael Hayden, the Billy Bigelow, just could not sing. He was awful. The night I went two elderly ladies sitting behind me were talking. One said to the other, after the Soliloquy, “Why didn’t they get someone who could sing?” Why, indeed? Hayden was a great actor but that is a show and a role for someone with a VOICE, like John Raitt or Gordon McRae.

There is a lot of fake singing on YouTube and sometimes it shows up on the competition shows on TV, too. Do we really need yet another preteen girl singing “And I’m Telling You I’m Not Going” at the top of her lungs on America’s Got Talent? They should call it America’s Got Ambition. And when the judges of any of these shows do not themselves sing, and have not studied singing, and have no idea what a beautiful well-trained voice can do when it is in the throat of someone with a heart and a brain, well, it’s a wonder that they manage to find anyone to be a winner who can actually sing well!

I am on vacation at the moment. Every week there is a young couple of “folk singers” who play guitar and sing on the street in front of the coffee house in this small town. They can do neither very well but the singing is hard to describe. Unpleasant is what comes to mind. I’m not expecting miracles, given where I am, but they don’t deserve to sing anywhere other than their shower. Yes, I believe that everyone can and should sing, for their own betterment as human beings, but that doesn’t mean that I think everyone should stand up to sing in front of other people, no matter what. No.

And, of course, you have read here before about the fake singing at colleges. This happens when someone who can’t sing well gets a doctorate of some kind and ends up a tenured full professor. Scary stuff but very real. Some of these people actually believe that you are supposed to manipulate your throat into whatever behavior you have to create to get that loud ugly sound — the one that clocks in at 110 decibels. Some of the conversations I’ve had over the years with other singing teachers would make the hair on the back of your neck fall out. Leontyne Price “couldn’t sing”. Dietrich Fischer-Diskau was “boring”. “Luciano Pavarotti was just yelling”. I’m not kidding. We won’t even discuss what they said about singers who were NOT classical.

There is a lot of fake singing out there. Those of us who teach singing are supposed to know the difference. I wonder.