Various Posts

Lots of people now know and understand what goes on in the throat and body when we sing. Lots of folks have read the scientific literature and understand vocal production and acoustics. Many of them have written books and articles and are teaching. And many of them can’t sing well.

Tenors with no high notes. Baritones with constriction. Sopranos with big wobbles. Mezzos with massive vibratos.

What good is the science if it doesn’t help you sing better?

Who cares if you “know” the larynx must remain “low” when you are a tenor and you cannot easily sing high. That makes you a baritone by default but without the heft. Who cares if you “understand” that there should be a “singer’s formant cluster” at 3000 hz or so if you cannot yourself make tones that carry without sounding like a goose? Who cares if you “realize” that our Western ears like vibrato rates of 5.5 to 6.5 cps and an extent of about 1/4 pitch above and below the fundamental frequency if you sound like Bert Lahr in “The Wizard of Oz”.

What good is the science if it doesn’t help you sing better YOURSELF? How can you presume to teach someone to do something you yourself have not mastered and cannot accomplish? What kind of hubris is that anyway?

The idea of being a good teacher is finding out HOW TO APPLY the exercise to the person who needs it. It’s not enough to explain it and demonstrate it, it’s not enough to talk about why it is doing what it is doing (you hope), it is not enough to wait for the person to figure it out……..you have to observe the student and if you don’t get results in a relatively short period of time, you must assume YOU are missing something. You must change what you ask for, because that is what the student is paying you to be able to do. If you get stuck and blame the student, you are dead in the water and so is the student.

The secret to good teaching is finding out (usually by asking) what the student is making of what you have asked her to do. If you have problems you have to say WHY the exercise isn’t working. You have to ASK what the student doesn’t understand. You have to adjust the thing you are asking for and the way you are asking for it. You have to modify your expectations about what it will do. You have to be present, open, non-judgemental but also aware, willing and creative in the process of using exercises to stimulate vocal change.

It is in the application of the exercises that we are either master teachers or not. Knowing something is only great if you use it. Otherwise what you have is simply information not wisdom.

Muscles are supposed to stretch and contract. That is how they function when they are healthy and by doing so, they maintain good muscle tone or tonicity. Muscles that do not stretch are very tight and muscles that do not contract are very weak. Neither situation is a good one. In order for the muscles to do the job(s) they were intended to do (and there are many) they need to be activated. In order to develop greater flexibility, they must be stretched. In order for them to develop greater strength, they must be stressed. In other words, you have to go past their normal comfort zone either way to develop more flexibility and more strength.

Muscles are also supposed to be able to do their job my moving independently of other muscles that do nothing to contribute to that job. Everyone who is in good condition ends up working until each muscle does its own job without interference from other muscles. This articulation of muscles is what people who want “ripped” abs are going after, and it is what body builders seek, in that they want each individual muscle to be visible when they contract them in various poses. It is what gives dancers expressive control over every moment and it should, in singers, give us a wide variety of tone qualities, vowels, consonants, pitches and volumes when we are technically skilled. It SHOULD…..but

Muscles do not always work independently and in fact, in those individuals who are less than “toned”, they often do not work much, period. Getting the individuation takes time. The muscles may be getting a message from the mind instantaneously but the response they make to that message could be so small as to be unnoticeable. This is where clarity of intention is important and patient repetition cannot be substituted for something else. Asking your throat to make a louder sound or a higher pitch is what it is. Substituting one request for the other won’t help get either thing to be more available or correct.

If we remember that it takes about 55 sets of muscles to make a voiced sound, and that there are 35 muscles in the tongue alone, we can understand why it takes a long time to get a fully developed, free, strong vocal instrument. Every one of those muscles has an impact on what the vocal ligaments can accomplish. Even though the vocal folds are the source of the sound, the muscles in the pharynx, the soft palate, the tongue, the jaw, the face, the mouth/lips, the neck, the shoulders, the upper back, the belly and the diagphragm (inside) have an impact on how the sound is made and controlled. Who can coordinate all that over two octaves or more right away?

When any muscles have not been actively energized, they can get “stuck” to the muscles nearby. The fascia, or connective tissue, should allow the muscles to “slip and slide” over each other, moving smoothly, but there can be adhesions preventing one muscle from moving without being restricted by its neighbor. In essence, the muscles are stuck together. The bodywork practioners who move the fascia (deep muscle massage, myofascial release, structural integration, etc.) help to “unstick” one muscle from another through manual manipulation. In an area where there has been little or restricted stimulation or movement, activating a muscle, in isolation, could be almost impossible without intervention of some kind. You can’t stick your fingers in your throat to pull the muscles fibers of your tongue apart and make them work independently. You can’t make the muscles of your soft palate lift and stretch by holding them up with your fingers either. How do you get these muscles to move and how do you get that movement not to pull other muscles along for the ride?

If you work on producing resonance with breath support, opening and closing your mouth and pronouncing clear consonants, you could work for most of your life and not get very far, at least technically, from a purely physical place.

This complicates singing and learning to sing. The muscles of the tongue, for instance, don’t move much in an untrained voice. When you seek to get the tongue muscles to move you must do so by asking for some kind of change in the position of the tongue and couple that with some kind of sound. In the first responses the singer gives you, there may be a bunch of other chaotic movements at the same time, many of which you do not ideally want. So the sound improves in one way but gets worse in another. [Common occurance.] Over time, the muscle response one is seeking can become strong enough to pull the targeted muscle away from any neighbors, freeing it to operate as it should, on its own. This is the only avenue available to us for the muscles deep within the throat and neck. Said a different way, the only available intervention for those deep inner muscles is the sound itself. Making the sound go where you want it to go ends up making the muscles that influence the sound go there easier. In the end, the movement makes the sound and the sound creates the movement. When you realize that all of this is indirect, except for muscles that you can see with your eyes and touch with your fingers on the outside of your body, it is amazing to realize that we can accomplish what we do with vocal training at all.

The single most direct tool in this journey is the cultivation of separate vocal registers, and accuracy of undistorted, unmanipulated vowel sounds.

As the muscles involved in making voiced sound become “individuated” or “articulated”, they allow the singer to have greater responsiveness and greater control, even if the person singing has never heard of or thought about the complex musculature that produces what we call “voice”.

If the training process is done well, the muscles in the throat and body are coaxed (and that is the operating word, coaxed) into new and different configurations until they settle into efficient adjustments specifically directed at singing. The coaxing is done in very small increments over a rather long period of time so as not to make the voice artificial, or to simply mock a particular kind of vocal production. When the muscles of the throat are authentically able to maintain a specific “set” or adjustment on their own, with no conscious help from the singer, the new “default” position allows the singer to concentrate on the communication of the words and music.

Sometimes the correct position, that is, the one that is the most efficient one for the kind of music the person wants to sing and the kind of voice the person singing has, can be rather far away from the sound the person is used to making as an habitual expression. Cornelius Reid differentiates “habitual” from “normal”. This means that you can get used to some very skewed vocal behavior that becomes a comfortable habit, but that isn’t what most voice experts would call functionally normal. To make matters worse, there is a difference between “normal” and “average”. Normal behavior is based upon function. No pathology, no symptoms of musical problems, etc. Average vocal behavior is whatever you do most of the time, and that could be normal or not. Abnormal usually implies pathology but not always. It could just be unusual but not abnormal. Whew! What a mess.

If you can find your way through all of this, you might end up making a sound that is functionally good, correct, efficient but very unfamiliar and, therefore, weak. Most people solve this problem by making the weak sound instantly louder but that doesn’t usually work. The way to strengthen a weak sound that is correctly produced is to repeat it over and over at whatever volume you can do without distortion or lack of control until the sound becomes stronger “all by itself”. It allows you to make it louder by simply thinking “louder” (and maybe by pushing harder on your belly muscles, but that’s not always necessary. Remember, most people with healthy voices that are NOT trained can get louder without thinking about “breath support”).

Lots of young people with lyric voices are asked to sing too loudly too soon. It pushes the voice out of shape, distorts things like vibrato (gets too wide and too slow) and makes the vowels lose their optimal shape. Most people need to grow into their voices and their bodies for a period of several years before sustained loud singing works well (be it belting or opera), but rarely is that considered by teachers or singers. The few people with wide sturdy bodies who are also strong can sometimes be too strong for their own good. Vocal folds are not automatically as strong as the rest of the body. They have to resist quite a bit of breath pressure during a loud sound, and if they are not conditioned to do so easily, the extra air blasting up against them from below can cause overstretching (which leads to sharping) and a slow legubrious vibrato. The answer to all of this is that the exercises for balance, stability and strength must be done repetitively if they are to be useful in solving the problems mentioned above.

Most people practice but do not necessarily understand how to use specific elements of each exercise to guide their own vocal behavior. Strengthening exercises are different from flexibility exercises but neither of these will work in a system that is stuck. Exercises that promote individuation of muscular response within the vocal appartus are requirements if repetitive exercises are to do be done correctly. Repeating the wrong thing over and over just makes things that are wrong more wrong. Uh-oh.

The moral is, do not repeat what you do not know for sure is functionally correct. Do not get louder to solve weakness. Do not push past weak areas as if they didn’t matter. Do not overblow weak sounds with “breath support”. Do not assume that good singing is just about breathing and resonance.

To those not familiar with bodywork, the concept of deep muscle release will be a foreign one.

The concept that the body “holds” or remembers trauma goes back to Wilhelm Reich, a student and later, a colleague, of Freud’s, who believed that the best way to change the mind was to change the body. Many different types of bodywork emerged as a result of Reich’s work including Bioenergetics, one of the first, (created by John Pierakas and Alexander Lowen). After Bioenergetics other kinds of bodywork sprang up, and now, there are dozens and dozens of offshoots with various points of view about body energy and physical freedom.

In Western “first world” countries, we like “hard” bodies, that are “solid”. This model can work, but it can also make the body deadened and less alive, even while making it look “better” in terms of muscle development. People who push through pain, who force the body to the point of exhaustion and abuse, who would treat it as a stupid robot, do not, for the most part, have the philosophy that the body has its own wisdom and should be “listened to”. The idea that there is a consciousness or intelligence in the body itself is fairly unusual here in the USA but it is not unheard of. It is certainly more widely held now than it was 40 years ago.

Reich got himself into trouble a few times partly because he believed that unexpressed sexual energy or tension built up in the body as “armor” and stiffened the muscles, causing them to “lock up”, lose sensation and eventually drop out of a person’s awareness. He had other ideas about “orgone” energy that were odd and thankfully by now they have been more or less forgotten. Fortunately, where he left the most lasting impression was with the idea that any trauma (emotional, physical or psychological) which is not processed through some kind of acknowledgement and catharsis would stay in the body until it was addressed consciously. The “unconscious” holding would block feeling, emotion, expression, and ultimately, satisfaction. Armoring would suppress true sensation in a specific area and limit the capacity of the body overall to take a full, deep, free easy breath and release it in the same manner.

There is much validity in these ideas. The various kinds of bodywork that developed from them has helped thousands over the years recover in a deep and lasting manner from all kinds of maladies including physical pain. These various approaches address the body in different ways, and specific ones may indeed be better for certain people, certain situations or certain times in someone’s life, but all of them can be useful, especially in the hands of a skilled and generous practitioner. Further, they are not unrelated to the ideas of acupuncture or shiatsu or some types of Eastern approaches where the body and the mind are not split as they are in the West.

Why is this important to those who sing?

Singing is supposed to be about expressiveness. If you are a rock hard robot, how do you think you will sound? If you are hellbent on singing as loudly as possible, how do you think you will touch people? Would you even be interested in touching people? If you do not even know that physical freedom and emotional depth are possible and that having a strong, free body that can breathe deeply and easily is one of the greatest pleasures in life, how could you contemplate ecstatic musical communication?

Somatic Voicework™, my method for training the voice, is based upon conscious use of the body with love and respect for its wisdom, and with trust in the power of music to transform those who sing and those who hear the singing. It rests upon the principles that “unprocessed” or “unacknowledged” trauma will get in the way of truly beautiful singing and that the process of learning to sing, if done properly, will cause that very stimulation towards freedom. The singing will provoke movement and that, in turn, will promote emotional depth, spontaneity, and heartfelt communication. What more is there than that?

Science is the way out. Out of what? Out of the quagmire of argument.

Science is going to give us a way to KNOW what goes on in the vocal machine that is grounded in function for whatever kind of sound we make. Only real idiots will argue, then, about whether or not you are vibrating your eyebrows or your forehead and whether it is important to spin the tone or just float it.

This is a very good thing. This will allow people to train for the kind of singing they want to do and to save lots of time (just ask Leischen in the comment below) that is wasted studying something you don’t want, don’t need to know, and would just as soon never deal with at all. Training that is style specific will also allow us to look at maximized function.

In order to know about something science has to have subjects to study. As long as people are busy arguing about whether or not we need better breathing than for normal conversation when we sing (we do) rather than which way of breathing works best, we are wasting time. Is using the body better in a certain way for (a) sturdy folks (b) slim folks (c) flexible folks (d) stiff folks, and whether or not there is a more efficient way to breath for (a) rock (b) gospel (c) country (d) folk, etc.? How can we ever really know? Maybe there are very definable patterns of all kinds that work really well when properly combined. NOW we have to find out which way is best, one person, one voice, one kind of music at a time, exclusively through trial and error. It takes 25 years just to know what you don’t know. What kind of a way is that to learn anything? [Can you hear any frustration in this? Nooooooooooo.]

Sports training has bested singing training by a long distance. So much is known about how the body works in various sports. You have Olympic-level coaches looking at high speed video of arm movements, hand movements, finger movements, or body torque and twist in minute amounts, looking at aerodynamics, and the relationship of movement to the laws of physics. We singing teachers are still deciding if the second formant lines up with the second harmonic, is that the boost you need? For what style? In what kind of voice? The scientists (by and large, men) are just now deciding that the high soprano voice is a separate breed. 35 years into the real research and NOW they say that? Gee whiz! Imagine if we hadn’t been fighting for the past 50 years about whether or not classical singing was the be all and end all and whether or not belting will give you nodes. I can only try to imagine.

An imaginary conversation between two singing students in 2110.

Mary Jo was speaking to Charlene.

“Gee, I just read that in the old days all training for singing was called “classical”. Everyone studied the kinds of sounds that people make in arts songs or operas no matter what kind of music they wanted to sing! Isn’t that WEIRD?”

Charlene answered, “Yeah. I heard that they said that if you sang rock or gospel music you were told it would ruin your voice and that learning to sing opera would let you be ready to sing things like R & B. My mom even told me that singing teachers used to argue about this stuff ’cause no one really understood how many different kinds of sounds a person’s voice could produce. I’m really glad we don’t live back there in the 20 teens!”

Mary Jo continued “My mom also said that when her grandmother was young operas weren’t amplified at all and that singers sang without any kind of mikes. She said her grandmother remembered when her mother went to the opera and the opera orchestra didn’t have any electronic instruments in it or any kind of effects from a sound engineer. Her Granny told her that her mom went to lots of operas in New York at the Metropolitan Opera where people sang like this all the time. Isn’t that incredible? How do you think they did that? I think that was when they showed the first television broadcasts on big screens to people in theaters and on the street in New York City. That was before everyone had a portable TV they could wear on their wrist to see and hear anything they want at any time. It must have been a strange way to live, you know?”

Charlene continued. “I did a report last year on schools back then. I found out that if you went to college (of course that was before we could all take college courses at home on line) you had to study all kinds of things that were required that didn’t really have anything to do with what you needed to learn so you could go out and get a job singing after school was done. You had to take sight-singing and music theory if you wanted to be in music theater but not necessarily get dancing, and you had to study acting in drama school but maybe they wouldn’t give you singing lessons, or if you wanted to be a rock singer and learn to play a guitar, they probably wouldn’t give you singing lessons at all, or teach you how to perform on stage. The training was all mixed up and there were no schools where you could get a college degree studying all the things in one place that were practical, necessary and important, but related to whatever kind of singing and music you wanted to do. Lots of people had to study “classical” singing to get a degree when that wasn’t what they wanted to sing at all. A lot of the teachers were teaching things they couldn’t do themselves and hadn’t studied either. How wacky is that??”

“Wow,” Mary Jo replied, “I had no idea. I guess that’s why they call it the Dark Ages of Singing Training. I’m so glad it’s not like that now, where you can study anything you need to at any time with any kind of teacher just by getting on your computer. It’s so simple. Like, you know, you can study Japanese with a Japanese teacher in Japan while sitting in your own kitchen. Imagine back then when most people had to go to a school in a building sometimes far away, and go outside even when it was snowing. Yuk.”

The key to singing well is understanding register function. No matter if the music is classical or some style of CCM, if you do not understand registers, you will not get good vowel sounds (resonance) and you will be limited in what you can do with your body and breathing.

Why is this so? Because the vocal folds are responsible for both pitch and register quality. When you are vibrating the full length and depth of the folds, you are using the vocalis or thyro-arytenoid muscle, and the sound is chest register dominant (meaning it is full-bodied). If you are contracting the crico-thyroid muscle, tilting the thyroid cartilege, you are stretching and thinning the vocal folds, tightening them, and pulling them to vibrate only on their upper edges, which gives the sound a lighter quality and is called head register. You can label these vocal qualities any way you like (chest resonance, chest voice, chest mechanism, heavy mechanism, lower mechanism, modal, etc.) and you can say that either or both are good or bad (depending upon your pedagogical point of view). You can even say they don’t matter or aren’t there, but that won’t change the FACT that they exist and, in normal voices, they function.

The vocal folds are in the larynx (the above mentioned thyroid and cricoid cartileges together, as a joint), and the larynx can go up (for swallowing) and down (for yawning) by virtue of the contraction of the constrictors (upper, middle and lower). Theoretically, you can have thick folds (chest) or thin folds (head) in a larynx that is down low at the bottom of the throat, in the middle of the throat or up high near the soft palate, as there is a lot of variability here. One thing you CANNOT do, however, is by-pass the larynx. Any sound that is voiced comes from there, no matter where you feel it vibrating in the bones of your face and head, or kneecaps!

The key to developing the voice is developing control over registers for their own sake which, for the vast majority of human beings, is a deliberately learned behavior. Rarely is a voice perfectly cultivated and balanced through life experience without any kind of training. Breathing is a factor in singing, but it is most important in classical singing for the sake of generating sufficient levels of volume (high decibels or high sound pressure level), called “good breath support” by most teachers, and in other styles that require a belt sound. Soft easy production as used in many styles of CCM need conversational level volume or something close, but are electronically amplified when more volume is necessary.

No one really knows or understands why it is that the mechanism wants to change from chest to head at approximately the same place in everyone (give or take about a major third) which is approximately at or near E/F above middle C. There have been studies for a long time but no one has really explained why we have these two different sound qualities and why they want to adjust where they do. (Ask Dr. Titze about this if you don’t agree). It is pretty much decided, however, that we do have these registers and they do function differently. The behavior of the vocal folds effects the parameters of the air that flows between the vibrating folds (the vocal folds control the airflow, NOT the other way around. The wind moves the sail, but the sail doesn’t make the wind blow). The vocal folds do not make the air move, but they control how much gets out and how fast, no matter what goes on with the abs and ribs.

If you do not learn to control the transition between the two registers, you don’t really have “good” vocal technique. If you control everything by manipulating the shape of the vowel and the volume, good for you, but that’s not all there is to know or do. If you have one register developed and the other is latent, you don’t even know what balanced singing is. If you confuse one parameter with another, you are confusing what is cause with what is effect….a good recipe for poor control if ever there was one.

Many people teach effects as if they were cause. What does that mean?

It means that they want to change the basic color or tone of the sound by manipulating the breath or the shape of the mouth. Those are not causes, they are effects. The vocal folds are the source (cause) and the vowel sounds are effected by the position of the larynx and the behavior of the vocal folds. The shape of the vocal tract (resonant space) is very variable. Not all shapes are equal. Some are more accurate for bouncing the vibrating patterns of each vowel sound around in the vocal tract, therefore producing resonance (effects) or less accurate and don’t produce much resonance. Without a good deal of pressure (strength) from the exhale, and without the ability for the vocal folds (larynx) to receive this strong exhale in a viable manner, you don’t get real “resonance”. Therefore, a hard driving exhale does not good singing make. A yell has high sound pressure levels, but you know it is a yell and not singing, so the idea that “breathing” does it all is just WRONG.

Understanding registers or registration takes time and developing them takes more time. There is, however, NO SUBSTITUTE for this in vocal training. I repeat, NO SUBSTITUTE. Only register development is register development. If you do not have this figured out, keep working on it, as everything else will get better as you do, especially in your middle voice, which is where the vocal function (the mechanics of singing) matters. You CANNOT skip over this in terms of skill development. You can try, but if you were to ask the people who have done so for years, and who are well aware of the fact that their singing has always been “flawed” even though it was good enough to get them high-level work, they would tell you, it’s worth doing it right in the first place. It’s better than not figuring it out all at or figuring it out after 20, 25 or 30 years of being a singer.

Singing is a physical skill. The exercises that singing teachers give students are meant to provoke change in the muscular systems that produce voiced sound.

An exercise is a stimulus and the sound the singer makes is the response. If the response is not good, it could mean that the stimulus was incorrect, vague, confusing or not possible. If the person giving the instruction has no idea what the exercise is meant to do, the exercise is just a random shot in the dark. Great way to learn to sing or to change how your singing happens.

That’s like learning to bowl by knowing that you need the ball to do something in the alley with the pins but not knowing what, exactly, that is or how it is supposed to be accomplished. Should it just “come to you” that the ball needs to be flung hard with one hand to roll down the alley so that it hits the pins and they all fall down at once? If it did not just occur to you would that make you an untalented bowler?

All explanations about singing that are NOT functional can only be musical or dramatic. The mental images that are poetic can stimulate various kinds of sound, but they can’t help someone learn to change the core ingredients of their own sound. They relegate the singer to being stuck with the sound they already make, albeit in a more deliberate or controlled manner. They might make the singer more imaginative, more expressive or even more audible, but they will not really help change anything from the inside out in terms of vocal or breathing patterning.

If the singer’s response did not seem to be good and the stimulus was, there has to be something else going on in the first immediate result. The most common possibility is that the singer is getting the right response but that it is too small to register, either as movement of the vocal organs or in the externally perceived sound. Repetition of the same stimulus will eventually produce a new audible and kinesthetic result. If the person understood what was being asked and the teacher understood what was being asked and those two things agree, the singer will get there in due time. If, however, the teacher does not understand what is being asked, or the student misunderstands the teacher or both (very common occurance), then how can the result be anything but random? Vocal development done randomly is better than none at all, but it is a very slow, very frustrating way to learn.

The teacher has to think in a certain manner in order for any program of vocal training to be effective. The teacher must listen to the singer for function, first. That means the teacher understands what normal vocal function is and is not. That means that the teacher also understands developmentally what extended, professional music vocal behavior is, not just for classical styles but for all styles, and what various vocal ranges and voice types do in normal people under typical circumstances. It means that the teacher understands individual variance that is still normal and normal consistency that is not limitation. It means that the teacher can assess what is going on that is good and should be kept and maintained, what is missing and needs to be cultivated and what is wrong with the singer’s vocal production and how to fix all of that using exercises. It means that the teacher also knows how to adjust the exercise so that it is more applicable, easier to do, and that it is done effectively but at whatever level the singer can manage.

It means that the teacher sees and hears progress quickly (and progress always means change and improvement in some area). It means that the student agrees that things are improving (if it is only the teacher, that problem has to be addressed). It means that the singer’s instrument is getting ever closer to a freer, easier more satisfying vocal production that is suitable to that particular person’s professional or personal goals and that both parties agree that this is so.

You do the exercise until it produces the desired result first time, every time. Then you ask the student to go repeat it on his or her own, allowing the exercise to do its job. When that takes place, you no longer need that exercise. You do it until you don’t have to do it any more because it has done it’s job.

If singing is a physial skill, then motor learning or kinesthetic coordination should be a much featured part of development. Singing teachers are just waking up to the idea that what they do is train the singer’s voice and mind to do a series of physical movements and coordinations on demand.

The vocal exercises given to a student are a stimulus. The response the student makes through sung tone is the result of the stimulus. If the stimulus is vague the response will be vague.

Some people are perpetual victims. They are always sick, they always have problems, things are always happening to them and they really want your pity. These people may be very nice, at least on the surface. They may seem like they are doing the right things, making all efforts to go beyond their problems, but sooner or later, they end up back in the same hole.

Everyone has troubles and everyone, now and then, experiences a true catastrophy. Life can play hard and be very daunting. But it’s rare for things to stay in a miserable, continously disastrous state without the cooperation of the person in whose life these situations occur. Unless you are a very negative-thinking person yourself, you will admit that most people are OK most of the time, except those who are delighted to remain in their miserable mode.

It takes a while to learn how these people operate, particularly if you are not one of them yourself. You can be taken in by the outside, by the seemingly normal exterior, by what seems like their efforts to do “better”. You have to observe their behavior for a while before you realize that it is not going to change, and, in fact, it resists true change very strongly. People who are always in a state of being a victim like being there, even if they have no conscious knowledge of that at all. Mostly, even if you were able to point out alternatives, they would either not listen or say that you were incorrect in your assumption about their situation. Things seem to “just happen” to these people. They NEVER have anything to do with their own situation. The world is against them. People don’t treat them fairly. They do so much for others but others never reciprocate in kind. They get taken advantage of, etc., etc. They do not understand how to look at themselves in an honest, introspective manner and ascertain why it would be that things ALWAYS do not seem to go their way. It is always something external that is to blame, something over which they have “no control”.

Victims like pity, it enables them. If you pity a victim, you will get sucked into the vortex that they create and find that they can easily impact your life negatively. In fact, if you don’t watch out, you can end up being their victim (at least once) because your pity makes you vulnerable. Better to feel distant compassion. Offer whatever assistance you can, but if it isn’t taken or acted upon, walk away without a guilty conscience and be content that you have attempted to be of service.

If you teach singing, you must learn about the students who are always victims. They are absolutely out there. You can put in lots of time offering them your skills, your expertise, your commitment to their vocal progress, goals and dreams. You can work hard to help them overcome their vocal faults, limitations and confusions, but keep your antennas up, folks! If you find the person working with you over a long period of time and you see that you are in the same place over and over again, be suspicious. If you keep correcting the same faults, if you keep fixing the same limitations, if you keep giving the same advice, and the person keeps going back to the same issues, and you have done this more than once over a period of months and years, WAKE UP! The person you are teaching is STUCK and you will not, you CANNOT, unstick someone who refuses to cooperate.

Some students want you to teach them to be “better” but are not willing to change anything about what they do. They want to keep what they have and add to it. That only works if what the person has is good in the first place. If it has faults or problems, you must fix them, because if you do not, the new behaviors will not work. People who cannot change in order to grow are not willing to let go of control and experience any kind of vulnerability. They cannot be taught. They are stuck. They will say, however, that they really do want to “grow”, it’s just that they haven’t found the “right” approach/teacher/time/situation just yet.

This can show up in any kind of situation. The person has changed teachers several times, the person has gained and lost their vocal range several times, the person has had nodules repeatedly, they have had confusion about breathing for years. Nothing you do seems to get through to a deep enough place to make a lasting change. Remember, Einstein’s definition of a crazy person is someone who repeats the same behavior over and over expecting it to produce a different result. If you do not stop the cycle, you become a victim of the person’s stubborn resistance.

Every singing teacher who cares and is persistent is bound to encounter at least one of these people in the course of a career, maybe many more than one. Sooner or later, though, you begin to get a feel for “the victim” and you don’t lose too much time on them. You develop the capacity to determine whether or not the student is able to assimilate what you are teaching and what you would like to convey without taking forever to recognize those who are stuck. If you are new to teaching, do not feel badly when you encounter this kind of student, as it must happen if you are to build your experience. Just remember that the truly stuck always have their own company and that of others who are also in the same place, and that’s not a place that YOU are willing to stay.