Various Posts

If you have ever answered the phone and heard on the other end, “Hi”, and the voice was low in volume, descending in pitch, shaky in tone, and belonged to your child, spouse, parent or close friend, you would have known within seconds to ask, “What’s wrong?” How is so much information conveyed in a sound without a visual that lasts just a second?

It’s the emotion that we hear…..what does emotion sound like? If you have ever heard anyone sound really emotional, you would certainly be able to identify it. Anger, sadness and fear are universal and, at high intensity, each emotion sounds the same in everyone. You would likely also recognize the lack of emotion when you heard a voice that was flat. Lifeless. Blah.

What happens when you divorce feelings (emotions) from the voice is that it becomes less. Less interesting, less persuasive, less memorable, less alive, and yes, less human. If, however, the training process for singing is based upon constant mental evaluation and a relentless demand to be perfect, being emotional will certainly get in the way. So many trained voices are disconnected from real emotional communication. The singer becomes a sound-making machine. They live in their minds, paying little attention to what the body feels, except perhaps whether or not there is “breath support”. This makes for very boring singing.

Allowing someone to feel, express, experience, and live-through honest emotion while they are making voiced sound is a crucial part of teaching the person to sing. This can’t be done in an atmosphere that is dry, clinical, restricted and judgmental. Stopping someone from feeling emotions during sung sound so that the person can be “in control” is a good way to teach suppression or the opposite of communication.

Co-mingle, Commune (be with), SHARE. We have to be able to experience emotions in the sensations and behaviors of the body. We cannot share what we do not actually feel. It is possible to truly and deeply feel emotional and to let it go out while speaking or singing but to do this fluidly and healthfully, takes practice. If a singer must be emotional every night in a performance while singing a powerful song that is also musically and vocally demanding, he or she must learn to do this properly or it will be damaging. The opposite, however, is also true. If there is an unspoken communication that is or has been continually unexpressed or swallowed, the sensations and emotions pushed away, ignored or avoided, there will be a different kind of damage, just as bad to the person as well as the voice. A good singing teacher will encounter these emotions, sometimes unwittingly, and will be supportive when they finally emerge, even if the emotions have nothing at all to do with the process of singing.

Emotions can swirl and it is possible to feel many things at once and to be conflicted in what those emotions are. In fact, most of the time difficult and painful situations create a multitude of reactions, not just one. Physical reactions accompany these emotions, too. Martha Graham understood that in her work. She observed the human condition in the body and used these movements in her pieces to express the human condition through her dances.

Society asks us to suppress ourselves in order to be “socialized”. We learn to express emotions politely if at all. Art, on the other hand, asks us to do the opposite. It asks us to find exactly what we feel, to become acquainted with it, and to use it as a vehicle to create dynamic communication with others. The link between all of these things is the breath. Emotions effect the way we breathe. Fear stops our breathing, reducing it to a tiny amount. Sadness and anger can make us breathe more deeply or restrict the breath, depending. All of this has to be worked out in a song (or spoken piece) but if the voice can’t manage it the music itself will not make up for its lack of ability.

Music can be just notes on a page, played as pure sound for its own sake. Many composers argue that this is so. Modern music, it seems, can often sound just like that…..sound for its own sake. There may be a place for such music but I, personally, would rather be moved than intellectually stimulated at a performance. I would rather be touched than impressed. I would rather remember that I was transported than notice how incredibly complex the music was. I would rather that someone told me something I had never heard before, in a new way, than hear someone tell me the same old thing yet again.

What is it that you wish to share with this world? What it is that your voice, and your voice alone, is here to say? What is it that you would convey that would shed unique light on the human condition, make us think, make us more? Who are you and are you willing to share yourself from your deepest depths while we hear your voice?

Perhaps, then, “Hi” would tell us all we need to know.

There are fewer and fewer “purists” in the music world. More and more we see styles blending. Willie Nelson says there never were any, that the PR people just made them up and maybe he’s right. Music is music, right?

I am one of those folks who thinks that styles evolve but that isolation has something to do with the cultivation of certain characteristics in a specific style. In-breeding is self-reenforcing and useful in that it carves out or creates something that has a life which would not otherwise, on its own, exist. You can’t really mix something that doesn’t have its own contours with something else. If you lived in the mountains of Appalachia and you just didn’t hear much except the music that was made by live musicians in your town at your church (which was true for a long time) you learned that tradition and probably not much else.

It has been more and more true that electronics has made keeping things “closed” nearly impossible. First movies, then recordings, then radio, then TV and now the internet make it possible for people to see and hear anything anytime almost anywhere. What will that do to music 100 years from now? Can’t imagine.

Some things, however, have not changed in spite of all these kinds of possible outside influences. Rock music has lots of variations but it is still recognizable as rock music. That’s true of some of the newer shows on Broadway, they can ring true to shows going back decades, and of new music in other styles as well. Is this a case of the more things change, the more they stay the same or is it artists deliberately choosing to go back to basics, stick to a “roots” philosophy, or is it just liking a certain kind of expression more than another? Can’t say. Still, some styles are clearly as recognizable now as they were a long time ago.

I remember when we were told years ago that rock and roll was deviant and would go away someday and die. I’m so glad that didn’t happen. Opera has been “dying” for 100 years, but its end somehow never arrives. Broadway is always on the edge of survival, except that currently all the houses either have shows running or have new ones coming in. Hmmmmmmmm.

Guess we will just have to keep learning about all these styles, old and new, unchanging and moving around, just to keep on keeping on. That’s OK with me.

Most people sing in an undifferentiated mix. This means they have a middle voice but not much energy either very high or very low in whatever range they have. Training is supposed to develop the response of the instrument such that it can go higher and lower with ease. A few people have a powerful lower register and no top and a few people have a strong top and no bottom. Most people, however, are middle of the roaders. They can be very talented and have really good careers, so remember that those issues are separate things.

Classical training which emphasizes relaxation (yawn-sigh) produces a head dominant sound that is “silky” and “spinning”, beautiful and sweet, but not particularly dramatic. Configuring the sound to be “forward” makes it crispier and clear, but not warm. Allowing the sound to open up by making deliberate space in the back of the velo-pharyngeal port gives it depth but clarity of words can be sacrificed. If the voice is robust to begin with, this doesn’t much matter. (A lot of people didn’t like Joan Sutherland’s diction but it certainly didn’t interfere with her being declared one of the greatest sopranos of all time.)

Classical training like this, which deliberately avoids any direct use of “chest voice” or “chest resonance” or “heavy mechanism” makes for voices which can handle rapid scales and embellishments, jumps and leaps, trills and ornaments, and keeps the voice light (think Cecilia Bartoli). Classical training that “engages” the lower mechanism produces a powerful, cutting sound, a great deal of energy or brilliance and sturdiness (think Marilyn Horne), but can make soft singing and runs tricky (not impossible if the work is balanced with other things). Those with an active “chest register” must work on blending it into the middle, as they quickly find out if they do not, that they can’t go very high in a resonant sound.

The rest of the singing world who work on making the voice “more resonant” with whatever amount of sound develops through use of it in various exercises, music and breathing development may not address either register in any clear and deliberate manner. Is it any wonder, then, that when we go to belting, there is confusion?

True belting is chest voice, speaking voice, lower register, modal quality, or whatever else you want to call that sound carried up above the traditional “break” at about G above middle C, at a loud volume. [And let’s add here that we mean carried easily and freely above the break, otherwise you are just shouting.] If you do not have such a register, and believe me, a lot of professional singers do not, and you have not worked to cultivate it deliberately, (and even more people have not done that), you cannot possibly understand what true belting is. If you take a light speaky sound across the break and make it brighter by driving the sound towards the nose you will get a poor imitation of a belt sound and you WILL be confused about what belting actually is. If you don’t do any of this at all, well, stay out of the discussion, please.

True chest register occurs at the bottom of a person’s pitch range, but that supposes the person has knowledge of what is reasonable to expect as a pitch range in each voice category. If you are a tenor who can barely sing C below middle C at mezzo forte, you do not have an active chest register. YOU DON’T. If you had worked on your lowest pitches until they developed strength and power, fullness and depth without force or exertion in the throat, your entire voice would be different. To do this takes a great deal of time and cannot be worked on in isolation. It has to be coupled with other exercises so that the various ingredients in the responses of the vocal mechanism are all being attended to simultaneously, and none of this has to do with what happens in repertoire. If you were going to be a belter you would only be able to belt in a kind of light mixy chest which would take you up pretty far but would never be really cutting and “edgy”. In other words, not really a belt.

To some extent the work being done has to do with an individual instrument, the person’s age and experience, the kind of music they want to sing, their willingness to work and the amount of time being put into study. Lower voices can rise, high voices can learn to get lower, soft voices can become stronger and strong voices can develop flexibility. THAT is what training is supposed to be about. All of these kinds of behaviors require a strong body, an open and robust rib cage and belly muscles that are coordinated with the rib cage during the making of the sound itself and none of this work is a substitute for the sound — for what happens in the muscles within the throat, and within THE LARYNX. People who do not belt can learn how. Natural belters can learn to make others sounds. That is what training is supposed to be about. All of this can and should be healthy singing.

At master classes, I often encounter people who will tell me they are belters when, in fact, they are mixers. They don’t know they aren’t belting. They do not know that they do not have the real heft and power that a true belt voice has. That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t sing. It doesn’t mean they should not perform or that they are not talented or that they are not artists. No. It doesn’t mean any of that. It does mean, however, that they cannot judge what belting is by what they do. They only way they would know that is to understand function as it applies to what is being HEARD by others AND someone would have to show them how much more chest register was available if they actually worked on developing it at the bottom (where it belongs) before they could produce the sound that they THOUGHT they were producing. That alone, and nothing else, is what would inform them.

I don’t see this confusion going away any time soon. Even the people who are working with this topic every day and who understand it often get lost and confused because we are always stuck, in the end, with words describing sounds. Sound production is subjective in that every person singing experiences that in a uniquely person manner, but vocal sound quality has recognizable characteristics for all human beings (no one mistakes a person for an elephant). I return always to the hope that there are singers out there who can belt or not, who can sing “legit” or not, who can sing “mixy” when they need to, and who know the difference between all that and “style” and “emotion”. THOSE individuals should get together sometime and talk about what they do and how and everybody else should take whatever they say as THE REAL DEAL.

The idea that vocal exercises are physical exercises is relatively new. That there is no “magic button”, no “find your voice by doing this”, is not one that most singing teachers generally accept. If you rely on breathing exercises or “placement” or “resonance” exercises to fix things, or you are a “vibration in the front” person, and things don’t get better using this as the primary approach, you are likely to blame the student for not trying hard enough, not caring, not hearing, having poor support etc., etc.

Register balance is a question of stabilizing vocal function that begins in the larynx. The vocal folds themselves must balance. That this is so is shown in the research done on my voice 20 years ago in Stockholm. A look at the EGG readings shows that the open/closed quotient in the folds was consistent and defined in each of the three vocal qualities examined: belty chest, mix, and “legit”/classical head. The airflow parameters, the acoustic parameters and the overall vocal quality was also consistent and different in each. Without understanding what’s going on in the larynx, you can’t really fix much of anything.

Further, since this function is well below anything that is conscious, the only tools one has to effect change is the sound itself, and the musculature above the larynx, most especially in beginners or non-skilled singers, the external muscles. The mouth/lips, jaw, face, head, neck, front of the tongue and torso/abdominal muscles can be monitored and controlled deliberately. The pitch, volume and the vowel itself are also deliberate choices. It is with these tools, and ONLY these tools, that we can “get at” the vocal folds over time.

The path of creating change deep within the larynx is complicated by unconscious constriction and deliberate constriction, most of which is also not understood by teachers (let alone singers). “Focus”, “point”, “ring”, “ping”, “zing”, “buzz” and “masque” are words that are euphemisms for TIGHTEN. It is necessary to develop great strength at the level of the vocal folds in order to resist significant amounts of air pressure from below in order to generate a high decibel level in order to carry over an orchestra. You cannot strengthen any muscle in the body without making it work. Muscles must be made to tighten (contract) and stretch (loosen) in order to have increased muscle tone.

It is therefore necessary for the vocal folds to be made very strong and how do you accomplish this if you are taught that it is FORBIDDEN to ever do anything that involves your throat? If there is no “good” constriction, you end up singing like Peggy Lee or Perry Como (a “crooner”). That’s great as long as you have a good sound system, but not so great if you want to sing over an orchestra without a microphone. Hence, classical vocalists constant return to “breath support” as a fix-all.

Constriction from pushing too hard to reach a note, from yelling, from forcing the voice in any way, is always a bad idea and can cause vocal and musical problems. This is usually just lack of skill and experience and can be eliminated with training. Constriction from emotional issues, however, is something else entirely, and matters.

If you “can’t spit it out”, if you “bite your tongue”, if you “didn’t speak up”, you “swallowed your feelings”, “got a lump in your throat”, “were unable to speak”, if the “cat got your tongue” or you “held it in”, you had to tighten your throat, suppress your breathing (hold your breath) and force your throat to stop moving to hold back your communication or emotion. If you do that enough times, over and over, the muscles in your throat will freeze up, stop moving and refuse to move, causing you to have “vocal problems”, sometimes severely. This is not the same as having a biological illness, diagnosed by a medical specialist, or losing your voice because you were screaming out the words to a heavy metal tune. This is an emotional/psychological problem that becomes physical and is very real. It is a psycho-neuro response and it will be absolutely resistant to going away until and unless the person with the problem addresses the unexpressed issues and deals with them. Sometimes, even after the emotions have been faced, the muscles have been so long in the constricted position that re-training is very frustrating and difficult. If, however, the singer is to go back to singing in a free manner, re-training is the only way out.

That we have to work on the voice to keep it balanced, healthy, responsive, functional and free is a new idea for many people, but it is a fact. Breathing must come along for the ride as well. There are no short cuts, no magic bullets and no “this always works” fixes, just discipline, patience, dedication, courage and will-power. Sounds like the rest of life, no?

I can’t think of a more beautiful thing than teaching talented people to sing. As much as I enjoyed working with absolute beginners who had never sung for the many years that I did that, and as much as I still enjoy working with children, people who are getting back to singing after a hiatus, people who have been injured or ill, and people who have specific issues that bring them to me, I am happiest working with artists who are already at the top of their game, yet still want to improve and grow.

These people do what they do because they love it and are dedicated to it. They are willing to put in whatever effort or time is necessary to explore their own boundaries, to push them out, to remold them, to challenge their limitations and to go into new, not-so-safe territories. Not only does this take commitment of the deepest kind, but it also takes an inquiring mind, a generous spirit, and trusting heart and enormous courage. Most people are happy to hide — from themselves, from life, from hard work — an endless list. Artists, however, thrive on staring life in the face. They understand that their own vision is the source of their creativity, their body is the vehicle of expression (at least for performers) and that the meeting of mind and body is the heart – their emotional life. They discover that there is never an end, a finality, a place that growth stops. They address each musical moment as it comes, both surrendering and confronting whatever it brings.

How can you not respect such souls? How can you not be humbled by such intentions? Is it not a privilege to facilitate transformation for individuals who bring so much to the process?

Standing up in front of others, in front of an audience, is an act of generosity and courage. It is SO easy to judge, so easy to fail. It is so hard to develop all the abilities that great artists, and yes, great singers, must have in order to make what they do look so simple. It is such an enormous risk, to put everything you have on the table, over and over, and have people do whatever they will with it, even stomp on it or totally ignore it, and go on anyway, but people do, every day. It takes a certain kind of make up as a human being to hone yourself into the best you can be at any given moment but also know that you can never ever be perfect or never ever depend that what you have when it is almost perfect will stay that way.

These artists, these singers, lift the rest of us up. They do so sometimes in quiet, unacknowledged ways. Not all who are artists are publicly known and not all who are publicly known are artists. The people who strive to express their own unique artistic vision who must also hold down a job they don’t love in order to pay the bills are just as important as those who are making a living making their art. The students, too, have much to contribute, and are to be encouraged and admired, but are not in the same category, as real art takes a long time to burnish the artist. Youthful exuberance is sweet and fresh, but it cannot substitute for the wisdom of someone who has been pummeled by life.

It would take too long to write a list of names of the people who have come to my studio to work on their voices and their singing with me over the last 37 years. It would be an interesting list, especially if I included all those who stayed, sometimes for a very long time, coming and going over the years to keep on keeping on, and contrasted it with the group who took a few lessons and left……satisfied? dissatisfied? confused? angry? One wonders. It would be interesting to ask the group that was in it for the long haul….why? What kept you coming back when you could easily have stopped or gone away to something or someone else?

I am grateful, deeply and continuously grateful, for those who go to the trouble and make the effort to share with me this most precious gift called “their voice” and “their songs”. It keeps me going when I am exhausted, too tired to think, and want nothing more than to stay under the covers. I remember that someone has come to ask me for guidance, for support, for help, for an opinion, for healing, and I remember that I, too, made a commitment a long time ago to be of service with a happy heart. So it is, in each moment in my studio with each of these incredible beings, a gift to be a singing teacher, and it is in every way a beautiful thing.

How can you know about Broadway and about music theater on Broadway if you have never been in New York and never seen even one Broadway musical?

NEVER SEEN EVEN ONE MUSICAL ON BROADWAY IN NEW YORK.

That sentence boggles my mind.

I guess if you have seen a good professional quality “Broadway” show in your closest big city or town, with a cast that has substantial credits from New York, LA or London, or perhaps from Chicago or some other big city, then that would be better than nothing, but if you have never BEEN IN such a show yourself or at least been in a show with someone else who was, you wouldn’t be privy to the “lore” of theater. You wouldn’t know “what’s done” that isn’t written in any book. You wouldn’t have the experience of learning by being in the world of theater people (a special and unique experience). As is true in any field, when you “live the life” you pick up things by osmosis. You hear things and see things you couldn’t encounter anywhere else. Is there a substitute for that? I don’t think so. School, however, absolutely does not qualify.

These days, because there is so much influence from “outside” throughout “show business” and “entertainment”, you can easily find people directing, producing, and yes, “starring in” musicals even on Broadway who have NO experience of any kind in music theater, and likely no training. This is supposed to be a good thing, bringing in “fresh ideas” and “new audiences”, but only once in a while is that true. More often than not these people have no clue what’s good and what’s lousy because they have no background. They stick out and the productions they effect stick out as being less than wonderful. Chicago, for example, cares not who walks on that stage, so long as the person has a “name”. I’ve seen some pretty awful performances in that show, but it makes money, so the producers don’t care. Other people in the business, however, have very different opinions. It’s as if you ask people who have grown up exclusively eating cheeseburgers and cokes to create the menu in a gourmet restaurant. Cheeseburger a la mode anyone?

I have seen musical productions here in the New York City area, at some of our institutions of higher learning, where students were being trained in “music theater” programs, where most of the faculty had little or no music theater experience, and I have been unsurprised, but nevertheless disappointed, to find these performances very lackluster, unmusical or just plain unprofessional. If you spend upwards of $200,000 to send your child to a four-year training program that professes itself to be professional in calibre and your child was directed in a musical by someone who couldn’t sing, had never sung, didn’t know music, was not musical, and had no experience being in a music, but was nevertheless the person in charge of the program, would you be happy about that? Cheeseburger a la mode anyone?

If you are someone who has never bothered to come to New York City or go to London to see a genuine, real, actual Broadway or West End musical, and you also teach music theater songs to your students, I strongly advise you to get on a plane and get to one of these two places with enough money to see as many musicals as possible right away. I also urge you to purchase all the DVDs of Broadway performances that you can find and watch them. You can’t count watching movie musicals unless they are actual replications of the show (like “The Producers”), as they bear little or no resemblance to their staged counterparts.

All the telltale marks of those who do not know show up in the performances of their unfortunate students who come to New York not knowing they have been trained inadequately. The vocal and musical behaviors that belong in professional music theater could be completely absent. You can tell these students immediately, as soon as you hear them, and you will know right away — “teacher was classical”. Over-pronunciation of the consonants, very abrupt pitch changes at all times, more emphasis on vocal production than on conveying the meaning of the lyrics, singing a song in head register that was meant to be belted, standing absolutely still from the shoulders down, as if the singing came from the neck and head alone, etc. I see this over and over. If you actually GO to a Broadway musical, even just an “Encores” presentation that has no set or costumes, you will not EVER see these things or hear them, in the people up there on stage.

Some people have never seen even one musical on Broadway, and THEY TEACH MUSIC THEATER!!!

No, I don’t like cheeseburgers a la mode.

If the human voice is capable of all kinds of sounds, and has a wide range of pitches and volumes (as sitting at any playground for a couple of hours will prove to you), then what happens to that ability and why do some people exhibit so much more of that than others when they outgrow childhood?

Let’s take a look at the average American (but could be almost any nationality) kid. Runs, jumps, plays, falls down, cries, gets up, laughs, makes faces and turns into various imaginary animals, monsters, aliens, grown-ups, and alternate selves, yells, screams, giggles, grunts, roars, gurgles, yodels and does who knows what else with voice and body. Then the child gets “self-conscious” and stops because adulthood looms. Correct behavior encroaches (at various ages) and spontaneity subsides. Vocal expression also shrinks, unless the child is doing some kind of singing, in which case it might survive a bit more.

If, however, you go to performances or listen to music written by today’s living composers who deliberately do things with the voice that are “not-traditional”, you find out that there are a lot of people out there, some with advanced degrees even, who think the human voice doesn’t have to shrink or fit in a box. In fact, you find that many vocal artists wouldn’t begin to entertain the notion that you have to confine yourself in any way in order to be considered “good”.

This blog entry is inspired by having just attended the 4 hour marathon retrospective of Meredith Monk today at the Whitney Museum. It took a look back at Meredith’s performances, the first one being done there was in 1971. There was an entire new generation of young vocalists up there with some of the other “senior” artists and they were all having a ball. A few are operatically trained, some are dancers, and some are musicians, and all of them all singing really wild, inventive, and YES, vocally taxing stuff, but NO ONE lost their voice and no one was being vocally damaged, since Meredith herself is very careful about how she sings and what she asks, respectfully, others to sing. You might think, at first hearing if you were not familiar with her style, or this kind of music generally, that going abruptly from one register to another or from one pitch range to another, or one volume to another, or making gutteral, nasal, glottal, unsteady, unpleasant sounds would automatically be “harmful” but if you did have that thought, it would be WRONG. The performers who sing with Ms. Monk are very talented, highly trained, intelligent and mostly New York artists who are mostly self-employed free-lancers. They are not going to ruin their throats for Ms. Monk or anyone else, as they would be out of work for quite a while, and maybe could get injured seriously enough to be out of work as a singer forever. Since I have been Ms. Monk’s voice coach for nearly 30 years, I know how careful these singers are with their voices even though what they sing sounds like they aren’t being careful at all.

Beware. And if you are a singer, or a teacher of singing, and you think that singing outside a certain set of parameters will harm you in some way, think again. Singing anything shouldn’t prevent you from doing something else. If how you sing is based on fear of harming or losing your voice/technique/high notes/control/expressiveness,etc., I will suggest that you don’t have much depth in your singing to begin with, and it wouldn’t be nearly as a big loss as you imagine if you were to let it go. Think about that.

How do you know that you aren’t any good if all you do is stay at home and sing for your students? How do you know if you never sounded any good in the first place, especially if you didn’t really have much of a career? How do you know you sound good if you have never actually given the topic any thought at all? How do you know if the reason you don’t sound good is that your throat is tied in a knot that you don’t feel and you think you are just fine? I’m talking ALL kinds of singing styles here, not just CCM.

I recently attended a conference at which one on the attendees mentioned that she was a chair of a voice department in a college. That would have been fine but her speaking voice sounded like something between Yogi Bear and Bart Simpson. Can this person sing freely? Can Superman land on your roof? I can only cringe to think how this effects not only the other teachers in her department under her, but all of her students and theirs. Your perception of how you sound is affected by how you feel what you hear or, said in reverse: BY HOW YOU HEAR WHAT YOU FEEL. If squashed sound is what you do, and you have sung in front of others that way, and you are oblivious, you will hear really free singing as being “wrong”. Yikes!!!!

No kidding. A colleague of mine, now deceased, once told me Leontyne Price “couldn’t sing”. Yikes and Yikes!!!!! I never heard this colleague sing, but I can only imagine.

I also know of someone else who is in charge of a voice department at a college who tried out working with CCM techniques on her own, interpreting information she had obtained in a workshop, and got into trouble. Instead of concluding that perhaps she had misunderstood what she heard and seen at the course, or that she had applied it incorrectly working alone, she decided the information was at fault, it was dangerous, and therefore, every single student in her department would absolutely be in danger if they tried to sing in a belt sound. She found support from her classical colleagues (all of whom are teaching music theater) who agreed that their students were BABIES and had to handled with kid gloves. It couldn’t possibly have had anything to do with HER, of course.

I have encountered wobbling jaws, rigid head positions, singers with over-straightened necks, tightly squeezed throats, heavy pressed phonation, depressed larynges, and all manner of other abberations in teachers who are at a college somewhere. These are classical singers who often have masters degrees in voice and some of them have doctoral degrees. They sound BAD. BAD. Did I say BAD? Yes, BAD. You cannot have a sound that is out of balance function freely or with emotional authenticity, and that is what beautiful singing demands. You must conclude, then, that the singers don’t know they are stuck, or they think being stuck is correct and good, or they think that it is BETTER technically, for some specific reason. They probably think that free singing is just a metaphor. (I have actually been asked by someone who has taught at a college for 20 years, “How do you know if the sound is free?”) Are you surprised when I tell you that she had lots of vocal problems? Didn’t think so.

A free sound MOVES. The vocal organs move (the larynx is a sinoval joint that has to be able to rock back and forth). And, although in classical singing the idea that the larynx MUST remain low at all times has gained in popularity, in fact, the larynx needs to be “dynamic” [William Vennard] or “engaged” [Cornelius Reid] in order for the mechanism to work properly. Garcia and Lamperti knew that, way back in the 1800s. A freely produced sound is neither breathy nor tight but there is a range of both that is acceptable and still healthy. A free voice produces undistorted vowels, allows for clear articulation, dynamic (intensity) variation, steady vibrato (or control over a straight tone), and is EXPRESSIVE (assuming the artist has something to say………a big assumption.)

The same holds true for classical and CCM vocal production, but the dominant register behavior is opposite, and other parameters adjust accordingly.

If it is dangerous to have scientists who think they know what a belt sound is researching it, when in point of fact they have a skewed auditory picture of it, and can’t sing it, then it is twice as dangerous to have people who are LOUSY singers writing vocal pedagogy articles and making decisions about voice training anywhere. We can’t stop that or do anything about it, but at least it can be stated here that these conditions exist and that they have an impact on singers. Perhaps knowing that is enough to give moral support to those on the receiving end of the behavior, opinions, ideals and decisions of such individuals. If so, then this was worth the writing.

We all know the value of a label. What’s worth more, a Cadillac or a Lincoln? A Ralph Lauren or a Donna Karan? A Rolex watch or one made by Movado?

If we are talking about sound, the label matters, maybe more than for a watch, except how do you label a sound? You can’t weigh it, you can’t see it or feel it, it has no smell. We don’t understand much about the relationship between hearing and sound making except that there is one and if it goes away, speaking gets much harder and singing probably gets impossible unless you lose your hearing in mid-life. Are you hearing what I hear in the same way I hear it? Probably not. How can I know how something sounds to you when I can hardly label it clearly to myself? (I know, be psychic!!)

There are only a very few words in English that describe vocal sound and nothing else: hoarse, breathy, raspy, and throaty are some examples. Additional words that describe voiced sound come from the other four senses or from descriptions of the personality. Warm, sweet, clear, powerful, squeezed, harsh, flowing, etc. Those words are endless but not very precise or telling. If we get into describing specific types of vocal sound, ones that have only certain characteristics, we are in even choppier waters. Belting is a kind of sound, but what kind? When is a sound a belt and when it is not? How is this decided? What kinds of words are used to describe a belt sound? Want to enter a quagmire? Door’s open, com’ on in.

If we do not come up with labels based on acoustics and physiology, then how do we know we are talking about the same phenomenon? We don’t. But, in order to gather information that can be measured, someone has to make the sound, saying, in effect, “This is the sound and it is because I say so”. Whew!

When talking about any kind of vocal sound, sung or spoken, and describing vocal quality with words, we are bound to have issues of communication because our language has few and poor descriptive words and because our awareness of vocal sound doesn’t have to be that acute in order to live and be understood. If we complicate matters by saying “I am going to sing in this sound a lot” or “I am going to teach someone else to sing it” and we can barely describe it or understand how it gets produced, can there be anything as a result that is not just plain confused?

I have dealt with the entire situation for 37 years. It may be, and I emphasize, MAY be, that things are getting better in the vocal community of teachers, researchers and singers, but not at the speed of sound, or even the speed of a car in Times Square at rush hour. We have to keep trying, though, as just because it is difficult, it is an important topic to address. It’s just that sometimes, I get tired. Want to take over? Volunteers welcome.

We know that there is more than one way to belt. If, however, the scientists that look at singing don’t go along with that, the research they do won’t help us. I see that as a BIG problem.

Having just returned from the PAS 4 Conference in San Antonio (that’s Physiology and Acoustics of the Singing Voice #4), I encountered a number of well-known voice science researchers who were going to argue with me about what belting is and is not. This argument was based upon their own knowledge, of course, not of making the sound commercially in a piece of music in front of an audience or audiences, but of making it on their own, in a lab situation, without verification from anyone else. How is this any different that the classical teachers, working on belting, who think they know or assume they know, but have never actually worked on this sound with any other EXPERT to actually get verification that they DO know? Not different.

This is not good for all kinds of reasons. The first reason is that we all, including me, hang on voice science to help us out of 200 years of subjective misunderstanding of vocal production and other ensuing confusion. What has been published on belting is largely the result of the research of just a few people, (that includes the work I have published) working with just a few subjects, many of whom were used as subjects just because they were locally available to researchers.

If the science that is submitted has to be evaluated by other scientists as to its accuracy and credibility, but the singing being researched as a part of the same project DOES NOT GET REVIEWED AT ALL, can that be useful? As a subject of voice research on belting I, at least, had sung one entire musical show in a professional quality production as a belter, but some of the subjects in other research may not have sung in any professional calibre performance at all. Nevertheless, the research was given credence because of the science and not the sound itself and published. Seems like a conflict to me.

This is made worse when the scientists take the sound into consideration and the sound is the wrong sound, or is misunderstood by the researcher. The information they collect gets published and only makes things worse. Adds to the confusion rather than to clarity. How do you tell an important scientist, “Excuse me, Big Dr. Professor Science Person, the sound you think is belting, isn’t?” How do you tell him (usually it is a male) “You sound awful, sir, and no one who gets paid money would sing like that unless they were in trouble, so please don’t use yourself as a baseline model for this sound.” How do you explain “You are studying something from a confused place to begin with, so how is that going to guide you in your research?” Answer is, you don’t. I know. I tried. I continue to try. Hasn’t worked yet.

Yes, my opinion on belting is just mine, but I truly feel it is representative of the sound for all the reasons I have stated and stated and restated on this blog in the past. I work with people who are out there being asked to make this sound (or versions of it) for a living and if they were not able to do that, they would be out of work and so would I. I know whereof I speak and sing. I don’t for a minute pretend to understand the deep inner workings of voice science research and am always quick and willing to be corrected by the scientists, but they, unfortunately, are NOT willing to be corrected by me, who, at this point, is one of the senior teachers of CCM in the world. If not me, or my colleagues, then whom?