Various Posts

Over the holidays I got sick with a head cold (not unusual). I sang at the holiday concert I mentioned a while ago, with 90% voice, the Handel piece, “Let The Bright Seraphim” with trumpet and organ, as well as two other songs (one a capella). Although it was not one of my best performances (understandment), I received very complementary feedback from several people, so I think it was a decent, professional job in spite of my vocal problems. After that, I thought I was over the hump, on my way back to health, when I received surprising bad news and found myself instead with a developing chest cold. Not good. The coughing is very bad for my vocal folds. I can manage a head cold but it doesn’t take much coughing to give me laryngitis. So… I take cough syrup which suppresses the coughing well enough but makes me sleepy. I drink caffeinated tea to stay away, and this makes for a balancing act, and not a good one at that. After three days, just one day before I took my holiday break from teaching, at the end of the day, I had a really bad coughing attack and I went from functional to completely hoarse in about 5 minutes.

I knew immediately that my voice was “blown out” and that I was in trouble, as this has happened to me twice before, when I had bronchitis, and once before, when I was recovering from a normal cold. I thought I had either broken a blood vessel on one fold or that I had severe swelling. I cancelled teaching the next day and went to my throat specialist. He looked at my folds with a strange expression and it made me nervous. He has been my doctor for 20 years so I know his reactions.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

He said, “I think you have a dislocated arytenoid.” I was stunned.

For those of you reading this who do not know what that means, let me explain. The arytenoids are the moveable cartileges to which the vocal folds are attached and which assist in moving them apart so we can breath and together so we can make vocal sound. If one of them gets dislocated, the folds don’t move properly and the sound can be very bad (as mine was). This is about as serious an injury as one could have. I could see for myself, on the video monitor, that one fold wasn’t moving and that when the folds came together one fold seemed to be slipping under the other, rather than meeting together in the same plane. There is no remedy for this situation. Either Mother Nature moves the arytenoid back to its correct place or not. Sometimes surgery is done to help get better closure, but you can imagine that this doesn’t work in terms of producing the kind of quality necessary for a professional singer.

In truth, I saw my life flashing before me. I thought, “Well, wouldn’t this be an ignominius end to my life as a teacher of singing! I coughed myself out of a job and a life!” I ran through possible other things that I could do…..type (I go at about 100 words per minute), cook, clean, dance…..not a lot of options. My doctor suggested that I go to Dr. Peak Woo for a second opinion. As fate would have it, I was on my way there anyway, to deliver my holiday gifts to his family, as they are personal friends. In the cab I prayed. “OK, Lord, I don’t think I am supposed to have this karma, losing my voice. If there is anything you could do to fix me up, I would be very grateful.” I had been given a shot of prednesone, a steriod to reduce swelling. My doctor said that sometimes that allows the artyenoid to go back on its own. I kept my fingers crossed.

I arrived at Mt. Sinai about 20 minutes later in my Santa hat (which I had been wearing all week) and the receptionist looked at me very dubiously when I croaked to her that I was a personal friend of Dr. Woo’s. Fortunately, he greet me warmly and welcomed me into his office where I scratchily said that I had just been given a diagnosis of a dislocated arytenoid. “What?” he said. “Let me see.”

He palpated my throat in several places, asking as he did, “Does this hurt?”

“No.” “No.” “Uh-uh.”

“Sit down and wait,” he stated, so I did. Two hours later he examined me and I could again see for myself on the video monitor that both arytenoids were moving uniformly and that my vocal folds were swollen. I was quite surprised.

“You just have bad laryngitis. You have hot dog vocal folds. Go home, take the prednesone and be quiet.”

I was never so grateful to have a diagnosis of laryngitis in my entire life.

This was four days before Christmas. I couldn’t possibly be quiet over the holidays, I knew, as I can never keep my mouth shut under any circumstances, but I was very very careful. My voice came back slowly and by Christmas day I sounded almost normal, although I still felt weak and didn’t try to speak loudly. I absolutely could not sing.

I attempted to sing for the first time the day before New Year’s Eve. I knew it wouldn’t be pretty, but I had to try. This is where words don’t do any good. My voice was just awful. Sustained tones were impossible. The sound stuttered like an old car with a bad carburator. I had no volume, no vibrato, little control and a hole at both the break and the top. The middle was stuck. Even my husband said “Gee, sweetheart, your voice sounds bad.” He didn’t mean it as a criticism, but as a sign concern, that it was so far away from normal.

I wish I could tell you then I just did a few warm-ups and then all was fine. Fortunately for me, I have not only taken myself through this sorry situation three times, but I have walked countless others through it over the years. It is a very scary experience and I think that I would have been hysterical had it not been for my previous experiences. The first time it happened, I had to return to teaching while in rather bad shape, and teaching slowly coaxed my throat into its normal function. I couldn’t pay too much attention to my own troubles (just as well) and the constant quiet examples I sang throughout the day allowed my poor folds to heal themselves until I began to sound normal. It took more than three weeks for me to feel that I could sing vigorously, but I learned a lot in the process.

It was four days before I could do any kind of crescendo. In the meantime, every scale and exercise was “sticky”. The pitches were unstable, the top was a squeak, when it came out at all, the middle was not a middle but a hole, and everything made a lot of noise. I couldn’t practice for more than 15 minutes at a time, but I pushed through, as not to do so was not an option.

At some point my husband suggested that I write about this on this blog.

My husband asked, “How could anyone go through this alone? Wouldn’t they be frightened and worried? How would they know that this was a normal phase? Even the doctors might not know.”

I thought he was right. It is important to know that my voice came back. I can sing now with little problem, although I have lost all the “being in great shape” that I had before I got sick. I will get it back again as I start teaching next week, and then practicing full out, but I might not have been able to make that statement if I had let the way I sounded the first few times I tried to sing have a more significant impact than it did. I can’t help but wonder if that’s what happened to Julie Andrews that caused her to think she couldn’t sing after her surgery. Too quick a judgement caused by lack of experience. I will never know.

The point is, I am 57 years old. I am no spring chicken whose vocal folds just pop back into shape because they have nothing else better to do. They get there because I have a lifetime’s worth of keeping them healthy and because I understood how to guide myself back into a good place. Perhaps this knowledge isn’t so unique. Maybe other singers understand this, too. I don’t know. Perhaps the doctors like Peak Woo can tell them that the return of the singing voice takes time.

I just wanted all of you who read these pages to know that something as unspectacular as a cough could be the “end of everything” if not handled wisely, and that normal singing can and does lag behind the return of normal speech even in a veteran.

I am still grateful that things are OK now. I absolutely did have moments when I was practicing in those first few attempts, where I was worried that perhaps this time, it wouldn’t be OK. That’s the way the mind works, I suppose, trying to find the worst case scenario. I hope this event in my life might be a roadmap for you and for your students. If ever you find yourself or your students in a similar situation, be patient, “wait for the bus”, do the work, and trust that the results will show up. In the meantime, appreciate your voice when it is healthy, as really, we never know what could happen, do we?

As I see it, my job is to get someone to make a sound that he or she has never made, and therefore has no concept of. It’s my job to trick the person’s throat into some new behavior that has never occurred so she can say, “Gosh, I never made that sound before”. I consider that kind of comment a mark of success.

This does not involve the idea of remembering anything…..a common practice in teaching someone to sing. Make an [i] and then remember that feeling and make an [a]. That idea never helped me, I couldn’t really do it. It worked better for me to just bring my tongue up and forward in the [a] while I was singing the [a] and let go of the [i] when I wasn’t singing it any longer. If I can get a student’s tongue to be able to come up and forward, that’s helpful. Some people have trouble with that, so you have to work at it in stages. When it is finally an accomplishable task, this gesture alone is sufficient to affect the sung [a], so no “remembering” of anything else is necessary.

Register change, the primary adjustment in vocal quality that is available to humans, is a response, or a reaction. For instance, a light lyric soprano can’t just decide to sing in chest register if she doesn’t have one, or much of one. Chest register has to be cultivated, slowly, if it is going to become active, through various stimuli, such as the “fog horn” or the “Santa Clause” exercises. “Thinking” chest register would just be silly. You can’t think yourself into a sound, no matter how clearly you imagine it. (I can imagine singing C above high C, but I can’t sing it, and I never will). Singers must be guided to make sounds, in shapes and patterns that are different from their normal “default” patterns (usually based upon their speech), so they can discover these sounds, and the sensations attached to them, in order to gain awareness of both processes. Only then can the new sounds be replicated through practice until they become part of the individual’s permanent lexicon of vocal gestures.

The teacher’s job is to provoke the responses from the singer through exercises, used effectively. The singing student’s job is to attempt the exercises until they are done correctly and repeatedly so that the response can surface. Patience is required on both the part of the teacher and the student, as the throat and/or body doesn’t always respond immediately. Even if the stimulus is doing its job, the amount of time that it will take for it to create the desired result in the sound will depend upon the length of time the patterns being changed have been in place, and the amount of change that needs to take place between the situation at hand and the one being sought in the person’s singing behavior.

It’s fun to get someone to sing in a brand new way. It’s a thrill to watch someone’s face when they hear something they have never heard before. It’s also exciting to see if such sounds can be discovered along the way. It makes teaching an adventure, rather than a chore.

We all have all kinds of sound within us. Never stop looking for new ones, as you never know what you will find.

I was teaching for a long time — years — before it occurred to me that I was in a service profession. I knew I was a singing teacher but that was as far as I thought. When it finally dawned upon me that I was providing a service, I was somewhat surprised. “Imagine that,” I said to myself, “I am a business woman providing a service, not just an artist sharing her art”. Da Dum.

I then took it upon myself to investigate what “being of service” was about, as clearly it was part of my own spiritual goals to be of service somehow or other. I understood serving, as my first job (at 16) was as a “busgirl” in my uncle’s Italian restaurant, where I was “at the service” of the entire place: my uncle and his son, who ran the place; the bartenders, the waitresses, the kitchen staff, and the customers. I was the bottom of the heap (for minimum wage and no tips, thank you very much), and took orders from everyone. That was some learning curve! After that I had all sorts of other part and full time time jobs while still in school, all of them insignificant. After I got married I learned to take dictation and got a job as an “executive secretary” (that’s what we now call an “administrative assistant”). In all of these situations I had no instruction in how to be useful, I just did the best job I could and hoped I was succeeding. I admit that it was hard for me to draw a line from those jobs to teaching singing, as typing a financial report didn’t seem to relate much to teaching “Caro Mio Ben”, but I did understand that I wanted to help my students sing and also to help them find joy in music and in their own voices.

Slowly, after a lot of reading of various spiritually oriented books, and some considerable amount of reflection, I concluded that what I wanted to be most of all was useful. I wanted to be of practical, down-to-earth use to the people who came to me to learn how to sing. I wanted my instructions to be simple and clear. I wanted people to be able to grasp what I was talking about without feeling confused or stupid. I wanted singing to seem accessible and rewarding and not just something that was so special that only certain people could do it well.

As I realized over time, each person came to singing lessons for their own reasons, with their own ideas about singing and about his or her individual voice. Each person came with a history, both personal and vocal, and with various tendencies and abilities, limitations and talents. I began to see that I had to accept and work with all this as the ground or fabric into which I fit the training, or it didn’t work. Either I lost the student’s interest or I just lost the student. It became clear that the student’s goals had to become my goals for the student, unless I thought the goals were harmful, in which case I had to find a way to say that (didn’t happen often). I realized that I had to convey to the student that he or she was doing the teaching, and that I could only comment from the outside, offering suggestions that I thought might save time or effort. It came to me that sometimes the student was looking for something through singing that had little to do with singing.

Some people came hoping to find their voice in life. They wanted to be heard as people. They wanted to have something worth while to say and a way to say it.

Some people came looking for a path into their own heart. They wanted to learn how to fall in love with music and let that love heal them and open them.

Some people came searching for a way into their bodies. They were seeking a way to become one with the breath, and with sensations that were powerful and potent, so that they could feel more vividly alive.

Some people came to let go of a secret. These people were the most difficult yet the most compelling to teach. It was only if they stayed that this motivation showed up, and sometimes when it did, they left, as the realization was too overwhelming to be faced straight on. Perhaps it was also, in the beginning, because I was too young and inexperienced to create a safe place for the secret to be revealed.

Some people came because they had been told not to come. (Don’t sing. You sound awful!) They were rebelling against the restrictions that had been placed upon them in some way, and they wanted another human being to challenge them to let go of the bindings that they no longer wished to accept.

There were a million reasons while someone wanted to learn to sing, beyond wanting to learn to sing. In order to be of service, I discovered I had to find a way to honor all of these reasons, and use scales, exercises and songs as the tools to reach into each singer’s mind, heart and body.

Later, I also realized that I had to create a sense of “professionalism” because I wanted to honor my work and myself. I had heard and seen singing teachers opening mail during lessons, talking endlessly on the phone in a lesson while the student tried to keep singing. I had heard of teachers talking in lessons about other students whom were better than the one singing, for less than great reasons. I knew of singing teachers who took money from students whom they felt were untalented and boring, but the teachers needed the money so they “tolerated” the student anyway. I created a “Singing Student’s Bill of Rights” in my head (I will tell you what it is, but not here). I wanted to avoid all of these attitudes and behaviors and others of similar ilk, if at all possible.

As I got this worked out, and it took over a decade to do so, I realized that living in an atmosphere of “being of service” freed me of trying to prove anything. It allowed me to be vulnerable, spontaneous, and human — to stumble, to be stuck, to “not know” and to be a student of the entire process even while being the “person in charge”. It became clear that I was a guide, and that was all, but it was more than enough.

In all the years I have attended singing teacher events, conferences, seminars, courses, and gatherings, I have not ever seen or participated in even one on “Being of Service” or even “Being Effective in a Service Profession”. Things like “customer satisfaction”, “customer service”, “quality control”, “delivery of services” can and should apply to us as singing teachers, no matter how lofty our artistic lives may be. Running a successful private practice or school program involves just these things, even if at first glance they may seem irrelevant.

Since Somatic Voicework® The LoVetri Method is a body-based method of vocal training, with a service-based approach, was generated by me and therefore has inherent in it my point of view, I thought I should share these thoughts with you. I look forward to your comments.

In order to have standards, you have to have some kind of structure. You have to make up some guidelines and stick to them. Some people won’t like it, as they will balk at what they perceive to be restriction, others may find that the guidelines are too weak, and do not set a course that is stiff enough. If, however, there are no standards, no guidelines, no criteria at all, how does anyone make an assessment about what’s going on?

Singing teachers are not licensed. They are not monitored, they are not required to do or be anything special. Being a “professional singing teacher” is like being a professional ice cream taster, a nice job but who decides if you are any good? In a profession which has steadfastly refused for more than 200 years to organize or police its own practices in any significant manner, is it any wonder that there is so much chaos in the field? Under the guise of “the mystery of singing” so many looneys with ideas that came from places that Freud would have feared to tread, have plied their trade as “masters of singing” that is it a wonder, really, that the profession survived at all, or that any teacher of singing was ever taken seriously. I sometimes marvel that the really wonderful singers of our present time have learned to sing so well, given what a minefield learning to sing can easily be.

This week I encountered someone who was told by a teacher that she was singing in “a false voice”. Since the sound came from the woman’s throat, how could that be possible? Any sound you make is your sound, whether it sounds like your speaking voice or not. This comment goes into the Voice Teacher Jargon Phrasebook with other such pithy gems as “you are listening to yourself!!!”, “you must sing so that the sound goes beyond your cheekbones” and my all-time favorite, “spin the tone so it floats out of the back of your head”.

What if singing teachers actually agreed on some basics like: this is what chest register sounds like, this is what head register sounds like, this is what a bright vowel sounds like, this is what a dark vowel sounds like (sound familiar, my graduates?) These things can be heard and they are NOT arbitrary. What if we agreed that terminology ought to be based upon actual vocal function……would that be so bad?

And what if teachers actually had to take some kind of test to show that they knew enough about what is happening when someone sings that they could do something with that information to help the person? Seems like a good idea to me. So, why is there so much resistance to it? What’s the harm? (You know the answer…..that thing again…….FEAR).

So while an entire profession is willing to continue to bury its head so that no one will be “found out”, yet more students are lead down the garden path, thinking they are learning something, only to end up confused, lead off course, or worst of all, vocally damaged. This is supposed to be OK, but it is not. It will continue, however, until a large number of singing teachers has the courage to stand up and say stop, out loud, and in print. We have no one to blame but ourselves.

I can usually tell when I am listening to someone singing CCM who has had only classical training, as there are “telltale signs” in the singing. One of the most blatant is nasality. So many teachers think that making a nasal sound is an end in itself, a destination, and a stepping stone to belting. Wrong. Nasality is a disposal by-product (as William Vennard says) that helps firm up the laryngeal and pharyngeal musculature to make the voice more professional. Teachers who confuse nasality with brightness (ping, ring, point, focus) are doing their students a real disservice, as it makes them sound unnecessarily ugly and it makes it difficult for the student to change vocal qualities since nasality causes tenseness in the tongue and soft palate to be increased.

A bright sound is the result of chest register. (What? Isn’t brightness part of head register?) No, warmth and relaxation (yawn sigh) are part of head register and make the voice appealing and pleasant. Brightness or “sparkle” or whatever other of the many words you want to give this quality, brings out the high frequencies in the vocal tone (the “squillo” in Italian, or the “crying baby” here). It doesn’t make the voice sound nicer but it allows it to be heard easily. (We hear those baby cry frequencies around 3000 hz better than we hear the lower frequencies…..evolution, I suppose. Cavemom could always hear the baby crying, even when she was out with the hunters looking for dinner). If you sing with an active, full chest register quality, even when you go back up to your high notes, they will have more sparkle, regardless of whether or not that’s what you want. Try it and see for yourself. Chest register alone is enough to make the sound bright. To add nasality on top of that is overkill. Making a head register dominant sound nasal will cut down on the “open” feeling, camoflaging the “classical” quality, but it is just that…camoflage, not the real deal. It doesn’t substitute for chest register. Lack of clarity about the functions we are discussing here can cause a singer to be really confused.

AND, in a young singer, particularly a female, who grew up singing in mix, all sounds are some form of mix. What that means is that such a singer can sing a “heady-mix” and a “chesty-mix” but NOT a true isolated head tone or a true isolated chest tone. These young woman think they are in head when they are not. They confuse mix with head because it is the only configuration the throat can do. If classical training is put into such a system, the vowel sounds will never, ever sit in the right place and the resonance will never really be adequate to classical repertoire. Such students will manipulate the voice to try to create “forward” resonance, again by going toward nasality, and that just makes matters worse. If you don’t fix the imbalance before you do the material, you tie up the throat, confuse the singer, skew the singer’s perception of what she hears and feels and spend a lot of time “creating effects” instead of dealing with causes.

Nasality is useful, but it is important to understand what it does and does not accomplish and what it inhibits. Don’t get sucked into confusion about its functions.

Over the past several years I have encountered so many teachers who have had wonderful experiences learning to work with CCM and with Somatic Voicework. Each has a personal point of view and has incorporated my work into his or her own work in their own special manner. Since the point of my work is to give teachers tools, and not to create “Jeanie clones” I am encouraged by these developments and so hope that each person will give support and encouragement to all the others. To that end, I have asked those who are graduates of my course (and those who are doing this work on their own with none of my training) to write about their experiences. So far, only one person has done so. I am baffled by this. Why will no one put pen to paper? Surely it isn’t because there is nothing to write.

In our society, we validate things by writing about them and by putting them into the various media (TV, magazines, newspapers, radio, and internet). The written word carries with it a certain weight that nothing else matches. People, where are your articles? What are you afraid of? Why are you reluctant?

Each person matters. Each person’s experience matters. Each person’s opinion counts and adds to the opinion of others (especially in a democracy). If we are to make a change in teaching, we can only do so by stating that, and by making an effort to state it in a public place.

Be bold, folks. Step up to the plate. Get those ideas out of you head and on to a piece of paper (or monitor). NOW is the time.

I know that I never really thanked enough the people who taught me, past saying “thank you” at the end of a lesson. (That’s something certain students do but many do not). I wish now that I could go back and say to each person who was an influence on me as a singer and teacher “thank you for what you gave me — it was so incredible.” I would also like to be able to tell the people who hurt me, “thank you for teaching me what I don’t want to be like”. I guess what I am trying to do by writing this blog is to tell the people who were misguided “I wish I had something to thank you for”.

It’s great to see a student make progress, to have break-throughs, to be validated and empowered. It’s wonderful to hear her singing more joyfully, freely and with confidence. It is gratifying to know that someone has had a burden lessened, a load lifted, a struggle end, but it is even more wonderful when the person says “thank you, I couldn’t have done it without you”.

It is easier to teach a student who is grateful for the teaching because the gratitude implies that the student knows that they have been given a gift. It opens the heart to allow for even more giving. It is no fun to work with someone who regards you as the “hired help”….someone they have little regard for like the unfortunate cleaning woman who comes in to dust, vacuum and empty garbage for a fee. Yuk. I’ve had a few students like that (fortunately, very very few), and this attitude doesn’t sit well with me, and probably does not with anyone who is a teacher of anything.

If the student is never grateful, one can assume the student doesn’t recognize or acknowledge any progress that is being made, or value any changes taking place in her singing. Usually the student doesn’t take any responsibility for this either, as doing so would require some awareness that one has to be willing to be taught and to learn from that teaching. Responsibility implies that this is a two-way process. Some people don’t understand the concept of gratitude period. They don’t much learn about appreciation as a state of being. Too bad. It diminishes their lives and if they sing, their art as well.

I am grateful for all my students. I appreciate that they trust me and that they bring me their most precious possessions, their voices. I am grateful for all the challenges that are presented in lessons and for the opportunity to be of service to other human beings, helping them achieve their goals, dreams, aspirations or hopes. I am grateful for the opportunity to grow as a teacher and person, to examine myself and try to be better each day. I more and more appreciate everyone who has ever taught me anything, and hope to deepen my own ability to express gratitude and thanks as I continue to go forward in my life.

There are 35 muscles in the tongue. The larynx is suspended from some of them. That means that the tongue and the larynx are intimately connected. The jaw, also, has a relationship to the tongue and the larynx. You might think of them as a sandwich. Jaw on top, tongue in the middle, larynx at the bottom. (I don’t know. It’s what came to mind). The swallowing muscles, which function thousands of times a day on their own, have to be taught to remain in abeyance while singing. Keeping the throat open continuously is a very weird thing to do deliberately. Singng sustained long passages where one doesn’t swallow is the equivalent of doing a slow sustained arabesque…quite out of the ordinary, although lots of people learn to do both, OVER TIME. If you are a classical singer who has ever sung such passages you might have experienced that when you are done it takes a few moments for the swallowing response to come back.

The swallowing muscles constrict the side walls of the throat, allowing the larynx to raise and the epilglottis to flap over and cover the larynx so that food or saliva can move down the esophagus. They work to prevent anything caught in the folds to be expelled violently threw coughing (you cannot override this response). In order for these muscles to do their job they have to be free to move. Holding them still is a way to restrict their movement, so too much of that isn’t good. Keeping the vibrato out of a system that has one is also a way to hold the muscles still. Early music, barber shop, and jazz, all use deliberately straight tone and if the singer happens to have a natural vibrato, these styles ask the singer to “supress” it. OVER TIME, this can make free movement of the entire vocal system diffiicult.

If we go back to the tongue, the at-rest position of the back of the tongue (the part we don’t really feel) determines a lot. It affects the position of the larynx in the throat, and the amount of “tilt” in the thyroid cartilage, and hence, the pull on the vocal folds. Pressure on the back of the tongue also inhibits the soft palate from lifting, as the muscles of the soft palate wrap around in the back of the mouth starting underneath the tongue. Classical singers talk about “spinning” soft tones and “floating” them (ah, those “voice teacher jargon” words). This is only possible when the tongue base is released from the swallowing muscles and is actually free to adjust itself in the back of the mouth. Easier said than done. Singing a high note softly isn’t difficult if the muscles are loose enough to do this, to let go. BUT, singing loud asks the opposite…..that the musculature be “engaged” (activated) such that the larynx isn’t bouncing around. The laryngeal musculature has to help, as do the muscles of the jaw, mouth and tongue, and there has to be a good deal of air in the lungs and pressure on that air, for the loud sounds to be sung well, and not shouted. Therefore, these are opposite behaviors and it takes a lot of work to coordinate both ends of the physiologic scale such that all the muscles can make all responses, including the vocal folds. Most people are better at one thing that the other. Big voices sometimes have trouble with soft tones and flexibility. Smaller, light voices can fly like the wind and sing in hushed tones but wear out when constant volume is required. Fussing with the balance of these skills is required for all good singers, no matter what kind of music they want to do. It is a task that is tedious, and sometimes a pain in the neck (not in the throat!).

I have developed the ability to feel the muscles of the back of my tongue and mouth move them more or less independently. That sounds crazy, I know. I would be willing to have someone test me with either more electrodes or through X-ray photography, but I doubt that will happen. I have only this to back up my statement. The first time I had a fibre optic tube put down my nasal passages, I discovered that I could move things around in my throat by looking at the video monitor. I attracted a crowd at the Voice Foundation Symposium (where this happened in the early 80s). It seems that whatever I was asked to do, I could do. What I thought I was doing, I was doing, and it was clear that others saw this as well. Later, when I participated in more research, I repeated this many times.

I believe that we all have the ability to develop this type of responsiveness. Most of my students end up having very accute perceptions of what’s going on “in there”. This is the same thing that happens in bio-feedback. People learn to control body reactions through the feedback loop of what they see and hear on the “machine”. (Bio-feedback training is used to control high blood pressure and heart rate, and other conditions). It takes time, but it isn’t all that difficult.

I know from experience, both as a singer and as a teacher, that very small adjustments can make an enormous difference in the sound. It is possible to change the shape and position of the entire tongue, and of the other intrinsic muscles, and to change them deliberately. Learning to do this produces authentic stylistic changes, not imitation or manipulation. I don’t mind nit-picking with experienced professionals about getting these adjustments to show up (through changing the registration and the vowels). It’s the way to move from excellent to sublime.

A woman used to advertise in Back Stage with an ad that read: “If you can’t sing, no one can teach you. If you can sing, you don’t need lessons. If you are somewhere in between, I can make you a singer.”

This ad always made me laugh, then sigh. She wasn’t alone in those beliefs. There are other ideas about singing along the same lines like, “kids don’t need lessons, cause kids just sing naturally” (wrong). “Some people just don’t have a good ear” and the old favorite, “if you can sing like I do, then you’re great. If not, you have no talent”.

Put these alongside the ones like “if you study classically you can sing everything” and “all singing is the same” (that one really gets me), and you have quite a stew. Is it any wonder that singing training is a jumble?

Let’s say that it would be better to put things in a different light.

The LARYNX can or it can’t.

The larynx, and the vocal folds within the larynx, is the boss of the system. It is a scientific fact that the vocal folds control the airflow, and NOT the other way around, even though every singer in the world has been taught that the air controls the sound. If the vocal folds don’t do what vocal folds do easily, efficiently, correctly and continuously, no amount of breath support, resonance adjustment, “placement”, or any other maneuver is going to make up for that.

Anyone who works with injured vocal folds, or ones recently recovered from injury, in a singer, finds out soon enough that the folds decide what kind of a sound the person is going to produce. All the other things that affect the sound are important but they won’t make up for the folds themselves. Singing teachers and singers, as well as anyone else who works with the voice professionally, need to understand that, as not to comprehend this is to confuse the forest for the trees.

That’s why, as long as you treat the symptom as the cause, you are doomed to failure. If you don’t understand that the person is singing flat because the folds aren’t able to properly adjust, because the larynx is somehow stuck, you will think the singer “isn’t listening to the pitch”, has a “bad” ear, or that she isn’t using enough “breath support”. If you don’t understand that a persistent register “break” is caused by lack of flexibility in the folds and in the laryngeal musculature, and not by poor “breath support” (only) or lack of “forward resonance”, you will never get anywhere. If someone is singing with an unsteady tone, and that person is a relatively decent singer, and the person cannot get the tone to be steady no matter what they do, something is wrong INSIDE. If the voice is hoarse, rough, or raspy, no amount of “nasal resonance” or “forward placement” or abdominal strength is going to make that hoarseness go away all by itself.

The larynx is the source. THE SOURCE. It is the Godfather. All the other ingredients that go into voiced sound are the CAPOS (sorry, my grandfather was born in Sicily). The lungs are the CAPO di tutti CAPI, but they are not the Godfather….remember you can live without making sound, so the lungs cannot override the vocal folds and insist that sound come out on their own.

What direct influence do we have over the vocal folds, over the larynx? NONE. It’s nice if you think “my larynx is down” but you cannot make that happen on purpose, and if you do, you will not sing well. It works the same if you think “my larynx is up” (just as incorrect). What we can do, very deliberately, is make a specific kind of sound. We can learn to repeat that sound consistently. We can label it. If we are lucky, we will be able to replicate it with more and more accuracy, and also to vary it with greater subtlety. That’s it. We should be paying a lot of attention to sound for its own sake, but what most singers are told is “don’t listen to yourself” or “you are listening to yourself” (as a negative judgement). Without the ability to hear yourself, how can you possibly learn to control what you are doing? Deaf people don’t sing, right?

So, remember what we can and cannot do and don’t confuse them. Remember what happens indirectly, as a response, and what we do to cause those responses is MAKE CERTAIN TYPES OF SOUNDS. All else follows. Cause first, effect second. Don’t lose that, ever!

ARROGANT — I have been called arrogant. I don’t like that accusation, but I suppose it could be true. Certainly I do my best NOT to be arrogant, but I am pretty definite about my opinions and not very willing to change my mind about most of them, at least in terms of singing teachers and politics!

The most common occurance of this accusation is when I assert that classical singing training is not “one size fits all”. That costs me (and also my colleagues who think similarly) the most. Still, I find this such an odd label.

Here am I, singing decently at 57+, both classical and CCM, including belt songs and Handel, Mozart and Motown. Teaching hours and hours every day, singers in all kinds of styles from classical (yes, classical), music theater (on Broadway and not), jazz, folk, rock, gospel/R&B, and working with singers who have injured vocal folds, with children (professional and not), with people who have been recommended by my speech pathologist or medical colleagues, and with teachers of all ages and backgrounds. Here am I, who have had my vocal folds wired with electrodes, right straight through holes made in the outside of my neck, for the sake of science, who have been scoped and studied by all manner of doctors, and who have made myself my own guinea pig, trying out every single exercise before I ever gave it to a student, to make sure that it was safe to do. (I never ask anyone to make a sound I would not myself make, and make repeatedly, for any reason. )

This gives me enormous confidence, certainty, and courage, because I have been there and done that over and over. I know how it feels, both good and bad, and I have (in the past) trashed my voice a few times in exploring things. When I speak, I base what I say on more than 35 years of teaching (that’s 185,00 continuous hours of listening to people sing just in lessons, not counting recordings and concerts, or listening to myself). I have had plenty of time to see what helps people consistently and what doesn’t, what kinds of things work with what people and in what circumstances, and what don’t. No, it isn’t ever a guarantee, or a promise, and it isn’t always possible to ABSOLUTELY KNOW, but vocal problems do have some “typical” qualitities, and after a while, you see what they are and how they develop. Often, now, I can tell what kind of problem someone is dealing with and where the problem will show up, just by listening carefully to someone’s spoken description of the problems they have with their singing.

Is this arrogance or experience? Is this arrogance or knowledge? Is this arrogance or self-confidence? Should I make believe I don’t know what I know just to make myself look humble? Shouldn’t I say what I have experienced so that others who have not had the chance to garner the same experience might at least have the opportunity to consider the efficacy of what I am suggesting? (Not that they have to accept what I say, only try it out to see what happens when they do). In fact, isn’t this my moral obligation?

And, when the person accusing me of being arrogant hasn’t ever sung, or has only sung classical music, and may, in fact, not have been in a public performance for years, and maybe wasn’t all that great as a classical singer in the first place, and maybe hasn’t ever read even one voice science article about CCM, let alone done research, and hasn’t traveled the world listening to a wide variety of vocal music styles, and doesn’t like those styles, and isn’t capable of making any of the sounds of any kind of music except classsical……..who is such a person to call me, or anyone like me, arrogant?

When someone speaks with authority based upon long years of experience, study, investigation, practice, observation, experimentation, documentation, validation, and results produced, it is bound to be frightening to someone who does not have that same kind of background. And, if such a person says “you need to improve what you are doing, as it is not adequate to meet the needs of the situation at hand” I suppose it can be seen as an arrogant statement — as a threat. BUT, perhaps it is just an urgent plea, like when someone who is standing at the top of a tall building watching a big Tsunami approaching the shore is saying to someone on the beach, “I can see what’s coming and I am telling you, you have to change your position”. Such a statement would not be one of arrogance but rather an urgent plea and a warning to take care.

That’s me. I know that the music world is going to keep changing and that all styles of music are going to continue to influence each other. I know that voices will continue to be placed under great stress and that composers will continue to write things for the voice that take it where it did not go in Handel’s or Puccini’s music, or in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s music, or even in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s music. I know that vocal instruction has to be geared to function, and to style, and that is going to be more necessary in the future than even it is now. If saying this out loud, to whomever will listen, like the folks reading this blog, makes me arrogant, then I stand guilty as accused. I will be sorry, when I leave this earth, that this was a label I acquired, as I really do strive to see myself as just another ordinary person in every area of my life, but if it makes the process of getting accurate and excellent vocal training one tiny bit easier for young singers, then it will have been worth it.