Various Posts

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.

Human beings are capable of believing some amazing things. I couldn’t begin to list the ideas that have been taken up by millions of people that are, at best, silly, and at worst, dangerous.

Singing teachers, then, are no worse off than a lot of other groups of folks. They are no less blind, pig-headed, and stuck in their thinking than any other collection of individuals. I write about them, of course, because I am part of this group, and I get to see and deal with their attitudes on an almost daily basis.

It seems to me that many singing teachers don’t know and maybe never knew that there is a difference between a “good voice” and “good singing” and between “having a good voice” and “being an artist”. Even if you stick to classical music, you can go to Maria Callas, whose instrument became flawed at an early age, as someone who didn’t sound great, but was an amazing artist. In CCM, there are dozens of people who have had major careers with awful voices or not great voices. These days, it is as if the music business seeks out people with no special vocal quality, deliberately.

What’s worse, the teachers, who are supposed to be the experts about what constitutes “good singing” often don’t know what that is either. They think that good singing is whatever they like. (How’s that as a fair basis for evaluation?) That means that the people teaching opera sometimes don’t know what good opera singing is, or what an “operatic voice” is. I know that sounds ridiculous, but I am talking here from personal experience. (I couldn’t possibly make this stuff up). A teacher I knew once told me that Leontyne Price “couldn’t sing”. (??????) Another one told me that Fredericka von Stade was “boring” (!!!!!!!) Give me a break! I would have understood either of these people saying “I don’t care for this artist’s voice or style” but to make these comments is to demonstrate enormous ignorance, not wisdom. I could only quake thinking of their students.

The people with ideas like this are sometimes in positions of great importance…..they are making rules about audition and course requirements, choosing winners of competitions, and choosing who gets work. It’s scary to think of how little fundamental agreement exists in teaching singing over even the smallest criteria, yet teachers of singing act as if we all had the same ideas about all sorts of things. Voice science has helped some in this regard, but now there are a lot of teachers who know a little science and think that’s all they need to know. We are all familiar with the adage “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing” and this couldn’t be more true than in the case of singing teachers. They throw around words like “larynx” and “vocal folds” with little connection to anything more than whatever they imagine these body parts to be in their own minds.

I read an article recently written by someone who had taken a course in introductory voice science that contained every buzz word in the course. Anyone reading it with some modicum of knowledge garnered immediately that the writer barely understood how to discuss simple vocal function, but she surely knew that if she used all the big, fancy words she would impress the folks who had never seen them before, including the editor of the publication where the article appeared.

Singing teachers who believe that classical singing is a “one size fits all” training will continue to lump all CCM voices into the same category (awful or acceptable). Since most of them wouldn’t know a “good” belt sound from a “bad” belt sound, and have to rely totally on the singers’ own perception of what works, analyzing further what is happening is pointless. Sending such people out to teach (happens every day) is a sad and sorry state of affairs, and saying so isn’t meant to be an inflammatory statement, just something truthful. The teachers of singing who find such sounds awful would love for the sounds, and the styles in the music business that generate them, to just go away and die. The ones who have found them acceptable, but won’t personally sing them, will continue to hope that what they think and what they teach are somehow in the ballpark (and the students are on their own with that). Those of us who do make the sounds, who understand what we are doing when we make them, who understand how to explain that to another person to help them make them, who know what constitutes doing them in a healthy and appropriate manner, and who can make other kinds of sounds as well, will have to just keep on keeping on with the crusade. There’s no harm in hoping that we can have a universe as we want it to be.