Various Posts

Tonight I had the great pleasure of attending a rehearsal for a show I am in called “Broadway Soul”, which will be done on Monday evening, November 13th, as a benefit for the Amas Theater and its related functions. The creator of the evening is the same man I did shows with between 1975 and 1978, and I haven’t performed anything with professionals since my last show with him in 1978. It was fun and rewarding to attend this evening’s rehearsal of gospel, rock, blues, and soul music, all of which we learned by ear pretty much on the spot, for the show two days from now. It was great to be with four people who were with me in that last performance (three of whom I haven’t seen since then) and a whole bunch of others, some of whom were born well after 1978.

I am singing in every vocal quality, I go from G below middle C to a sustained high C#. We are also doing some simple choreography or movement in some songs, all of which I picked up on the spot.

Why is this significant? Why should anyone who is reading this care?

Because I am living proof that you don’t have to sing only one kind of sound to be healthy, to be viable, to be in shape. Because whatever “chops” I have, have been maintained by teaching, not by performing. Because the other people who are singing with me are also in great shape, and some of the gospel singers who are wailing away have been doing so for 40 years and sound absolutely terrific.

I expect to do a performance of Handel’s “Let The Bright Seraphim” with baroque trumpet and organ in December. I will have about four weeks to get it ready and I expect that will be more than enough time. I sang it successfully this past May.

Doesn’t it seem worthwhile to look at what I have done vocally? Not because I am this great singer, or because I have the best voice on earth (hardly), not because I have a different kind of vocal folds than other human beings, or more talent and ability than most professionals. No, it is because the process of learning to sing in a variety of styles, and of staying in shape has to do with respecting what works in the body. No one “owns” that knowledge, no one can possess it or take it away. It is learnable and it is teachable. And THAT is why paying attention to what has happened with me, and to me, all these years is important.

If you let the voice go where it wants with awareness, if you allow yourself to breathe, if you keep your connection to your heart and to music, only good can come from that. We are not limited, and neither are our voices.

I am thrilled to be singing again with these wonderful artists. It catapulted me right back to where I was all those years ago, as if in a time warp. The only thing piercing that bubble was my awareness that my voice is better and my mind is clearer now, at 57, than it was when I was 29.

Is college vocal training supposed to be development of Cultural Sophistication or is it Occupational Training? Is it both?

I think most schools are confused about the direction of their vocal instruction courses.

If I were spending $250,000 for a four year college education, (that’s what it costs here), I would want to be able to get a job after I got out…right after I got out! Of course, I think that cultural awareness, as well as many other wonderful things that are supposed to be part of a “liberal arts” education are very important. We do need to know about the great composers and the times in which they lived, just as we need to know about the great writers, painters, sculptors, architects, and leaders of civilization, in order to be well-rounded individuals.

BUT

Students can learn about composers in a class on music literature, or vocal literature. The do not need to sing “O Del Mio Dolce Ardor” to become good vocalists. Vocal training based on function develops the voice to its fullest capacities, and is aimed at giving the vocalist the widest range of choices for his or her singing. That this has been associated with learning Italian, German, French and English art songs is happenstance. It doesn’t have to stay that way, but this idea is slow to die as an ingredient in training programs at schools and universities as well as in private studios. There is no benefit in singing “Caro Mio Ben” versus “Edelweiss” to a beginning singer, one works as well as the other in terms of application of technique to music, provided that the teacher knows how to make and teach the appropriate sounds necessary in either song.

Going back to the schools, aren’t “mock auditions” occupational training? Isn’t it also true that inviting agents in to see productions is about “getting a job”? Preparation for singers to go to job interviews (called auditions) for jobs (parts, roles, concerts and recordings) ought to be based upon a knowledge of what the job particulars will be. (Job description). If you apply for a position at a corporation as Chief Accountant, there would be specific skills that you would be expected to have. Why wouldn’t that also apply to a job in the music industry?

If the music business/industry (show business) knows what it wants, and it usually does, wouldn’t it be useful to have any vocal training program align with those requirements? Isn’t that, in fact, what the schools are doing when they hire “professionals” with life experience as performers to be faculty?

Why, then, don’t more schools have curriculum that reflect the standards and practices of the 2006 music industry, rather than those of 17th and 18th century European society’s musical tastes and expectations? How is it that certain “Doctors of Musical Arts” who teach “music theater” don’t even know how it sounds on Broadway right now? (Some do, a lot don’t). Why is there such an emphasis on “songs before 1968, 69, 70” in college auditions? What happened after that? It was that Rock music came to theater. Hmmmmmm.

In classical music there is tremendous emphasis on respecting the composer’s wishes. No one would think to “re-write” Puccini by changing the notes, rhythms, words or markings of “La Boheme”. Why shouldn’t the same be true of CCM? Shouldn’t the wishes of the composer be important? If a show was written to be sung by rock, pop, gospel, jazz or country vocalists, shouldn’t the performers in a student production be able to meet those requirements? Why is it considered unreasonable to have young people make those sounds? Because the teachers can’t make them and/or teach them, and because the teachers don’t like those vocal qualities, or those styles of music, and because the teachers are afraid of the sounds, thinking they are dangerous (which you would likely conclude if you couldn’t make them). Conversely, if the students are making those sounds, shouldn’t the people in charge (music directors, coaches, conductors, teachers) understand when the students are making them in a way that is incorrect (unhealthy)? Isn’t it, at the least, unfair, and at the worst, unethical, to send the students on stage to sing “Seussical” with no clue as to how they are doing, other than asking the student, “Do you feel OK?” Not good. Not good at all.

No one needs to sing to stay alive. In fact, no one needs to speak. You could take a vow of silence (people do) and get along just fine. You certainly do not need to express music to communicate with others.

So, why sing? Why bother? Ask anyone who does….you will get all kinds of responses.

I sing because I love to sing. As a child, it was the most joyful thing I could do. Singing was a very wonderful experience. Later, when I understood it better, I would have ranked it as a “high experience”. Right alongside eating vanilla ice cream or kissing my sweetie.

As a child, whenever I sang, I got noticed. This was a mixed blessing. Sometimes the attention was nice and sometimes it made me uncomfortable. I didn’t understand why what came out of my mouth was any different, or better, than what came out of other kids’ mouths, but the world seemed to think it was. It wasn’t like I tried to make myself sound a certain way.

I found out quickly that some people said they couldn’t sing, and even amongst those who could sing, as in “carry a tune”, that not everyone had a “good voice”. I could have opted to keep my mouth shut, I suppose, but it would have been almost impossible, as I sang for myself. My life at home being less than happy, singing was one way to cheer myself up and to get away from everything else. In high school, the experience of getting a leading role in a local musical at 17 changed my life. Actually, it gave me a life, as up until then, I really didn’t have one that made me want to continue living in it. Singing was a miracle, it was a path, it gave me a reason to get up in the morning, and that was something I really needed. If I could have measured my love for singing, I would have had to find a very large scale.

Little did I know that my singing was going to be a lifelong journey. Learning about singing has been the biggest passion of my life and continues to inspire, enchant and enrich my life every day. With each person and each lesson, I learn something valuable about singing and about life.

The saddest thing to encounter is someone who used to sing but gave up after taking singing lessons unsuccessfully. What an awful legacy! The second saddest thing is to encounter someone who has lost the ability to sing for unknown reasons and can’t seem to get it back. The third saddest thing is to meet someone who has never sung because they were told to “be quiet” due to “sounding bad”. Such a terrible and unncessary fate! Fortunately, if anyone in any of these circumstances would be willing, the situations can be remedied with guidance from a knowledgeable authority.

I think the best question to ask is “Why not sing?” Since it is a fact that everyone can sing, even if they have little ability to do so at the outset, why not? Singing is a healthy, free, available, entertaining, fascinating thing to do. It’s a great hobby, and an interesting profession, with lots of avenues to explore. We all agree that singing is different than speaking, but the agreement stops there. What if we sang in our day-to-day conversation instead of spoke? What if singing was so rare that it was difficult to find anyone who could do it? Our entire world would be different, wouldn’t it?

No one knows why we can sing, where singing came from or what it’s for. All cultures have singing in them somewhere, so it is a universal thing, something very human. Remember that the next time you hear someone singing. Remember it when you hear yourself humming in the kitchen or singing along with the radio in the car. Be grateful. You are experiencing something inexplicable and powerful, something unique and ordinary. Enjoy!

What, exactly, is training for the voice anyway? We all learn to speak by listening to our parents or caregivers by the time we are about two. Our genes determine our anatomy — how long the vocal tract is and how wide it can be, the length and thickness of the vocal folds, the size of the jaw, and mouth, etc. Some people grow up in circumstances where the voice is used energetically and some don’t. Some families are musical, some are expressive, some are performers — it varies so much. Why does anyone need training anyway?

It depends. If we speak about training in the sense that it coaxes the voice to go beyond its own natural tendencies, and prepares it to stand up to doing things no one’s voice was ever meant to do (like singing 8 times a week in a Broadway show), then we are discussing an atheletic development. It seems that music has always taken the voice somewhat beyond speech, although exactly how much has varied widely. Theatrical speech, however, also used to demand a lot from the voice that wasn’t exactly the same as conversation at dinner, but much of that kind of skill is disappearing, since virtually all professional (and a lot of amateur) theater is now amplified.

Based upon science, loud sounds and high notes need more air to be produced. The only way to get more air is to take a bigger (deeper) breath. If the air pressure inside the lungs isn’t sufficient, it needs to be pressurized so that it can be high enough to get the job done. Seems pretty simple, then, to figure out that a person needs to find a simple, easy and quick way to breathe in a lot of air and use it judiciously while sound is being made. The two parts of the body that logically would be involved with this process are the lungs and the belly. One could include the chest/ribs and the entire abdominal area, but the further away we go from those areas, the less direct the activity becomes. It also stands to reason that if the chest cavity is collapsed due to poor posture, not much air is going to go into the lungs. So posture figures significantly into the inhalation process.

If we decide that making continuous sounds is unusual (speech starts and stops), and if we also conclude that making continuous sounds primarily on vowels on specific pitches and volumes is also unusual, (that’s what vocal music does) maybe even very unusual, then we would have some good reasons why we would need to do something to acclimatize the voice to executing these tasks comfortably. If you just kept making such sounds, over and over, at increasingly loud volumes, you would be training the voice, and indirectly the breathing. That, in fact, is what self-taught singers do and in a lot of cases it works very well.

The problems come, then, when the above doesn’t work well, doesn’t work fast enough, or actually causes a set of problems. For instance, one could just lose one’s voice doing the above, and keep losing it over and over, unless you figured out something about what you were doing to cause the problem. Some folks can do that, and some can’t. It isn’t so much that there is just one way to train the voice, or that one person has found “the” answer, it is that the body (voice and breath) seem to like a certain way of working and not like other ways. Understanding how to take the voice beyond its natural boundaries and tendencies in a way that isn’t going to cause problems isn’t effective when it is just a random process of trial and error. In the case of quite a few singing teachers that is exactly what it turns out to be. Figuring out that you really cannot force the body to do anything that is not in its best interests, because sooner or later it won’t hold up, is just a question of common sense.

A great deal is known about exercise physiology. We know that straining the neck happens frequently while doing stomach “crunches”. Many atheletic trainers have modified stomach exercises in order to avoid this negative side effect. A good singing teacher is going to do the same thing with vocal exercises, so that the student will understand how to go beyond the normal demands of speech and simple singing, and into vigorous vocal expression without strain.

Because that is so, many people can teach singing effectively, with or without an organized method. For those who haven’t had time to figure out a variety of approaches and test them in order to see what kind of results they produce, learning about effective methods that someone else has developed and tested over time seems reasonable. As long as the exercises and attitudes work, as long as they are useful, as long as they get to the goals of the singer and do so without violence or harm, to the body or mind, the proof is in the doing.

Training that prepares the voice for any extended behavior is good. Training that is directed towards helping the singer do whatever kind of style they choose is good. Training that takes the voice into only one kind of sound or one way to breathe, is not.

Do you think that babies are afraid to cry really loud, lest they lose their voices? Perhaps infants do get laryngitis, but I have read also that vigorous crying is necessary for lung development and for strengthening of the muscles of the throat and mouth. Do you think that children on a playground generally worry about the sounds they make? It is true that children can and do injure their voices, but many children just play, making various kinds of noises and sounds, and end up just fine.

At what point does really using the voice fully and freely begin to engender fear? When does the fear of making some kinds of sound override the spontaneity and joy of just letting sound go?

Think about this. If you want to sound like an opera singer you must not let yourself do anything to disturb your set-up. (If you are a pop singer, you don’t have a set-up available that will let you authentically sound like an opera singer, so that’s not an issue.) If you are a popera singer (a la Bocelli or Sarah Brightman), you can’t really sing classical or pop music full out. Isn’t all of this odd? Some sounds are better than others because of how we have accepted them and labeled them culturally.

Fear isn’t a good basis for any art. Art implies that there is creativity at the bottom of the process and that anything could or can happen. Fear of being spontaneous or creative seems to be anti-both. On the other hand, since being afraid occurs frequently on the road to being a vocal master, it is something useful to look at, explore, investigate and absolutely face. The fear is within, it is real, it is a block, and it is a useful teacher.

What frightens you most as a singer? When? Why? What have you done about it?

Tonight I watched a few kid belters on YouTube. Some of them were 9, 10 and 11 years old. The singing was impressive, but pretty pressured, and to me, anyway, troublesome. I would love to know what happens to these kids over time……I mean years. I was also troubled by the fact that these little girls were singing love songs. Should a 9-year-old be singing “I’m Telling You You’re Not Going”?

Our society likes loud, pushy singing, not just in kids, but in everyone. We really don’t think as much of the silvery angelic girls voices as we do of the kids who can belt to the rafters. I want to know what happens to the kid belters when they grow up. Do they turn into Whitney Houston? Look at her voice and her life……….

Belting isn’t automatically damaging, but it is stressful in what it asks for from the throat if not done well. For the same reason that the old traditions didn’t ask a child to make an adult operatic sound, we need to ask if letting a young woman belt without any limit at all is good for the voice over time. Andrea McArdle survived really well, but she sang more than she screamed.

I don’t have an answer here, just questions. There is so much we don’t know.

In a perfect world children would always look, act and sing like children, not like little adults. I think maybe this statement dates me, but that’s how I feel. How about you?

Physical skills, which singing is, must be learned by doing. Most skills, like dance, but sports, too, are taught by those who have become experts at doing the process themselves. They impart their wisdom, in one-to-one sessions, and in classes. They teach what they know from life experience. I can’t imagine a golf pro who didn’t golf or a dance teacher who had never actually danced. Somehow, though, singing seems to be treated differently and I wonder why.

It is true that just because someone has done something, they may not understand how they do it. It is true, also, that knowing what one does, doesn’t mean that you can relate it to someone else such that it helps them do it in the same manner. But not to have experienced it at all and still teach it……how does that work? On the basis of observation alone, what is the criteria for deciding how to coordinate the necessary behaviors and attitudes? It seems to me that such teaching adds to the considerable confusion about what’s going on, most especially in the case of singing.

“Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach”. An awful aphorism, but one that turns up anyway. I suppose that a lot of people who never had careers, or had them but not at a very high level of public acclaim or financial recompense, “retire” into teaching because, what else can they do? Being a professional or professional-level amateur singer doesn’t much prepare you for anything else. What does one do with all those years of making musical vocal sounds? Let them go to waste?

On the other hand, people who play piano in singing studios often go on to teach singing, even if they have never sung themselves. This has been accepted in singing since its beginnings. No one has ever studied if such teachers are better, worse or the same as those who teach from having first been singers themselves. It would an interesting study.

In my opinion, one of the key ingredients to effectively teaching Contemporary Commercial Music, or pop, rock, jazz, country etc., is to be willing to make the sounds of those styles oneself. My Institute at Shenandoah requires that everyone who wants to pass the certification exam be willing to make the sounds, (at least in a small way) not just talk about them. The reason I did this is because some sounds that are pretty harsh can be made without vocal stress and some sounds that are pleasant can be made with a good deal of tension that is covered up by acoustic patterns that please the ear of the listener. The best way to tell the difference is to learn to feel the process of sound-making at a subtle level. Interior musculature differences can be perceived, although not by a beginner, and not by someone who has been taught that to “feel” anything in the throat is bad. The ears can be fooled, if not backed up by some keen kinesthetic awareness. The eyes, too, don’t always have anything to look at that seems signficant.

This brings me to the following. Why are classical singers so afraid to disturb their vocal production? What is the level of fear that makes them hold on so tightly to what they have learned? This isn’t an unusual attitude, although I grant that not everyone feels that way.

Here is my answer. If you have invested thousands of dollars, years and years of time, and both mental and emotional energy trying to make your voice do something it was never intended to do (remember science says the vocal folds were evolved to protect the lungs from foreign bodies, not for sound making. That came later), you get very invested in the results you have produced. Your voice becomes a “Ming Dynasty” vase or a Rembrandt painting…..you don’t want to do anything that might “damage” or disturb it. Then, of course, your voice and your singing become a museum piece, and energy has to be expended on maintaining it “as it has always been”. This isn’t the greatest mindset to be in if you are teaching. One has to assume that the majority of time the people being taught are youngsters or beginners. Do they want to learn how to be a “museum quality replica” or do they want to know how to sing “what’s happening now”? Answer that yourself.

Example: I have a bunch of students who do experimental theater. One of them was creating a piece that called for all sorts of sounds….grunts, inhales, squeals, noisy exhale, growls…..you name it. When he had an occasion to work with opera singers his reaction was “what’s wrong with these singers? Why don’t they want to make the sounds I am asking them to make?” I explained that growling was likely not on the menu of preferred sounds for someone who might be singing Mozart after this particular work was over. An understandable attitude to me, but perhaps not to him.

Conversely, when this artist was asked to perform a simple Broadway show tune, he was hesitant. Not his expertise, not his world. Not so different, then, the position of the opera singer who was also reluctant to go away from operatic sounds.

If, however, we aren’t willing to continue to be open to new sounds and new patterns of making sound (or new styles of music), how do we expect the students to be open? Aren’t we supposed to be role models? A cardinal rule of leadership is: Never ask anyone to do something you yourself would not do. If you don’t “walk the talk” (sing the sound) then how can you expect your student to do so and do it well? Where are their auditory role models — the ones who know how to do it properly who are acting as the guides of the voice?

Are you afraid to let go of “your sound”? Are you afraid to sound like a rock singer, lest it ruin your voice? Then don’t teach rockers. Have the integrity to teach from what you have at least attempted to do (it doesn’t mean you have to earn your living singing rock songs), or say that you just don’t go there. Face your fears, but overcome them. Voices, like people, are resilient and adaptable, especially in an atmosphere of joyful experimentation. If you treat your voice gently, with respect, and go slowly, fear isn’t necessary. To paraphrase the saying…..”Be the sound you want your student to become.” But please don’t teach what you can’t or won’t even attempt to do. The world of singing doesn’t need more of that attitude.

We all learn, I hope, from mistakes. Doing what we do, however, means learning by working with a student, who gets to be the recipient of those mistakes. Not so nice. We all mean well and do the best we can, and we all have to experiment, to “tinker”. As long as these experiments are small and non-violent, they are appropriate. As long as we “seek to do no harm” (a quote from Oren Brown), we are within ethical bounds to try things, but it does mean that the student has a right to know that. We don’t want to hide the fact that we are experimenting. If a doctor can make adjustment on medication, then a teacher can make adjustments in vocal exercises.

When I had been teaching for a little while in New York City I went through an “animal sounds” phase. I don’t know why I went this way, but I had students barking (I’m so embarrassed!) and mooing (sad), and chirping (tweet tweet). I don’t think I did any vocal harm, but I can only imagine what they thought of me…….I look back and hang my head.

I remember being perplexed about why some students just could not sing a recognizable [a] (as in father). I can recall telling one student, “Look, you just have to find a way to get an [a] out of your throat, as I can’t make it come out for you!” She was so desperate to sing, that it did just literally pop out in one class, suprising all of us, and causing her to burst into tears of joy.

Another time, I was bound to untie the vocal knots I heard in a different woman’s voice, and I set about doing so very vigorously. I didn’t realize that in taking her voice apart, I was also taking away her ability to sing and leaving her with nothing. She came to me and said, “Before I started working with you I knew I wasn’t singing all that well, but now, I can’t sing at all.” She was right. Fortunately, she wasn’t really angry at me, but she did stop studying. Also fortunately, I saw her a few years later and was able to apologize. She was OK, as she went on to other things that she actually found more satisfying than singing and I offered to have her come back to straighten things out, but she said she didn’t need to, that she was fine. I was truly chagrined, but I never again attacked a vocal problem so straightforwardly, nor without warning, and was always careful to make sure that there was enough vocal function left so that the person could get through a song, no matter what.

Then there was the student who was the daughter of a famous movie star. She wanted to be a pop singer. She came twice a week. I did every exercise I could think of, I demonstrated, a explained, I questioned. She said she was practicing, but we got nowhere. Absolutely, positively, nowhere. I kept trying because she was so determined and she had people hounding her to “make a record” (before the CD was around) because she was who she was. We worked consistently for well over a year and there was no evidence whatsoever that this young woman was learning to sing. She sounded bland at best, and had no connection to what I was trying to do. I finally told her that I thought she should try someone else and she did. Her next teacher is an older man I know who has been teaching successfully for many years. He had slightly more success with her, but he told me subsequently that she had been doing cocaine off and on and that was effecting her, as one might well imagine. DUH. You think I might have noticed something like this. Not me. Little Aries Ram the determined doesn’t know the symptoms of drug use. I gave up because I had failed to get her to be able to sing. Later, I heard a demo that she had done. It was unrecognizable. Turns out that this was at the beginning of sampling and over-dupping electronic digital effects in the studio. The demo sounded great…..just not at all like her. She got to where she wanted to go but it had nothing to do with my ineffective teaching!

The hardest part of teaching someone is knowing that singer has left in midstream. This isn’t really a mistake, but it operates in the life of the student as if it were. I had a woman come to me saying that she was a dramatic operatic soprano, but that she wanted to sing jazz. I didn’t agree with her that her voice was truly a dramatic soprano but I went about working on her voice and pulling it over to a chest-register based, speaking voice place. It was tough, as she was in her mid-40s, and had been singing a long time, but she seemed willing to practice and she did get better. At just about the point where the instrument was turning around and beginning to balance, she stopped coming. I called a few times to see what was going on, but she never called me back. I didn’t know if it was me, the lesson process, or something else, and that is very frustrating. It was like eating a meal and having the waiter take the plate away before you are done……

Years passed. I forgot about her. Then, quite by accident, my throat specialist and I spoke one day because he wanted me to suggest someone who worked with “ear issues” for a singer who could no longer “hear the notes”. A patient of his had asked for a referrel like this. She did not have actual hearing problems, he said, but had been told that she wasn’t singing the notes when she thought she was. The vocalist had told him that she seemed to have “forgotten how the notes sounded” because she couldn’t match them exactly any more. This seemed very odd to me, like nothing I had ever heard of. I asked for more information, thinking that this sounded like someone who was experiencing a form of muscle tension dysphonia, causing the voice to go flat. I asked who it was, just in case it was someone I knew, thinking perhaps I could speak directly to the person. Guess who it was? Yep. Ms. “Now I’m Outta Here”. I immediately wondered……what happened? My guess was that she was had gotten stuck in chest register because she hadn’t stayed through the process long enough to balance out the newly aquired bottom with the middle and the top. This always causes pitch issues. Since I had called to no avail, I opted to suggest a teacher who specializes in a method that positions every single pitch and vowel in a specific place on the hard palate. I don’t know what happened after that. I wonder if the vocal problems had anything to do with the fact that she left in what I would call mid-stream. I think about it every now and then and have no answer.

Remember, this is a helping profession. It is a relationship profession. Like all relationships, some work better than others and sometiimes things just don’t work out at all. No one is to blame. Mistakes may or may not be part of that. As long as we take responsibility for our own actions, that’s all that’s necessary.

In my work as a teacher, I have always done better with experienced students. Not that I don’t work with beginners or singers of average ability, it is just that people who have been around quite a bit seem to respond best to what I have to offer. My list of such students is longer than I can give — singers of all styles who have been to 4, 5, 6, or more singing teachers for 5, 10, 15, up to 35 years (yes!) with no success in solving specific, persistent problems. Sometimes those teachers are themselves well-known and experienced, but have been unable to unlock the issues these dedicated vocal artists are striving to address.

Singers who sing well, in spite of limitations, are sometimes aware that they aren’t doing their best, but can’t seem to get out from behind their own problems. It undermines their confidence and prevents them from going full out toward their own career success. They report to me that they have been told “there’s nothing to worry about”, “your problems aren’t so bad”, “no one is perfect”, “it’s no big deal” or even “there’s nothing wrong”. The singers are left to feel like vocal hypochondriacs, narcissistic babies, or super perfectionists. They feel like frauds. In their work with me, however, I can often find the not so tiny places where the vocal machine has a couple of “knocks” that are causing trouble, and with work, get them to disappear. The statement I hear most with these singers when that happens is “Why couldn’t the other teachers do this?” My answer is always they same: “Because they don’t know how.”

Think about it. You have a group of people who believe that all one needs to know is wrapped up in classical vocal technique. Fix the support, or fix the resonance, fix how you do the vowels, or let go of something (by osmosis, of course), or else just know that “your voice just doesn’t do that”, and stop trying.

Fixing “support” is good if the person has issues with inhaling sufficient amounts of air, or of not having enough strength to keep the ribs up during exhalation or has no control over the abdominal muscles. It isn’t good if the person has an issue that isn’t about breathing. Fixing “resonance” is good if the person is an opera singer and needs to sing over an orchestra unamplified, but useless (really) if they are singing CCM, as an end in itself. Fixing the vowel sounds so that they are “placed” differently, fixes the vowels so that they are “placed” differently. It will not change the registration, it will not give the singer a way to handle constriction, or tongue stiffness, or anything else. It will change the way the vowel sound is shaped and thats all, folks.

It is any wonder that when I address the musculature deep within the throat itself that things change? Is this a mystery, a miracle or is it something akin to “pyschic healing”? No. It’s none of these. It is skill, based upon experience, garnered from my use of my own throat in every and all vocal styles, and in working with those muscles until I understood them from the inside out.

Any decent teacher can work with a decent singer and help them improve. Any person with eyes can see external tension and with ears can learn to hear squeezing and swallowing. Only someone with experience can undo negative non-volitional non-visible vocal behavior. If you are a teacher, the place to begin is with your own throat, and if you aren’t willing to do “bad” things with it, so you can learn, you needn’t bother at all.

To those teachers who think there is nothing more for them to know because they know it all, I say, how many kinds of music can you sing authentically? How well do you understand how to sing BADLY? Can you replicate any sound your student makes? Could you go from Mozart to Motown, or from John Larson’s RENT to Puccini’s LA BOHEME? Why not? (and you can hear me saying now…….I can, and there ain’t nothin’ special ’bout me!!)

Everyone who has taken even one singing lesson has encountered some form of useless terminology. There is an endless list of terms that don’t mean anything, and new ones are coined every day. While this may be a show of creativity, it certainly isn’t helpful to anyone wanting to learn how to sing, or to improve their singing.

Think of the list! “Support the tone from your diaphragm”, “Spin it out”, “come down from the top”, “Cover over the back”, “Lift that more”, “Expand the lower space”, “Buzz the cheekbones more”, “put it higher into the skull”, “use more support”, etc. etc.

What is “it”? How do you control “it”? How does one make the cheekbones buzz? What is coming down from the top of what? No matter what kind of phrase you use, how can it be understood if the average person, with no background, has no idea what it means.

This is where the profession got lost. The idea that the larynx must always remain in a low, unchanging position, costs us beautiful, shimmering high notes. The idea that the sound should “be big” makes everyone strive for volume for its own sake, instead of as a means of expression. The idea that the sound has to be positioned or placed in an unchanging “focus” makes for uniformity, but for the wrong reasons. The idea that vocal sound couldn’t be nailed down in simple, basic ways, gave teachers license to make up descriptive phrases that conveniently avoided any connection to physical reality.

In the same way that teachers who do not understand vocal function and mechanics use “breath support” changes as a “fix-all remedy”, so do teachers who do not understand basic acoustic or physiologic response use “placement and resonance” issues as a teaching tactic. It isn’t uncommon for a teacher to “like” or “prefer” certain resonances as being “better” than others, regardless of whether or not they are produced freely and efficiently or with struggle and excess tension.

I remember attending the master class conducted by Alfredo Kraus a few years ago……the auditorium was huge and the audience filled every seat. Mr. Kraus had a long and illustrious career as an operatic tenor and was much esteemed due to his artistry and longevity. What he did during this master class, however, was nigh on to unbelievable, and he got away with it.

He began the evening with a discussion of “voice science” announcing that the vowel [i] (as in free), “has the biggest and most resonance”. He said other equally bizarre things, and, of course, no one stopped him or questioned him, since most people probably didn’t know that this statement is false. He went on to tell the lyric soprano who sang “Signore, Ascolta” from Turandot that she wasn’t “singing in her head register” or something similar (what, she was belting?) Kraus was looking for a “foward, pointed sound” and this voice was round, full and lush. Of course, she was singing a head register dominant tone, but her vowels were not so much bright as “chiaroscuro”. Her issues were that she had no way to interpret the deep emotion of the character. It was astounding that he didn’t help her where she needed help and that he didn’t know enough to leave her beautiful singing alone.

Next, a young tenor came out and sang one of the arias from William Tell (it has lots of high Cs and C#s), which Kraus had also done when he was young, Kraus told the young man that “his vowels were all wrong”. The French of this artist was just fine, but his tone was so heady, it bordered on falsetto. It was “too light” to be really commercially successful in a mainstream opera house. Since Mr. Kraus had inaccurate words as his tools, he could not distinguish between the vocal tone (ultra light) and the vowel sound (just fine) and kept harping on the tenor for “the wrong vowels” while making vocal examples that had the exact same vowels but were considerably heftier in tone quality. You could see the young man straining his brain trying to figure out how in the world his vowels were different from the ones that he was hearing Kraus produce, and you could hear him desperately trying to imitate Kraus’ chestier sound unsuccessfully. Finally, after an agonizing few minutes Kraus announced that this young singer “would never have a career” and sent him away. I was ready to throw things at Kraus, but no one else in the audience seemed to be the least bit perturbed.

Perhaps if Mr. Kraus had had accurate words to assist the singers in understanding what he was trying to convey, the entire evening would have been different. Perhaps, if the profession of teaching singing had some STANDARDS about what the terminology means (not impossible at all), the audience wouldn’t have sat there like a bunch of sheep, listening to a good bit of nonsense and gobbledegook disguised as instruction. Perhaps if we had terminology that related to vocal function rather than vocal effect these two singers would have left the stage as stronger, wiser artists rather than vocalists who had been made to feel bewildered in front of several hundred people.

Does the buck stop here? YOU BET!