Jeanie’s Blog

When I was a child, I sang with an open heart to the angels in the sky. I sang as the music pulled me off the ground into the air and lifted my little body into heights of heavenly bliss. I did not think at all about the songs as they found their way out of my child’s ...

If you trust your body, you know that it will go towards health and wholeness if it is allowed to do so. If you eat well, exercise every day, get 8 hours sleep and drink 8 glasses of water every day, if you eat fresh, healthy food and maintain your optimum weight, you increase your ...

I have heard again that there are many who are “against” certifying teachers of singing. I find this very interesting. Why should they care? Shouldn’t they care that teachers of singing are NOT certified and that anyone, regardless of who they are or what they know, can teach singing and not be stopped? Shouldn’t they have ...

I know a very highly esteemed scientist who thinks artists should only make art. He very much dislikes artists who are involved in various political parties or have social agendas, artists who use their art for protest or for support of protestors. His view is that artists should leave everything else alone and stick to their ...

Many people are easily convinced by things that sound authoritative. The people who are talking heads in politics (and elsewhere) understand this well. It is easy to sew the seeds of discontent when there is unrest or insecurity of any kind. They use this well when they plan their propaganda, inciting fear, anger and more ...

The glory of living here in New York City is that you can hear wonderful singing every night of the week. You can go to Carnegie Hall, The Met or other houses at Lincoln Center, to City Center, BAM, or other venues or churches to hear classical singing from Early Music to modern opera. You can go ...

In order to enhance the first harmonic, it’s best to align it either in front of or behind the first formant. This, coupled with a high level of sub-glottic pressure and a long closed quotient, will ensure that the squillo will intensify. In addition to a high nasal placement in the loft register this specific alignment ...

I was involved recently in writing a pedagogy paper with some colleagues in which the phrase “engaging the expiratory muscles” was used. I objected to it. If you knew nothing at all about singing and I said to you, “please engage your expiratory muscles”, which ones would you use? In fact, would you even know what ...

More than 35 years ago I presented at a program for the New York Singing Teachers’ Association on the music of Stevie Wonder. You have to know that at the time, it was a RADICAL presentation. This was a strictly classical organization and I was presenting an R&B artist. Scandalous! I was/am a Stevie Wonder ...

In keeping with yesterday’s post, it’s important to look at the body because if you sing you also have to look at bodily function. You might think you can override it, but you cannot. The primary thing your body is going to do is breathe, or try to. It only takes about 5 minutes, maybe less, ...

Human beings have limits. Some of them are flexible. Some of them absolutely are not. The human body will definitely die if some very specific things happen to it. It will also be harmed under some circumstances. Interestingly, some people don’t care about that. They really do not care about respecting the limits of their physical ...

What is your voice worth to you? What is it worth to you to be thought of as an excellent vocalist? Not an actor, not a musician, not a dancer, not a ‘creator’, but a VOCALIST? I ask because there are people who don’t really care about the voice at all, yet they sing. They think the ...

The hardest thing to change is someone’s mind. People “get married” to their own ideas. They invest in them and their validity. They build a case for the “rightness” of them and then proceed to make everything they encounter either fit in with their thinking or just reject it because it doesn’t. I have run into this ...

I’ve written here before about prejudice regarding singers. It’s odd that this exists in so many places and shows up in a variety of forms. Very few college composition programs teach young composers how to write for the voice along traditional classical lines. These “lines” (guidelines) are based on the laws of physics (how a pipe ...

For every person who gets to live his or her dream, there are many others who never get close. While some of us are “making a life” being artists, there are many who look with envy on what we do and wish they could join us. Who knows why some are successful and others are not? ...