Jeanie’s Blog

The other side of multi-disciplinary interchange is that speech language pathologists (who don’t sing), medical doctors, and voice researchers need to be willing to learn from teachers of singing. Many in the community I have been in for nearly four decades do, but not all, and, sadly, many who are not in that community at ...

We all know that change is very difficult. Most people don’t like it and getting a group of people to agree to make changes can be very challenging. Nevertheless, once in a while that does happen. A group, sometimes a large group, decides to stop the old and begin the new. It can be a ...

For a very long time I stayed away from talking about classical singing using my method, Somatic Voicework™, because I had had so much trouble in that community over the years. I decided it was easier if I just stuck to talking about CCM styles and stayed away from all things classical. It’s time now to ...

I recently attended yet another “operatic” master class lead by a noted Metropolitan opera mezzo. At one point she told a young soprano “Don’t act on the high notes, just focus on singing them, and then go back to acting after they are over”. Well, I guess it works for her. She said some other pithy ...

It used to be that singing was easy to recognize. Not so much anymore. It used to be that we knew when someone was singing because there were recognizable cues. Not so much anymore. The lines continue to blur. Why? I don’t have an answer. All I can say is that it many factors have converged to ...

Some people think they know everything and refuse to learn new information because they strongly believe they already know what they need to know. This idea is deadly but it, sadlly, is not uncommon, in all kinds of areas. Figuring out that you might have new information to learn would take a sense of humility, particularly ...

The only way our profession, the one called “singing teaching”, is going to go forward is by paying attention to voice science. We can’t live as if voice research doesn’t matter to what we teach and we can’t hide from what voice science is telling us about how we make sung sounds. Many people, however, still ...

Somatic Voicework™ The LoVetri Method should have the trademark symbol after the word “Voicework”. On a Windows computer, it’s Alt+0153 on the number keypad (Make sure Num Lock is on.) On an Apple computer, it’s Options+2. For more information, including how to type the symbol on Linux, check out http://fsymbols.com/computer/trademark/ After introducing the full name of the method in ...

What happens when you hear these words from a medical doctor or a speech language pathologist? What then? Do you just accept them and go home? How does this up end your life? There are all kinds of illnesses and vocal fold injuries that can compromise the vocal folds, some have to do with the vocal ...

All repertoire is not created equal, and that includes music theater songs. I have implied here before that this is the case, but I well remember a conversation I had many years ago with a classical colleague who professed to teach music theater that the really difficult music was classical and the other stuff was, ...

Eleven years ago I did my first Somatic Voicework™ training. At that time I was teaching alone and did not know how my work would be received by others. Since that time it has grown and now many people have participated in the courses, at Shenandoah during the full summer CCM Institute and at the ...

There really isn’t anything that’s as beautiful as a human voice singing sincerely with no outside help. It is stunning to hear such singing and these days, all too rare. We hear voices with so much help from electronics that we forget what it’s like to hear someone sing really well, at a professional level, spontaneously, with ...

We talk about the singing voice and the speaking voice as if they are separate when we realize that we only have one larynx, one set of vocal folds and one throat. Why? Because we do not experience singing in the same way that we experience speech and that has to do with what happens ...

In order to learn to sing the person studying needs to grapple with the process in a large way. Some people have trouble doing that. They can’t connect the dots. I have encountered this several times over the decades. The person seems only able to hang on to what happens in the lesson during the lesson. ...

The point of understanding vocal function is to also understand how to apply it in a useful, simple, easy and precise way to vocal production. Otherwise it is just more words that are no better than “place the tone in your eyebrows” or “support the sound from your diaphragm”. In order to apply functional exercises you ...