Jeanie’s Blog

How do you know if you are singing from your heart? Seems like a simple question, no? How does one determine what heart-felt singing is? Do you really know that you are singing from your heart when you are? What does that mean? Of course, you can’t define this experience. You can write about it. You can talk ...

Who talks about the throat muscles? Who bothers to think about them as if they mattered? Who even knows there are muscles in the throat? Of course the vocal folds are ligaments, not really muscles, but they are pulled by muscles and they are certainly effected by muscle movements of whatever is in or near the ...

If you are a singer and you know yourself as one, singing is part of your identity. This is true if you are a dancer, an actor, a painter or, in fact, in our society where work is a crucial part of one’s adult persona, if you are any type of professional in the arts. ...

I am going to way out on a limb tonight (who, me?) and say some things that I absolutely cannot verify at all. They are 100% from my own perceptions and you can take or leave what I am going to write. If you don’t believe it, that’s fine. If you are willing to take ...

When the voice is working properly, the majority of the functional response is inside. The idea that you can make a good deal of sound without widely opening the mouth or dropping the jaw a lot is in many classical approaches and is aligned with the behavior of a ventriloquist. If the work travels into ...

In order to see a pattern, you have to look at it in a broad way. If you fly above a landscape, you can see the patterns of the rivers, trees, lakes and hills. On the ground, you can only see a short distance. There might be a river just over the hill, but you ...

I just heard that in order to get into one of our undergraduate programs for jazz here in NYC, you have to sing one song in two different keys a fifth apart. This is supposed to show some kind of “skill”. Wanna bet the person who set these requirements was not a jazz vocalist? Jazz singers, when ...

It’s very hard to imagine what it takes to mount a Broadway musical if you are not involved in that world. It takes a long time, a whole lot of money, lots of patience, and many people. Commercial theater, anchored here in NYC by the 15 unions involved with it, is enjoyed by millions, but ...

I ran into something this week that I haven’t encountered in a very long time. A noted teacher pointed out how ineffective it is to tell a student that he has tongue tension. He said that pointing this out would only make it worse and cause the student to become stuck. Really. Clearly, not pointing out to ...

There are quite a few people who understand vocal function very well but do not understand how to apply functional exercises. Some of these are the people who can quote you the latest scientific research from the most important books, and are the people who have the biggest reputation for presenting at conferences. Unfortunately, few ...

Referencing the two productions I saw last week, “Cinderella” and “Hands On A Hard Body”, both on Broadway, it is important to note how much our expectations about singing have shifted in the last 50 years. The Rodgers and Hammerstein production allowed all the singers to sing in traditional pitch ranges, in a normal (but ...

It is impossible to discuss function intelligently without also discussing the muscles in the physical body that affect function. It is impossible to discuss those effects without understanding what the various muscles in the body do and how they do it. If you assume you know, and many people make that assumption, and you have ...

Two nights ago we went to see the new Broadway production of Cinderella written by Rodgers and Hammerstein for TV in the 50s. The book has been changed and updated, some songs have been added. Still, it has the old values of traditional theater and the singing is lovely. There is no rock influence here ...

Just returned from a preview of “Cinderella” a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical written for TV in 1957 and done again in 1965. The first production starred Julie Andrews, the second Lesley Ann Warren. This show has no special smoke and mirrors. There is a monster, there are some really cool special effects and the rest is ...

If you love singing, if you are passionate about singing, if you can’t live without singing, you are a good candidate to become a singer, and then later, a teacher of singing. If you are lifted up when you sing, if your heart feels full and overflowing with joy and love, if you know when you ...