Jeanie’s Blog

“You don’t need to understand physiology to sing well.” “You don’t need to understand voice science to sing well.” “You don’t need to understand vocal function to sing well.” These statements are all true. If they were not true, there would be no singers without formal training in physiology, science or function, singing in any style, who have ...

Singing well requires strength. You have to have strength in your core muscles, which includes the muscles in your back from the sacrum to the shoulders. You need strength in the intercostal muscles and you don’t get that unless you have done something that stretches and strengthens your upper body like volleyball, basketball, gymnastics, swimming ...

How do you know what kind of vocal boundaries you should have? In fact, what are functional boundaries and what, exactly, is functional training anyway? Isn’t all vocal training functionally based? Hot and heavy questions and few would dare to respond to them with answers, but that, of course, won’t stop me. (OK, stop laughing). A boundary ...

In Italian the word “spinto” when applied to singing voices means “pushed”. Every singing teacher worth his or her salt is against pushing the voice, so what’s up with that? You have to know classical singing to understand this term. Jerry Hadley was a light lyric tenor. He studied for a long time with a teacher who ...

If we let go of repertoire entirely for the moment and looked at singing training strictly as a physical activity like a sport or like dance we can talk about what it takes to develop an Olympic quality vocalist (which is related to, but not the same as, an artist who sings). Gymnastics requires greater and ...

There are a lot of people whose idea of singing is based on making the voice do something. They have never, not once, sung a free, unmanipulated sound that arose without interference. From the get-go they have been taught to “find resonance” and “open the throat” or “keep the larynx down” or any number of ...

Anthony Tommasini, the classical reviewer of the New York Times, recently reviewed 85 year old Barbara Cook and had the nerve to say that she wasn’t quite up to singing really hard music, the way classical singers do, since she is so old. What nerve. The Times (another reviewer) said something similar ...

You can blink, swallow, cough, and breathe on purpose but when you are not doing so, those things happen on their own through the wiring of the nervous system. We can intervene, but we cannot stop ourselves from doing these things. The “fight/flight” mechanism, which connects to the old limbic brain, kicks in when we are ...

Sooner or later, you come to a place where you think, “That’s it. I don’t need to learn anything more about this topic. I’m an expert and that’s the end”. Then, as time passes, you just rest on your laurels, you do what you’ve always done, you know what you’ve always known and you preach ...

This blog has addressed the changing atmosphere of teaching singing int he 21st century numerous times. It is slowly but surely moving towards changes that will be truly seismic once they are instituted. The biggest and most significant change will be when college students are no longer required to learn “An Die Musik”,”Caro Mio Ben” or ...

In spite of the fact that I am always championing students, placing the responsibility of learning to sing squarely on the shoulders of the teachers, I must reluctantly admit that are some people who just cannot learn. I have had various students over the decades who have spent lots of money on lessons, have made progress ...

How many kinds of singing are there in this world? Do we really know? How many kinds of singing are available to the average person who wants to listen? How about how many are available if you want to sing them yourself? The truth is there are so many kinds of singing and so many kinds of ...

I have two students, both middle aged men, who came to me with no background in singing who wanted to sing and who, two years into the process, now sound very good. They practiced, they were disciplined, they were dedicated. I write this because there is an idea out there that a person can be “too ...

Lenny Bruce was arrested a number of times on charges of obscenity. Compared to what comedians get away with now, what he did was minor, but back then, it was a big deal. He broke the rules and it was because he did so that comics like Richard Pryor or George Carlin had it a ...

Recently, I was called upon to give a talk to an mixed audience of teachers (new and experienced), classical and not, speech language pathologists, students (all ages), and interested amateurs. During the breaks of the seminar I again encountered people who came to me to say, “I’m so glad you are saying these things. This ...