Jeanie’s Blog

If you are not taught to meditate in some formal way, you may not know the concept of “emptiness”. The idea is that if you calm your mind, eventually (believe it or not), it ceases thinking, sometimes for long stretches of time. You can be very awake, very aware, and not thinking in your mind ...

Competitions require judges. We have them now on TV every night. Who gets to be a judge and why? Who is judging the judges? If you are a member of NATS, you might be asked to judge one of their local competitions. You may or may not have expertise, they don’t ask. If you are available ...

All of us who are of a certain age have seen “The Wizard of Oz” many times. The shot of Judy Garland standing outside her aunt and uncle’s farm singing “Somewhere Over The Rainbow” in her sweet young voice is deeply etched in my ears and mind. This truly free, unpressured natural sound more or ...

For decades, I have advocated that we can sing in a number of vocal qualities without issue. I have stated and written about the ability for the voice to sing all over the map and remain healthy. I have also stated that some qualities do better with classical singing than others. There are boundaries. You ...

Very few singing teachers understand the gag reflex. It is one of the strongest reflexes in your body and it is a core ingredient of behavior of the throat. Functional training provokes movement in the vocal mechanism. If it does not, then it isn’t really functional training at the deepest level. If you want someone to ...

In literature, a writer has “a voice”. It means that he or she has a way of writing that is distinctive and recognizable. Although I haven’t read many novels since high school, preferring to read non-fiction most of the time, I know that certain famous writers’ styles are so unique that fans would know ...

The term Contemporary Commercial Music was created in 2000 to stop the use of the term “non-classical”. It was created to draw all the CCM styles together as a genre equal to but different from classical styles. To clarify: Classical music includes opera, operetta, art song (recital), chamber music, oratorio, early music, and orchestral music solos. ...

We all have busy lives. Some people have lives that are so busy, they don’t get much sleep. They are pressed from morning till late at night with all manner of busy-ness. I am one of those people. I am the first to admit that I am very bad manager of my own time and ...

I heard years ago that “either you are part of the problem or part of the solution”. It’s very easy to complain. Most of us complain about something, maybe more than one thing. Complaining is a way of saying “I don’t like this. It’s not right with me.” If all one does is complain, however, nothing ...

We have a resource now that only a few years ago didn’t exist that makes it hard to be unfamiliar with singing. Between iTunes, YouTube, Spotify, and dozens of other sites that have music on them, as well as individual vocalists’ websites and all the various social media that we use, it seems you could ...

What was the first thing you did when you got a new board game that came in a box? After it was open and you took out the all the pieces inside and you read the rules. You couldn’t play the game if you didn’t know the rules. How would it be then, to learn what ...

Recently it has come to light that at least two organizations are pushing ideas that are quite dead. This certainly in keeping with the political struggle that is going on in this country. We have people who want to go back to the 50s, 40s or maybe even to the 1840s and we have people ...

There used to be a weekly ad in Back Stage that said, “If you can sing, you don’t need a teacher. If you can’t sing, no one can teach you. If you are in between, I can teach you to sing”. (I’ve mentioned this ad before). It always made me laugh because there was then ...

Every year many bright beautiful young hopefuls come to New York City to be in “show business”. Many of them are here straight from college or graduate school, some come while still in their 20s. A few are natives to the area and don’t have to move here. They are of all types, sizes and ...

If you learn a sport, one of the first things you are taught is the rules of the game. Smart. You learn that there are three bases and home base, that you have a thing called a bat, you use it to hit a ball and so forth. Before you learn to throw and catch, to ...