Jeanie’s Blog

Fear of Success? Yes, Fear of Success I have run into this so many times. Someone comes in claiming not to have been able to do something vocally for the entire length of their training and performance career. Often it is a baritone who suspects he is a dramatic tenor or a classical singer who has always ...

Voice Science or Vocal Pedagogy? You can’t win either way. You need both but you can’t get married to either. William Vennard, Marilyn Horne’s teacher, was one of the first people to do voice research with Bell Labs. His book, one of the best (and my personal favorite), Singing The Mechanism and The Technic, is clear and precise. ...

From Wikipedia: Occam’s razor (also written as Ockham’s razor, and lex parsimoniae in Latin, which means law of parsimony) is a problem-solving principle attributed to William of Ockham(c. 1287–1347), who was an English Franciscan friar and scholastic philosopher and theologian. The principle can be interpreted as stating Among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected. Occam’s Razor In Singing? There are very complicated methods ...

If you are in the midst of a career one thing you certainly do not want to do is totally change the way you sing because someone told you that is a good thing to do. Do you have a real fear of change? If you want to be an ethical singing teacher, you need to be ...

Parlor Tricks  — that’s all they are. I have encountered the phenomenon of “moving the structures inside the throat deliberately” many times in the past. No method, no matter whose it is, should be teaching anyone who wants to sing well to move any structure within the throat  or deliberately stop those structures from moving. Read that sentence again. Go ...

Why would anyone have fear of training? I have written here before about people who are afraid of training their voices lest it make them sound different. There are those who think that training somehow is an admission that you need help, in the sense of not being “good enough” (a very ignorant point of view, ...

New Year, New Directions Each new year begins with hope and anticipation toward new directions. Maybe it will be better than last. Maybe it holds adventures, and surprise, gifts and blessings. We all wish for those things, and for peace and health. We cannot, however, know what the year has in store, plus or minus. All ...

Ethics? Who talks about ethics? We live in a society in which ethics is rarely discussed. Often people don’t really know how to answer when asked if a particular person’s behavior is ethical. Some people confuse ethics with obeying the law. Some people think it is about doing whatever one wants. According to the dictionary ethics is that branch of philosophy dealing with values relating to human conduct, with respect to the rightness and wrongness of certain actions and ...

Cult Following? It has been hilariously suggested to me that I have a cult following and that Somatic Voicework™ is about me. “Gee whiz”, as I used to say as a kid, “give me a break!” If you have 44+ years of experience teaching singing (and how many people do?) should you hide in your studio and ...

There are people in this world who can do something easily and well for no good reason other than they can. Singing is one thing that has a certain percentage of people who succeed because they sing well, sometimes very well, even though they have not trained to be singers or, sometimes, even though they ...

Leadership requires courage. It requires that you do not worry about whether or not you are going to be liked for your decisions. You cannot lead without taking a stand and holding it. No one ever lead a charge by saying to the troops, “I hope this works. Let me know how you feel about it and ...

Point of View – What’s Yours? Everyone on earth has their own point of view about life. The primary point of view you live through affects everything you do. Women often make relationships the window through which they see everything. The roles they have: wife, mother, sister, daughter, niece, aunt — often are key aspects of their ...

Noble It means righteous, virtuous, good, honorable, upright, decent, worthy, moral, ethical, reputable. (Google) It would be nice if everyone in charge of the various things that run our world were “noble”. So often, it is the case that people who make decisions don’t even contemplate, let alone behave, in a way that has any nobility. Probably, ...

Half-Truths We live in an age of “spin”. Perhaps average people don’t necessarily lie all the time, but it’s pretty common for the truth to get “fashioned” for various reasons. This has made it impossible for any of us in our entire society to know what is true and what is not and that is bad news for ...

Clarity. How do we find clarity? If you are in touch with your own goodness you will have clarity about what is and is not “right”. You will understand a few basic things that do not need to be proven or questioned. Those that live in any kind of dogma, any type of programming that comes from ...