Jeanie’s Blog

Did you know that the American Speech and Hearing Association (ASHA) decided years ago to take away a singing teacher’s legal right to use the words “rehabilitate” in relationship to singing training? That’s right. Unless you are a licensed speech language pathologist (SLP) you may not use the word “rehabilitate” in regard to ...

We can all agree that anyone with the money, time and desire can study an instrument. If there is a piano teacher available and I have a piano and am available to take lessons and practice what I am being taught, I can, in time, learn to play. If I am determined and ...

Many times I have heard that lovely little saying “Those who can, do, and those who can’t, teach”. Would that this were never the case, but it, sadly, sometimes true. I think it was true in my case. I started teaching when I was 22, in Connecticut. I did so because ...

Enthusiasm naturally spills over — it is difficult to contain. People who are enthusiastic are energized and passionate and happy all at the same time. They seem to have a great sense of anticipation and optimism about whatever is the source of that enthusiasm, and all of that is contagious. The human side of ...

As a child, I was told often by my mother, some people just don’t know how to behave, so you have to forgive them. She was cognizant of the fact that life’s “rules and regulations” sometimes pass people by, and consequently, they are not truly responsible for failing to know what to say or ...

Most of us who sing don’t think much about our voices until and unless something goes wrong. Then, we think about them BIG TIME. Only those who have had a brush with serious or permanent damage understand what a terrible loss it is to have something that we enjoy taken away from us, ...

This is an additional “argument” about including the audience in the overall energy of the performance, regardless of what type of music one is singing. Each style has its own parameters of musical expression, vocal and emotional patterns and “code of behavior”. One of the interesting factors is clothing, both in audience and ...

I found out today that I have been rejected from joining a certain University faculty because I don’t have a PhD. I was not the one who submitted my resume to this University (it was done by a medical colleague) and I didn’t know that it was even being submitted, but it was and ...

It doesn’t make sense to stand up in front of an audience as a singer and act like the audience doesn’t matter, but this behavior isn’t difficult to find. It doesn’t matter what discipline we speak of — it can be found just about anywhere. A long time ago I went backstage to get Joan ...

Yet another 20 year old who started studying when she was 6, with an “opera” teacher, who taught her for 6 years, and then some other person, with whom she had 2 lessons, arrived this week and explained that she “sings everything”………except that she was awful and couldn’t really sing anything. There was no ...

Still controversial. There are still some people who teach singing that think singing CCM vocal music written after 1968 is dangerous. This is not news to anyone in the field, but it is still, in it’s own way, astounding. Think about it. Forty years after the fact, singing music that is rock based, ...

I’ve been gone for a while due to personal pressures, but now I have a few moments to write. I am invigorated by the response I received at this year’s course at the CCM Vocal Pedagogy Institute at Shenandoah from participants as far away as Australia and Israel and from all four corners of the USA. ...

I just spent Saturday afternoon teaching for The New York Singing Teachers’ Association’s Professional Development Program, and had to acknowledge to the participants (about 25 people) how different things are now than they were in 1983, the first year NYSTA held a symposium at Donnell Library in midtown Manhattan. That Symposium, modeled on the ...

Restlessness isn’t a virtue. Ask anyone who has a restless nature and they will tell you that this drive from within exacts a price. On the other hand, complacency (what I call the “chew your cud factor”) isn’t so great either. Constantly looking at how things work, at how they can be made to work ...

Just came back from a performance of a quintet with special guests at “Birdland”, one of our premier jazz clubs. This was an instrumental group, no singers, but the musicians were amazing. There was the band leader, Paquito D’Rivera, originally from Cuba, who played clarinet and sax, and two percussionists, a trombone player, ...