- Announcement October 1, 2015
Big Changes I am announcing here that I am no longer affiliated with Shenandoah University. Those who have associated my work with this university should know that what continues there under the banner of the Contemporary Commercial Music Vocal Pedagogy Institute is not going to be about my work in any way. If you would like to know ...
- No Such Thing as “Classical Training” August 19, 2015
How is it that there is no such thing as “classical training”? It has been written about here many times that “classical training” was all there was for decades if you wanted to study singing. Either you took lessons with a person who taught “classically” or you taught yourself. Now, however, we have other options. There are several ...
- Middle-aged Guys With Long Hair August 19, 2015
Middle-Aged Guys With Long Hair Not my favorite thing. : ( Beware paunchy middle-aged guys with pony-tails and bald heads. There are a few whose hair goes below their shoulders, thin, grey and totally unattractive. What are they thinking? It makes them sexier? More authoritative? Younger-looking? And, there are a number of these fellows teaching singing, mostly to ...
- Broadway: It’s All About The Acting August 17, 2015
On Broadway: It’s All About The Acting Currently, on Broadway, you will find the values at musical auditions ranked in this order: Excellent actor Excellent dancer OK Singer If you have a spectacular voice but you can barely act, you will not, NOT, work on Broadway. If you are an excellent actor with a so-so voice, if they really like ...
- Singing That Changes The World August 2, 2015
Singing That Changes The World Can you really change the world with singing that has been so electronically manipulated it could have been generated by a computer and no one would know the difference? Is the magic of one human voice, unaltered, not enough any more? The pop music world is dominated by beautiful young people many ...
- Hold On For Dear Life August 1, 2015
Hold On For Dear Life Over and over I encounter the idea that someone can hold on for dear life to the muscles of the throat or to the larynx and sing well. SAD. The person responsible for this idea gaining validity worldwide was herself an awful belter…..choked, strangled and shouty. She “investigated” her own throat and decided ...
- Beware The Slick Packaging June 27, 2015
Beware the Slick Packaging and The Hype Lots of people sound like they have something really good to offer. If you are easily taken in by packaging, you can be duped. Sometimes things that look fancy and expensive, once you dig a bit, are still just junk. There are currently an amazing number of teachers of singing ...
- Too Relaxed To Sing? June 24, 2015
How Can You Be Too Relaxed To Sing? Students are often told to relax. Some of them are very deliberately “relaxing” while singing, all the time, in everything. That could be good, but if that is the only instruction, it can get to be not so good. It is possible to be too relaxed. That can cause ...
- Inaccurate Descriptions June 6, 2015
Inaccurate Descriptions or… Huh? We have a lot of words in singing that are attempts to describe what we hear when someone sings. These words are very meaningful to those who use them but typically not so much to others. They are mostly inaccurate descriptions. Bad news. Labeling, or the process of defining something by noticing what ...
- The Truth About Repertoire May 22, 2015
What is the truth about repertoire, folks? Is it magic? If you give a beginning student an opera aria to “challenge” her, is that a good idea? (Yes, I’ve had someone come to me with less than six months of lessons as a rank beginner who was assigned such by a previous teacher.) Does learning Italian ...
- What is “Ego”? May 16, 2015
What is Ego? When you are a serious student of the arts, sooner or later you hear about “Ego” (with a capital E to differentiate it from ego with a small e, as the word was used by Freud). It isn’t typically a compliment to hear, “Oh, she’s got an enormous Ego!” What, exactly, is that? It’s ...
- The Very Long Haul May 14, 2015
Singing and The Very Long Haul I sometimes discuss “waiting for the bus” or taking time to let the voice and body get used to the changes we are stimulating through vocal exercises. How much time am I discussing? It could be as little as 30 seconds for an exercise to cause a new response to ...
- All Muscular Systems Have Limits April 7, 2015
My mother was a professional dancer. She was very young when she started (age 14) and had little formal training (back in the day, and this was way back, that was possible). She was taking class and had her leg up on the wall. Now, mind you, she was already dancing well enough to get ...
- In The Beginning Was The Sound! April 6, 2015
In The Beginning Was The Sound! The most popular theory about the origin of the universe is that it began 14 billion years ago with a “Big Bang”. In the beginning was the sound. Everything in the universe is sound. Everything vibrates. From the smallest sub-atomic particles to the galaxies as they give off radioactivity (which comes ...
- Inherent Conflicts April 5, 2015
No matter how you approach singing training, sooner or later you will bump into the inherent conflicts that arise. There issue of balancing one thing against another is dealt with beautifully in William Vennard’s book, Singing: The Mechanism and the Technic published in 1967 by University of California press. This is my favorite vocal pedagogy ...