Jeanie’s Blog

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 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 ...

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? 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 ...

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 ...

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! 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 ...

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 ...

What does it mean when someone says “it’s too hard”? Does it mean that they expect whatever it is to be only easy, effortless or joyful? Some people associate singing only with enjoyment. If they are amateur singers they might think of “singing songs” as something they like to do as a hobby. Particularly if the person has a ...

You can be book smart — learning a lot of facts on any particular topics. You might know every tidbit on a particular subject and be impressive in a game of trivial pursuit, but knowing is not wisdom. Wisdom is about applying knowledge in a useful manner. When dealing with singing, you can recite every operatic role ...

The Vocal Folds Are The Source Of Your Sound But… How you sound has to do with all the muscles in your tongue, your jaw, your soft palate and the side walls of the throat itself (the constrictors) in the pharynx. In other words, it’s more than vocal folds that make the sound what it is ...

I’d like to ask you, are we still in the 18th century? Singing techniques that were cultivated to help singers learn to do opera and art songs being written in decades and centuries before the mid-1950s had a different world to master than do the singers of today — classical and CCM both. If I ask you, “Are ...

Let’s get this straight. There is no such thing as “nasal resonance”. No matter what you have been told, you will not find any valid, peer-reviewed paper by a qualified scientist that says there is any resonance coming from your nose or your sinus cavities. Sacrilege! No, truth. If you understand science you will know that ...

Not so long ago if a student of singing questioned a teacher to explain why an exercise was being done or what it was for, a teacher could easily respond, “Don’t worry about such things! Just trust me. I know what I am doing.” These days, this might not be as common as it once ...

We have all heard that context is everything. That is true. The context in which something is said or done is vital to know. A simple sentence like “The dress is blue,” could mean anything depending on how and where it is delivered. If I am getting ready for my wedding and I open the box ...