Jeanie’s Blog

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 ...

Most people in our world think of their voice only when it is (a) ailing, (b) not behaving normally  or (c) when it is commented upon by others. Further, most people do not think much about the words they use when they are speaking unless they are giving a speech that was planned in advance. Do mindfulness ...

We live in a culture that glorifies violence. In entertainment, it is much easier to portray violence than to show people of the same sex being in a loving relationship. That’s really sad. In certain circumstances we are up against the contrasting mindsets that promote the dichotomy of vocal empowerment versus vocal violence. What We Have And What ...

We are living in an age when education, sophistication, refinement and elegance are suspect by a large portion of our society. When kids emulate “gangsta” types and think that using incorrect language is not only cool but a very good idea, everyone suffers. Honoring cultural differences in a pluralistic society is necessary and beneficial, but ...

It seems that many singing teachers do not understand the nature of a master class with a master teacher. They do not know how to get a student ready for singing in a master class. A master class is a situation in which very well prepared students who are mostly secure in their vocal training sing briefly for ...