Jeanie’s Blog

We all know that being popular on social networks is one of today’s highest achievements. If you have lots of followers or people who “like” you, you have it made! Unfortunately, being popular doesn’t mean very much of anything except that you are popular on the social media. It isn’t an indication of anything else. Young ...

Appropriate training is only possible when the teacher of singing knows a great deal about a great number of things. Then, that knowledge must be applied over time because the only way to learn anything really well and own the entire experience is to go slowly. You do not develop mastery over anything in the proverbial ...

What is evidence of conscious awareness in singing? Many times when I work with college students in a master class or young adults in a private lesson for the first time I ask if they have had any vocal training. It isn’t unusual to be told they have “studied singing” since they were in third or ...

If a singing teacher enters into a session with a preconceived idea of where a student’s voice should go or how it should sound, and if that student is young, they might never have a chance to develop any experience of singing that includes exploration without a specific goal. I like to work with a student ...

In a two-way communication, both people are 100% responsible for the results. How does that work? If I am communicating to you, one-to-one, I am completely responsible for what I say, how I say it (what words I use),  their precise meaning, the intention of the words, and the impact they have upon you, the listener, even if I ...

Opera Singers Who Can’t Can’t what? Quite a few opera singers have made “cross-over” recordings to show their versatility. They seem to want to say, “I can sing anything”, except, of course, they can’t. I presented a lecture on CCM styles a number of years ago to a university/conservatory that was strictly classical. I was invited there by the ...

Most of the people who love teaching singing also love singing and people. If they are good teachers, they will hold voices, music and people as being equal and worthy of love and respect. Love. What is real love? (I know, you can hear a song coming on. Not.) True love is that which is all-accepting but allows ...

Breath pressure (Sub-Glottic Pressure) is how much air is in your lungs when you begin to make sound. Breath pressure goes lower as you run out of air. If you push, pull or otherwise activate the abs while at the same time resisting the collapse of the ribs, you can keep the breath pressure increasing ...

Want to know what gives me a real high? Working with college students. Young adults have better concentration, can actually sit still, are more adventurous, and seem capable of grasping the abstractions inherent in singing better than young children or kids in high school.  Whenever I encounter them, I find college students a whole lot of fun. I worked ...

If you think of the body as just a bunch of parts that happen to somehow randomly have gotten together, or if you think the way to deal with the body is strictly through Western science, you cannot understand the holistic point of view that says everything is connected. The body is far more than ...

Hi, coach, nice to meet you. Hello, Mary. Nice to meet you, too. What brings you here? I was told you could help me prepare to be on the team. I’ve been preparing myself but I was told that I need training to be really good and get to a professional level. That’s true, Mary, and I’m glad ...

We all remember “Back to the Future”. Fun movie. We could say, however, that we are now living in a time called, “Forward to the Past”. All over our society we are seeing things we thought were fading or gone long ago revive and gain strength. This includes measles, suppression of African-American, gay and women’s rights, ...

What is the truth? We are surrounded by liars of all kinds every day. Most people “fudge” the truth to be polite (we are taught to do that), to be non-confrontive, to avoid conflict. Some people delight in deliberately lying (politicians, maybe?) Your neighbor? Your boss? Who decides how much not telling the truth is too much and ...

If you are seriously committed to being on an artistic path, if you think of yourself as an artist, if you long to create and will do so regardless of what gets in your way, you are on a spiritual path, even though it may not have a formal name. If, on the other hand, ...

I have given this talk twice, both times as a keynote speaker at two conferences. Basically, its essence is that there are certain people, famous ones, that are not only known for their skill of speech or song, but whose voices came to represent a time, a place, or a moment for a society. Whenever we ...