Taking Responsibility

Everyone is responsible for what shows up in his or her life. Whether you intended it to be there or whether it got there “by accident” it is incumbent upon you to deal with whatever it is that’s there as if you planned for it. Most people do not operate that way.

“It’s not my fault.”

“I didn’t do it.

“Don’t blame me.”

“It’s not my problem.

“I’m not the responsible party.”

“She’s the one who started it.”

The only way to go forward in life is to always take responsibility for everything that is in your life. That includes the things you like and the ones you don’t. It includes the people you have deliberately chosen to be with and those who are there for some other reason. It includes how you operate on a day-by-day basis and even a moment-by-moment basis.  Whether or not the issue is “fair” or “reasonable” is of no matter, the thing to do is address the situation as effectively as possible, owning every aspect of it, even those things that occurred that were not in any way caused by you.

Operating this way is an enormous protection, even though it is sometimes dauntingly difficult. If you are fully responsible for everything that intersects your life and you deal with it that way, you will never be a victim. You will never be at the effect of something outside of you over which you have little to no control. You will never be permanently damaged by any negative event. That, folks is a BIG deal.

Some people deal with adversity by getting angry and seeking revenge. Some people shrivel up and go into hiding. Some people talk themselves into a stupor. Only a few people look at the rocks and make rock soup.

It can take a long time to figure out how to deal with adverse circumstances. It can take quite a while to dig out from under a big mess that has fallen upon your shoulders. If, while working on things, you don’t even see the light at the end of the tunnel, as long as you do what needs to be done, proceeding in the best way available at the time, sooner or later you will see the sunshine.

We all admire the runner who looses his legs in an accident and eventually goes on to be on a winning team of wheelchair basketball. We admire the person who looses use of his arms who learns to paint using his mouth to hold the brush (saw one of these folks on TV just recently). We do not admire the person who stubs his toe on the sidewalk and decides to sue for $10 million of damages and then uses the settlement money to buy a yacht.

If something happens to your voice, taking responsibility is the only way to go. Get help. Find out what’s wrong. Find out what’s possible. Look for answers and do the work required to make a new, different way to speak or sing. The lesson you learn there could apply to the rest of your life. How you deal with adversity, is how you deal with adversity, no matter where it falls.

Success amounts to getting up one more time than you have been knocked down.

In order to live a decent, happy life, you have to have a conscience. That entails various ingredients, but quite a few people who consider themselves to be “nice” never actually look to see if their behavior could be unconscionable.

As someone who has encountered a good deal of envy, jealousy and resentment throughout my life (which always catches me by surprise), I always end up feeling pity towards those who find it necessary to act upon such emotions. It always leaves me untouched and demeans the other person. Manipulation, lying, telling half-truths, using others in plots and schemes — are all tools of people who are weak and insecure and who know they just don’t “have the goods” that others have.

In life, I have seen others be the butt of jealousy and envy perpetrated by lesser individuals who made it their reason for getting up in the morning to take down someone else who was more successful than they were. One famous example was Oren Brown, an internationally-noted singing teacher, who was vigorously pursued by another teacher, a woman who was his peer, who kept him from being invited into ASHA and another prestigious organization because he did not meet her idea of “standards”. She managed to work her way into a position of importance in a national organization but, in the end, very few people were impressed by her work as a voice expert. She was acknowledged only for her administrative duties. Oren, on the other hand, paid her no attention. He just went on doing what he did (brilliantly) and ended up teaching at Juilliard, writing a well-respected book, working with lots of professional singers at the highest levels and garnering esteem and respect from singers, other teachers of singing as well as medical doctors, voice science researchers and speech language pathologists. He took the high road and it worked. The other person who never worked with any high level vocalists, left nothing much behind. Guess who is still remembered?

As I go forward into a new phase of my life and work, I look back at what I have accomplished and know that I have not ever walked on anyone else to get where I am. I have tried to help many people and am always happy to see someone else succeed.

It is pitiable to see people who strive to make themselves look good by trying to tear others down because what they actually accomplish is simply to expose the deep dark mess of their own soul to the rest of the world.

 

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 more about my work the training will be offered at several new locations including The University of Illinois Chicago Medical Center and Douglas College in Vancouver. Info will be posted here but the basics are already on this site elsewhere.

 

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 highly regarded training programs (not just mine) for people who want to sing CCM and stay healthy. There is no one way that is universally accepted and some of them are pretty extreme, but that’s what some people want.

If you talk about “classical training”, the only consistent ingredients are breath support (management/control/pressure) and resonance (put the sound somewhere: eyebrows, behind the nose, in the cheekbones, in the masque, forward in the mouth, etc.) or “find the ping/ring” or “project”. These days you hear about matching the harmonics to the formants, but you can only do that with your ears, if you know what those two things are, so that’s tricky.

HOW you accomplish these things is up to each teacher. This is where all the arguments take place. Belly in? No, belly out. Ribs lifted? No, ribs at rest. Jaw dropped? No, close the mouth. Lots of consonants? No, keep them to a minimum. Make the sound “bright”? No, keep it “warm”. Mouth in a smile? No, lips forward and protruding. Larynx in a fixed low position? No, larynx moves around.

On and on.

You get whatever the teacher likes and/or can get you to do.

Is this in any way an organized, clear, universally accepted system? What is it that people have discussed for over 200 years? How does this have anything to do with singing rock and roll? What can one take from the idea that “being classically trained” allows you to sing anything? Really, if we talk about it as if it were a definite something, there is no such thing as classical training.

What there is, is training to get the voice to do certain things on command. Some of them are helpful to classical literature and only to that. There is training to teach the vocalist musical things (legato, even tone, consistent production) that have little to no use in another CCM style. “Operatic resonance”, which varies slightly from person to person, is absolutely not necessary in a jazz or folk artist. Successful rock singers have very strong voices but sing, especially the women,  very differently than classical singers.

It’s time we all talked about “functional training” and let the word classical disappear except to describe the style of music being sung.

I am functionally trained to sing “Broadway legit”, chest/mix, and can belt. That is honest. It is accurate. The behavior of each is unique in my throat. It has nothing to do with singing an aria except when I am actually doing that.

If we could all get it into our heads that there is no such thing as classical training — that training is, in fact, functional and that good functional training is necessary in any style. If we could understand that every style has its own unique parameters and that they should be learned and respected if you want to do the style well, and if we could stop disagreeing on small things and understand that there are a number of ways to use the body well while singing, then we would be in a much better place. If we could stop arguing, for instance, about “breath management” and start to discuss who breathes this way and who does something else, the whole profession would be better off.

If you agree with this, please spread the word. PLEASE.

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 young “rising stars” who are easily lead….sometimes astray. Flashy studio talk, flashy prompts of “gorgeous, baby!” Lots of razzle-dazzle and not much else. Still works, as good as ever. You can find them all over YouTube.

Humility isn’t much to be found there. In fact, humility and show business seem an odd combination, except that some of the most talented, successful people over the decades were the very last to blow their own horns. Instead, they relied upon their work, their professionalism, and their overall sense of security in who they were. Robert Redford comes to mind. Has always been serious, successful and was, when young, drop dead gorgeous. He has used his success to greatly help many others. Doesn’t spend much time on the internet making himself look good to aspiring actors, does he?

I cannot  say strongly enough, singing is about singing. If you do not sing well, if you do not know what you are doing when you sing, you will not find it easy to teach. Even if you sing well, it doesn’t mean that you know what you are doing or what someone else who isn’t you needs to do or avoid. If you do not sing well, you will chase rainbows and find some way to make yourself feel better. Young, innocent students who are talented enough as natural singers and who would do well with virtually any teacher who wasn’t outrightly crazy are out there, and if you go trawling to find them, you will succeed. Then you can take credit for their talent. You will take credit for their talent.

Middle-Aged Guys With Long Hair

You have to ask yourself why someone who is balding wants to grow the hair on the back of his head down below his shoulders. I guess you could also ask why Donald Trump doesn’t bother to get a really good hairpiece. (He thinks his comb-over makes him look good?) You have to ask yourself why someone who is that insecure would be good at teaching anything. (Or, heaven forbid, wanting to run this country).

We all know that there are people in this world who could sell you the moon. Thousands of people have been bilked out of their life savings by Ponzi schemes perpetrated by people who seemed very trustworthy and nice.  If you find someone on the internet who has all the answers, who is going to tell you how you can have a big fat career by working with him, turn off the computer or your phone and go practice instead. You will find what you need not in some outside person but in your own voice and body.

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 you and think they need you, you will get a job and then they will send you out to “get a few lessons” with one of the big singing teachers here. If you need to dance a bit (and you don’t always have to) then you had better be decent (minimally) but if you are expected to really dance, as a serious dancer, you had better be very very good. And, no, you won’t be sent out to “get a few lessons” because the standards for dance here are so high. You can’t fake dancing, but I guess the producers think you can fake the singing. Right.

When you do get to sing, you must have a very clear idea of the “Ws” (who, what, where, why and when) about your song, your character, the plot, the scene — all of it — and it had better be very strong in your mind so that when do the song all of that is very clearly communicated. You will have no microphone at the audition, and you will not use any props, you can’t sing with a pre-recorded rendition of any kind and you can’t wear a costume or dance. You are there to sing, yes, but you are there to be an actor who sings not someone who sings really well without good acting.

Got that?

Really Great Singing Is Just A Bonus, Not Always A Necessity Or Even A Plus

The point is that if you sing really well say, as a graduate of a classically-oriented college program, but you aren’t a strong actor or dancer, and you are at an entry-level, your singing won’t help you much. That this is so is unfortunate but far from new. After “A Chorus Line” producers discovered they did not have to have a professional singing chorus (typically legit vocalists). They could save money and have the dancers sing. They also had the advantage of rock and roll having a greater influence year by year on Broadway musicals generally. Rock and roll has produced some great vocalists (but not on Broadway) but rock isn’t mostly about voices for their own sake. So, if you were auditioning for “Hair” or “American Idiot” having great pipes would be helpful but being able to stay vocally healthy would be more helpful, at least to you.

You Find Out After You Get Here

You don’t really get to understand much about any of this until you get here. If you are busy taking sight-singing lessons instead of acting lessons in your college program, you might try to get that changed. They really care here about acting. If you can sight-sing, good for you, it can help, but it will NEVER get you a job treading the boards. On Broadway, it’s all about the acting.

And by acting, I mean being able to be convincing in the song. The last thing they want you to do is A C T. You have to be very real but not “perform” in an old-fashioned sell-the-song kind of way, unless, of course, that is what they want as would be the case if you were being asked to play Pseudolus in “Forum”.

Confused enough for the moment? I understand. On Broadway: It’s All About the Acting. You have to be here and live it.

 

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 of whom don’t have much by way of voice, but can dance and look good on a magazine cover, or do well creating fragrances or clothing lines. Althea Franklin, with her incredible talent, would have a hard time breaking into the business today. She was a somewhat awkward, not very attractive or slender youngster when she made “Respect”. She didn’t have a perfume or a line of exercise equipment to sell. She just sang and, absolutely, that was enough. She didn’t dance, but she could certainly move, and she wasn’t and isn’t an actress, but she can certainly tell a story through a song.

Electronic gimmicks are OK. They can be cute, interesting and sometimes are creative in their own right, but as someone who sings and teaches singing, I am not interested in what the electronic engineer can do to a voice, I am drawn to the uniqueness of the voice and the artist on their own. Elvis had a great instrument sitting above those gyrating hips. Yes, he was very handsome, but it was his voice that we got first. Surely, Elvis changed the world.

Of course, there are people who are famous for sounding awful, in fact, quite a few of them who manage to make that their signature. That can work, as quirkiness can be interesting, particularly if it is honestly out in the open and not the result of someone’s electronic embroidery.

Who are you vocally? Do you know?

If you sing, you need to know what your own voice is. You need to understand how it works as an instrument and how to get the most out of it using just your lungs and your brain. You need to understand how your larynx makes sound and what you have to do to keep your vocal folds healthy. Before you go into a recording studio know what you sound like minus any outside help. If you rely on electronics to make you sound good, even if you succeed, you will be forever dependent upon the sound guy and the producer to present yourself. Those of us who are “of a certain age” are unafraid to stand up and sing alone, with no music, without apology and without a microphone of any kind.

Singing That Changes The World

It all begins with you. If you want to make someone who is sad suddenly feel better, if you want to calm down someone who is angry and frustrated, if you want to communicate a powerful message to the world in such as way as to catch everyone’s ear, you have to have your own voice under your control. You have to know what you want to say in your singing and you have to be able to say it without outside help. Our job as musicians (same root word as magicians) is to TRANSFORM the world through our art. You can’t do that if all you have to give is a canned performance that was created in a studio. Ask yourself, who will heal the world if the healers are all afraid to sing from their hearts because they don’t trust their own voices and bodies? Who?

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 that everyone who belted should do what she did. When she investigated, she saw constriction, squeezing and rigidity. She wrote that down. She published her observations in peer-reviewed journals that did not at all take in the truly dreadful sound she was making. They did not take in it’s “non-marketability”. They judged only the data, correctly presented, and thus the work was given validity. After further investigation, and more research along the same lines, the woman organized her “approach” into a complicated methodology that, unique at the time, she proceeded to take all over the world.  Those who wouldn’t have known belting from a hole in the ground (mostly classical singers and speech language pathologists) drank her Kool-Aid. The only place this woman and her method did NOT do well was here in New York City where there were excellent teachers of belting (like Helena Monbo, mother of well-known vocal pedagogue, Robert Edwin), and David Sorin Collyer, another very successful teacher. There were others here that weren’t interested as they knew better that the sound itself was not a good one.

Listen to the “Old Timers”

Nevertheless, one of the disciples of the “woman who squeezed on purpose”  became very successful here in NYC and has had many many famous people come to her for training. This tight screech is now pervasive on Broadway and easily recognizable but not what you would have heard from Angela Lansbury or any other vocalist of her era. Lansbury  taught herself to belt, as you had to back then. Her sound, and the sound of many of her peers, was open and free, strong and expressive. It was certainly not deliberately constricted.

Those who believe that all training for singing is about deliberate movement of the larynx or muscles in the throat are flying in the face of 200 years of vocal pedagogy based upon FREEDOM as the primary goal of training. You cannot sing expressively while simultaneously squeezing or deliberately holding onto anything  in your throat. To do so will tie you in knots or inhibit what you can do with your voice. If you learn deliberate manipulation of your throat while you are young you will not even know what else is vocally possible.  Again, SAD.

In observing the various teachers of these methods demonstrate, inevitably they do not sing well. Why is it that the case?  Why do they have vocal problems? Are they aware that such squeezing and positioning is completely unnecessary? No, I don’t think they are.

Some very insecure people who don’t perform well and don’t sing well themselves want to pursue a method of vocal training that involves deliberate movement of the larynx or squeezing of the throat because it gives them a feeling of security. They LIKE holding onto the muscles of the throat. They like the idea that you can control the larynx directly. They want to feel “I am controlling my sound” but the kind of control they have (even if it wasn’t deliberate) isn’t ever going to be useful. If you want to MOVE someone with your artistry, you have to sing from a place of freedom and getting there requires courage and trust of the throat and body. And TIME.

Hold On For Dear Life

If you hold on for dear life to anything in your throat, instead of working with your body, and you think that holding on is a good thing, let me suggest to you that this is a very wrong concept.  Let me advise you that you are on the path to shallow singing (even if you make millions of dollars) and that your heart and spirit will be diminished, not enhanced, when the sounds you produce have to be forced. Hold on for dear life only if you don’t want a life that includes authentic, honest singing.

 

 

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 on social media. Individuals who have great mastery of the internet do very well in promoting themselves and their work. They have an answer for everything. They have “tips” and “classes” and special instruction for singers and teachers of singing. They can solve every vocal problem and offer just the right information. They can also take your money and not help you at all and what can you do about that? If you get sold a bill of goods, who will help you get your dollars (or Euros, or whatever currency you have) back? [no one]

Slick Packaging Is Not A Guarantee Of Quality

You CANNOT learn to sing from a book, a tape, a video, a TV show or something you see on the internet. You can try out the information but if you do not have someone to listen to you and watch you, live and in person, you won’t know if you are applying what you’ve seen and heard in a way that works for quite some time. Those who offer to teach you in a group, without meeting you in person, and who have unlimited availability are, in my mind, suspect. True, they may not be harmful, but how much good they do remains to be seen over time.

You cannot learn to drive by reading a book. Nor can you learn golf  by watching someone else play the game. You cannot know how you are doing if you dance unless someone is there to help you. Same with painting or drawing.

Young people, you particularly, need to be careful. What you see on your mobile devices may not be helpful. Beware the person who has all the answers. Beware the slick packaging. Life isn’t like that and neither is singing.

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 trouble. The idea is that the muscles within the throat and mouth should be “poised” and “ready for action” with a kind of physical alertness. In fact, a great deal of movement is necessary in the muscles and having them relax can also deaden those movements. Then, in order to get “results” the student manipulates or pushes and eventually, that gets him into more trouble.

Aliveness Is More Than Relaxation

The old-fashioned use of the word, “quicken” is to make alive. The quick and the dead means the living and the dead. If you quicken the muscles, you are conditioning them to be not only more responsive but more easily responsive to smaller cues. If you bear down on them they get “parked” and if you deadened them in an effort to relax, they can’t move. Either way the singing is going to suffer.

The muscles of the tongue (especially in the back) and the mouth (inside, also in the back) as well as the lips (all around the mouth outside) and the jaw (massater) and the muscles connecting the tongue and jaw to each other inside (numerous), all have to move a lot (extended excursion) and easily. They don’t usually do that without working them (sometimes indirectly) over time. If any of these muscles is slow to respond to the mind’s request for something specific, the singing suffers. The singer will not feel much and consequently there is no “kinesthetic feedback” to notice. If you ask the student, “What do you feel when you sing that?” the response will be “I don’t know” or “I’m not sure” and those will be honest answers.

If Muscles Don’t Move You Can’t Feel Them

Remember that singing is activity. Movement is necessary and the training process is meant to provoke such movement. In a system that is either atrophied (hasn’t moved much) or hyper active (moves too much) or can’t move (tight) causing the right kind of movement in the right amount and is the point.

How Much Is The Right Amount?

How do you know what the right amount is? By listening and looking. If the sound is pleasant and the singer is singing easily, things are moving, particularly inside where they cannot be observed. If the face (outside) and body (breathing) move through various changes but with a sense of freedom and cohesiveness, that’s positive. Relaxation is a good thing but, remember, you can have too much of a good thing and then be in trouble. You can be too relaxed to sing well, so stay aware of that in your studies.