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Quite some number of years ago I did two workshops with the noted  Speech Language Pathologist, Dr. Daniel Boone (grandnephew of the famous D. Boone). He has been an important researcher in mid-20th century into speech science and has his practice in the southwest. He kindly told me I was the only singing teacher he could ever understand. The blogpost title here was the one we used for the first workshop.

Currently, we have a plethora of videotaped “experts” from all over the globe offering every possible manner of “instruction” regarding the voice, particularly the singing voice on the web. It  is the case that the vocalist has to be really careful as there is no organization, no governing body, no objective set of standards and/or expectations to guide a singer, (or a parent), nor is there any recourse to having spent thousands of dollars and many years (even decades) on training that turned out to be very substandard. PT Barnum had it right when he said “a sucker is born every minute”.

Further, many of the people teaching all over the world, cannot or could not themselves, sing well. They were limited in what they could sing and how they were able to sing it but that did not stop them from developing methods based entirely on their own abilities (or lack thereof) and marketing them to countless thousands of people who knew nothing, or almost nothing, and could not deflect the ridiculous information being sold. This is still true. Most people don’t know enough about singing to recognize the good from the bad, the truth from the lies or the able from the not-so-able, until it is too late.

The voice is inside the body in the larynx, and we must choose to   make sound deliberately (we can speak or remain silent). Sounds  like  laughing, crying, coughing, sneezing, or shouting,  typically happen spontaneously and are not exactly choices. Cultivating deliberate vocal behavior, enhancing natural capacities, has been a goal for over two hundred years, but it has not stopped people from making up truly crazy ideas about what people can and cannot accomplish through training.

I say again, and again, and again — if it sounds good and it feels good, it probably is good. If it doesn’t fit the music, or sounds wrong, it is probably wrong. You can learn to make any sound comfortably but some sounds take longer to master than others and why that is the case has many factors. You can shout, yell or bellow your way through music and voice lessons but that does not mean you will sing well for a lifetime, and if you are willing to sacrifice your long-term vocal well-being for a quick result, hopefully you do that from a very informed place.

As I have also said here previously, I have a number of people who studied with me on a regular basis for at least a year (some for quite a bit longer), who are using my work as if the concepts and approaches in it are things they came up with on their own. They claim to be vocal experts when they are absolutely not, but there is no one to stop these individuals from using what they gleaned from  my work as if the ideas were their own. If you encounter one of them, you will be at their mercy and you are on your own with what they have made of my lifetime of study, investigation and application of principles which operate in accordance with vocal health, vocal honesty and artistic integrity.  From what I know, it’s unrecognizable and I guess I’m glad for that. It would be worse if they were publicly claiming to teach my work and making a mess of it in my name. Yikes!

Be careful of videos, and the multiple lies about voice. Just because someone says something doesn’t mean it’s true or accurate. Keep your guard up, folks. It’s a wild world out there.

Would you take a painting course online if the teacher could not look at what you were painting and make suggestions? Would you take a course in writing online if the teacher couldn’t read what you were writing? Would you expect to learn to play piano by looking at web videos?

If you seriously want to be a better singer, someone with expertise has to listen to you while you sing and give you feedback. Better still, you need to find someone who not only sings well herself but also knows how and what she is doing while singing. For the most part, the people on YouTube don’t have a clue. They are there so they can make a lot of money from eager beavers who don’t know any better.

It is flat-out impossible to learn to sing exclusively from watching a video, no matter who makes it. You can learn about singing, as intellectual information, but you can also find that in a number of books, especially recent ones. If you consider just singing songs in any old way as a path to learn to be a better singer, you can waste a lot of time and lose a lot of money and never get anywhere at all. Please, don’t spend your hard earned cash on websites and YouTube videos. Go find a live human being and study until you get better and know why.

Remember that we in the USA are living in a very strange time when people are famous because they are famous. Being a “celebrity” requires nothing except that you got lucky and became a “brand”. Being good at something always requires spending a lot of time with it — years, not months. Being an expert requires about 10 years of diligent work even if you are very talented. Doing something that is a physical skill (which singing is) requires that you do it under the guidance of an expert. Being an expert ought to mean that the person teaching has both training and life experience and, in the case of singing, they should sing well. The only exception to that would be when the teacher has had some kind of injury or illness that precludes them from sounding good, but it should be assumed that that was possible in the past.

Remember, common sense. If it feels bad and it sounds bad and it’s very hard to do and it doesn’t make it better, it’s WRONG.

 

If you watched the Tony Awards in June you would have heard a variety of singing. Broadway covers all styles and all kinds of voices. You would also have noticed that there is a lot of belting and that, in fact, the belting is louder and higher all the time. The idea that people are shouting while singing seems to have disappeared because now it’s just “the way people sing”. In fact, loud for loud’s sake is the name of the game.

Yes, belting is exciting. It is amazing to know that people can sing that high and loud in a powerful sound but if you had a moment  to listen to Bebe Neuwirth, you might have noticed that she has a pronounced wobble. Twenty years ago when she was in Chicago (and she was terrific) she screamed her way through the show and I wondered then, how long will this voice hold up, given how she is singing? The answer is, not too long. She is, after all, only 56. Maybe the problem is caused by something other than her singing, but I wonder.

The need to sing in a loud, high belt isn’t going to change any time soon. The need to make this sound if you are going to work on Broadway continues to be essential. Considering that a lot of singing teachers are still old enough to have been exclusively classically trained, most have only a vague idea of how to approach it.

You must understand that belting arises out of chest register. It requires a very open mouth (dropped jaw), strong pressure from the abdominal muscles and the ability and willingness to lift the head on high notes.

If you are singing this music, understand that it takes a toll on the vocal folds, even in those who are good at it. If you sing 8 times a week in a show, you are even more likely to incur vocal injury. You MUST learn to do this sound with the least amount of effort possible. If you have a teacher who asks you, “Does this feel OK? Are you belting now?” RUN away. RUN away!!!!! If they are asking you how you are singing, they should be paying you.

Remember, if it feels hard and sounds bad, it’s wrong. Find another way, another teacher, another coach. You only have one voice and if anything serious happens to it, you might never get it back.  The world is full of people who think they know because they do.

Sometimes words don’t stick. They don’t “go in”. They don’t compute.  No matter how much a person thinks he or she wants to learn something, there can be reasons why they don’t or seem unable to, even when they are highly motivated.  In this case, the person speaking can have the experience of feeling like the message is falling on deaf ears.

Even if you are doing your best to communicate in a very clear manner, and you can explain yourself in myriad ways and you can cover the topic in a variety of approaches and you check in to see if what you are saying is being understood, the message can still not do what you had hoped it would do. For me, this is one of the most disheartening aspects to encounter in a relationship whether it be in a friendship or with a student.

Over the years, even with students who have studied with me for a very long time, some of the things that I consider basic to good vocal production just don’t “connect” deeply enough and I am chagrined to see and/or hear that what has been worked on and accomplished in the lesson process over time has simply gradually slipped away again down the road.  Occasionally it is because there were external or personal circumstances that have made it nearly impossible for the singer to keep her skills up but I admit that sometimes I believe the singer never really understood in a deeply profound manner just how important some of those skills really were to her own artistic expression. It could be a difference of opinion, philosophy or attitude about that aspect of singing, perhaps unexpressed or unconscious, but it’s not always possible to know where the break-down is.

You cannot make someone learn something. You cannot force a person to understand the impact of what you are saying (or teaching). You can’t make someone change and stay changed. If you have worked on something over and over again through a course of months or even years, sometimes the only reasonable thing to do is let the whole subject go, particularly if the singer seems to be doing OK and just doesn’t care.

All of us have to choose what we focus on and what we let go of. Do we work on things that are difficult and require complete attention all the time or do we do what is easiest and live with that? How much time do we devote, on a daily basis, to all the aspects of singing, even at a professional level when singing is our full-time endeavor? There are so many things to attend to and only so many precious moments to invest, how do you choose?

If you find that different people from different walks are telling you similar things, pay attention. Maybe the universe is prodding you to listen, to pay attention, to think about what the words could mean. Don’t let yourself walk around with ears that don’t hear.

 

Many people who deal with singing professionally are clueless about it. The latest “Master Class” video by Christina Aguilera is a classic example of someone who sings very well (and has since childhood) but who has exactly zero idea about how we make vocal sound. Her ideas are as convoluted as some of the old “vibrate your forehead” methods and just as useless. Still, because of who she is, I’m sure she is selling like gangbusters.

At the courses I teach, I encounter (occasionally) people who truly know absolutely nothing about singing other than they like it. I just encountered a 24-year-old who couldn’t sing a five-note scale on pitch or take a decent breath who has set himself up as a singing teacher, and he thinks that’s just fine. Can’t stop him. Let the buyer beware.

When you have international celebrities laboring under the idea that squeezing structures in your throat is a good idea, things are bad.  When you have teachers in highly respected universities saying that moving structures your throat you aren’t even supposed to feel  while you sing is good, then you have a profession that is in trouble.

One really popular idea is that you must MUST keep your head from moving and you must deliberately keep your larynx “down” while singing classically . That is, simply, wrong. Your throat should be comfortable. It should be able to respond and move in a fluid manner without you thinking at all about moving things in it directly. The idea that things inside should move is a very old, well-respected premise of classical vocal pedagogy. To throw it out because someone (anyone) wrote a book that says you should is silly, but I run into this idea all the time.

The larynx is a joint. No joint in your body does better when it can’t move. The movement of the muscular within the throat allows it to be highly responsive and react to the subtle impulses caused by emotion and feeling. Screaming your way through metal music might indeed cause some constriction but the idea is that training should mitigate that, not cause it deliberately.

When people who do not sing well set themselves up to teach, and when people who study voice science but can’t apply what they know to their own voices in order to sound wonderful, also start to teach, when the profession tolerates all manner of confusion under the guise of “open mindedness” — you do not have a profession that knows in what direction it needs to move in order to go forward intelligently. You have a profession that is in trouble.

Young people who graduate with a degree, particularly a doctorate of some kind, think they know everything because they have a piece of paper. They will argue to the death with someone who has more experience teaching than they have years on this earth because what they learned is school is unassailable. It is incredibly arrogant for a person who is working on a degree to argue with someone who has had the same degree for decades longer and who has written several highly respected books, to criticize her, but I know that this has happened. (It’s not me he is criticizing. I don’t have a college degree).

Beware those who know nothing and do not know they do not know. They are to be avoided at all costs. Accept no one’s word for , particularly if they teach — anything. Read. Question. Investigate. Explore and experiment. Then, you will know whom to trust and why. There is no substitute.

 

Are you standing on the shoulders of giants?

This evening I saw a post on Facebook about a course that teaches youngsters about the giants of the civil rights and women’s suffrage movements. We don’t want our young people to forget those who went before and paved the way. They sacrificed and gave much so others could have an easier time.

Teachers of singing don’t get a lot of acknowledgement. The profession isn’t structured that way. We don’t stand on stage next to our students and take a bow along with them. (I did see someone do that once. It was so strange.)

If you work with a student who comes in with no high range or no low notes or who has no clue about breathing and you struggle to get the student on the right path, finally succeeding after quite some time of trial and error, it’s not uncommon for the person to forget entirely that that very thing was worked on at all.

“Do you remember when you had so much trouble with that pitch? Now it’s easy peasy!”

“I had trouble? Really? No, I don’t remember that.”

Same thing happens when I ask about previous teachers. Sometimes I get a response like this:

“I studied with this woman for two years. I forget her name. We mostly worked on resonance and breath support but I don’t remember exactly what we did.”

Two years? You have forgotten her name?

Happens more than I care to think.

In a culture that does not really venerate teachers as some others do, you can end up being the “hired help”. You are the go-to person to “get some exercises”. Nothing more, nothing less. The value of those exercises is lost on people who do not have great respect for singing and for vocal training. It is thought of more or less like going to the gym to work out with your personal trainer, but with less glamour than what you would find in Hollywood.

There is so much ignorance in the field that some people don’t know that they don’t know. This is deadly, too, but quite common. If you want to check this out go to Masterclass and watch Christina Aguilera “teach” how to sing high notes. Sad that someone so talented has no clue whatsoever about what happens when she sings. I’m sure she will sell lots of DVDs and courses. Should the purchasers list on their resumes, “I studied with Christina Aquilera”? “I studied with her virtually?” “She would have told me that I was good, if she had been able to hear me.” (Money makes the world go around….?)

If you have studied with a human being and not an image on your phone or computer, and that person actually generously shared with you what she had to offer and it helped you, the first and most important “payment” you owe the teacher is respect and the second is gratitude. If you have learned from them to do something you could not do before or if they helped you grasp a concept that you had not encountered or had not understood, you own them a debt of appreciation and public acknowledgement. You owe them the truth.  Particularly if you haven’t really figured out anything independently, it’s important that you give credit where credit is due.

Right now there are several former students of mine who are teaching in NYC and elsewhere in the country, who never mention that they worked with me extensively…..for years. Who never acknowledge the work that was done in a partnership and whose singing and knowledge of teaching singing grew enormously because I was willing to share what I had learned in four decades of teaching. These people teach as if they have come up with the ideas  in their teaching and singing by magic. They stood out in the middle of a great lake and an angel came down from on high and visited them with special messages about singing. They should be careful, as what goes around might just come around.

I am always talking about and thanking the people who taught me, who gave me so much. I am always grateful that they kindly shared their knowledge with me and am happy to recognize them in public and in writing.

In this country, everyone is supposed to strike out on his or her own and “stand alone” but no one can do that without help. If you have been assisted by a teacher, or any mentor in anything, have the decency to recognize the person and be appreciative. If you have gained something from an approach or a method, if you have learned something valuable, if you have taken something that another has worked hard to assemble and made it your own by absorbing it completely, and then you act as if you found the information on the beach, you should take a good hard look at that. The old system  where a master had apprentices doesn’t exist, but if it did the master would be paid due diligence through the students’ respect, even long after they were out in the world on their own.

One day you might be a “giant” yourself and your students can say they stood on your shoulders. If one of your students also becomes a teacher then you will know how it feels when you are acknowledged and thanked, when the person says she has been allowed to stand on the shoulders of a giant, on your shoulders; or when she instead  treats you like an old library book that was picked up out of a dumpster, read, and then thrown back in.

Ignorance is one of the great evils in the world. Blind ignorance causes all kinds of problems and always has.

Ignorance is not knowing or unconsciousness. We can be ignorant in many ways. The grossest way, and the most dangerous, is to think that life is what you decide it is. You are born into a circumstance, it effects you, you ride along in your life from day-to-day without any kind of awareness except survival and you make decisions based on very little information.

This leads to fear, pain, anger, suffering and all manner of problems. If you are under the burden of a dysfunctional family dynamic, an oppressive or restrictive religious programming , a cultural structure that sets you apart from others by making your group “good” and other groups “not good”, you are suffering under great ignorance. It seems the world is full of people and groups right now that think what they believe is the only way and that those beliefs should be shoved down the throats of others, at any cost.

The most conscious, the most present people are open. They take life with an open mind and heart and ride with the unknown but with an attitude of presence and awareness, not fear and negative judgment. People like this may have the same number of challenges to overcome as everyone else, but they take on life with a sense of excitement, wonder and adventure.

The path of mastery is to have a clear vision of what you have discovered and to know in a discerning matter what is clear, true and honest. To share from that place means that you do no harm and you do not carry doubt into your work. It implies, however, that that clarity is not the same as absolute, rigid ideas that cannot change and that others must accept without question. When being an expert devolves into “always being right” it loses its authority and become hollow and empty.

Teaching singing requires that the teacher have a clear, organized approach to teaching, to singing and to interpersonal interaction. This doesn’t mean, however, that this one way is right for everyone or that it would be appropriate to think so.

Beware of experts who say that everything anyone teaches is good, everything is equal, there are no differentiating factors in anything and it’s all OK. No one who thinks that way deserves to be considered an expert. Beware, too, of the people who tell you they know everything, they can never be wrong, everyone else knows nothing, and that every word they utter should be wrapped in gold and preserved in a museum alongside other icons from world history and culture.

To bridge the gap of ignorance you MUST ask questions, hard questions. You must investigate why you believe what you believe, you must unearth where your ideas came from, and why you are invested in them. You must question all the aspects of your life and your self and of Life itself. Carry that over to singing, and you must question everything you have been taught and everyone who taught you about singing. That is the only way you will know what to trust. You must live the questions until the answers are revealed and not handed to you.

Do not allow yourself to be deliberately ignorant in any area where you could just as well investigate on your own and wake up. Look around. Seize the opportunity. Break free!

Over the decades I’ve heard voice teachers and coaches say to students, “You are afraid. You are holding back. You are thinking too much”. The student nods her head and gathers up her pluckiness to try again to “do it better”. Sadly, this situation indicates great ignorance on the part of the teacher.

The throat closes when you are threatened. You have nothing to do with that response. It is deeply programmed into your Reptilian brain and you aren’t meant to override it with your conscious mind or will power. If you are nervous about what will come out of your mouth, because you really don’t know what will come out, that is a situation which provokes anxiety. If you are seeking to let the sound out freely and easily and it simply won’t come out freely and easily no matter what you do, that is a situation which provokes anxiety. If your throat is tight or stuck or closed for any reason, and you did not sit down and decide to tighten it on purpose, (and some methods actually ask you to do that, which is crazy), the only way to get through the tension is to work with a conscious intention of “letting go”. If you know your throat is squeezed and you sing anyway, doing so will provoke anxiety and inhibit respiration. Doing so will: PROVOKE ANXIETY AND INHIBIT RESPIRATION.

Letting go of the swallowing muscles (indirectly) is a confrontation with the forces the body that are there to help us survive threats. Seeking to let go of such deeply buried tensions reverses the process and asks that we pass through the fear that caused the muscles to get stuck in the first place. Letting go, or trying to let go,  provokes the same anxiety that caused the problem, particularly if the structures in the throat have been stuck and almost immoveable for a long time. When you have finally moved through the holding in the constrictors, and you are singing in a freely produced sound, you transform anxiety into excitement. When the fear is gone and you can sing from a place of freedom and excitement you will wonder why anyone would ever advocate deliberately constricting anything in the throat or moving structures in the throat on purpose. You will see why that kind of instruction is the opposite of creating a healing environment through your singing for yourself or your audience.

If you studying with a teacher of technique, and  you hear, “Don’t be so afraid. Don’t hold back! You are thinking too much!!” have the courage to explain to your teacher that you are not holding back, it’s your THROAT that is holding back. In fact, you can say, politely of course, “If I were able to really let go and sing freely, I wouldn’t  be here working with you right now. It’s your job to help me find ways to coax my throat to let go”.  That will raise some eyebrows, but be brave, and speak up.

In its most extreme version, the flight/fright mechanism in the brain is what causes us to go into shock. The blood leaves the extremities (hands and feet) it flows to the core (organs) and inhibits the breathing. It’s a version of a deer frozen in a car’s headlights. You stop moving. You can’t move. Thankfully, it’s rare for us to be a situation that is so horrible that we go all the way into shock, but the reaction we have when we are “anxious” or “nervous” is a low-grade threat and the body does the same thing. So, in addition to general stress of being alive on the planet at this time, we have the additional stressors from our personal lives and then, we go audition for something. Guess what? We stop breathing. The throat closes and we “can’t sing”.

The training process is supposed to interface with this reaction and help you ride on top of the nervousness, giving you command over your body’s ability to breathe, and to “biofeedback” yourself to a calmer state. Trained relaxation in the body and throat can develop the capacity to override these reactions, at least to minimize them. Once the throat is open it is much easier to keep it open through repeated exercise (vocalizing). Then, fear becomes excitement. There is nothing more exciting than singing this way and hearing someone sing without any fear. A pushed, shoved driven sound makes us cringe. A free sound gives us shivers.

If I worry about what you think of me, I’m in big trouble. If I don’t care at all what you think of me, I’m a brute. Which is it?

Terry Cole-Whittaker wrote “What You Think Of Me Is None Of My Business” in the 80s. It was very helpful to me. I suggest you read it. (www.terrycolewhittaker.com)

We are all socialized to fit into “polite society”. To behave. To have proper manners. To be good, law-abiding citizens. As women, particularly in the 50s when I was a child, we were told many things that we tried to change later, in the 70s, as feminists. Some really did change (we have a woman running for nomination in the Democratic party for the Presidency — that’s a big deal) but some things did not. Women are still paid less then men and men still, mostly, rule the government(s), the corporations and the religions of the world. Depending on the kind and the amount of programming you got in your family, your community or in other groups, you may be trapped tightly in what you were taught or you might have wiggled out from underneath it at least a small amount. Some few of us have jettisoned the programming almost completely and have consciously chosen what we want to believe and how we wish to conduct our lives as adults. And even fewer individuals live completely free of external programs operating out of an inner light that understands moral, compassionate, honest behavior that generates out of deep personal wisdom, not external rules and regulations.

If I am very successful, some people will look at me and say that I am too proud. If I am very confident, some people will look at me and say I am arrogant. If I am generous, others may say I am trying to make myself look good or that I am trying to make up for being selfish. If I am conservative with my money and possessions, others may say I am cheap and miserly. If I am shy and quiet, others may say I am closed and suspicious. If I am generous, others may say I am a spendthrift, wasting my money. If I am conscious of my appearance, other may say I am vain and shallow. If I don’t care how I look, others may say I am slovenly and lack self-esteem.

It is so that when you put yourself out there in the “real world”  — you have to have courage. In so doing, if you succeed, you will absolutely encounter jealousy, envy, and resentment and perhaps even rage. If you try to give back to others when you succeed by helping them to be successful, too, you might receive instead a stab in the back when they are, themselves, more visible. When you introduce a new idea or concept to the world, you may find that others are lurking in the shadows just waiting to pounce on your ideas to steal them and claim that the ideas are theirs instead of yours.

You can do nothing about any of this. You cannot stop others from thinking or doing whatever they want and if you believe that you will not encounter such negativity caused by the actions and thoughts of others, you are wrong. You will be the object of  many diverse judgements and negative actions and you need to know,  as you begin your journey, that it will come simply because you choose to walk a public path.

Nevertheless, how you deal with what comes your way is up to you. What’s best is to walk forward, being yourself, and paying no attention whatsoever to the racket of the “real world”. What other people think about you is, truly, none of your business. If you know you have behaved with scrupulous integrity, with total honesty and with openness; if you know you have done only good and no harm; if you are certain in your heart that you have tried to help others and to give back; and if you hold no malice in your heart towards anyone else no matter how they treat you; then you do not need to trouble yourself with what others say or do regarding you or your life.

Have the courage to carry on being the best human being you can be. Live by the light within and don’t let anything shake you from that light. In the end, it is enough and that’s all that matters.

What Happens If You Sound Great and Still Have Vocal Issues?

Hang in there, folks, This is long.

Too much chest register in the middle voice or perhaps at the bottom can create functional issues. [If you are not familiar with the term “chest register”, don’t read further, as you won’t understand what I’m writing about here.] A flutter is one kind of instability that could show up. The vocal folds are “kicking” (spasming) because they are not strong enough to resist the air pressure below. They cannot “hold” against the sub-glottic pressure needed to phonate in that pitch range. If head register can’t counter the pull of chest (and that can definitely happen) the secondary passagi (such as the one at about B above middle C or B4) will do odd things. Or, the odd behavior can delay until about F/G at the top of the treble staff. In both cases, the laryngeal movement is suppressed and the “adjustment” can’t happen as it should, and the larynx slightly “rebels”. It happens in men, too, but the pitch range varies a bit.

Sometimes the larynx is too low to move or adjust. It has to be in the middle of the throat, loosely, to be in optimal position to function. If your sound is “warm” and “full”, especially at the bottom, you might have to work to get the lower pitches to be less “deep” by making the vowels bright and the tongue lifted from the back. Classical singing can make this difficult to do. It can also be stuck up too high in the throat and that creates a different set of problems. You can sing in either place, but the function ends up skewed. NONE of this can be done by trying to move the larynx on purpose. That just makes things worse. You can never, ever deliberately manipulate the structures within the throat and sing freely. NEVER.

This “chestiness” can be very difficult to hear in yourself or as a teacher if you are listening to a student, as the sound itself can be fine artistically — musical, comfortable, attractive. The clue, however, is a fluttering behavior (or the consistent flatting or weakness or the inability to sing softly, etc.). You have to go by the response the mechanism is making (assuming the vocal folds have been checked to be sure they are OK). The response of having problems at any “mini-passaggio” place is always register imbalance. Assume there is “too much” chest and lighten up the entire mechanism, acting on a temporary basis (about 3 weeks) as if chest register didn’t exist. Keep the middle light. Work softly about 75% of the time and in practice. It’s OK to do some chest low (below E/F4) but keep it to a minimum. If the problem decreases, it was too much chest, lurking in a disguised form. Watch the /a/ vowel (as in father). It tells you what is going on at the level of the folds.

I once asked Richard Miller about how to work with a voice that sounded wonderful but had technical problems. He said, “the way you work with any other voice”. At the time (it was decades ago), I didn’t think he understood what I was asking about but I didn’t have enough knowledge to ask better questions. I think many teachers of singing assume this is a “breath support” issue and ask for “more support” but it is my personal experience that the problem does not stem from “too little” breath support, but sometimes from “too much”. This camouflages the stickiness of the larynx (temporarily) but, over time, it makes it harder to sing, to warm up, and to keep the top going. Mix can be very tricky or just go away entirely.

It took me at least 25 years of teaching to learn to really pay attention to what the voice is doing regardless of how it sounded. People with big, rich voices can be very deceptive to teach. They can get away with lots of chest in the mid to low range but that will also shorten the top a lot. It makes the voice louder, but can cause flexibility issues (meaning singing runs, rapid staccatos and softer high notes gets hard to do). Given that everyone, in any style, is always happiest with a “big” sound, I wonder if that doesn’t contribute to the increasingly common diagnoses of MTD or the latest variety of “muscle tension issues” in singers.

One of the reasons I have been able to keep going vocally is because I always used the high notes and the soft notes as a barometer of how chesty I could make my middle voice. As soon as the top sticks, I have too much on the bottom. On the other hand, in order to get my phonation back since my paresis diagnosis three years ago, I have had to work very hard on chest in the bottom and middle. The stability I have gained there has been enormously helpful to the ability to sustain a louder mix in the area of the paresis (between about F and C above middle C). It is a zigzag maneuver, but it works. Theoretically, if the mechanism balances across the break, without distortion in tone or vowel, at mezzoforte or louder, whatever sound one makes is the “right sound” for the voice. If you are going to “override” that by making the middle deliberately chestier or headier, remember that this imbalance might be necessary for repertoire but may still be out of whack for the instrument, especially long term. 

 In other words, singing in a very heady mix in order to keep my classical sound beautiful isn’t really “normal” because in the pitch range I would use for speech, instead of being in chest/mix (the normal mode) I am in head/mix. It can be very tricky to get the sound there to be strong enough to be useable and cheating towards head is a good “substitute” for having the ability (or the time) to do otherwise in repertoire in performance.

This is one of the reasons why you cannot even talk about having this happen with 15, 16, or 17-year old students who have been studying for just a few years, or (worse) those who started “studying singing” at 7 or 8 but who just sang songs in whatever sound came out. Even in a 25-year-old you may not get this balance immediately, even when working toward it very deliberately.

Analogy: As I have said before, young ballet students take class for hours a day but they do not go “en pointe” until they have studied for at least 5 years and are 12 or 13, as they are still growing. Even then, the amount of time on the toes is supposed to be limited, so as to avoid serious damage to the feet and legs. Some of the traditional roles are left to be danced by those in their mid-20s who have the strength and stamina to hold up but the “big roles” like the Swan Queen, go only to the most powerful dancers who can hang in there for this very long, demanding role. Dancers, feel free to correct me here if this is not accurate.

If we regard the singing voice in the same way (and traditional classical vocal training did just that) then there are some things that younger voices just should not do if the voice is to hold up for a lifetime. These days, a lot of people do not think in terms of “holding up for a lifetime”. I can think of a lot of present moment older singers who pushed for a big sound on Broadway when they were young who do not sound very good now. Coincidence?

Therefore, for some of you who are new to teaching, or who are CCM based, or who have not had specific issues with your own technique, and for all of you who work mostly with kids, teens and young voices, or even with adult beginners, you can’t know about what I just wrote until and unless you have the guidance of an older, more experienced teacher. A teacher who has expertise in functional training (me, or someone like me) and who can sing very well as a classical vocalist but also does other styles; and, has had significant experience with adult professionals in several styles, over time and can explain all this to you as I just have.  Working with kids, teens and amateur adults isn’t the same as working with seasoned professionals with decades of life experience who go out on the road as singers. Remember that.

For this reason (and there are many others) the people with their “few quick tips” who make a bazillion dollars selling their wares online, will never be true master teachers, understanding the instrument from a broad and diverse point of view. They are mostly young, mostly not capable of singing well enough to have had careers and who, therefore, do not perform or, if they do, stick to just  one style, and think they have “the answer”. Always a bad sign for singers but a great sign for the teachers’ bank accounts.

In a profession that does not respect long life experience and does not “venerate” those with a long history of vocal excellence (particularly as teachers), the “prizes” go to the flashiest packages or the loudest noise-makers. Somatic Voicework™ is not and will never be a method that teaches manipulation of the structures in the throat as a goal. Those methods are just a way to teach vocal parlor tricks. They work well instantly, but they do not serve artistry nor humanity. For that, you need long-term training.

We are living in a time when “humility” is a dirty word. (Donald Trump is beloved by millions. Ditto many others in public life, both in politics and in Hollywood whose world consists only of themselves. The world loves the Kardashians whose claim to fame is being famous. Really?) A great teacher is not interested in self-promotion. He or she is interested in the student and the profession. That matters to some, but many now could care less. Somatic Voicework™ has in mind the highest ethical standards for overall vocal health and longevity, for vocal authenticity and for honest, painstaking vocal development over time.

The exchange of information, from older singers to young ones and vice versa, is very necessary. In Somatic Voicework™ all styles are discussed with respect, because we offer a range of experience and ideas, but we all strive to be the best teachers of singing possible. My 44 years of life experience as a teacher can be a guiding force to those who choose to accept my advice, using what I have developed and taught as Somatic Voicework™, but it is a choice to let me guide you. You must all know that I learn everyday, not just here but in my life outside of Somatic Voicework™. If you are not willing to learn from someone who is older and wiser, then you must question why someone who is young should trust her voice or her life as a singer to you.

There are many ways that you can sound very good and have vocal problems functionally. If you have persistent or difficult problems that you “sing around” you might think about why you should settle for that. An experienced teacher can help you sort out what’s wrong without making everything you do change. Function is a measure of balance, and freedom comes from balance. If you do not understand the concept of vocal balance, you should. Functional vocal training is available. See me in Chicago or Vancouver.

If you think you understand this, please share it with every singer you know, most especially those that teach.

The next Level I training of Somatic Voicework™ is in April in Chicago, followed by a Level I in Vancouver. The details are on this website.