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.

 

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 it is and is not, or by noticing its characteristics, borders, or distinctiveness, is what sets it apart as a specific entity in your mind. You have to define what it is and also what it is not. A label is crucial if you are to store it in your memory and categorize it in a useful way. Mis-labeling is a big problem in communication.

Objective words are more easily understood. Tree, chair, book, car, shoe, pencil. You don’t have to wonder what those mean, you can see them. It’s harder to understand abstract concepts  because they are defined by clusters of words and are not concrete things. Condescending, impatient, compassionate, melancholy, cheerful, confident, fragile. All of these words need clusters of other words to explain what they represent. If you go to things like sub-atomic particles, fuel-injected engine, polyphonic composition or borderline personality disorder, you really need an expert definition. In some cases you could get several different versions of a definition and they could all be correct.

Lets say you hear a vocal sound that is penetrating (easy to hear) and you label it “bright, forward, ringy”. Let’s also say you think it was a good type of sound. Let’s say someone else heard the same sound and called it “nasal, piercing, edgy” saying it was not so good. The description would have everything to do with the listener’s personal experience, their taste and their ability to use specific words accurately. Inaccurate descriptions are very deadly but they happen every day and mostly go unchallenged.

Teachers decide that they like or dislike a sound coming from the student’s throat. They label it. The label could be positive or negative. If the student is criticized, he might try to make a correction in his sound, more or less from a trial and error approach towards something the teacher likes better. If he succeeds, he will be acknowledged, if he does not, there will be more criticism of his vocal efforts.

Teachers of singing often decide  a certain kind of sound is not aesthetically acceptable and want a student to make a change. If the evaluation is subjectively described, the student could be quite confused as to what was wrong or how to attempt to change it. If a teacher tells a student that a certain sound is “too bright” or even that it is “nasal” and says to the student , “You are singing in your nose. Stop that. Get it out of there.” The teacher may not know that this “over-brightening” could be caused by any number of physiologic factors over which the singer has little to no conscious control. The vocalist would not be able to apply counter measures to change the unconscious default of the throat and the labels, whatever they are, would be of no use to the vocalist in making changes. Again, understanding how to describe what you want, one step at a time, is a good way to avoid the trap of an inaccurate description and that is something you do want.

If, while I am singing for you, and you are my teacher, and I am trying to get myself to produce the sound you are seeking, I might, after some time, figure that out. But, I might not. If you keep singing examples, I might, by listening carefully, be able to emulate what you are doing and how you do it and finally get something you want. If you then announce to me with great confidence, “There! Now you have found the “spinning forward tone” that has a lot of height. Do you hear that? Do you feel it?” In contemplating your answer, I might think I do hear it and feel it and that I could locate it and sing it again. Knowing what to think of when you go into your memory to call it forth would be enough to produce the same sound multiple times. You would have stored it as the  “spinning forward tone”, and use the words that way probably for the rest of your life. If you would ever go on to teach, you might seek that same sound in a student who would not have any clue what “spinning forward tone” meant until you sang it a thousand times and they tried to imitate what they heard and observed, with the idea that it would show up eventually. In every case, however, a  negative description of a sound over which the student has little to no conscious control isn’t going to make it easier to find something more pleasant or comfortable to sing instead.

If you do not know, for instance, that an “unsupported squeaky tone” is the result of a high larynx, tight tongue muscles, tightly pressed vocal folds, and constriction in the muscles of the tongue and throat, (or some combination of any of these) which disconnects the larynx from easy inhalation and controlled exhalation, you wouldn’t be able to know what to ask the student to do that would get him out of his problematic vocal responses. You might simply say, “Don’t sing in your nose” and expect the student to immediately stop,  just because you pointed it out and implied that you don’t like it.

Sorry, but that’s not how it works. Inaccurate descriptions produce inaccurate results, and they produce frustration, wasted time and confused mental concepts. They often also produce a student who feels stupid, untalented, stuck and discouraged. Not a recipe for success.

They Don’t Know That They Don’t Know

The profession of teaching singing is fraught with individuals, even very highly successful individuals, who teach and who do not know how to use words to help the student get a new behavior to emerge, over time, from her throat. Too bad, as the scientific concepts about how we make sound are not new and are available and understanding them allows the teacher of singing to use words with precision.

If you hear something that’s not good in a student’s (or your own) sound and you know what is happening physiologically to cause that response, you might be able to use words to describe it as well as what you want that is different.  If you know how to counter that response through vocal exercises, and if you are willing to let things change in stages, and if you are also willing to be patient through those stages while things gradually adjust more permanently, you will get where you want to go, both as a teacher and as a student.

Whenever possible, avoid inaccurate descriptions. If you don’t know how to describe what’s happening when your students sing and you don’t know how to accurately describe what you want instead, go find out how to do that. When you can use plain, simple everyday words in your native tongue (language) to define what you want, you will see results. In fact, you will see results right away.

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 art songs or German lieder help you sing virtually anything?

For long decades students of singing have been required to learn foreign language arts songs and other classical material (including songs in English, by both American and other English-speaking countries), originally with the goal of preparing students to perform in classical performance. The practice of assigning classical songs to students of CCM styles, however, has carried over, mostly for no good reason, because, like eating your spinach and an apple a day, this is supposed to somehow be “good for you”. Well, is it?

If you are hoping to sing “Mimi” in Rent, and not “Mimi” in La Boheme, you had better sing songs that take you in one direction and not the other. If you are hoping to do R&B and gospel or country music and you are trying to do songs by Fauré to assist you in those styles, you are going to waste a lot of time.

Classical Literature Has Great Value

Of course, learning classical song literature has great value. It teaches you cultural and historic material that enriches your appreciation of all that classical singing has to offer. It teaches you about the composers and the times in which they lived and about styles and their parameters. Learning the great classical music from all eras and places in an excellent endeavor. It is NOT, however, connected with being a better rock singer. NOT.

Most college programs still require “juries” (vocal music tests) that include classical repertoire which is supposed to show that you have been properly and correctly trained, vocally. Even Berklee expects you to learn that rep. Of course, if you don’t sing it too well, that isn’t going to concern anyone much…..as long as you were exposed to it. I think. Maybe. ???????

What if things were reversed? What if all classical vocalists — those who really do want to go out into the world after college and become opera and concert singers — were first forced to learn songs by Billy Joel and James Taylor, by Cole Porter and Carole King,  before they could sing one piece by Schubert or Fauré? Seems silly considered that way, right? But it is just as silly the other way around.

I, too, was taught to think that classical music was necessary “first” and the other music could come later but that was because hardly any of my extensive vocal training (with noted classical singers and coaches) was based on function. I learned “breath support” and “resonance” and the rest was up to me. Repertoire was given to me “just because” and I learned it in the best way that I could. Even though I really wanted to be a music theater singer, (there were no music theater degrees when I was young) I learned classical rep because that’s all that was available in institutions or private lessons up until very recently.

It’s time we broke the link between “classical training” (that undefined something  everyone agrees exists but no one can codify), “classical repertoire” and functional vocal training. Singing songs in the style you want to do, even if they are very simple, makes sense, when you are ready to do songs. Remember, songs do not, in themselves, teach function any more than random syllables on various pitches do. You have to have some “chops” (capability) functionally in order to do repertoire and get something out of learning it. That is the purpose of “vocal technique” lessons.

Question Everything!

The truth about repertoire is that there is no magic in it any more than there is magic in vocal exercises. You can learn to sing any song very badly and what you will have learned will be of  no use to you and certainly not to anyone who should hear you! The next time you encounter someone who says, “I teach all my students to sing classical first” ask her why that is so? Is she not capable of instructing singers to learn whatever it is she thinks classical rep will give them without the rep? And, if she is trying to generate operatic resonance in a jazz singer, by teaching her classical songs, why would she do that? Remember, conscious awareness begins with questioning things.