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This word comes from “soma” or body in Greek. Psyche means mind. Psychosomatic means  of the mind and body.

Somatic education, experiencing, awareness. All of these words imply that the body is directly involved in something that has to do with what is happening. Surely, if anything was ever “somatic” , singing is.

Yet one must go to acting work to find deep connection between sound and movement. It is actors (and occasionally dancers) who find ways to make sound while moving around, breathing. It is actors who work to find a sound that comes from the body’s free expression of the human condition. Why is it, then, that classical vocal training programs have no such courses? They might have dance (but maybe not) and they might have “stage direction or deportment” but developing acting singers or singers who act seems separate from vocal technique training and learning repertoire for juries. Why?

The very act of separating these things is foreign. When human beings are connected to their bodies in a conscious and deliberate manner, they can move and express a wide variety of emotions and ideas and their voices follow suit by coming forth with little strain. It is understandable that things need to be isolated and investigated both physically and intellectually in order to learn about them and assimilate them, but that separation needs to be acknowledged as a construct, not an end in itself. “You are over-thinking this. You are thinking too much.” This is a common criticism singing students hear. Of course, they are thinking too much. You can’t do something new if you don’t think about it!!!

It may be easier to produce a big, fat operatic sound while standing still. I have heard that said. Still, the great singers of opera and concert repertoire were able to move enough to convey the emotions of the characters in the music. Being a tree trunk isn’t very interesting and doesn’t work well for singers’ voices either. I have seen amazing performances of opera in which the star vocalists were very flexible and busy with stage movement but still sang well enough to give the audience chills.

If we study how human beings look and sound at dramatic moments, we will find that they all share many basic things. Martha Graham knew this and made excellent use of it throughout her career both as a dancer and as a choreographer. If you see someone kneeling down, head bowed, you assume something different than when that same person is standing up looking at the sky with amazement. So, too, do we assume something when we hear a scream that is different than a laugh. The primal sounds we all make, such as grunts, groans, shouts, screams, howls, laughs, giggles, cries, sobs, moans, sighs, and cooing, all convey some kind of emotion without any specific words or language. These sounds should remain available to us as undercurrents in all of our communications. Human beings who sing should not lose the primal quality of expression through body and voice that conveys authentic emotion, lest their singing be empty. They will do so, however, if they are trained to ignore their bodies and the information they contain. As I wrote the other day, classical singing can sound like empty howling. Who would want to hear that?

One of the reasons the great singers were great was because they were always deeply connected to emotional truth and authenticity. Angry music sounded (and looked, if you could see them perform) angry. Callas, Pavarotti, Hvorotovsky, Horne…..many more. Memorable because the voice, the person and the communication were always one and the same. All of it passed through the body, over which they had great control. Streisand, Bennett, Cook, and many other of the “old timers” all powerful communicators. Maybe this is not so much the case with the present generation of singers.  Amplification doesn’t substitute for emotional truth.

The path into the body and its consciousness is slow and requires dedication. You cannot get there in a moment or in several moments. You can only get there through patient, repetitive persistence, over a great deal of time, and with a desire to know and explore all that it has to tell you as you go.

Somatic Voicework™ is a way into your body through your voice and into your voice through your body.

 

Learning to pay attention to something when you have not previously had a reason to do so can take time and commitment. Paying attention in a broad general sense asks that you proceed very slowly, taking time to absorb experience as it occurs, moment by moment. This mental state, alert and alive but not filled with “word thoughts” is one that many people in our society do not experience, except perhaps when they are in nature or deliberately meditating.

This kind of mindfulness can be directed by intention. For instance, what is my body doing when it breathes in and out? Where am I moving and how much? What else is shifting? Can I locate other areas in my body that respond to the air moving in and out and if so, which areas and what sensations do I have there? Is my breath even or uneven? If I watch that, how regular or irregular does it stay if I keep noticing over a period of minutes? Is is possible for me to allow the body to do all the movements of inhalation and exhalation effortlessly? Can I intervene with deliberate movements? What happens when I do? How does that change, if it does, my earlier awareness of what my body is doing as the breath goes in and out?

You can’t possibly know any of that if all you do is force yourself to “breathe in your diaphragm”.

If someone is working on you as a Feldenkreis, Alexander or Shiatsu practitioner, what do you experience as the work takes place? How does it shift your perception of your body during the session and after it’s over? If you are doing yoga, how much can you bring your conscious attention to the asana and what it is doing to and with your body? Can you stay linked to your breathing, your sensations, your movement and your sense of moment by moment experience? If you are linking your body with your mind, how deep and how broad can that link become?

This kind of awareness can, of course, also be brought to any other life experience. You can learn to be aware of eating patterns, work patterns, patterns that show up in relationships. You can notice that you are behaving in a reactionary manner (this is how I always am and always will be) or that you have a choice, in the moment, to watch the desire to react but not follow it. (I want to eat a donut now but I will have an apple instead). You can do this with your voice. (I have a hard time singing that note. I’m just going to yell until I get it to come out or I have a hard time singing that note. I wonder if I could find a way to get there in an easier manner and still sound OK?)

Some people will never “get” any of this. The people who read this blog regularly are probably not in that category. Most of the people who “get” my work are conscious, open, loving beings who desire to use their artistry in the highest possible manner.

If you do not know how to increase your awareness of your body in an “out of the box” manner, please learn. If you are a graduate of my Level III Certification, come to work with Peter Shor in July at Shenandoah. You will not be sorry.

Many people work on “physical fitness”. In that world, feeling the pain isn’t uncommon. Pushing the body to go past its natural limits comes with the territory. If you do that enough, you deaden yourself to pain and learn to ignore your body’s natural wisdom, and then you run a greater risk of becoming seriously injured.

Cultivating awareness of the body is exactly the opposite of “getting ripped”. It has to do with drawing your attention into your body and noticing what, how and where it feels something. If you ask it to do something it typically doesn’t do, you might not get much of a response or have much control. If you are not deeply in touch with your body, you may not only lack strength and coordination but also may not be able to direct specific movements even if you understand exactly what you want to move.

Even dancers and athletes can be out of touch with their bodies when they enter into activities that require a different kind of movement than that which they typically use. All dancers know that they have to adapt to each new choreographer and depending, that can be easy or take a bit of time. Being a great tennis player doesn’t automatically make you good at baseball, even though both require great hand/eye coordination.

Physical awareness happens best in a body that is in good health and decent shape but it is not limited to that condition. People who are ill can have great physical awareness and people who are really strong and powerful can have very poor physical awareness. Also, noticing subtle changes in the body takes some degree of sophistication in awareness, as the smaller the change or reaction, the greater the level of conscious attention (awareness) has to be.

Generally, unless you are familiar with “mindfulness” techniques that are directed specifically towards the body, you may not even know if you are physically aware or not or if the awareness you think you have is all there is. You can only become more knowing by experience and the experience has to be anchored to intention. Anything else is not helpful. Only physical awareness is physical awareness. If you sing and you have not done something to increase your conscious awareness of every part of your body and what it is capable of, you don’t know it well enough to do yourself much good. How would you know that? You wouldn’t until and unless you participated in some kind of bodywork.

If you have the opportunity to work with anyone anywhere who will help you gain a very personal, and perhaps unusual, perspective on what it is to live in, experience through and have a body, take it. This can only benefit you in every aspect of your life but most particularly in your singing.

Most of us are taught that when something isn’t working it’s because something is wrong and it needs to be fixed. That’s not a good attitude to have when you are working with students of singing.

A much better attitude is to find out what works. Look for what a student can do not for what they can’t do. Look for things that go in a good direction, not the ones that do not. Do not fix what’s wrong, find what is right and build on it.

In order to help someone correct vocal problems or faults you have to guide the voice towards efficiency of production. That will take it away from incorrect habits and poor usage. If you tell your students the many things they do “wrong” they get very good at knowing their faults but not at understanding what they do well. Tell each vocalist about things you notice that are “plusses” and refer to the “issues” as minor things that will go away over time. Provided, of course, that you have that as a goal and know what you are doing.

If the student can’t sing high notes comfortably, work on lower notes that are comfortable and strengthen them through traditional tools: vocal freedom, posture and breathing exercises, and clear vowels and consonants. Work on vocal flexibility and strength. Work on listening for function. Done well over time the high range should emerge without undo strain as long as you incorporate trying high notes from time to time. If the student can’t sing very loudly, work on strengthening the sound from its typical level by using specific exercises, over time, gradually going from mezzo piano to mezzo forte to forte over a series of lessons.

Having a clear intention to improve something that is already functioning at a minimally acceptable level is important. As problem or issues arise, acknowledge that they are there but do not make them worse by working only on them, as if nothing else was available. Incorporate awareness of what can be better over time while expanding the domain of what is already good or excellent.

Strengthen what works, address what does not gently and in small doses. If you know what you are seeking and the student cooperates it will emerge over time.

It’s frightening to listen to instruction that has no basis in reality and that rests entirely on ideas that are not grounded in any rational codified system that is broadly accepted and widely acknowledged as being valid. This, of course, happens every day if you are dealing with vocal instruction. When it happens in a master class and everyone is nodding and clucking approval, one has to wonder if the entire room thinks the Emperor is still wearing his clothes.

There is so much nonsense in the profession as to be laughable, but sadly, the game that is played is that gobbledegook is actual information. First and foremost, in order to be SANE, people must stay in touch with the body and how it processes whatever data it experiences, as it happens in time, moment by moment.

We live in a society that thinks its feelings. If you are asked, “How do you feel about that?” and you respond by saying, “I am having trouble getting my work done,” that is not a feeling. You might feel angry or sad or frightened that you are not getting your work done. It might make your chest feel heavy, or make it hard to breathe or make you clench your fists. Those are feelings and sensations that reside in the body. The way you feel about having trouble getting your work done has to begin by being either a sensation or an emotion, located in your body as somatic experience. Mostly, people have no idea what the previous statement means. Guess what? That will make you very confused and you will find it hard to trust your own judgement, to follow your “gut” or to know “how to listen to yourself”. If you are a performing artist, that’s deadly.

In this state, it is easy to get lulled into thinking just about anything and it is easy to be brainwashed. Beliefs not based on trust of your body and its experiences will lead you astray. Emotions are feelings and sensations and must pass through your body as feelings and sensations. How you react to them is open but you have to experience them to react to them. Think about that. How can you learn to direct something you don’t actually experience?

Information that is meaningful has to be heard, seen, felt, and sometimes tasted and smelled, for instance, such as when one is studying to be a chef. Singers need to hear and see and those things operate through the ears and eyes but also through the mind as visual images and cognitive recognition of things like pitch (notes), volume, and other auditory cues. They have to listen and look, inside and outside. Seems obvious, no?

Instruction which tells the singer feel this, don’t feel that, or release this or make that happen, is poor. It is better to ask a student singer, “When you read these words, what do they mean to you? What is your reaction to them? How do they make you feel? What is your reaction to that feeling? Now, if you were having that experience in your own life, right now, and you had to say those words, how would you sound? Let’s find out!” Then, in exploring this (together, teacher and student) the singer would have a chance to work towards making a sound that has something to do with their life experience and that would give the voice natural power and meaning. Most vocal instruction doesn’t go near that, sometimes even in a master class. Not good.

No, it’s not a substitute for basic vocal function learned through exercises but if you can already sing decently and no one helps you connect that sound to meaningful personal expression, who cares? That’s why many people don’t like opera. A lot of it sounds like loud, empty howling.

Voice teacher gobbledegook:

Open the space, make it vertical. Keep it high, don’t drop. Don’t do your “singer thing”. Stop being hung up, be free. Try to make it looser, don’t hold your jaw. Watch that you don’t fall out of the buzz. Keep the spin going. Draw up from the belly more. Want it, really want it. Go for it. Stop thinking too much. Remember how that felt. Keep the dome going.

B A L O N E Y.    S P A M.    K O O L   A I D.   S C A R Y.

Translation in plain English:

Let your jaw go straight down. Keep your mouth/lips in an oval shape. Smile. Focus your attention on what you are saying. Allow your body to move. Allow your jaw to hang as loosely as possible while you pronounce the syllables. Articulate as clearly as you can while you sing. If you can hear and feel a kind of firmness in the sound, stay with it. If you can sing softly and easily without a lot of pressure on your belly or your throat, that’s great. Be sure to contract (lift, engage, work with) your abdominal muscles while you are singing. Be very clear, as the character, that this is a very important moment and the stakes are high. Know what it is that is your character is saying and why and then sing as if it were vital that you be heard and understood. Focus your thoughts on that and only on that. While you practice, pay as much attention to what you hear and feel as you can and make note of those things so you can return to them next time. Remember that as you get more skilled in your singing, changes in your soft palate will allow you to sing a sound that is fuller and has more harmonic richness because the vowel sound shape, inside your mouth, will change.

Advice. Suggestions. Queries. Guidelines. POSITIVE statements (no “don’t’s”). And no one should be given more than ONE of these at a time. ONE.

Yes, I recently went to another master class. Yes, I was frustrated (angry, in my gut). Yes, you’ve heard all this before.

Someday, an entire audience will know that this kind of teaching is meaningless and they will not sit there making excuses for the teacher because the instruction is “artistic” or “creative” or “passionate” or “well-intended”. We’re not there yet. Not at all.

When you are born with a lot of talent and life circumstances are such that you can enhance that talent through training, and you are lucky enough to get recognized by those who can put you forth into the world with that talent; you can end up with a career, sometimes a very big career. Things being what they are in our society, people will gravitate towards you as soon as you start to become successful. They can foster even more success and eventually a talented person can end up with what we call “celebrity status” and become a public figure.

There are all sorts of problems with a situation like this and it’s rare that it does not deeply touch the artist in some profound and lasting way. When multiple people from various worlds tell you on an almost continuous basis that you are a genius, a life changer, someone who is “special” and “different”, it must be hard not to finally start to believe that this is indeed true. You can accidentally fall in love with yourself, or what you perceive to be your self, and build your own sense of importance, sometimes to the detriment of all those around you who love the real you.

A true artist has some amount of protection if he or she really delves deeply into the work they are creating, for it is there that they must confront the depth of their being and ask difficult questions that have no pre-ordained answers. The questions can only be resolved through brutal honesty, thoughtful and extended self-examination and confrontation of habitual patterns, both conscious and unidentifiable. Still, without diligence, delusion is possible and even artists who truly seek to be free of any limiting encumbrance can be fooled by their own defenses and end up falling in love with their own false self-image. This can lead to deep, dark despair and profound self-doubt.

The ego is interested in itself and its own ideas, its own needs and its own emotions. It survives by finding ways to justify its own existence and can become a shadow self (“I am nothing, I am always a jerk”) just as much as it can be “I am the greatest”. Either way, its hold is great and its damage is even greater.

The one and only remedy to a raging ego is service. True service liberates the individual from the bondage of the small self. It is in work or task that serves the highest and greatest good that freedom is available. It is connected to producing something of lasting value that leaves the world a better place than it would be had it not been created. Truly generous work, done for the sake of the work and for no other reason, is ego-free and not bound by any time frame nor monetary consideration. It is not at the mercy of momentary obstacles nor does it shirk from determination. It does not drain but supplies energy. It does not harm but heals. It cannot be limited even if it is confined to small endeavors.

In order to serve the only requisite is to desire to be of service. Understanding what needs to be done and doing it is enough. The job at hand is the job that needs to be executed, without complaint and without acknowledgement.  Service, carried out in this manner, creates joy and in this perfect expression of love and life, the ego shrivels and goes into hiding.

If you are famous and you want to help, take a good long look at what those who are not in your inner circle tell you and remember that you are just like everyone else. No worse but surely no better. Wash the dishes, sweep the floor, take out the garbage, listen to the birds, walk on the beach. Don’t let your huge ego eat your soul.

When does learning stop? When do you get to have “all the information you will ever need?” When is your education complete?

I think a lot of folks would say when you finish school. Many people learn what they have to and stop there. Singers, however, should NEVER have that idea. You absolutely cannot afford to think that you have nothing more to learn at any stage of your life.

Taking courses, studying new things, working with teachers, coaches, conductors, directors, composers, choreographers, language specialists, diction experts……there is so much to discover when you sing. Yet, sadly, I have encountered singing teachers who have had one, maybe two teachers, were happy with them, liked their own singing, and that was that.

I have to admit it – that mentality baffles me completely. I can’t imagine not wanting to grow, to challenge myself, to examine old ideas and beliefs and see if they need re-organization. It’s like never cleaning out your garage or attic. Ideas, like boxes of “life stuff”, can become out-dated and irrelevant. I am always taking courses or attending conferences, working with coaches, talking to my colleagues and mentors, reading articles and books.

Self-satisfaction in an artist is important because you really can’t share your singing with others if you don’t much like it without feeling like a fraud. Self-indulgence, however, can become a trap. Thinking you are above it all and know more than everyone else is AWFUL, but every profession has people who think this about themselves and, sadly, they convince others that they are smarter than they actually are. Then, not only is the individual deluding him or herself, but he is taking others down the road of delusion as well.

If you study with a teacher who hasn’t been to one of the conferences that are offered to voice professionals (and there are many now), or hasn’t sung or performed in decades even though they could, or has no interest in reading the latest information about voice science or pedagogy – why would you do that? Is your teacher some kind of magician? Even the smartest, most talented people continue to develop through study. Why should your teacher be different? Don’t study with such teachers. Look around for those with a more open, curious mind.

CCM Vocal Pedagogy Institute, Shenandoah Conservatory, July 2014. ccminstitute.com

“Spin the tone more from the top”.

“Release the back as you ascend”.

“Engage the respiratory muscles before you begin the tone”.

“Aim the tone high into the mask so you can generate the singer’s formant”.

“Support from the lower chamber to find the inverted triangle used in belting”.

“Sing as if you have no jaw”.

“Sing as if your head is empty”.

“Let the tone go up and back but lift the soft palate into a dome”.

“You’re listening to yourself!”

“You think too much!”

 

Nonsense language. Meaningless language. Impossible to understand phrases. TYPICAL phrases of a singing lesson.

These phrases and the hundred others just like them belie profound ignorance of kinesthetic learning, of the way the brain is hooked up to the larynx and the throat, of the responses the body makes to a verbal stimulus and an intention. (What intention? Is “spinning” some kind of intention? Is having no jaw an intention or a goal?) Want more of the same? Just go to the internet. What’s there is endless and mostly ridiculous. Worse, look on the NATS website forum and take a look at the things the singing teachers say there. Scary stuff.

It is absolutely and completely unnecessary to use anything other than plain simple English with no voice teacher jargon to teach singing based on vocal function. Of course, if your teaching is based on your own unverified ideas, and your basis for “proof” of those ideas is your own singing, and you have decided, based entirely upon your own personal observations that what you do is what everyone else should also do, you will have no choice but to make up words to describe your “discoveries”. If you have drunk the Kool-Aid of some method that is not based on science but also on vocal health and music marketplace reality, and you teach what you have been told without really understanding it personally as experience, then you will have no choice but to be stuck when trying to help someone else learn to sing. You will have to resort to making up meaningless phrases to convey your ideas to others. This will add to the profession, what? Exactly nothing. That we are still there, 50 years after I took my first voice lesson, is appalling, but so.

If you teach or coach singers and you don’t run your ideas about what the voice does before an actual honest-to-goodness voice science researcher, or a laryngologist or a qualified speech language pathologist, you may not know that your ideas are incorrect, or incorrectly applied, and what you think is happening is not what is actually happening at all. You can make up new terms, you can call what you do by any description including naming the sounds orange, pink, purple and red, but that doesn’t make those terms real, accurate or even useful. In fact, even if all your students do really well singing the red sound and win contests with the one that’s blue, it’s still not useful to anyone but those particular students and only useful to them while they study with you and not if they ever study with someone else, ever.

As long as the profession tolerates or even encourages this behavior we are doomed to remain in the past. We will continue to disagree about “breathing in” and “breathing out” and “forward placement” and “masque resonance”. We will argue over small irrelevant things instead of deciding how to use common language, grounded in science, and applying function to actual present-moment music and the demands of the music marketplace.

Dysfunctional training? We are surrounded by it.

CCM Vocal Pedagogy Institute at Shenandoah Conservatory (ccminstitute.com). Think different.

 

What’s vocal function and why study it?

In fact, isn’t all singing training functional? Aren’t all singing teachers the same?

Maybe not. Depends on what you think you functional training is. Most people don’t know but think they do.

If you think all you need to know in order to sing better is “resonance” and “breath support” or versions of “placement” and “breath management, control, or coordination” then any teacher who presents these ideas in some way would seem to you to be just as good as another one. If you have a teacher who doesn’t sing or sings really badly (sounds awful) and tells you that doesn’t matter (and it might not, but it usually does), then you can study with anyone with equal results. If you study with someone who teaches from their own point of view, which is very clear to them, but maybe not clear to others, as long as you finally figure out what that teacher wants, that’s OK, until and unless you study with someone else or become professional. If what the teacher tells you smacks of “this is the new, best way” and only they know those techniques, then that’s OK, too? Not.

If you can’t tell the difference between good singing and bad, and you don’t know a thing about how we make sounds as human beings, and you don’t know any parameters of musical styles, and you think that opera singers are better than every other kind of singer; or, if you think that really good singers don’t ever need lessons and that training will “change” your voice or that you only need a few lessons to “get some tips” then you are ripe for lousy teaching, lousy results and a big load of baloney from the teacher.

If you are NOT in any of these categories, and if you want real, honest information, you can find it but you have to look. You have to know what good singing is and how it works, and that means you have to do some research. If you look online, talk to other singers and read some books, it should help you ask intelligent questions.

And, if you don’t want to go through months of searching, you can come to Shenandoah University in July and learn more in 9 days than many people have reported they have learned in 9 years. Come learn with others of like mind. ccminstitute.com

“I Am The Greatest” worked as a slogan for Mohammed Ali. He actually delivered the goods to back up his claims.

There are a few singing teachers here in New York who boldly announce that they have “THE” voice studio. They are “The best”, “The most famous”, “The most important”, etc., etc.

Generally speaking, the people who decide this about themselves are NOT the most anything, except perhaps the most egotistical and narcissistic . The people here who have the most students, the biggest reputations and the most well-known students don’t advertise at all. Some of them don’t even have websites. One thing they do not ever do is claim to be “The (fill in the blank)”. They don’t need to.

I have twice had students who came to me from two different singing teachers who both claimed to be the “only famous” singing teachers in New York and both of those students had learned next to nothing useful. Both teachers continued to claim these students in their ads long after they had stopped studying with them. This is borderline unethical. When they were studying with me, I didn’t discuss it.

If you are foolish enough to study with someone who has decided (based entirely upon his or her highly inflated opinion) that they are the best or only teacher of singing, RUN AWAY. RUN AWAY.

Teachers of singing who know what they are doing have a wide variety of tools and techniques, based on vocal function and voice science, vocal hygiene and the requirements of the music business. They respect their colleagues, even when they disagree with them, and they are not egotistical or, yes, stupid, enough to make up exaggerated claims about themselves. It is shameful that teachers of singing can make such fantastic claims based only on their own ideas of their self-importance, but they can. There are no laws against it. They can also advertise themselves on the internet claiming to teach every human being on earth how to be a vocal star in 6 lessons or less. There are dozens of teachers like that. Can’t stop that either.

If you are seriously interested in learning to sing, before you decide that any one teacher is “perfect” and before you let that teacher convince you that he or she is THE ONLY person who really understands singing and how to teach it, take lessons with at least 5 other well established teachers (with a solid reputation, going back at least 5 years, preferably longer). Read about them, question others about them. Do not be sold a bill of goods.

Here in New York City there are probably at least 1,000 people teaching singing, with new ones emerging every day. There are many others who “coach” who are not really singers (they never sang) but work with singers. Some of the teachers have been around a very long time. There’s a reason why that would be so.

If you end up with someone who has convinced you that he or she is THE ONLY teacher who can teach you, or claims to be THE BEST or THE MOST FAMOUS or THE FIRST, and that person turns out to be not nearly as good as they convinced you they were, it’s your fault if you stay.

One more thing: the teachers who really know what they are doing are not going to make you sell your first born child to raise money to pay for a lesson, either. Expensive is not a guarantee of effectiveness. If you know someone studying with a teacher who claims to be “the best, most famous, most important and greatest” singer teacher who ever lived send them a copy of this post.