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I have said on this blog many times that the best teachers of anything physical are those who have done that activity. While I can try to imagine that it is possible to teach something you have never done, in the end I can never accept that picture as being valid. I do not believe that you can teach something physical just because you have been exposed to it for a very long time.  I cannot believe that this is ever the same as doing that activity yourself, successfully, for a long time. Only then do you really know how it feels, what it’s like and what has to happen while you are in the middle of doing it.

In singing, if all you have ever done is classical repertoire and you are asked to work with students who are performing a rock song, you might intellectually understand that it’s a different thing but how would you know the exact differences? How would you know what the appropriate boundaries are? How would you judge the amount of effort required to do a sound you have never made and have no idea of how to make even if you wanted to do so?

I well remember the big blow up in which I criticized two teachers who were presenting Broadway women composers to a large assembly of teachers by singing all the songs, even the belt songs, as if they were Schubert. When I pointed out that the songs should be done the way the composers intended I was told by one of the presenters, “Well, we know the students don’t sing them this way. The students know how to sing the correct sounds”. My response should have been, “Well, you should pay the students, since they are teaching you what those sounds are.” How would these “teachers” have known whether or not the students were making sounds that were healthy? The answer is obvious — they would not.

Would you like to study with a brain surgeon who had read about brain surgery in a book, watched a bunch of brain surgeons or maybe had studied foot surgery? Would you want to work on your golf game with someone who had never actually lifted a golf club but had read a lot of books about how to have a great swing and hung out a lot on golf courses? Or maybe he had a really lousy golf game but decided to teach anyway despite having fumbled around for a long time without much personal success. Would you study dance with a teacher who had never danced? Or acting with a teacher who did not have life experience acting in a wide variety of styles and performances? I surely hope not.

Still, our profession, that of teaching singing, tolerates more than almost any other, people who do not sing or sing badly teaching singing. It tolerates them for reasons I don’t understand. Many of them are very confident and can tell you (absolutely will tell you) how gifted they are as teachers and a lot of their students drink that Kool-Aid. The question becomes, “Why?” Why should anyone accept this sales job as an answer? It’s not mathematics or music theory which can be learned from a book. It’s SINGING.

There is such a thing as a naturally talented singer. There are people in this world who can simply sing very well, without muss, fuss or bother. They learn a few things about posture or breathing or vowels, and off they go to win contests and get jobs. Those people sing in a way that is properly coordinated, working effortlessly with the body, to produce vocal sound properly. If they go off and take lessons and then get famous, the teacher takes the credit and sometimes, gets a big reputation from that alone. Doesn’t mean they had a thing to do with it. The teacher just got lucky. I know some of those teachers.

No. The real teacher is someone who can take a person who thinks she cannot sing at all and help that person learn to sing well enough that singing becomes a regular part of her life. The real teacher is someone who can turn around a voice that has been mangled by lousy training and make it work properly. The real teacher is someone who can help a vocalist find a sound that is hers authentically. The real teacher can teach all kinds of students, with all kinds of backgrounds, goals, and levels of ability in all kinds of styles. The real teacher has lived with singing in her own throat and body and knows it from the inside out but also from the outside in. Both intellectual understanding and kinesthetic and auditory life experience.

You can’t learn to sing from reading a book, buying videos or attending one weekend workshop. You can’t learn to teach if you do not yourself make the sounds and make them well. While there are exceptions to this for valid reasons, if the circumstances are not justifiable (i.e., the person may have had a vocal injury due to surgery or other life experiences but was an excellent singer prior to that), then there is no reason why the techniques being taught should not have also been effective with the teacher’s own voice in the first place. Students, if the teacher sounds bad and doesn’t make sense, and if you can’t get clear instruction or you are confused, leave.  L E A V E.

 

I have never understood why some people are content to be “pretty good”, even at something they profess to be very serious about.

I know people who are doing professional musical things who will readily admit that they aren’t particularly good but who do nothing to improve their skills or abilities. They spend their free time traveling for fun, writing on topics unrelated to their work or participating in groups that ask for some kind of commitment in terms of time and energy that are also unrelated. I know people who claim to be “professional singers” who haven’t had a paying job in decades. I know people who are willing to stand up in front of an audience and sing regardless of whether or not they sound good. Maybe the fun of singing in front of others trumps common sense? Maybe they think they sound just fine? Maybe they think it doesn’t matter as long as they know the words and the music?

Even very musical people who should have the ears to hear sometimes don’t. People who have enormous amounts of musical expertise may be intellectually superior but that doesn’t make them terrific artists. I have met quite a few people over the decades who fell into a musical job because they had some training but sadly they did not also have the level of skills that should also have gone with it. Skill building in such a circumstance would not be a nicety, it would be a requirement. Of course, that means the person would have to have the desire and the sensibility to improve.

Why is it that some individuals think they are better than they are and some think they are not very good when in fact they are excellent? As a teacher I have encountered both kinds of singers and it’s quite difficult to get them to re-evaluate their opinions and they can’t work to change things until they do. Kind of a Catch-22.

Don’t go through life being “pretty good” at anything. Have the guts to really commit, learn to be absolutely excellent without qualification and don’t give up until you get there. You are worth what it takes to become a master. If you don’t know whether or not your skill set measures up to industry standards, find three working professionals, do your thing, and ask them for an honest evaluation. Pretty good is pretty useless.

Age gives everything a different, more diffused perspective. It makes it easier to tolerate things that seems unacceptable when you are young. It teaches forgiveness and compassion. Things are not always just black and white.

When you begin something, unless you are very lucky and have an excellent mentor, you can’t see very far into the process. You may not know the way to go unless you have been taught what steps to follow and that leaves you to trial and error, a painful and slow process. Even when you have a mentor you can still get lost but without one it’s both lonely and scary.

Since singing isn’t organized in any formal manner and there are so many ideas about it, it is perhaps even more likely that you will get lost or at least face a few serious detours if you study. Even if you have a clear idea of where you would like to go, there is no guarantee that you will arrive.

After decades of life experience one has the advantage of looking backwards. It is possible to see where you have been, what roads you have traveled. It’s possible to review the ups and downs and the successes and failures and gain some insight into the whole tapestry. If you are lucky, there will only be a few regrets.

Age cannot go back into the past and make it be different but it can change how you look at the past and that perspective actually does change things in the present, sometimes a lot. Recently I read that the actor Patrick Stewart has always resented his father who beat his mother and was very cold and brutal to him. Turns out he discovered that his father had been on the front lines in the war and had seen a lot of violence and was suffering from what we now call Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. While it doesn’t excuse his father’s actions, it allowed Stewart to see that there were reasons why he behaved the way he did. He has decided to do charity work for both battered women (for his mother) and work with PTSD victims (for his dad). How he sees his past, now, as an older man, has changed what it means to him in the present.

I have met and spoken to many people who had terrible voice training in their younger days and who were damaged by it, some so badly that they never sang again. This is a tragic loss. I have met people who loved to sing more than anything else who gave up singing because of someone who hurt them so deeply they did not have the will to go on. I came close to being in this situation more than once but my desire to sing was ultimately stronger than my ability to throw in the towel. I’m still here. Beat up, maybe, but not a quitter. I have learned to look at my past as a journey during which I learned some hard lessons. Now I make those lessons work for me as a teacher. I use what I learned, what I experienced and what went wrong to help others avoid, as much as I can, the same messy issues. It’s not a guarantee, but it’s a possible map and that’s better than having none. If there is such a thing as “aging well”, I’m trying my best to do that. Sometimes it really is the best “revenge”.

What is good singing? Can anyone capture it in words?

All kinds of singing can be considered “good” for all kinds of reasons. Certainly, if one applies the thinking of the typical “classical” voice teacher to all styles, then some singing is “more good” than others. Clearly, I do not adhere to that at all in terms of style.

What I do think, though, is that singing has to have some kind of integrity unto itself and to the artist singing. If it doesn’t have that, it cannot be “good”. Integrity is defined in the Webster College Dictionary as being “fidelity to moral principles; honesty; or soundness; completeness”. To me, that means that if you don’t know what style you are singing and you don’t know the accepted parameters of that style either musically or vocally, and if you don’t know the boundaries of your own vocal production, you are singing without integrity, regardless of what style you are singing. That can never be “good”.

When the artist Pink sang at the Grammy award ceremonies in front of Liza Minelli, “Somewhere Over The Rainbow” she murdered the song. Having no clue about how to perform it nor how to sing it in anything other than a crude, sloppy manner, it was in very bad taste. I felt very sorry for Liza. I like Pink. I think she is an interesting artist. She just had no clue and someone should have told her so. Guess not.

When Deborah Voigt sang “Annie” in the Glimmerglass production of Annie Get Your Gun, there was no integrity in that performance. She sang “Annie” as Debbie, suiting her own vocal capabilities regardless of the way the character was written to be portrayed. Unfortunately, since the role was written for a belter and Debbie wasn’t about to belt, (since she (a) has very little chest register to begin with and (b) certainly doesn’t take what little she has up very far in pitch, and (c) was about to sing her first “Brunnhilde” at the Met a few months later), she turned the role of a  young woman who starts out as an backwoods hick into something unrecognizable. Too bad for Irving Berlin. He’s been dead a long time so why not stomp on his composition because if you are a Diva at the Met, who’s going to stop you?

Then, of course, there’s the highly commercially successful (as in it made a lot of money for the TV network) Sound of Music with Carrie Underwood. There we had a natural belter from Oklahoma unable to make herself into a European woman who was aspiring to be in the convent just before the second World War. Oh well, who cares if you don’t have a mezzo-soprano voice or acting skills when you can bring in 18 million viewers?

What constitutes good? Staying on pitch? Singing a style as if you know what the style is supposed to be? Understanding the limitations of your own vocal output? Truth be told, there are no voice police and whatever “standards” there may be are arbitrary, subjective, felicitous, and fleeting. Today’s “great” was yesterday’s “so-so”. Today’s “successful” was yesterday’s “crass”. This is not going to go the other way any time soon. Of course, that means today’s “so-so” might be tomorrow’s “wonderful”. We just don’t know.

Therefore, when you see and hear someone who is singing in any way that presents a cohesive whole, be appreciative. If the person and the performance and the music hang together uniquely but effortlessly, that’s about as “good” as it gets.

If you have studied any discipline — yoga, baseball, violin, acting — you know that you have to spend time working on that discipline before you become very good at it and even after you are good it takes years to be a master. A master is someone who can deliberately do very difficult things with little struggle and still be effective at a high level.

Those who think that learning to sing is about finding the “right” sound in one moment and then staying there, misunderstand the nature of vocal training and its purpose. Those who think that “vocalizing” is just a way of warming up and that learning songs teaches you whatever you need to know are equally misguided. People who assume that you can sing any song in any manner and that this is just fine because its part of “individualizing” the song are also incorrect.

Repertoire is useful for polishing something to a high degree after it is ready for polish. After Michelangelo finished the “Pietá” he polished the marble to a high sheen. He did not do that while he was working on the basic form of the sculpture. If you do the “finishing touches” while you are in the middle of a task, you will have to do them again when you are actually done. You might even ruin things so you can’t finish at all.

So it is with repertoire – songs or roles, classical or CCM — you sing to the level of your technique as evidenced by your vocal function exercises. Nothing else is possible. The choice, therefore, is to know what level your vocalizing is at and to make sure that you do not try to sing a song that is over your head. Sadly, singing teachers often assign repertoire that is extremely difficult to beginners, thinking (incorrectly) that this will allow them to “grow into” the material and teach them things along the way. No. If you take someone who can barely make it through a one mile run and put them in a 10 mile run, they will collapse in the middle or perhaps be injured while pushing past their physical limits. If, however, you let that person gradually run distances that are slightly longer than their easy endurance encompasses, they can build up to doing a 10 mile race and maybe winning it. In fact, if they are to coast through the ten-mile boundary, they should train to run at least 15 miles in hard conditions over a period of time. THAT would make the 10 mile race much easier.

If you can barely make a sound that is secure, free and undistorted, at a moderately loud volume, in your highest pitch range, then singing a song with those requirements, particularly if they happen over and over in the song, is doomed at the outset. You can only struggle, push, and ignore the extra effort you are expending and that, more than anything else, will actually set you back rather than help to develop your vocal skills.

When evaluating a song looking at the pitch range, comparing it to the normal pitch defaults of vocalists (SATB and all derivatives thereof), at the tessitura and the lyrics (how emotionally potent are they?), the tempo (how fast or slow) and the style (ballad or driving pop/rock song) can give you a lot of information, even if you have never heard the song or seen it as printed music before.  When you choose or suggest repertoire for a student do not pick songs that are more than a small amount beyond the student’s present skill level.  In fact, the song should be easier than the vocal capacity of the singer as evidenced in vocal function exercises. Even if the song is very easy, making the singer dig into the meaning, the communication and the nuance of the style should be challenging enough. Even “Happy Birthday” can be interesting. Remember Marilyn Monroe at JFK’s birthday long ago?

If you want to push the person, make the exercises more challenging, but not so hard as to wear the person’s voice out during practice. If you can’t make informed repertoire choices, go learn how to do that. Don’t guess.

These days things everywhere are looser then they were even 25 years ago. It seems that it’s OK to list things as casually as possible without any degree of correctness just to put some “spin” on them, maybe to enhance who you are or what you do.

I am not in this camp, however, and I try to be as scrupulous as possible about what I claim to have done and not done. If I write something with another author, it gets listed as “co-author”, not “author”. I don’t try to make it seem as if I wrote it alone. If I publish something, it is with the other authors’ names in order and what it is and isn’t is CAREFULLY noted so as to be exact.

If you take a course, one or even three courses, or if you take a few private lessons (less than one year’s worth of bi-weekly training sessions), the old “Code of Ethics” would not allow you to claim that you were the “student of” whomever it was that you saw. In fact, you cannot use “studied with” if you took a course, as that implies that you were a private student. You have not “worked with” or “worked under” for the same reason. You can claim, I took this course. I was given certification to say that I got the information from this course from this specific person. That’s not wrong. That is ALL you can claim. If you have been a student in a master class with a master teacher, you MUST list it that way.

Speaking for myself and others in similar circumstances to mine, I really do not appreciate it when someone who has seen me twice or three times, or who has taken one of my trainings, claims on his website or social media to have “worked with” me. Especially if I wouldn’t remember the person if I bumped into him or her on the street. I do not expect to see on social media that the person has “worked under or with” me. If you want to claim that you have a personal relationship to me, you have to actually have one.

You have to earn your own reputation. Young people, be aware, claiming to be someone’s student when you have not met the above criteria is borderline unethical behavior. True, it’s not illegal, but it is misleading. If I catch anyone doing this, you are going to hear directly from me and you won’t be happy.

The only people who can say they are my students are those who have worked directly with me, one-on-one, for a minimum of one entire year (on-going) or who have been involved in my coursework over a long period of time (several years). I’m watching.

There is such a thing as learning to sing step by step. Most singing teachers don’t know which exercises are difficult and which are easy. They don’t know what kinds of things are vocally challenging for everyone and what’s only difficult for certain students. They can’t decide what kind of progress is slow, rapid or average (until they have been teaching for years).

The advantage of teaching for over 150,000 hours is that you have heard a lot of people sing a lot of exercises for a long long time. If you have your eyes and ears open you can’t help but notice patterns. The patterns between individual singers, in different voice categories, doing different styles at different stages of their lives. You notice what happens that’s typical, what happens that is unusual and all sorts of stuff that varies but not chaotically. It’s like studying the ocean. The ocean is the same all over the planet. It’s just one big body of water broken up by land, right? If you ask an oceanographer, I would venture to say that this answer would not suffice. Even sailors know this isn’t really the whole truth.

If most people who teach singing don’t learn how to teach singing (and most don’t), but just sing and go by what they were taught and what worked for them, it’s no wonder that there is confusion. If you are someone who has only sailed in a small boat in Long Island Sound for all of your life, then  teaching someone else how to captain a tug boat in New York Harbor or sail an ocean liner in the Caribbean wouldn’t be a good match.

The point of studying different approaches to singing is to develop a broader base, a wider perspective, a more diversified skill set in order to be useful to all sorts of students. If you do not know how normal voices function, you will not know what to do with a voice that is unhealthy or unhappy. If you do not understand kinesthetic learning or intellectual process you will throw exercises at students thinking that one of them might “stick” and be helpful. Of course, if it doesn’t, you can always blame the student for his or her inadequacies.

If you ask second graders to do calculus and they fail, is that their fault? If you ask a beginning vocalist to sing a song that has all sorts of difficulties (for any number of reasons) and they can’t sing it well, is that the student’s fault? If you are mystified as to what’s wrong, or what to do to make it better, go take a course in pedagogy. Anywhere. Just go.

CCM Institute, Shenandoah Conservatory, Winchester, VA. July 12-14, 2014.

 

What if the sounds you make could be heard by angels? What if they were invisibly there, listening to you? Would that matter to what you were doing?

If thought is energy (we know this since it can be measured now with electronic instruments and various kinds of scans), and if energy can neither be created nor destroyed (thank you, Mr. Einstein), then every thought you have is still floating around in the universe somewhere, maybe even inside your own grey matter. Now wouldn’t that be interesting?

If the words we utter can never be retracted, and if their impact can never really be undone, shouldn’t we be taught to pay attention to what we say and how we say it from the first day we  say “mamma”?

I have been writing about “mindfulness” lately (along with everyone else). What is that? Mindful means being aware of what you are doing while you are doing it. It means that you operate in each moment with awareness. You think about what you say, how you act and the consequences those activities have, before and during the action. It’s rare that anyone actually does that.

What you say to yourself, both in your mind and out loud, matters. If a lot of it is negative and judgmental, it will cause you to look at life,  particularly your own, in a depressed way. Read the last two sentences again out loud.

Some people don’t want to trust the universe, they don’t find it benign. Some people don’t want to be open-hearted, loving and kind, they would rather be suspicious, cold and mean. Some people don’t care to put the good of the whole above their own personal gain. And some people would rather try to control life than let it flow through beautifully as it does. Those people relate to singing methods that promote squeezing something in their throats or bodies. They like the idea that holding on inside themselves protects their message or uniqueness.

In point of fact, the opposite is true. The freer the sound the more likely it will be to be healthy and also to convey honest emotion. The more the sound will ring true when you tell your truth. Why, why would anyone want anything else as a vocal artist????

You can sing however you want to sing.  Not everyone is interested in singing freely and telling the truth. Not everyone cares what kinds of things (words and intentions) she says to herself all day long. Not everyone “believes” in angels. If, however, you do care or maybe would like to care, then I invite you to try being mindful and conscious for just one day, watching what you say and how you say it for all your waking hours (both in your head and out loud). What you tell yourself is true. It is what it is. Unless you actually have two separate voices in your head (which is a mental illness) there isn’t anyone in there but you.

Watch how you sing and how it sounds to you. Sing as if “the angels” were real and are there with you……….treat your sound, both words and music, inside and outside your head, as if it is sacred and powerful. See what happens.

Things are changing now, faster and faster. Everyone is jumping on the bandwagon to champion functional training based on body awareness and voice science.  Mindfulness and voice science are jumping out of everyone’s mouth. They are the flavors of the month.

“Bring in the high partials.” “Tune the 2nd harmonic to the 1st formant.” “Find the singer’s formant cluster on those high notes.”

Twenty five years ago when I spoke at a meeting of the New York Singing Teachers’ Association and said that sooner or later the profession was going to go over to voice science, the room was against me. They were artists, not scientists. They were musicians and actors, not researchers. The scientists didn’t understand singing because it was mysterious. THEY understood because they sang and that was the only way into their private club.

Oh.

Now I read about all sorts of things that were “forbidden” years ago and for which I was called “fringe” by mainstream classical teachers. What was ignored or mocked years ago in my not so long life (I’m 65, not 95),  is now touted and celebrated. It’s funny.

I also keep saying that the opera world is going to one day wake up and allow electronically amplified music by pop/rock composers into the house and then opera as we know it will change, in the blink of an eye, into a museum piece. The seats, however, will be filled by young people with money to spend and sooner or later, the old folks, who will be outraged, will slowly disappear and their objections will disappear with them. Has to be.

So, beware the teacher who has read a few books, attended a few conferences and knows the buzz words. They sound like they know what they are talking about (“Increase the subglottic pressure.”) but many times they still are as clueless as when they were talking about “pink mist” and “singing from the back over the top while spinning out of the dome”.

Can the teacher sing? How well? What excuses do they make if they can’t or sing badly? Is their explanation something you can validate by going online and looking it up on a voice science website? Do they talk to you in plain simple English? Do you feel stupid at the end of a lesson? If you don’t get good answers, L E A V E, people. Caveat Emptor.

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.