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On a recent “American Idol” Harry Connick, Jr. lectured Jennifer Lopez about pentatonic scales. Lopez apparently did not know what one of those was. Are you surprised? Do you care? Mr. Connick does.

This argument reflects some of the things I have written about here over the years. You do not need to be (a) educated, (b) sophisticated, (c) talented or (d) any of those things, in order to be “successful”. Ms. Lopez is remarkably attractive and very very rich and packages herself beautifully. She is an excellent dancer and maybe can sing (who knows, since so much of what passes for singing these days is what comes out of the equipment) and certainly has a large “following”. Mr. Connick is a musician and whether or not he is brilliant I will leave to my jazz friends to decide, but it is clear that he has more musical information than the other two judges.

Humanity being what it is, conflicted and all, it’s always going to be so that those who are most qualified at anything do not automatically end up on top or in charge. It is so that people do things for all kinds of reasons other than those that are best, most practical or serve the most good for the most people. In fact, we are living in a time when finding anyone who thinks of what’s best for the most people most of the time is not only very rare but, even when it happens, fraught with angst.

I heard yesterday that people in the “conservative South” think that the snow which is unusual there is a government conspiracy and that it was put there by the government because the government is controlling the environment to threaten people’s safety. They think the snow was fake. Huh?? That we live in a time when this idea should be taken seriously is just plain pathetic. Still, it was on the network news. I guess it goes along with all the other stupidity these people embrace as “truth”.

Extrapolating this to singing, if you point out that it might be better to have singing lessons based on function and you point out that being musically literate might also be useful if you intend to have a professional career, there will be people who are OFFENDED by this suggestion. (aka, Ms. Lopez). What do you do with that? Laughter is giving it more dignity than it deserves. There will always be people who are so ignorant that pointing out their obvious lack of knowledge is an affront to their sense of their own importance. Imagine, learning about jazz theory as a singer is considered insulting! And this person is JUDGING other singers??????? That’s why I DO NOT WATCH these shows.

All there is to do is read this quote from a poem by Dylan Thomas:

It seems that being traditional requires that all “old” traditions be upheld without question. Traditionalists stick to the rules as they are and have been and hold up the ideas of the past as being “tried and true” and worthy of continuity. A traditional person wants to keep things within the bounds of the accepted norms so they are not tainted or watered down.

We need traditionalists. If we did not have them, things would fall apart, decay and get fuzzy, and there would be nothing old to study and examine, to enjoy or appreciate. For all the people who brag about throwing things away and never hanging on to anything, we have folks to cling to what has been. Without them, museums would be pretty empty. History would be hard to find!

The anarchist wants to throw out the past, get rid of it and start fresh. The anarchist is interested in overthrowing the current ideas. You could think of the anarchist as a rebel, one who rails against stuffy old ideas that have grown rigid, stilted, and confining. An anarchist is someone who destroys what has been around too long and is ready to die and go away.

We need anarchists. Without them nothing new and exciting would ever be created. There would be no radical change, no breaking with things that have grown brittle and useless. The anarchists and rebels, railing against the status quo, are responsible for breakthroughs against all odds. We need them, too.

If, however, you value the past and the traditions it gives us but you also look to the present moment for innovation and for that which has never been before, what are you? A traditional anarchist? A rebel traditionalist? A lost and confused person with no direction?

We need to keep that which is good about the past. We need to honor it, to know it well, to study it, to become friendly with it, to learn from it and to respect it, but we also need to look at what can be better, what can be improved. We need to search for that which is fresh, dynamic, just emerging and exciting in it’s birth. There is no need to choose between the two. We can and should combine them. No one has to give up the past to be in the present or to envision the future. In fact, the more we are aware of and interested all three, the better.

Everything decays. Everything, even the universe itself, falls apart in time. The sun will die one day, so will all the stars. No matter how good or popular, eventually things decay, die and cease to be.

We are in the midst of a sea change of taste, values, and expectations regarding singing and music generally. Educated, sophisticated taste is harder and harder to find amongst those who are in the profession, sometimes even at a high level. In any style, classical or CCM.

To some degree this is a consequence of population growth. In my lifetime the population of the USA has about doubled. The planet has grown by more than a couple of billion people. With that many people, everything is effected. Since there isn’t more land, we are more crowded. Since there are no more “natural resources” they are being used up more rapidly and since it is harder to feed more mouths with the same animals and crops we have room for, we see many problems in various areas all over the world.

You simply can’t educate children in music and art if there are a lot more children and not a lot more money. If there isn’t very much money to pay for music education, you create an entire generation or maybe even two or three generations that has very low level education, or none,  in public school. Then, they don’t care much about music so they don’t put money into music education. Then you have a self perpetuating negative cycle.

The few people that do study music may or may not actually get decent information. And, sometimes people who end up being successful in the music business are self-taught. What they know is anyone’s guess. When these folks are “in charge” what happens is rarely good.

I know this from personal experience. I have met numerous people in my professional life who held positions in various areas of the music world, who were unqualified to do the job they had. Through a circumstance of luck, personal help or some other fluke, they found themselves in a job they probably shouldn’t have had.

It’s fine to watch contest shows, and reality shows, and award shows. Most people find them entertaining. I find them distressing, so I don’t watch them very often, as they remind me that our standards, across the boards, are going down and down, due, I suppose to entropy. Nothing to do about that, except notice it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dy00lD2bYT0

What do you do when people are screaming and yelling about how great it is for a kid (age 9) to sing —

(a) a opera aria

(b) that has nothing to do with a subject that could concern a child

(c) is written for a male, a strong, powerful tenor

(d) and requires vocal power and more emotional depth than a child has

The judges on this program, of course, didn’t say, “Honey, you have a beautiful, sweet voice, and you are a lovely lyrical singer, but this material is wrong for you, especially since it causes you to distort your mouth, overdrop your jaw, and go flat on some of the pitches. You need to sing songs that are appropriate for a child.”

And, if you want to, you can find Beverly Sills singing opera arias as a child and, guess what? She sings them the way a child should sing them: effortlessly and easily in her child’s undistorted, unaffected voice. They were just high vocalizes for a kid who could live up there and there’s nothing wrong, really, in that.

No, they gave this sweet child a standing ovation. Kind of like applauding the “rubber man” at the circus sideshow — applause for amazement at what’s in front of your eyes.

In fact, if you look for versions of “Nessun Dorma” which is what I was doing, you can find all kinds of amazing things on YouTube that are downright scary bad but that have audiences screaming their approval. Michael Bolton, Sarah Brightman (in Las Vegas), on and on. Luciano, who made this aria a world famous tune, sang the piece the way it was intended to be sung. The others? It runs the gamut. All the people who write comments on YouTube and are in the audiences of these videos seem to be very happy.

This is indicative of the lack of musical and vocal education available to the general public. People  like what they like and that’s that. It makes me wonder, then, why there is music education at all and what impact it has, if any, on the world at large. This takes us back to the problem with musical categories and the styles as individual aspects of the music marketplace. Saying they are all the same is a kind of ignorance. If you don’t know there are differences, if you don’t hear them, or recognize them if you are listening to them, you won’t sing them, or know not to sing them. Then, you get the kind of situation on the above YouTube clip. Figure that several adults, maybe more, music “experts” who work on the show, had to hear this kid and let her sing this way, and nobody objected? Nobody said, “NO!”??????

I don’t have any solutions. Just an observation that left me wondering.

We all know about “freeing up” the voice and letting go and having things relax and allowing them to “be easy”. That’s correct, right? We understand that deliberate squeezing and pushing isn’t good. We get that the breathing has to have some kind of “move low on the inhale” direction. We realize that screaming isn’t a particularly useful way to go most of the time.

Yet, how do we know the sound someone makes is “free”? How do we know if it isn’t pushed when it’s loud? How do we ask for “release” when the singer doesn’t feel what is restricted? What’s the purpose of telling a student to “get out of your own way and let the voice do what it wants” when that phrase has no real meaning until after it happens by itself?

What if you are embarrassed by the sounds you make because you don’t like them or because they feel awkward and you don’t really want to make those sounds in front of anyone else, even your teacher? Are you being neurotic or just being human? If you have a huge big scar all the way down the middle of your face, what does it take to go out into public without any inhibition? Ask someone who sounds pretty bad about why they don’t sing, and you might get an answer that makes sense.

Even in a student or singer who is willing to

“let go” it is not sufficient to bring the physical response of the vocal organs into a realization of their full functional potential. The fact is, some sort of movement, i.e., action, interaction or reaction to a stimulus, is involved.

– Cornelius Reid, “The Free Voice” (a book you should all read)

If you want to see how much confusion there is about singing and learning to sing, take a few hours and scour YouTube for “singing instruction” or some related topic like “singing lessons”.  You will see all manner of misunderstanding by “teachers” meaning to share their “knowledge” and people who want to sell you their courses or books. [Ten easy lessons to sounding like a rock star!!] The actual amount of honest-to-goodness accurate, useful information on singing in YouTubeland would fit on the head of a pin. Some of it isn’t bad or harmful, some of it is just plain silly, some of it is old-fashioned, and some of it, sadly, is scary. Let the buyer beware.

Stimulus (externally directed vocal exercise) should produce a response (internal adjustment of the vocal organs). A specific exercise should produce a specific response. If you can get a student to make a sound that he/she has never made before, no matter what it is, good or bad, then you have begun to teach the student something. New information is arising in the body and the mind is going to learn to track that sensory data by paying attention. It is so that the teacher must provoke this change through vocal exercise in order for the student to recognize AFTER IT HAPPENS that something is different. In going towards new movement, we are going towards freedom. Staying still is only useful in a mechanism that is weak and chaotic. You, as a teacher, must also know what kind of movement should come next and, therefore, what kind of stimulus would take the student there. YOU must know, not the student. YOU.

Be careful that you do not spend too much time trying to get the student to “let go” and “stop being afraid of your high notes”. Work where work can be done with relative ease, stimulate movement, allow for awareness, and acknowledge what happens when it does. That’s enough.

If all music were the same in “character” there would be no need for titles or descriptors. If opera singers could do rock music and rock stars could sing gospel tunes and folk singers could walk onto a Broadway stage and sing a traditional show, we wouldn’t need categories. The Grammy awards wouldn’t have categories, either, nor would Lincoln Center Library, which has even more of them than I was aware of prior to going there. The attitude that everything is the same seems to imply that all music is a spin-off of classical music, and all good vocalists can sing classical music easily and therefore, they can also sing well in any other style, as  all other deviations are simply “individual” interpretations of songs.

So, if you are Paulo Szot, and you sing “South Pacific” and then you go do an opera at the Met, are you a “crossover” artist? [Yes and also no.] If you are Michael Bolton and you record opera arias on an album, are you, too, a “crossover” artist? Does Mr. Bolton sound like Mr. Szot? Not in terms of his own voice but in terms of how he produces sound? Does Renee Fleming sound like a rock singer on her album of “rock songs”? The NY Times reviewed her album “Dark Horse” and said, “Ms. Fleming’s next step is figuring out how to sound, now and then, just a little less serious about it all”.

So, as long as there are different kinds of sounds in different kinds of music, we need names to define them. Within each category, there are all sorts of variations, all sorts of artists and there are no “border police” between one style and another, but until and unless we acknowledge that there are audible differences, we are left to confusion. The public decides and the public has its preferences. We are left with facing the reality of today’s music business, messy as it may be. You can’t train anyone from such a vague place as “everything is the same” and you can’t direct someone toward reasonable vocal and musical goals if all you know is the “it’s all one thing called singing”.

The origin of the terms of each style is interesting to contemplate. Maybe, some day, there will be a new style that emerges and hits mainstream. The last one to do that was rap, and that’s more than 20 years ago. It will need a new designation, too. Until that time, we have what we have.

If you are a rock/pop/gospel/folk/jazz/country/broadway/classical vocalist, good for you. Just don’t confuse the Nashvill rep with An Die Musik.

At a recent voice conference, the use of the term “non-classical” continued with impunity.

Why is it that this term, which uses the prefix “non” to describe an entire collection of styles of music, continues? Would we tolerate the use of the term “non-CCM” to describe all styles of classical music? There is far less classical anything than there is of commercial styles, but, there it was, used by all the classically trained people, to continue to describe music theater, pop, rock, R&B, gospel, folk, country, rap, etc.

This is from Merriam Webster online:

Full Definition of NON-

1: not : other than : reverse of : absence of <nontoxic> <nonlinear>

2: of little or no consequence : unimportant : worthless <nonissues> <nonsystem>

3: lacking the usual especially positive characteristics of the thing specified <noncelebration> <nonart>

Here is a definition from “dictionary.reference” online:

Non – a prefix meaning “not,” freely used as an English formative, usually with a simple negative force as implying mere negation or absence of something (rather than the opposite or reverse of it, as often expressed by un-

1: nonadherence; noninterference; nonpayment; nonprofessional.

This prefix refuses to go away because people refuse to deal with its meaning as if it were consequential. “Oh, it’s not so bad”, is the mentality. Really? I strongly disagree.

Even people who teach so-called “non-classical” styles use this term. (I did so reluctantly for over 30 years because there was no other one). For the past 14 years we have had the term Contemporary Commercial Music and it has grown in popularity. No, it is hardly used universally, but if there are people within this community, particularly, who are supporters or advocates of the methodology developed by the person who coined the term, who refuse to support its use, what can we expect of others?

I’m not surprised, but I am surely disappointed, that we do not have more “cheer-leaders” regarding the use of the term CCM, but even more distressed that we do not have folks who will stand up against the use of “non-classical” in a public forum, particularly if they are there to present on CCM training.

If you are one of those folks, please have the courage to stand up and say, “We don’t use the term “non-classical” any more to describe those styles that arose from average people in the USA. That is because the term describes them as being of little or no consequence and of being absent as a form of music and that is unacceptable. We use the term Contemporary Commercial Music. I hope you will stop saying ‘non-classical’ immediately“. You might take some lumps for being bold, but I think those styles are worth whatever it takes.

How do you get through to opera stars who insist they know what other styles are when they don’t bother to go to the people in those styles to ask? Or maybe they do and the people they seek out are too intimidated to tell the truth.

What makes it possible for opera stars who claim to be singing “crossover” who use their same operatic vocal production in other styles to think they are being authentic or even viable?  They don’t know the difference between opera and anything else. They don’t want to know.

“Just change the vowels, dear, and smile more into your nasal resonances. It’s easy.”

I have heard personally from opera stars who were known for their big booming voices, not once but many times, that in order to sing effectively, you just take a breath and let it go. Really.

For these blessed few people with gargantuan bodies and voices, I truly believe that that is so. They learn a bit about breathing, they learn about “shaping resonances”, they learn languages, and off they go, having world class careers. Bless them. All of them, bless them.

I think of all the people over 6 feet tall who do well in basketball. If you are hoping to be a pro and you don’t top 6 feet, even if you play the game very well and have good skills in the sport, you don’t stand too much hope of being a star professional player. Ditto, if you are nearly 6 feet tall at 15 years old and you want to be an Olympic gymnast. Even if you are really coordinated, your chances of making the team are very small. It is a sport for small compact people. Is this fair? Is this reflective of the rest of the people in this world who like and want to do gymnastics? No. Does it mean that no one should be in basketball if they are short or in gymnastics if they are tall? No. Does it mean that the professional world will not take them seriously if they are in the wrong categories? You bet.

With singing, if you are going to have a chance at a mainstream operatic career in major houses, you had better make a good deal of sound. Even if your acting is awful and you aren’t particularly emotionally expressive, if you have a great big gorgeous sound, standing still doing almost nothing, you have a better chance than most to get to the world’s most famous stages. Same thing, different world – if you can belt pop/rock music to the notes off the right end of the keyboard, you have a better chance at a career than someone who couldn’t do that trying as hard as possible. Even with electronic help, the power to belt stratospheric notes effectively isn’t given to everyone. Having it really helps.

So, taking for granted that opera stars with very successful careers can do whatever they want to do when they arrive at that level of recognition, what makes them decide they need to go outside opera and show the world how “versatile” they are? Do they not HEAR? Do they not listen? Do they not care?

Truth is, I have no idea, but the reasonable answer is that they don’t. Truth is, most people in the audience don’t care either for the same reasons. Surely the people who are opera fans, who only listen to opera, have no clue and perhaps are genuinely impressed with the great “versatility” of the opera divi. Still, it is ever disturbing to know that they don’t know, don’t care to know, and this mindless attitude is being passed on to a new generation when they teach. That smarts most of all.

It’s very hard when you are young to understand that sometimes in life you have nowhere to run. The self is always there and you cannot avoid it. If you are stuck in circumstances in your life, you are also stuck in yourself, and that’s the issue.

Going forward when you have no path to follow is extremely frightening. You are alone, you are vulnerable, you can feel helpless, confused and bereft. But going backwards is never really possible, and staying still is absolutely not possible, as time marches on, relentlessly. You can try to hide, both from the issues you face in the world and from yourself, but in the end, this never works as you pay a high price for the deception.

Countless words have been written by souls far wiser than I about courage. The Bhagavad Gita teaches about this very well. You can read about it in the writings of St. John of the Cross. You can study the life of Buddha or Jesus or St. Thomas Aquinas or many many other people who have dealt with difficulty and learned from it. In recent times, you can look at Nelson Mandela’s life or the life of someone like Gabbie  Gifford.

The way to go forward when you are lost is to gather yourself together, trust yourself in each moment as you go and endure whatever you must in order to keep going. The reason you should do this is because that is all there ever is to do, it only just looks like there are other alternatives from time to time. If you want to change something, create something or build something, the only way to achieve that is to risk failure and loss but try anyway.

The people in this world who are the movers and the shakers, who upset the status quo, who make a path where there has been no path, are not like most people who shuffle along, following the person in front of them. A true artist is never part of the crowd. A true artist has a unique and special point of view about life that only he or she can express. In finding that expression, you can expect struggle, effort and discord to cross your path, but don’t let that thwart you from reaching your goal. Go! Who knows what or who you will become!