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We have all unfortunately heard some one or other famous opera star sing a CCM song with operatic vocal production. Even if the musical style is appropriate and the artist has a valid and creative arrangement for the musicians to play underneath her, it doesn’t mean that she sounds like a CCM singer. In fact, in most cases, with women particularly, they cannot sound like a CCM singer because the mechanism doesn’t know how to go there, even if the mind wants it to. (See previous post). I have written here previously of the “Annie” of Deborah Voigt in “Annie Get Your Gun” at Glimmerglass Opera House which was, in vocal terms, completely disrespectful of what Irving Berlin wanted in terms of her character. I love Ms. Voigt as an opera singer but she should have chosen a “legit” role to make her music theater debut, not Annie. She can’t (maybe she wouldn’t) belt and the role was written for Ethel Merman, for goodness sake!

The same could be said to be true of the few CCM artists who have been courageous or foolish enough to make classical albums. Michael Bolton certainly didn’t succeed with his operatic arias album, at least in terms of the opera audiences who knew opera well. He got no calls from the Met to “come on over”. He did no better than Barbra Streisand in 1975 with her “classical album” of art songs. Mr. Bolton tried hard enough to get his voice to make the correct sounds but there were so many other things wrong that it didn’t matter much. I understand Mr. B worked with a voice coach, but not being able to get the rock-based constriction out of his sound, he was also not able to organize the necessary vocal elements into a classical performance that was eventually accepted by a classical audience. What happened? He has plenty of money, he surely hired the best people to help him. Was it just that he didn’t hear his own problems, that he didn’t care, or both? Being famous can skew your ego so much that you think you are really good at many things when, sometimes, you are not really good at even the one thing in which you had success, perhaps by accident, so who knows?

In order to sound different in different styles, you need to train differently for each style and few people do that unless they can figure it out on their own. And, if the styles are not going to conflict with each other (which is the fear that everyone has) such that the primary style does not suffer from learning other styles, artists have to learn appropriate boundaries for all styles and all vocal behaviors in each style. Who does that? (Somatic Voicework™ students, if I may be so bold).

If we are to respect our mostly American-created CCM styles we have to respect their history, their context, their own parameters of execution and the peer-based expectations of those who are mainstream artists in a particular style. In recent years several albums of “popular” music done by opera singers allow the classical singers to “play at” sounding authentic but no one has really been able to completely nail the vocal quality change necessary in order to be authentic. Going all the way back to the album by Placido Domingo and John Denver (Perhaps Love, if I recall its title correctly), the two tenors did not sound at all alike. Mr. Domingo did a wonderful job of scaling his voice down to match Mr. Denver’s but he couldn’t get rid of his “placement” and “resonance”. You wouldn’t have mistaken them, one for the other, even though they each sang the music from their hearts. Really, by now people in opera should be telling each other, “Don’t do that CCM album. You need to retrain your voice before you do. If you sing it the way you usually sing, just softer, it only makes you sound silly”.

Yes, artists can do whatever they want. There are no artistic police. But if Americans in particular are going to respect their own styles they can’t ignore the values those styles are expected to have. If classical music at a high professional level requires that people are fluent in at least four languages, know the difference between Bel Canto and Verismo, and  understand the “fach” system, then the very least they can do when they go to CCM styles is know that you don’t sing jazz with the same sound you make in Mozart or even in old Rodgers and Hammerstein songs.

Stick to what you know until you can sing what you don’t know such that it doesn’t sound like that.

There is no such thing as good generic training for anything. General study produces general results.

One of the basic tenets of acting is that all choices have to be specific and clear. You can’t be “kind of angry” effectively when that’s based on some kind of mood. You can’t be doing anything that requires focus if you have none and that includes things like skiing, cutting up a log with a chainsaw and cooking a delicate soufflé. You have to learn to direct your attention, concentration and mental clarity to the task at hand and stay there until the task is completed. Distraction of any kind is not good.

Students, however, are frequently criticized for “thinking too much”. I always find this a laughable instruction. “You are stuck in your mind”, they are told. “You are watching yourself sing.” Perhaps so, but why is this bad?

When was the last time you were instructed to do something new and complicated in front of someone else and executed that task with no thought whatsoever? The learning process begins slowly and often self-consciously and “thinking about it” is necessary for a long time. In fact, if you do not think about it, it never happens. If, on the other hand, you have been asked to do something that is beyond your capacity no matter what you think of (happens all the time) or you have been asked to do several new and difficult things at once (ditto) you will be left with a mess and remain self-consciously confused and stuck regardless of thinking. If you are then blamed (again ditto) by the person who gave you the instruction by being told, “You are thinking too much”, you are left to feel stupid and inept.

In order to learn to sing rock music you have to prepare your throat to make the sounds that are typical of rock music. If you do not listen to rock music, you won’t know what those sounds are. If you do not make them yourself, you will not know how they feel. If you do not know how they are produced by the vocal mechanism, you will not be able to teach them effectively or learn to do them easily without help. You can’t teach what you do not do and you can’t do what you do not understand. That flies in the face of common sense. But, in singing, people do it (or try to) every day.

If you want to learn to sing jazz, or country, or any other style, including classical, you need to know how mainstream successful artists sound when they sing in those styles and you need to know how to replicate those sounds yourself or help others do so if you are teaching. Since there are still, at this time, very few CCM teachers who have anything other than classical training, and very few CCM artists who understand vocal function, that means the probability for generic teaching is very high. Thinking that “classical training” (whatever that is) will help you sing everything because “one size fits all” also flies in the face of common sense, but that doesn’t stop people from having those beliefs or acting upon them.

Specific training is necessary for specific styles. If you want to learn to sing in one of them, find someone who understands how they work and how to communicate effectively to you, personally, exactly what that entails in terms of skill building.

Anyone who viewed The Sound of Money (sorry, I mean The Sound of Music) on TV recently got to see Audra McDonald juxtaposed alongside Carrie Underwood. If we are to believe that the public doesn’t care, then we must also believe that they did not hear a difference between Audra’s sound and Carrie’s sound.

It’s all singing, you know? Isn’t it just that Carrie had more “oomph”? Aren’t all voices the same?

Both vocalists are good at what they do. Audra is a consommate artist who has a “legit” voice but also has a really solid mix that is borderline belty on lower pitches when necessary. Whether or not she thinks about any of that, I have no idea. I imagine she is a well-trained classical vocalist who has learned to sing throughout her range with a full sound, always in service to the performance overall. Carrie, however, is a belter, and has no change in vocal quality whatsoever as she rises in pitch. You cannot hear a shift to a lighter sound and that has to mean that she has no choice but to stay where she is. Since her belt is powerful and she takes it up pretty high, that would make her typical of today’s young female pop belters. They don’t know about acting, they only know “performance”. They are not the same.

My argument over the last few weeks in this blog has been that the business itself across all styles (including Broadway, although the NBC version of TSOM could be argued to be a network TV phenomenon only) is losing interest in keeping track of who sings what. The sound that is disappearing the fastest is the “legit” sound which is supposed to be classical, but, as was pointed out in a recent comment, is now considered more or less “Disney”. To back this up, go listen to  Sierra Boggess’ version of Belle to hear belt, mix and legit in one vocalist. Here is the YouTube clip:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RdrQy0j39E). She went on to sing classically in “Master Class” with Tyne Daly and did a decent job (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdfHks9klz0. Go nearly to the end of this clip). Please note — Sierra is not singing with a “low larynx” position, the currently favored classical vocal production, nor is she singing with modified vowels.  You may not be old enough to know that all of the early Disney movie leads were sung by light lyric sopranos, so it hasn’t changed all that much, perhaps it is just the stylistic influences that make the singing more “present moment”.

If, however, you think that there is no need for specialized training, this is not correct. It is because there is no specific training AVAILABLE that many singers end up with a hodge-podge of vocal production. That is because there has been no clear, easy, available way to maintain accurate vocal production in any given style and sing in it with authenticity. In fact, classical teachers who teach from a generic knowledge of vocal production (and many of them have only that as a basis for their classical teaching) end up teaching generic singing. That is in fact a common scenario and an unfortunate one for both the students and the audience.

If Carrie gets to sing Mother Abbess when she gets older, they will just lower the key and let her belt away. By that time, “legit” singing will be a relic of the past alongside the music of the 30s, 40s and 50s, and people will only see and hear it on recordings. Richard Rodgers isn’t around to object. His heirs probably don’t care what happens to his music, as long as they are paid.

If you are a singer or a teacher of singing, pay attention. The times we are living in are shifting vocal values as rapidly as you can imagine (although not necessarily in the universities). This shift is enormous and you can watch it happen as long as you know that it’s there.

As has been discussed here frequently, we are ever more in an era where functional training is being recognized as “the only way to go”. It’s certainly not new and it certainly does not “belong” to any one teacher or method. It has been around since the 1800s and has been written about by many excellent teacher/authors. Of course, there are also all manner of books full of nonsense perporting to give “real” information when all that is being offered is the latest version of the author’s bellybutton. You do have to know something in order to tell the difference, but, if you are looking to make that determination, it doesn’t take long to discern the genuine from the counterfeit.

We are in a period of time when it is becoming quite fashionable to publish  books full of vocal exercises. The exercises of various expert teachers are provided in order to help singers and teachers of singing have specific “things to do” to get a certain desired vocal result. This sounds at first like a good idea but, like everything else, upon further investigation, it may be that this is not always what it seems.

Every functional exercise is only useful in the moment. Even if you know what an exercise typically will prompt as a response in a vocalist’s throat or body, you can never and I mean NEVER be sure that it will do so nor can you be certain that the result you get at first will lead you toward the result you ultimately want. If, indeed, you do not have a broad context in which to apply the exercise and a purpose for it that applies to the situation at hand, you will just be doing what teachers of singing have always done and that is sing the exercise for exercise’s sake. Maybe you are doing this because “someone told you to” or because “it’s supposed to work” because you read about it, but this can be faulty thinking.

A good analogy would be going to the doctor for a check up when you are well. The doctor has a series of standard things she will do and tests she will order to determine the state of your overall health. These might be the same for every patient and work well for most people most of the time. If the doctor is experienced, however, and asks the right questions and is a keen observer, she might spot something that other experts would miss and adjust both her exam and the tests she requests. And, if she typically prescribes a medication for reflux or laryngitis, based on her observations and test results, she might go in a different direction if she determines that the patient needs an adjustment tailored to their particular needs. In other words, the procedures can be standarized but not their application. Nothing can substitute for educated eyes and ears.

So, while I might suggest a general exercise that promotes the development of “head” register (or whatever term you use for higher lighter vocal production) I would only use the exercise in its generic form if this was warranted in the person standing in front of me at any given moment. Since there are infinite ways to vary basic exercises, it might be better if a specific student sang it in a different way. The pitch range, the volume, the musical pattern, the syllables and the vowel all contribute to every exercise. The specific application can only be determined in person, in a session, at the moment you hear the vocalist live (or while you are practicing yourself). Yes, if you know the student’s or your own voice well or if the voice is developed to a certain level, there are times when many different  exercises would be fine and when one could easily substitute for another, but you have to know when that would be true and when it wouldn’t work. Not to know is to put both yourself if you are a teacher and the student who is studying with you in a situation where you are potentially wasting time or perhaps even causing problems. You need (a) experience and (b) guidance to know when to do what.

If you sing, don’t be seduced into thinking that people with lots of exercises know what they are for or how to use them for your particular voice and/or vocal situation. Applied incorrectly, functional exercises are no better than the old “think of a big pink mist in the back of your throat” images.

It has been announced that one of the latest pop divas is going to be doing Cinderella on Broadway. Carly Rae Jepson will take over from Laura Osnes in the leading role on Broadway. She isn’t a “legit” singer, even though the part was written for one who was. This is the direction of the future. No point in lamenting what used to be.

For the many thousands of young people who graduate every year with a degree in voice from a university offering training in “classical” vocal music, there is less and less work. Having a degree in applied voice prepares you for — who knows? There are so many ifs. If at university you have been well trained, if you have a great voice, if you can act, if you have done music theater rep the way music theater rep is currently being performed, if you have confidence, if you have a “look”, if you can get seen and heard, if you can “move well” or dance, and if you are lucky enough to get cast in anything at all, you could get started in New York as a performer, but, of course, you could come here and face the thousands of others who want the same jobs you do and get nowhere in a hurry. There are very very few classical jobs and with the demise of NY City Opera, there is almost no way to stay alive here in New York being only a classical vocalist unless you are very unusual or have family money on which to live.

Yes, people get work every day on and Off Broadway, Off/Off Broadway, on tours, in regional theater and in other venues like private parties, and many of these jobs pay. A few pay very well. There are also “showcases” that don’t pay and people find ways to produce themselves in shows of various kinds every day. Some succeed. There are far fewer openings for opera companies, orchestral gigs (usually through AGMA) and for paying church and synagogue jobs. Not too many opera singers are free-lancing at corporate parties.

If the educational system that produces singers is geared to “classical” training, and the job market is geared to various kinds of commercial styles, it only makes it harder for a new vocalist, arriving in NYC looking to be  a paid professional singer to get launched. The first kind of job they typically land is restaurant work.

Arriving in NYC without the ability to “cross over” makes it nearly impossible to succeed as a singer unless you are an emerging Pavarotti or Fleming. Most newbees last two, possibly three, years and then give up and go home or go back to school to learn new skills in a different profession. Some become directors — others try play writing.

No one, however, comes here with good solid pop chops and finds that the only way to get work is to have “classical” training and sound more “legit”. The legit sound is going away as fast as an ice cream cone melting on an August day in Times Square. While some shows or casting directors do want a “legit” sound, if you take a look at the emerging trend (Carly Rae Jepson coming in as Cinderella, Carrie Underwood as Maria in TSOM), you will see that the old is really old and that the new is here to stay. Maybe that’s fine, maybe not. That isn’t the point. You have to see the writing on the wall and get used to the new. It’s not going to turn around and be “like it was”.

The world of opera is trying very hard not to fall apart. This has been so for quite some time but it seems that things have escalated and with the demise of NYCO, it can be seen by everyone that there is no great rush to restore this company or any other that might take its place. The Met survives in its own insular universe due to the constant influx of money from the one percenters who donate because it is the thing to do to be socially correct and, what else are they going to do with their corporate made dollars anyway? There aren’t too many places left in the USA where the very wealthy can be obviously generous and congratulated for it outside of the two Mets and a few other major arts organizations.

Opera houses in Italy are closing all over the place, even in houses that have been around for a very long time. Take a look: http://www.newsweek.com/end-italian-opera-will-they-wait-fat-lady-sing-225175

Surely, someone is going to wake up one day and realize that the way to keep opera going is to bring in electronic music and rock composers and let them have a chance to develop rock operas that will pull in all sorts of young audiences. No, you won’t hear opera sung the way it has been, but the form would continue and the world would adapt accordingly. Forcing things to stay the same when they are clamoring to change only makes things worse.

Opera has been dominated for decades now by nonsensical Euro-trash productions of older works that pay no attention to the music or the story as written by composer/librettist and by new music which is often complex or difficult for the average opera goer to appreciate. In fact, much of what is written sounds the same from one composer to the next. Most of the “big” composers are men and most of them refuse to write using older traditional harmonies or compose melodies that are easily sung by singers and therefore remembered by audiences. Combine that with absurd takes by directors on the plots and by the designers who create outrageous sets and costumes and you have a recipe for continuing disaster. Do the people running things take notice? Not in any way. Do the audiences stay away? In droves.

It is not so that making something different for different’s sake is a sign of creativity. It is not so that changing something because you can is always an improvement. It is not so putting “your spin” on a great work or art shows that you are brilliant. It is not so that re-constructing something to make it “more relevant” actually makes it more relevant. It is not so that audiences have to be pandered to in order to “understand” things. It is not so that writing music based on “old” ideas of harmony and melody relegates it to being sentimental (in a bad way) or of lesser  quality. It is not so that people can’t tell the difference between what they like and what they don’t, even if they can’t explain why.

Once, quite some number of years ago, I had occasion to speak briefly to Dame Joan Sutherland, and she said that she and “Richard” hoped that they were entertaining to the people in the high balcony seats, as those people had paid a great deal of money to see the performances and both she and Richard wanted the audience members to “have a good time”. If one of the world’s greatest vocal artists and her husband, a fine conductor, could have that attitude, why don’t the people who commission, write, produce and direct operas think this way too?

The mindset of those who continue to defend these policies is rigid. Most average people do not relate to the music of today’s most well-known and respected composers. Opera companies, however, continue to fund music that people do not like to hear and productions they don’t want to see, even though that behavior is self-destructive. It is absolutely the case that this continues unchallenged  as policy throughout the world but that questioning this status quo is also completely and vehemently opposed. The idea is that any kind of modern art, no matter how senseless, outlandish, grotesque or bizarre cannot be criticized lest one seem unsophisticated, pedestrian or banal. The thought that there are artistic expressions which are tasteless or even offensive seems to be as outmoded as a pair of spats.

Yes, some of the latest material of all sorts is wonderful, creative and innovative but much of it is not and no one who makes decisions seems much able to discern the difference. I do wonder, if Beverly Sills, a singer, could come back and have her say about what people get to see and hear if things might improve overall. There are very few women and even fewer vocalists making important choices at a high administrative levels in opera and that’s not good for anyone. And, with the new productions of living composers — if one of their operas fails to garner either critical or public acclaim, no problem, just ask that same composer to try again with another new work. Now, there’s a sensible response!

No one can say what “art” is. No one can define what creativity is. True. But common sense says that if people like something they will gravitate towards it and not the other way around. If composers wrote music that people really wanted to hear and allowed singers to sing in a way that brought out the beauty of singing, and if directors and designers created sets and costumes that people could relate to, people might actually attend these kinds of performances. Is this hard to understand? It wouldn’t hurt companies like the Met to put up a survey on its website with questions like: What kind of music would you prefer to hear? What kind of productions would you prefer to attend? What things turn you off? Why would you avoid coming to see one of our productions? They might be surprised to discover that the audiences who loved the great works of the past are not so enamored of what they are seeing and hearing, both in mainstream (old) operas and in new works not previously done or done infrequently. They might be surprised to learn that even sophisticated, wealthy and musically educated audiences would like to hear melodies and harmonies that were, yes, entertaining.

And, just to look at things another way — there have to be hundreds of operas written and performed over the last 100 years in various opera houses worldwide that have been done less than fifty times in total. Some of them were successful, but they have still become invisible. If you want an audience to like something, that something has to stay around long enough for people to have a chance to become very familiar with it. Some of the works mounted by living composers might have gained a following had audiences been given a chance to see them multiples times, for years running. That, sadly, seems never to be the case. What audiences get instead is the next new work that will also get a dozen performances and then, joining its fellows, simply disappear. This is what happens with movies. They either set box office records on the first two weekends or they disappear. That wasn’t always true. In times past, the sleepers often took a while to develop a following.  With new operas that possibility doesn’t even exist.

People will pay to hear music they like, they will stay in line for 48 hours in the rain and cold to buy tickets for their favorite artists. They will pay scalpers for tickets, and they will see the same show multiple times. What they want to hear, however, is not what they get in an opera house. If the people in the opera houses could tap into the market that pop/rock music has, they could build new opera houses and hire new artists every year. The gap between these two worlds is growing wider day by day, just as the economic gap is growing between the 1% and the 99. It doesn’t have to be, however, that this is the only way. A really dynamic individual in the right place could turn things on their head. I don’t see that happening in the current scenario.

So, the quick, short path to keeping the form alive is to go to electronic music written by rock composers, or jazz composers and let the vocal values go, too. Let opera as we now know it become a smaller, elite form for very small audiences who will pay a premium and go out of their way to see their favorites performed by an equally small pool of artists. If that doesn’t happen, something else equally drastic has to instead. If you doubt me, go back up and click on the link and read that article about opera in Italy again.

If the body is a hologram (and it is), then working with any part of it changes every part of it, whether that change is perceived or not. Of course, that idea can be expanded to include the universe, and certainly the globe. If any part of it is unhealthy, we all suffer for that.

Does it matter if you work to make someone really emotionally comfortable  making any and all kinds of vocal sound or you get comfortable after you make the sounds because you get used to them? No. Can we begin with work on the voice before we do other things? Yes. Do we start some other place? Maybe. Like everything else, it depends on where we are going.

Much depends on what kind of singing you do. If you only know the voice through speech, even if that speech is excellent, you don’t have the same experience as someone who knows the voice through singing.  Professional level singing requires more control over the voiced sound than speech. All singers can speak but not all speakers can sing. Said another way, singing includes speech but you can’t reverse that statement. While sophisticated, controlled speech,  is very demanding and takes work to perfect, the randomness of expression allows for greater freedom than singing in terms of “correctness” and therefore, less precision as well.

Singing mostly asks for some kind of vibrato. Singing can be up to three times broader in terms of range and four times as loud and typically, in terms of duration, a sung phrase lasts longer than a spoken phrase. Breaths and pitches have to be done deliberately rather than  at random, and pronunciation is often clearer in singing. Further, intonation accuracy isn’t something a speaker ever has to worry about and it is a significant concern of singers. Register change is also almost non-existant as a concern in speech but a very important part of successful singing.

A balanced sound allows for the greatest amount of responsiveness in the vocal mechanism. What is a balanced sound? One in which there are two registers, seamlessly connected through the area where the register converge, and one in which all vowel sounds are as naturally produced as possible, and which allows the sounds to be louder, softer, “brighter” or “darker” and consonants to be articulated without fuss. It also allows breathing to happen with very little effort, provided the body posture allows for that.

Acting is NOT a substitute for vocal skill. Being a really excellent actor who speaks very well does not automatically set you up to do the things that singing requires. The idea that you can “commit” to a choice that will propel you enough to “sing authentically” is faulty. It is only through singing training, aimed at musical goals, that singing can be coupled with vocal efficiency, stamina, demand, and style. And if you do not know the difference between musical vocal function for its own sake and free dynamic speech, you shouldn’t be teaching singing. What brings out the uniqueness and the humanity of a voice is a combination of all these things and it matters, quite a bit actually, that all people who deal with voice understand these differences.

No matter what you work on, at some point you will need to work on the path to the end product you desire. Practicing Shakespeare will not prepare you for a play by Harold Pinter. Singing Un Bel Di will not prepare you to sing Cherokee. Singing Joanie Mitchell’s River will not prepare you to sing An Die Musik. You can be as emotionally free and as willing as possible to use your voice in any and all manner of sounds, and have great connection to your breath and body. You can be very clear about what you want to communicate through music and lyrics, but none of this will prepare you to deliver the end product you seek on its own. Only working on that end product to get what you want out of it will take you there. Don’t confuse these things or you will get lost.

If you are interested in inter-discipinary interchange, please come to the symposium at Oberlin at the end of January. Many minds sharing many ideas can only be a good thing.

If you are thinking of attending, don’t wait to sign up. The hotel rooms reserved at a special rate will only be available till December 31. Come join us for a fabulous time, and encourage your colleagues to do so as well. We are all there to learn and to grow, and this can only be fun and very valuable. For further information about registration, please go to:  new.oberlin.edu/events-activities/vocal-symposium/registration.dot

Singing teachers forget that in the music industry, very few people care about vocal categories. Outside of classical music, and it could be argued that it is true there in some cases as well, the only criteria are: how well do you sing and how captivating are you when you do? The vocal categories that teachers fret about (soprano, dramatic soprano, lyrico spinto, light lyric, soubrette, coloratura, etc. etc.) and the music that goes with them (from Pre-Baroque to Modern) matter not so much in the real world where people have careers as singers as it does in the minds of those who teach. There are a great many examples of people who do not fit into any traditional box in terms of a specific vocal category and have done very well anyway.

The one place where things are unique and where it can matter is on Broadway. There, and only there, in some casting notices, it still states: must belt to X pitch, must mix to X pitch, must sing “legit” to X pitch. Whether or not you use or understand these terms, they have not disappeared and the expectation that the vocalist knows the difference between them in terms of the sounds requested, is a given. If you can’t distinguish between a belt and a mix-belt, or a mix-belt and head register, you could get into trouble, singing music that isn’t meant for the sound you are using without even knowing that’s what you are doing. If you are making a recording, you can do anything you want, but if you are auditioning for a role on Broadway and they want a belter, you had better be one. Elphaba is never going to be a “legit” role, so if you are a classically trained mezzo who can wail away on the high pitch but it’s not a belty sound, please stay home. They don’t want you on Broadway.

In this one realm, vocal classification really matters………except now, obviously, not so much. With Deborah Voigt singing a “legit-ish” Annie Oakley and Carrie Underwood singing a belty Maria, even Broadway isn’t so sure of what it wants in a vocalist. Maybe one of these days anyone will be able to sing any song in any style and any vocal quality and not have it matter. That would make life easier for many folks. The audiences, for the most part, don’t really care since they don’t know the difference.

If you are a female who has been singing Carmen maybe you could do a decent Aldonza, or not. Nothing is guaranteed. If you are a good Aldonza, however, you probably won’t be able to do Carmen, even if you have a good strong and comfortable voice. There are too many vocal production differences. But if we throw those differences out the window, are we are surely headed there, then who knows? If a rock singer can go to the Met and get hired in La Boheme (ask Michael Bolton about that) or if a legit soprano can make a rock record and appear with her rock band at Madison Square Garden (ask Renee Fleming about that), then everything is equal and everyone can sing whatever, however they want. If that’s not true, yet, then some of us still have to know the difference, know what makes that difference, and know what’s involved in getting there.

Just some food for thought.

 

Ohio State University has announced that it will be presenting a special Voice Forum on April 4-5. One of the topics listed is “Vocal Pedagogy of Commercial Styles”. How about that?

When I started my course at Shenandoah, Contemporary Commercial Music (CCM) as a genre was not yet recognized anywhere else. There was no formal course taught as a part of a recognized university master’s or doctoral program. We were the first to put forth the idea that this was not only valid training but necessary training. Subsequently, other schools have started master’s programs in music theater or offered seminars in training specifically aimed at vocal production that is not classically based. The term CCM is used widely now without issue.

Contemporary Commercial Music is finally being seen as a separate, worthy and viable alternative to classical music. People are beginning to realize that classical training (whatever that is) does not automatically set you up to sing anything, sometimes not even classical repertoire. Most of the people who say “I can sing anything” mean “I can sing anything classical”, but sometimes they can’t do that either, they just think they can. Those people are the most likely ones to say, “All you need is classical vocal training and you can sing anything.” If only that were true!

It is not unlike the idea that if you study ballet you are ready for any other kind of dance. A serious dancer will tell you that some ballet dancers never learn to be good at any other form, depending. There are dancers on Broadway who may or may not have had decades of ballet training, but all of them have jazz and modern and many also have tap, and if they don’t get it at home or at school, they get it here in New York City because they find out they need it. Ballet by itself has as much to do with tap as belting has to do with opera arias.

If you are interested in voice science, vocal pedagogy or vocal health, I encourage you to attend Ohio State University’s Voice Forum in April. Please contact Dr. Scott McCoy there at: VoiceLab@osu.edu.