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I was involved recently in writing a pedagogy paper with some colleagues in which the phrase “engaging the expiratory muscles” was used.

I objected to it. If you knew nothing at all about singing and I said to you, “please engage your expiratory muscles”, which ones would you use? In fact, would you even know what I was asking you to engage?

Why not say “exhale and contract your abdominal muscles” or “exhale and keep your ribs open while contracting your abdominal muscles? Wouldn’t most people grasp that better?

I guess not. I was shot down by a number of others. “Obviously, everyone who reads this article will understand ‘engage the expiratory muscles'”, I was told.  /: (   Oh.

This is voice teacher jargon. This is not in any way necessary. Why can’t we speak in plain English? Why is it necessary in any field to speak in technical jargon when you are writing for an unknown audience of readers?

Academia likes flowery, ornate, involved language. It likes big words for big ideas. I like common words for average people. I don’t want to impress people, I want to EDUCATE them. I don’t want them to know how much I know, I want them to learn. I don’t want them to “reach out” to “grasp” the information. I want the information to come to them so they don’t have to digest it, they can just eat it and let it digest on its own over time.

If you make things harder, you will lose some people. If you make them very complex, you will lose more. If you make them totally obscure, you will lose everyone who doesn’t know exactly what you know in exactly the same way you know it. That is not education, that’s extrapolation. If you write in a way that no one can understand, then don’t blame the readers by saying they are “disinterested” and “unmotivated”.

Silence is golden but silence is also death. Keeping quiet when it’s time to speak up and speak out is as necessary as holding your tongue and being discreet. There is value in obscurity, particularly in writing novels and secret codes. In writing for the average reader, however, the opposite of obscurity is a much better goal – transparency, clarity and en-LIGHT-en-ment (i.e. shedding light on) is the way to go.

So, don’t engage your expiratory muscles, just exhale. It will save you a lot of grief.

More than 35 years ago I presented at a program for the New York Singing Teachers’ Association on the music of Stevie Wonder. You have to know that at the time, it was a RADICAL presentation. This was a strictly classical organization and I was presenting an R&B artist. Scandalous! I was/am a Stevie Wonder fan and I loved his voice especially when he was young. Much to my surprise one of the oldest members, a tiny German or Austrian woman who always came to meetings dressed in her suit and pearls, complimented me on my presentation and said she had learned a lot. I was flat-out flabbergasted.

At the end of the presentation I predicted that in the not so distant future ALL singing teachers who were serious professionals would need to know voice science. I said that was where we were going and that the profession was going to get there. It wasn’t a question of if, just when. I was met with quite some amount of scoffing and skepticism.

Well, we’re there now. There is so much voice science in the profession now, you almost fall over it. The idea that we should deal with function is now gaining in popularity and that is a great thing. The acceptance of reality about singing is going to make it increasingly difficult for teachers who make things up and don’t actually know what happens when we make sound to get away with their convoluted ideas. Students will be able to easily look up whether or not what they are being told makes sense or is even possible. As someone who has campaigned to make this so for over 40 years, I couldn’t be happier. What I was talking about at the NYSTA meeting more than 3 decades ago, is finally coming to pass!!!!!!

If you are someone who reads this blog on a semi-regular basis, and you know anyone who sings for a living, no matter at what level from rank amateur to advanced pro, or who sings with seniors in a nursing home or tiny tots at a nursery school or performs with a regional music theater production, PLEASE tell them to go to the website of the American Academy of Teachers of Singing (www.americanacademyofteachersofsinging.org) and read the articles posted there. We will have a new one after July 8 about Fact-Based Training and that is one that EVERYONE should read when it gets uploaded. We work on these articles together (that’s the combined knowledge of over 30 expert teachers of singing) and write as one body on various topics of interest to the profession. THEREFORE, what is there is not from one teacher or two, not from one “special pedagogy” but from people who have no personal vested interest in anything other than service to the profession, allegiance to truth, and a decision to do what is most beneficial to the largest number of individuals. Each paper typically takes a full year of work and hours of discussion, writing and re-writing. There is no other body of teachers of singing that serves this function for the profession.

If you know someone who teaches singing, no matter who they are or where they are, ask them to read the articles written by the American Academy of Teachers of Singing. Help stamp out vocal ignorance. Help the present catch up with the past.

In keeping with yesterday’s post, it’s important to look at the body because if you sing you also have to look at bodily function. You might think you can override it, but you cannot.

The primary thing your body is going to do is breathe, or try to. It only takes about 5 minutes, maybe less, without air, to die. No one has ever committed suicide by holding his breath. We drown because we must breath. Further, while you can live without water for days and food for weeks you cannot override those processes either. People do die of both thirst and starvation. Will power aside, you can’t cause those behaviors to go away. Similarly, if you are on a desert island with no food, you will lose weight, regardless of genetic predisposition towards weight gain or any other factor.

If the vocal folds are in the throat to protect the lungs from foreign bodies (which is what science tells us is true) then all the theories about breathing for singing cannot violate that function. If you squeeze your throat for any reason, it will inhibit your ability to inhale easily and deeply, and that, in turn, will inhibit your ability to FEEL both emotion and sensation. If you keep squeezing your throat, over time that squeeze becomes chronic, and you get used to it. You don’t know your throat is squeezed. Your inhalation becomes shallower, your ability to relax decreases and, generally, you get used to a level of tension in your throat and breathing system that may never go away.

The throat closes when we are stressed. When we experience trauma, we go into shock. In shock, the body almost stops breathing, the blood flows to the core and away from the extremities and the throat closes (although not completely). If we are nervous, especially on a regular basis, then we are living with low-grade fear and that produces low-grade tension, particularly in the throat. In our society, who doesn’t have tension? Who doesn’t have some kind of low-grade tension, not just in the throat but throughout the body?

So, when people sing, it isn’t at all uncommon for them to sing through tight throats. It would be typical for someone who has had no training and isn’t particularly experienced vocally to sing with tension and consequently feel and sound pretty unpleasant. What if it were possible to get all that tension to let go? Would it be that you would automatically sound better if that were the case? How can we conclude otherwise?

The training process for singing, done properly over time, is supposed to (yes, supposed to) get rid of unwanted, unconscious tension until the throat itself is free to allow air in and out easily and without strain. Then training can help the muscles that make and affect sound to be both stronger and more responsive over time. This is done through vocal and breathing exercises, although most people put the emphasis on breathing just because that’s what they have been taught. If good strong breathing was the only requisite for singing, anyone who could breathe deeply and with control (like a deep sea diver who goes under water without a tank of air) would sing well. That’s not the case at all.

What if, however, you decided that you were going to use yourself as an example of singing, without any regard at all to the idea that “beautiful singing” was a good goal? What if you decided that ugly singing was the goal? Or that harsh, mechanical singing was the goal? What if you didn’t care about musical values or expressivity or authenticity? What if, you just decided to use yourself as an example of singing and then proceeded to decide that what you do others should also do? What if, in fact, you never really checked with anyone else before you went ahead and started telling others to do what you do, even if, unconsciously, you were singing over a constricted, swallowed sound?

Welcome to Voice Teacher Land.

If you behaved in that manner, you would be like many of the people who are out there teaching singing, based exclusively on their own vocal production. And, you would also be like all the other people who learned to mimic the sound of their teacher, regardless of how awful it might be, because you, too, had a constricted throat to begin with and the instruction felt familiar to you, somehow or other, in a way you couldn’t quite explain.

If you layer vocal instruction that deliberately manipulates the larynx over deeply buried chronic life constriction hiding within the throat muscles, you are building a crooked bridge on a faulty foundation. If you tell people to drive over that bridge as if it were straight you are asking them to create a “suspension of belief” and a kind of “circular thinking” and that is typical of both teachers of singing and singers when it comes to what is taught. This is what my teacher said to do so it must be right because, after all, he is my teacher, so  I do what he said. 

Methods that ask singers to deliberately manipulate or hold onto the muscles within the throat (aryepiglottic sphincter, false folds, pharynx, larynx) are violating bodily function. They inhibit breathing, they interfere with freedom, they restrict emotional authenticity and they prohibit truthful vocal quality from emerging. They are, simply put, wrong. No matter what a teacher of singing thinks he or she has discovered, if it violates what the vocal folds are programmed to do, it will never, ever be correct. 

If you are going to sing, first you have to get freedom of movement in the vocal system, including the muscles that are engaged in breathing. Then, you have to gradually build strength while maintaining flexibility over a wide range of pitches on various vocal qualities in all kinds of vowels at many levels of volume. Then you have to be able to add consonants for intelligibility. Then, you must have something to say as an artist. THEN you are singing as if your body was meant to do its job and also sing at the same time. Only then.

Human beings have limits. Some of them are flexible. Some of them absolutely are not. The human body will definitely die if some very specific things happen to it. It will also be harmed under some circumstances.

Interestingly, some people don’t care about that. They really do not care about respecting the limits of their physical bodies, up to taking severe risks with their own lives. Many people are taught that the body is stupid, or that the body is to be punished because it is bad or “sinful”. People are taught to defile the body as a way of showing spiritual strength (an odd idea indeed) and that the body will lead them astray if it allowed to “have its way”.

These ideas are ignorant. The body is should not be worshipped nor reviled. It isn’t inherently good or bad, but it has its own integrity. The body is going to stay alive because that is what it is programmed to do. If something happens to impede its ability to keep going there are mechanisms within it in the brain that will emerge and strongly work to keep the body going even while it is under siege inside or outside.

The vocal folds are in the throat to protect the lungs from foreign bodies. The swallowing mechanism is there to protect us from ingesting food or drink into the lungs, lest we die. The fact that we make sound from the vocal folds apparently was a supplemental development somewhere along the line of our evolution over thousands of years. We still do not know why we sing, although some think that singing was a way to build social contact, making tribal living more acceptable and increasing our ability to survive in a group rather than alone. That’s just a theory, not a proven fact.

We live in a society that glories “super human” efforts. We like sports that are “out there” and activities like that as well. We honor risk takers (when they survive their risk-taking) and we reward those that push past normal physical limits with prizes and honors. There are entire swaths of society (not just in the Western world, but all over) that look up to those who have gone beyond physical injury or restriction, even if that restriction is self-inflicted.

Extreme singing is popular. It is exciting. It is thrilling to hear (and sometimes also see). It isn’t what the average person sounds like when she sings. Extreme singing has been around for quite some time (you could consider the “castrati” extreme singers), but the extremes of extreme singing are always getting……ahem…..more extreme.

If someone can scream out very loud, very high, very powerful notes over and over again and not get hoarse, and maybe even work at a high level as a professional singer, does that mean that every singer should do that? Does it mean that every singer should be held to that standard? Saying yes would be like saying that every person who wants to play basketball should be 7 feet tall, and every person who wants to be a fashion model should be 6 feet tall and weigh 120 pounds (oh, yes, we do that, don’t we).

There is a big case for being human, as in average, as being ENOUGH. It is enough to have normal abilities, standards, activities, and capacities. It is enough to sing well, beautifully, expressively, and in a way that is unique to you and your body’s own natural behaviors. Training to develop your abilities isn’t the same as training to make yourself compete with a 350 pound operatic mezzo whose normal vocal output runs to 115 decibels. Yes, some people can belt to G every night and be fine but, guess what, that’s not most singers. In fact, that’s not even most belters.

For me, being human is a gift. I honor my body in its “older self” version. I honor its femaleness and I honor it for what it has done all my life to keep me breathing and living. I am healthy, I take no medications, I have no ailments and I am certainly no one’s example of a perfect specimen. Nevertheless, I care about my body and my voice and I am grateful every day for my human imperfection.

Ich habe genug.

What is your voice worth to you?

What is it worth to you to be thought of as an excellent vocalist? Not an actor, not a musician, not a dancer, not a ‘creator’, but a VOCALIST?

I ask because there are people who don’t really care about the voice at all, yet they sing. They think the voice is a kind of “leave it alone” sort of thing that’s best left to its own devices. They are unwilling, unable, or unconscious about “vocal development” for a variety of reasons.

Some singers think that lessons will somehow change the basic essence of their voice or their sound, so they avoid them. That is a legitimate fear. You could be turned into an “opera singer” whether you want to sing opera or not. Rather than risk that, they stay away from formal training, and end up with none. As long as they sing well enough to get by, they do. If they have a vocal issue, they may take some training, but by that time, it can be too late. They never bother to find out that there are teachers of singing out there who can not only help them sing beautifully but help them sound MORE authentic, not less.

Some singers think that acting will bring the voice to wherever it needs to go. If they are dedicated and committed to their acting decisions, the voice will reflect that. Perhaps that is so, but perhaps not. Speech for theater can be very demanding. The Brits understand this but we in the USA do not. Ever been to a show where you can barely understand your own native tongue, America? Yup. The actors think, I don’t need “speech training”. Wrong. And, if you are being asked to sing in a musical and you don’t train your voice, good luck. It’s amazing that there are professional music theater actors who believe that acting alone is enough to get the voice to go wherever it has to go. I don’t think so. No.

There are singers who believe that being a musician and creating interesting musical expression is the most important thing about singing. They like having a voice that’s “funky” and “different”. This includes artists who do jazz, R&B, Gospel, rock, rap and maybe folk music. Making the voice “too perfect” is seen as a threat to individuality or to uniqueness. Ignorance, this idea. Just ignorance. You can make much better musical and expressive choices if your instrument is programmed to do all that human beings’ voices are capable of doing, but you can’t possibly find out what that might mean if you do not deliberately develop it functionally to go beyond it’s natural boundaries. In fact, I encounter on a rather regular basis in jazz women, the idea that singing in a soft breathy sound all the time is a good thing. Since few people speak that way and even fewer people who are vocal professional singers speak that way, constantly reverting to a soft breathy sound while singing, for no particular reason, is like wearing old ratty sneakers every day because you don’t want to scuff up your “go to church” shoes. It makes for less individuality, not more.

If you care about acting or being a musician, if you care about your ART and what you are creating, and if what you create as an artist comes through your voice, you had better care about it and what it can and cannot do. You need to ask yourself why, in all good conscience, it should be ignored, taken for granted, distorted, pushed or harmed just because you don’t care enough about it to treat it like something special and important. The truth is, it IS something special and important, whether you think so or not.

Ask the singers who have lost their voices due to surgery, illness or accident, what it’s like to not have their voices be available. ALL of them will tell you that their voices are worth whatever it takes to fight to get it back and keep it running. What is it worth to you to have the best possible voice you could even have and what would you be willing to do to keep it that way? Really, answer this question honestly. You need to know.

The hardest thing to change is someone’s mind.

People “get married” to their own ideas. They invest in them and their validity. They build a case for the “rightness” of them and then proceed to make everything they encounter either fit in with their thinking or just reject it because it doesn’t.

I have run into this first hand many times. After presenting, I typically talk to people. Often they will tell me that they totally agreed with what I said only to go on and explain what they do and it’s totally different! I did a talk and teaching demo in London in front of a prominent teacher. I was very careful to point out the technical, auditory and musical differences between chest, mix and head registers, and how important it is to know those differences when working with students. Her comments to me where about how much she agreed with what I do and how she does that “chesty, mixy, heady thing” with all her students. From what I knew of her teaching, I was sure that the “thing” was all one thing – of some sort! She rarely dealt with technique at all.

People who go through a formal pedagogy program may or may not be exposed to different points of view about how to teach classical singing. In some courses there is comparison, but in others, there really isn’t. As of yet there is only one pedagogy course taught at the master’s and doctoral levels (mine). We can’t have “comparative pedagogy” for CCM styles yet as there are no other courses with which to compare, at least not at a university level. Nevertheless, being taught by someone who has a “this is the way it is” mindset, gives you the same mindset. Few are taught, “this might be a good way, but there might be others that are equally good, but different”.

Since I always say the only thing classical singing teachers agree upon is “breath support” and “resonance”, and that even those two topics are fraught with argument, there is clearly a mindset prevailing that says, “you have to know these things”. How about coming to teaching with different ideas? Ideas that are really outside of anyone’s box? What’s in the world beyond breath support and resonance?

When Picasso was a boy, he studied painting from his father, a fine artist. By the time he was 15 he had mastered the “old” realistic kind of painting. He must have been bored. He had to break out of that traditional box, and, we all know, he absolutely did. Of course, he was reviled before he was honored and he was mocked before he was praised. Comes with the territory. Still, the people who go outside the box are few and far between.

Really unique thinking is unique! It takes a creative mind, a kind of boldness, a sense of curiosity, a dedication to experimentation, a keen awareness of the world in which you are living (professionally) and a commitment to discovering new ways that work. This does not mean, however, that you decide that any idea you have is “revolutionary” and “radical”. No, it means that you compare what you have discovered with all else that is out there, and recognizing that, decide that there is nothing else like that in existence. If what you have found is so far out that it makes no sense to anyone but you, then you haven’t discovered anything but your own ego. THAT happens a lot. If, however, what you have done is turn the information available around so that it operates in a way that demands a new way of thinking and behaving, then you have something.

If you teach singing, ask yourself: Am I quoting my teachers without knowing why? Am I spouting a rote answer I read somewhere? Am I telling my student something that I was told that I never really checked out myself? Have I said the same thing to dozens of students over and over without coming up with a new way to put it? Am I giving an answer I made up, based entirely on my own personal experience without checking it with any other authority for validity? Am I saying something that I know is accurate because I have expressed the same thought to other experts who have corroborated my idea? How am I listening? What values do I bring to what I hear? Where did I get those values? What makes them “right”?

Do I ask myself these questions? Yes, I still do and I always did. Take no one’s word. Assume nothing. Search things out for your own truth. Be open. Think, as they say, “different”.

I’ve written here before about prejudice regarding singers. It’s odd that this exists in so many places and shows up in a variety of forms.

Very few college composition programs teach young composers how to write for the voice along traditional classical lines. These “lines” (guidelines) are based on the laws of physics (how a pipe vibrates) and on vocal function (the vocal folds are there to protect the lungs, not make singing sounds). How is it possible that someone could graduate with a degree in composition and not know that there are established pitch ranges for voices? Many composers write things that singers either can’t sing or shouldn’t sing and don’t seem to know that is the case. I have spoken to opera composers who think singers are “fussy” because they don’t like to sing certain things. I have written about at least one opera composer who wrote an entire work without knowing that singers have “this thing called the passaggio they don’t like to sing in” until after he had finished it. This man was not young nor unsuccessful, but it was his first opera.

Many composers don’t know that they don’t know. They are unaware that there are ways to write for a voice that make the voice sound better and the music sound better, because there are ways to set the lyrics (and the vowels and consonants) and ways to set the pitches in the line that allow the singer to be expressive. Music that is written badly for the voice makes both the vocalist and the composer look bad but the composer is seldom the one to take the blame.

If you look at what is being written for Broadway now, you have arrangements that go to the highest possible pitch range a belter can manage and stay there for the entire show. Why? Well, because. And, if you look at who is doing this work, it is mostly men. Many of them do not, have not ever, won’t sing. I would also bet that many of them have never even read a book about singing.

Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. Just because it is possible, doesn’t mean it’s optimal. Just because you like something doesn’t mean that it’s good.

Singers and their voices deserve respect. They deserve to have composers write music that lets them sound good and sing in a way that is easy. Singers deserve being treated like they matter. Singers deserve having others take their comments and their feedback in a meaningful, not derogatory, manner. Singers need to be listened to, not dismissed as “pains in the neck” by composers who think they know something when they do not.

If you write for the voice, LEARN what voices can and cannot do from a traditional, healthy place. If you think your music is “special” and “different” and deserves to be sung by “amazing vocalists” who have no limits, think again. Only singers with little experience and training think they have no limits. They, like you, don’t know that they don’t know. If you want to be remembered and you want your material to be remembered, take the time to find out what singers do when they are functioning well and write accordingly. Don’t brag about your ignorance by writing music that shows the world how much you don’t know about singing and singers.

For every person who gets to live his or her dream, there are many others who never get close. While some of us are “making a life” being artists, there are many who look with envy on what we do and wish they could join us.

Who knows why some are successful and others are not? I have known many people here in New York City over the decades who have been in every way deserving of success but just didn’t get there. Talented, educated, motivated, and willing but, for this reason or that, not successful enough to stay the course and succeed. Forced by circumstance, then, to “earn a living”, they go to work in various “job jobs” (as we call them here) to pay the rent, eat, and have a decent life. They may still play or sing or act “for fun” on weekends or vacations. Some of them go back to school to learn something entirely new. Some of them become teachers. It is true that many teachers are teachers because they gave up singing (or whatever it was) due to lack of  success at a high enough level to keep going. They often have no other skills that are marketable. Teaching seems to be a good way to use what you have learned.

It seems haughty, then, for artists who do well enough to keep going at any level of success, to gripe about “the artistic life”. If we get paid to sing, or dance or act, no matter how many challenges we face in so doing, we can say that we are doing what we want, and that is a big deal. Every day others who would like to do the same are not able to, and every day, others who have tried will have to admit failure and surrender their dreams. When you hit 35, and you have not yet had a “big role”, a “hit record”, a “major positive review”, and don’t yet have a “great agent or manager”, and you are still looking to “break into” the business, it’s time to swallow hard and look reality in the face. If you do not have a family trust fund to live on, or a retirement payout, and if you do not have a spouse who can afford to pay for you to keep going, you are less and less likely to become the next “new star”, no matter what art form you have chosen.

Yes, some people don’t care if they succeed or not. They do their work for the sake of the work and that’s enough. Sometimes they are successful in the larger world anyway, but some are never heard of by anyone at all.

We had a friend who was a retired business man. He had always wanted to be a fine artist. After his retirement, he rented a studio and went there every day for years to paint. He amassed many canvases of work and some of them were lovely. He even opened his own gallery, but his heart was never in any of it. He painted for himself. Sadly, he became ill and all of his work was discarded by his wife after he passed. Not even his friends were allowed to have any of his paintings. Perhaps he wanted it that way.

If, however, you are someone who is still knocking around trying to find your way and you have been at it for over a decade with only meager success, you need to look at that. You might need to have some objective others look at it with you. And, if you stop trying to do your art and decide to teach, make sure you go into teaching with the attitude that it is worth doing well. Don’t fail a second time.

 

Teaching is dynamic. You experience all that the human race has to offer, in all its glory and messiness.

Some people say “thank you” at the end of every lesson and some don’t. Some people seem always to be grateful as they are studying and some act as if taking a lesson is more like buying a purse at a store — maybe you like it, but maybe the one at that other store would be better. Some people even resent the process, but, thankfully, they don’t last long. If they come looking to be told how great they are — they don’t want to learn, they want a fan club!

Over time, as I have been teaching for over four decades, I am often asked for various kinds of help, over and above what happens in a lesson.  Sometimes I even get these requests from total strangers because they need help from “an expert” and they found me on the web. In every case, this is a request for my time and for some kind of favor. If it is at all possible, I agree, as I want to support others being successful, and this is something that I, and others with my level of life experience, also do, without financial re-imbursement. For a tenured professor at a university, who is expected to participate in a number of “outside activities” such as attending meeting and events, or guide students’ projects, as part of their position as a professor, such activity is part of their job. For a private practice teacher such as myself, there are no such expectations. In both cases, however, direct appreciation and gratitude on the part of the person receiving the assistance is appropriate as a response.

It’s interesting, then, to note, how many people who ask for help don’t bother to say “thank you” in a way that is commensurate with what they have asked for, or perhaps, in any manner at all.

I use myself here just as an example, but I am writing on behalf of my colleagues who I know have done the same as I have. I write to make those who have asked or expect to ask their teacher (or any expert) for help, assistance or time, to please be really conscious of their requests.

If I write a letter of recommendation for you and then must send it to four different schools, all of them with a different submission process; or if you interview me for your dissertation for over an hour, maybe more than once; or if you ask me to read something you have written; or you ask me to give you a lesson at a time when I don’t normally teach and must re-arranged my life to see you; or if you want me to support you in some other way; then take the time to be grateful in kind. Don’t just post a note on Facebook and expect me to see that you indeed, got your doctorate — send me a very nice card with a personal note in the US mail. Don’t just assume that I had nothing else to do with my time — send me flowers, or at least offer to take me out to a very nice lunch. (I might still decline, but the thought matters.) If I spent a significant amount of time doing something that I really didn’t have to do but did because I care about you, be conscious about that and at least try to do something nice for your teacher (whomever it may be). No, you don’t have to pay us, but there are other ways to show gratitude.

No one is entitled to someone else’s TIME, as that is all that we have. That said, however, the busier someone is, the more likely it is that they will make the time to do something else if at all possible. That’s been proven. But when you ask your mentor, professor, advisor or teacher for a favor, please remember that you may not be the only person asking for help, you might be the fifth person that week asking and that what you want impedes the other person’s ability to do something else for someone else. Of course, I could say no, and that would solve the problem, but it’s not the request that is at issue, it’s the response to the help after it has been given.

I sadly have to say that I have been occasionally astounded at the absolute obliviousness that accompanies, “Please, help me”, when, after I have done so, it comes with only an email (if that) of “thanks”.

What are “appropriate boundaries”? What is “functional behavior”? Many people do not know.

While I certainly can’t provide the “definite answer” to these questions, I think about these topics and I have some opinions as to what the discussion could include.

A boundary is that which sets up a perimeter. It could be a permeable perimeter (like a fence with a gate) or a flexible perimeter, like a floating line of buoys in the water, or it could be rigid, like a stone wall. It is something that sets one thing (or person) apart from another. Sometimes, in close relationships, it can be hard to separate ourselves from another. Where do you leave off and I begin? That’s the opposite of being in a relationship where it’s impossible to develop a sense of closeness or “unity”. Neither works very well. In losing oneself in another, it’s very easy to also lose a sense of personal autonomy and responsibility and become trapped in “us” with no sense of “me”. In being in a relationship in which it seems impossible to bond, there isn’t any sense that a true partnership exists. A healthy psychological state allows for both “us” and “me” and allows, too, for flexible boundaries. Sometimes its a negotiation, but negotiation is a sign of health.

Functional behavior, in a broader sense, operates according to certain criteria — and, within those,  individuals either function well or they don’t. If as an adult you can take care of yourself, (stay healthy), and support yourself (have a source of income), and provide for yourself (a residence and nutritional sustenance) and if you have friends or family that care about you (a social group), then our society considers you to be functional. If you have trouble with these things all the time (everyone has trouble with some of them now and then), then you are dysfunctional, whether you think so or not, in at least some areas. As one becomes more psychologically healthy, (functional) it is possible to increase trust, take moderate risks, investigate new activities and expand the possibilities of having more of the good things in life. A functional person can also weather life’s adversities and survive to go on to recover and move forward.

If you sing, you need to have good vocal boundaries and be vocally functional. That means you need to know what your voice can and cannot do, and the only way to really know that is to engage in technical study and develop its capacities over time (years). The way to discover what it can do is to explore all possibilities. As you study you might have to compromise by choosing less demanding repertoire, but you can understand that more challenging songs or work will be within your voice’s grasp in time. If you do not know what a healthy sound is, or how your voice operates when it is both healthy and strong, you will find it difficult to make adjustments, and can easily get derailed when it is not well or when you have to sing something demanding.

Vocal function, when optimized, is about vocal health and vocal behavior. It depends on your overall health, upon use (time and amount) and upon the choice of material you choose to sing. Not knowing  about and experiencing these things first hand makes keeping clear vocal and artistic boundaries difficult. It makes vocal function mysterious. You can become lost in the material or the experience of singing (in a solo performance or with others) and over or under-estimate what is best, or you could expect someone else to tell you how much to do and in what way, becoming dependent instead of independent.

Just like your psyche, your voice needs flexible but clear boundaries in order to behave in a way that is   functionally optimal.