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If you are a good artist, you will serve the music. That means you will not only understand what the words mean, literally, you will understand what they mean to you. You will also understand how that meaning effects you, what it does to you emotionally and how that emotion (or state of mind) shows up through your face and body while you sing. You will allow the words, the music and the inner reality of both to flow through you as sound and as movement in order to express the personal truth of that piece, character or moment. If you have trouble doing this, you will not be successful as an artist, as singing is not about making sound alone, even if your sound is very impressive.

I have said before it is imperative not to be OK as a performer, or good. You need to be memorable, distinctive, unusual, unique, special, incomparable. THEN, you and your voice will also be unforgettable and will make a deep and lasting impression on your audiences. Some people have a lot of that quality naturally (bless them), but anyone can work on being special, as long as they are willing to put aside their ego in the process. That seems like a contradiction, but most truth in life is contradictory, in that two opposing things happen at the same time.

Ah, the famous ego!! We should not let it get in the way, or get too big, or get out of hand. Right. Except no one tells you what, specifically, an “Ego” (with a capital E) is. What’s the difference between being very self-confident and having a “big ego”? What’s the difference between being a leader and being “too self-absorbed”? This discussion can go on forever. No one really knows what an ego is, good or bad, except when they encounter a person they don’t like…….then it comes up.

I care about this issue. I don’t want to be considered an “ego-maniac” even though some people put that label on me. (She thinks she is the only person who knows anything.) Right. I am actually interested in getting away from that as behavior, but, may I assure you all, it’s easier said than done when you find yourself in a position of leadership that you did not ever consciously intend to have.

For me, “ego” is when your opinion and feelings (emotions) are more important that getting the job at hand done. If your feelings or considerations about yourself make you choose to do something that “makes you look good” or “gives you the respect you deserve” or “makes those other people look bad”, your choices will reflect that and cause trouble, not just for you but for all concerned. This is the opposite behavior of not thinking at all about others, about not paying attention to what you do because you don’t care about the job at hand other than getting it out of your way no matter how. That’s “ego”, too. It can also come up in the form of “I’m terrible at that”, “I can’t do those things”, “I will always fail” because that is negative “ego”. The issue is still about YOU and how you feel, and not about getting the job done.

Many of us spend our days wondering how we look to others. How do we measure up? How do others perceive us? What do others think of us? If we spend most of our time trying to please other people, we will end up in a big hole. On the other hand, if you never wonder about what  others think of you, if you never wonder how you measure up to others, if you don’t care at all about others’ thoughts or feelings, you are in a hole there, too. It’s just a different hole. As with everything, you have to find a balance. Self-evaluation has to happen on a number of fronts, including measuring yourself against the expectations of society at large, against your own set of values, and against your goals for the future.

If you concentrate fully on a piece of music and work to sing it as well as you can, you will have to work through the technical issues, the musical challenges, the lyrics and their import, and your clear communication of the entire piece, and then be able to share it without any kind of mental filtering or distraction, moment by moment, as best you can. If you do that, then you can say you have done your honest best to “let go” of your ego. If you are confident you did not hold back or interfere with your communication, and someone tells you that your performance was just a big display of your own ego, that is the problem of the person who saw your performance, but it is not your problem. Others will judge you, no matter what, and their judgements don’t matter more than your own brutal self-honesty, provided you have brutal self-honesty!

“Just go out there and be yourself’,” people say. OK. How do I do that? What “self” am I? If you are doing your job as a vocalist, you are the self who is in the song, and only that self, while you sing. After the song (or show) is over, you go back to what you were before. Remember, however, that in the world people are flexible and no one is just one “self”, but many “selves” that change as we go through life’s experiences. That which remains is your behavior, your attitudes, and your way of interacting with the world. People notice and remember the overall quality of your energy as they watch you intereact with life.

There are no answers here, just things to think about. Breaking through your own Ego is a lifelong day-to-day task. All that’s necessary is that you engage the question, how can I break through my own Ego?

OK, to continue from yesterday’s post.

Does knowing that you have an engine in your car make you a better driver? No.

Does knowing that your piano has strings, hammers and a sounding board make you a better pianist? No.

Does understanding you have a heart that beats all day long make it beat more efficiently? That would be nice, but no.

Does being ignorant of something benefit you in any clear way? NO!!!

Being ignorant of anything is not a plus unless the thing is some kind of awful horrible way to hurt others. Being ignorant in any way at all of something you want to confront every day for the rest of your life, will not be helpful or useful to you at any point in the game. Yet, I continue to encounter teachers of singing who say, “Well, knowing voice science is nice, but it won’t help you sing”. Not knowing is certainly not going to make things better. Knowing [not imagining you know] might not help, but it can’t hurt. In the hands of someone who understands how to APPLY that information it could help you sing very well indeed.

One of the reasons our culture is anchored to science (although there are people who would like to undermine science, too. Now that is stupid!) is because what we have learned from science has helped us advance our present civilization in many ways, ultimately allowing many of us to live longer, healthier lives and do more with them. It has allowed us to explore our universe, both here on earth and out in space, so that we may someday learn to live in harmony instead of hurting each other and our holy planet. I don’t think we would be happy if we hadn’t by now discovered that infections, which can be serious, can be cured by antibiotics, which also had to be discovered, ultimately making us safer than our ancient ancestors ever were. Imagine if no one had ever tried to find a way to explain infection. Would we still think it was the evil spirits that had taken over our bodies? Would this be……OK?

Singing teachers will argue that we need to make room for the person who says that learning to sing requires that you put an actual egg in your mouth (seen that) and for the person who teaches that your sinus cavities are what makes your sound good (seen that, too). We need to “allow for” the teacher who says that singing requires you to “support from your diaphragm” which is down by your belly button (yes, seen that as well). It goes on. OK, maybe these people had talented singers for students who just needed an outside authority to tell them “you are good” and that was enough to get them out there singing and securing a job. We should make room for teaching like this?

Well, not in my world. No. NO!

If teaching is about illuminating the path, shedding light on it for someone else, lest they fall, then the items above do not qualify as teaching, or education, or guidance, or advice or anything useful. They are examples of everything about the profession that makes it unprofessional.

Yet, my colleagues seem to think that making no standard, allowing for any and all kinds of “instruction” and giving people permission to use “artistic license” as an excuse for not knowing what they are doing or what their students are trying to do, is valid.

As long as that is the prevailing attitude, and it seems to be, then we are doomed to live in the land called, “let the buyer beware”. There will never be anyone to set a standard that can be trusted by those in the outside world who wish to learn. Woe be unto them!

As for me, you can count on me to set a standard through Somatic Voicework™. You might not like it, you might reject it, but, by golly, you are going to know what it is and you will know it is based on solid pedagogy, solid science and the balanced application of both, to serve the goal of authentic artistic expression.

Everyone is ignorant at some point. No fault in that. Hanging onto ignorance when there is reason to let it go is…….stupid. I can’t defend that at all.

Why is it so hard for singing teachers to decide anything concrete? WHY????????

They can’t decide that you have to know even one single factual piece of information. The argument for this is that people have done very well learning to sing by knowing nothing and teaching only flowery images for technical training. Great. For all the people that find this useful, GREAT! The rest of us, however, would probably do better with someone who actually knew that we had a larynx.

Plus, even though knowing vocal function doesn’t mean you can teach or that you can sing well, not knowing vocal function pretty much guarantees that you are going to make things up. Why this is tolerated in the profession is because people are TERRIFIED to admit they just don’t know what they don’t know and they aren’t about to go find out while they hold jobs. They can’t admit they don’t know so they want a “standard” where no one has to know. It certainly works to protect the guilty.

I for one think this is truly astoundingly stupid. If you want to talk about pearls on a string or elephant’s trunks or sending the sound across the road, go ahead, but in the back of your own mind have a clear idea of what it is you’re trying to get the student’s throat to do. If you want to say that the sinus’ create lots of resonance, no one will stop you, but it would behoove you to read that NO voice science has ever found the sinus cavities to contribute in any way to “resonance” or to acoustic behavior in the vocal tract. If you want to tell someone to create a “watermelon sized space in your throat”, well speak up, but understand that your throat couldn’t ever open that much. We couldn’t even get a tangerine in there, although it might fit inside someone’s mouth if it were big enough. If you have some wacky idea about what people need to do when they are singing, and if you have not run that idea in front of someone who should know, like a voice scientist or a skilled Speech Language Pathologist, but you teach it as if it were “real” because you think it is, no one is going to pound on your door and lock you up, but I certainly wish there were some voice police who would!

Yes, being functionally trained does not make you a communicative artist. It does not help you share what you know with passion, but it does make it possible for you to do so without hurting yourself and it allows you to know how to change gears if you want to, and emotion alone won’t do that, no matter how crazy you get when you sing. Being functionally trained isn’t the same as being unique in what you have to say through your singing but not being functionally trained sets you up for more vocal health problems, limits your artistic choices and leaves you helpless if something technical goes wrong.

Why, then, would there be any sane reason for teachers of singing to undermine the goal of having every person who teaches singing know about how we make sound as human beings?????

Because teachers of singing are ……… figure it out yourself! Argh!!!!

When I attended the lectures of Eckhardt Tolle last year one of the questions he was asked was “how can we make the world a better place”? The answer Tolle gave was for each of us to be as present as possible, one moment at a time. Simple, but profound, advice.

If you think about it, singing is a great way to learn about this concept. You can only sing one moment at a time. Each note, each word, each breath going out of your throat as sound, is alive moment by moment. If you are allowing the process to unfold as you are in the midst of it, you have to be in each moment as it is happening. Nothing else is possible.

The odd thing about this is that as soon as you stop the process to observe something about it, you are no longer “in the moment”. And, of course, we do this all day long. Very few people are capable of “staying in the moment” for anything longer than a few minutes, if that. The artistic process, when taught properly, should help you acquire the mental discipline to concentrate only on the task at hand while you are in the middle of it. If you are blessed enough to be in love with what you do (in this case, singing), then you don’t need much prompting to allow your fascination to be the  engine towards your destination of continuous presence. Being present on the stage (“stage presence”) is always the goal and it isn’t so hard to do after you discover what that means.

The duality of life – what we live with each day without seeing it  — rules our perceptions. The  right/wrong, good/bad, me/them attitude that we are taught from infancy is still the dominant idea of our world and that prevents us from getting out of the messes we make. As long as we are incapable of seeing things as lessons and challenges, and of seeing each other as being OK even when we don’t like each other very much, we will continue to cause misery to be the predominant theme of many sad lives. If we don’t learn to be unselfish, regardless, life will continue to be hard.

The only way to get even remotely close to that goal is to be fully present wherever you are and not judge your experience no matter what it may be. If that were easy, we would be living on a totally different planet. What can help get us there, however, are the arts (all of them). Whether we are performing or watching a brilliant performance, for as long as it lasts, we are in the moment, and nothing is in the way. Live performance (and sometimes film and TV performance) that completely captures our attention keeps us in the moment and, in that, there is no room for outside sorrow, anger or fear.

A society that values the arts over fame, money and power can only be a society that values life, beauty and humanity. If you can add to that with your own gifts, be bold, step forward, and do just that. We need you. Each person, right now. If you can do that through your art. If you are not an artist, do it by being yourself, in love with life. That’s enough.

 

Some systems of teaching singing are based upon holding onto the muscles in the throat deliberately while singing. This makes people feel in control and gives them a sense that they can “make” their throats do what they want. Why anyone would want to sing this way is a mystery to me, but I think that people who don’t have natural talent or coordination who decide to force themselves to sing, regardless, can end up sort of singing decently enough to fool a few people. If they happen to end up in a position where they are asked to teach, they will teach from the mess they have in their own throats and think that what they do is what others should also do. Some of them have even developed “methods” of training. : /

Amazingly, I have heard some pretty famous people in voice pedagogy and voice science sing in public and let me tell you, some of the singing was scarily bad. People who had tons of information and education stood up in front of their peers and sang with squeezed, pressed, swallowed, overblown, unwieldy, just plain ugly sounds and seemed to have no notion that this was the case. Seems to me, if you are sane at all, that doing that would only be possible if you were (a) in denial about how bad things were or (b) had nothing to go by other than this kind of singing as being your only experience.

I was blessed to be born to two people who sang nicely and sang at home and had an aunt who was a professional singer in New Orleans on Bourbon Street in one of the big supper clubs back when there were supper clubs. I had a nice voice as a child and could easily match pitch and sing sweetly by the time I was 7. This blessed memory guided me back to sanity when, as a result of some really rotten training, I nearly lost my voice and my ability to sing. When it got so hard to make a sound that I was literally choking and had a vibrato about two feet wide, I had that memory of making effortless sweet sounds back there to prod me into reality. People who have no such memory, however, would think that effort and struggle were part of singing and that making whatever kind of sounds they made was just part of the process of “training the voice to be professional” or something like that.

Last year I watched someone who is teaching at a university sing for a classical master class. The master teacher was a very beloved artist, one of the greats of her day, who sang internationally for several decades and who has only retired from performing very recently. The vocalist in this master class sang so badly that it was embarrassing to think that she had been chosen as a candidate for the master teacher at all, but there she was. The teacher graciously treated her like nothing was amiss, going past her vocal production to talk about the music and the character’s behavior. Still, I couldn’t help but think of the vocalist teaching young students, believing that doing what she was doing in her own singing was what should be taught to others.

I really don’t know. Maybe some people just don’t hear or feel the difference. Maybe they think they sound like a great opera star or a pop diva. Who can know? I wonder how it is that no one of the teachers who work with such students tells them – you know, something is wrong here with the way your throat is working. Do they all think that “this is just the way her voice is”……not very pretty, not very warm, not very steady…….etc.? Do they not know that all voices can be balanced through functional training and when they do, they sound just fine. I guess not. What else could be an explanation.

If you are holding onto your throat in the idea that this is what you should do in order to sound “professional” or “classical” or “operatic” or “in control”, PLEASE let go of that idea. Please know that you can let go of holding on and when you do, I promise you that you will not only sound much better, and feel much better, but you will be able to express your own truth and that is what heals us all. Let go of holding on!

 

It is necessary to have a system of teaching that is both clear and fluid. (Chiarofluido?)

Rigid systems or methods have a set way of teaching and individuals are not allowed to vary from the set principles in any way. There is “one right way” and that way is the “best”. Things have to fall in line with the system or they are “wrong.”

The other way is that everything is chaotic. Each moment, things are made up, randomly, without any regard to what was previously done or what will follow. There is no order, no form and no consistency, in the name of “freedom” and “spontaneity”. Setting things into a framework would be discouraged or even frowned upon.

Such systems do not work. Sooner or later they break down or the people adhering to them end up locked in a box or just plain lost.

Sadly, there are plenty of people teaching singing who think one of these approaches is best.

Not everyone is there, thankfully, and that has always been so. Most people pick and choose what works for a student but with some sense of order or a goal of some kind in the back of their mind. This is the safest way to work, and the most practical, since we are all so different.

It is, however, a very slow way to work, as it takes a very long time to recognize patterns, tendencies and issues that come up over and over in a variety of singers who fall into several general categories. Addressing these things repetitively, over a length of time, one begins to recognize that there are certain kinds of behaviors that are typical of (a) untrained singers, (b) singers who “over do” and (c) singers who don’t “do much”, as well as those who have a history of pathology and those who have other issues like poor intonation, lack of coordination and musical illiteracy. Usually, a teacher is doing his or her best, but it takes a long time to recognize your own foibles, too, and the kinds of things you don’t notice, forget, or are just not very good at yourself (which we all unconsciously avoid).

A good system has flexible boundaries but clear guidelines. It has a structure but that structure is adjustable. It prevents the teacher from getting lost and the student from floundering. It allows the teacher to communicate well with others about their students but doesn’t make for all teachers being the same in a “cookie cutter” way. It sets up patterns and explains tendencies and gives remedies for attending to them but not without a degree of creativity to find new solutions to old problems all the time.

If you don’t want to waste years figuring things out on your own, alone, go study a system of teaching singing. Doesn’t have to be mine, as there are plenty out there, but measure the criteria on what I have suggested above.

 

If you were being stared at, scrutinized, and told to do things you either had never done or were new to doing, would you feel really safe? Would you wonder if maybe, you might be “doing it wrong” or “not be good enough”? Would you think that maybe the person looking at you and listening to you was deciding how awful you sounded or how dumb you were? Would that make you feel secure and happy? If you ignored the person listening, who was supposed to be smarter and wiser than you, how intelligent would that be on your part, particularly if the person who was doing the evaluation was also going to be paid a lot of your money? Would paying no attention to the listener/watcher be a good idea, even if it made you feel less nervous? Wouldn’t that put you between a rock and a hard place?

What if, after a while, the teacher began to tell you that you were “closing up your throat” because you were afraid? What if you noticed that, indeed, your throat seemed to close up when you tried to sing high notes or loud sounds? What if you thought that this was because you were unable to “let go” and “just sing”? Would this make you less nervous? Would it make you feel like you understood how to make the “correct” sounds? What if, also, the teacher was telling you that you didn’t quite “get” what s/he was teaching and that, if you could just stop being self-conscious and nervous, things would get better and you would somehow “be free” to sing. Would you know that the throat closes when it is out of balance and that it is the TEACHER’S job to fix that imbalance? Would you know that you can find a physical balance in your instrument so the throat remains open while you discover what that feels like without struggling at all?

What if you tried to tell the teacher that “something felt wrong” only to be told that this was not true. What if you tried to formulate a decent question based on how you were experiencing the singing only to be told that you were being “fussy”, “a worry-wart” or that your concerns would just go away if you kept practicing or learning songs, except that they didn’t go away at all. What if you were asked to sing music you didn’t like or found incredibly difficult only to be told not to worry about that and do it anyway? Would any of this make you feel happy and free about singing? What if you were in a class with others who did not seem to have those problems? Would you relax more, thinking about getting up to perform in front of others who were not having those issues?

Maybe you would convince yourself that you were OK. Maybe you would find your courage to go on anyway. Maybe you would see the light at the end of the long tunnel and keep on keeping on and maybe, just maybe, in time, you would find a way to sing that was decent enough to get you out into the world and get you some work. But if you did not, would you go on anyway? What would your confidence be based upon? What would hold up your desire to be yourself, making music, staying healthy?

Where in the process would the teacher be asking him/herself if the problems in the lesson had anything to do with how the teaching was taking place? [You have to have a very secure teacher to query herself about why things aren’t working.]

What about being told “you are……..” followed by some critical evaluation like “holding onto your jaw” or “making a fake vibrato” or “pushing on your throat” when you don’t have any such deliberate desire or notions. Those two words, “YOU ARE”, are deadly, because we need to be told what we don’t know, but we don’t need someone else to tell us how to experience our own subjective reality.

The process of learning to sing is delicate for many people and folks with big, loud, bombastic voices and bodies don’t always understand that. The process of learning a new skill can be much more confusing than simple for some singers , and there is nothing wrong with those who have to strive to sing well.

If you are feeling discouraged about your singing, take heart. Almost every singer I’ve ever known has had times when the process of being a singer was both difficult and frustrating, but the people who push through such troubles are the ones you want to hear. They understand the value of what they have because they have fought to have it.

Don’t let anyone tell you that you are “hung up” in some way when you are unhappy. Dig a little deeper and make your teacher do the same.

 

 

It seems that the world has not been stopped by the publication of my article in Karen Hall’s NATS Journal of Singing “Independent Studio” column wherein I stated that “there is no such thing as classical training”. I expected backlash (which is perhaps yet to come) because I haven’t yet been so bold, although I have had the idea for decades.

In a profession that has no national standards, and certainly no local standards, about what teachers of singing are supposed to know, to teach or to do in terms of conduct, it is amazing that we had any kind of “professionalism” at all. The  choices open to a student when I was young in the 60s were: go to a classical conservatory or university to study this repertoire, go to drama school, or go get a degree in Speech Language Pathology. It was also possible, of course, not to get a degree at all, or to get a specialized degree. I don’t think there were any jazz vocal programs back then either. I did not finish the program I started at Manhattan School of Music because it was an awful fit. My teacher there, Uta Graf, a Wagnerian soprano, had no use for me or my voice.

Eventually, some colleges began to offer music theater training, which was and still is a “mixed bag” (a phrase also from the 60s), in that the course materials can run the gamut and there is no “normal” in terms of how the curriculum is structured. It falls to the individuals involved either as teachers or as department chairs. The students take what they have to take and that’s that. There may or may not be “vocal technique” training, and it may or may not be with someone who has music theater experience, and it may or may not be with someone who has tried to learn what he or she did not, from their own life experience, actually encounter. There are so many other factors, but, sadly, there is little agreement about them.

If you presume that a good classical singer can generate a lot of volume and a certain specific acoustic spectrum (“resonance”) and you assume the tone sounds “beautiful” and that there is a steady, but not too obvious, vibrato, and that the consonants are minimally there, and that there is at least two octaves of usable range, then the methods that were used to acquire those skills can be assumed to have worked. What you cannot presume, of course, is that the person who has worked to attain these skills is also expressive, creative, and can understand what is necessary in order to convey the song to the audience. And all of this is separate from having a career as a singer which entails being plucky, facing failure, maintaining body and soul, and having enough money to do whatever is needed without killing yourself (or anyone else!!) getting it.

If the profession is finally willing to separate the training process out from “being an artist” and “learning art songs” to “promote” growth of both the voice and the person, and look at technical training for what it is: a physical coordination over the throat and body such that the singer has easy control over the sound while allowing it to do the job at hand of singing whatever music is being performed, then halleluia! Perhaps we are turning a corner in this respect. Think of what it could mean to students to have teachers who not only understood the mechanism, but also understood how to train it to do whatever job it is required to do in specific styles or songs.

One of the reasons there is so much contentiousness in the teaching of singing is because a lot of people who teach do not know what they are doing and they don’t want to be “found out”, else they lose their livelihoods. Another reason is that there are quite a few people who live in a world called “singing is a mystery” and each person, each lesson is unique, i.e., there is no order to the process in any aspect. Another is that teachers learn one way, and that way becomes a religion and if they find any other point of view, it becomes “blasphemy” and needs to be fought against, lest things get corrupted. Another reason is that teaching singing is regarded as teaching songs, and only songs, and people make the sounds they do and that can’t be changed.

All of these things are very unfortunate. They are out there. They are not going away quickly, no matter what happens. They are, however, GOING AWAY. I consider that a kind of progress. Believe me, I take what I can get when it comes to singing teaching. ‘

If you can help things change, I thank you for that. Keep on keeping on!

Each style has its own group consensus about what it perceives itself to be. It has its own lingo, its own professionalism, its own protocol. The people who inhabit the world of a particular style develop a perspective about it and about how it relates to the outside musical world and the world at large that only they know. You can’t really comprehend  these mini-worlds if you do not inhabit them.

If you have been in opera, in jazz, in music theater, in rock, in alternative classical, or in folk music (to pick a few examples), you know what people admire and how they are regarded within your own arena and what that has to do with certain ineffable ingredients. True, there are unique, individual aspects to each performer within any given style, but if someone crosses out of their home base style and brings with them the wrong ingredients, they are not well received in the new club. They are not seen as “innovators” but as “imposters” or as “interlopers” who cannot be taken seriously, even if they are famous. Sometimes, they break through to a popular audience (as was the case with Andrea Bocelli, who was rejected by the classical world, mostly, but widely accepted by the public), or Rod Stewart, who made a good crossover into Standards, selling decently enough to put out a second CD even though the jazz world wasn’t so impressed. Ditto with Ms. Fleming’s various efforts at music theater, jazz and rock…….     : <

The only way to understand the importance of these “group mindsets” is to encounter them. If you are going to teach someone, you need to know what they are thinking about and what they want to accomplish with their singing. A jazz vocalist mostly thinks like an instrumentalist, because the training is largely instrumental and musicianship oriented. A music theater singer thinks in terms of emotional truth through a character in a role. A folk artist thinks about telling a story, sticking to a set form of chords and harmony and having good intonation. A classical artist thinks of beauty of tone, resonance, and, in the USA anyway, volume. We also think about languages here because we have to master so many of them. An alternative modern classical vocalist might be thinking of the music, or movement, or a certain kind of sound, or of the rhythm, or all of those in some kind of sequence. A rock singer might not be thinking of anything vocal at all except not getting hoarse at the end of the performance, because so much of rock is physically demanding.

If you do not understand these things and you take what you know and plop it on top of your student as if it didn’t matter, you are not doing them a service. That’s why functional training works with the physical machine before it addresses repertoire and why I strongly say that you should never teach what you yourself can’t sing.

There’s nothing worse than a classical singer turning a rock song into an opera aria because that’s all she can sing and she “likes the song”. Happens all the time. The audience might laugh behind her back, but the vocalist, who may just be making herself look ridiculous, could have no idea.

Enter into each world as a babe, with innocent eyes and ears, and learn from the masters there. It takes time, but you can learn the conventions and then use them to sing and, at some point, to teach. The only mindset to avoid is the one that says “all singing is the same” because “all technique is the same”. FUNCTION is function and remains consistent, but singing is variable and always will be. They are separate but united.