Sadly, a good number of today’s most popular voice training methods use imitation as the basis for what they teach. They ask singers to “do this” and then sing, and it inevitably is the case that the singers are holding on to a particular vocal behavior while singing in order to get the “right” kind of sound. The musical and stylistic behaviors of any particular kind of music are part and parcel of the vocal production, so the imitation includes various “riffs” and “gestures” that make the music seem authentic. Seem authentic.

The problem with this, of course, is that only freely made sound can truly express deeply felt emotion and you virtually cannot (that is CANNOT) hold onto your throat deliberately and also sing freely. PERIOD. You must condition the throat to do what it does without your having to pay any conscious attention to the vocal production, until that is a reality. If you do not do that, you will sound like someone else’s version of you.

Why teach anyone to manipulate the throat deliberately? Isn’t the job of the singing teacher to take a student away from such behavior? Isn’t it the job of the voice professional to recognize wrong function and correct it until it is balanced and free?

With all the electronic manipulation of singing done both in the studio and live, how is one to know what a singer actually sounds like without help? When was the last time you heard anyone sing with so much emotion that you were actually touched by what they had to communicate? You have to search hard (though it isn’t impossible) to find artists like that. You would probably have to search even harder to find singers who even understood that that should be a goal of good singing, and that is really sad.

Yes, you can “make like as if” you felt something while you were singing. You can “act like” you were really feeling something in a song. You can “sound like” you have a deep emotional message to communicate in a piece, but if your throat is open and free to respond and you actually feel deeply what you are singing about, the emotion cannot help but show up, honestly, without any additional help, all by itself. You will sound like yourself, in your own voice that is instantly recognized, if you leave your throat to its own devices and sing freely from the depths of your soul.

That is what I want from a singer when I teach.

Look hard to find that, folks, if you take singing lessons.

At times, the gulf between the voice disciplines is large.

A medical doctor is going to look at a vocal problem from a strictly medical perspective. That is what her training tells her to do, that is what her experience is about and that is what the law requires of her as well. A speech language pathologist is going to look at all vocal problems from the standpoint of speech, for the same reasons. A voice researcher is going to look at the physical production of voiced sound and examine it in various ways to discern its components as accurately as possible. A singing teacher is going to look at the voice from a musical perspective, or perhaps, if they have the knowledge, from a vocal function perspective as well.

Does a medical doctor understand singing? Does a singing teacher understand phonosurgery? Does a speech pathologist understand singing or surgery or vocal acoustics? Perhaps yes, perhaps no. The languages of each discipline are different. Medicine isn’t always exact, but many terms are defined by specific symptoms and are listed in a medical dictionary. Speech conditions are also catalogued in order for pathologists to be able to understand their characteristics more universally. Voice scientists seem to agree that a formant is something specific and also that vocal fold behaviors can be measured with various kind of instruments. Singing teachers may not understand any of the words used by the other professions. Frequently, they do not understand words used by other singing teachers in their own profession.

If you think you understand another profession, if you think you understand their language, how do you know that is an accurate assumption if on a daily basis you do not interact with that profession? Worse, even if you do interact with that profession, how would the other person (the MD, the SLP, the scientist) know if you were knowledgeable about your own? Maybe they wouldn’t know at all.

I ask these questions because I have seen evidence, over time, in several places, that a medical doctor really doesn’t understand whether or not a singing teacher is any good if he doesn’t sing and has no basis for comparison. I have seen this because a speech language pathologist may not be able to evaluate the skills of a singing teacher if she herself does not sing. I have seen this because a voice scientist can understand physics but not how the throat actually works when it is doing its job well. In places where I would not expect to encounter lack of understanding I encounter it on a regular basis.

It is often the case that the experts do not understand each other well, even when they are attempting to do so. There is no remedy for this situation but perhaps one day someone will find a way to create a “Rosetta Stone” of the various disciplines and how they verbally describe more or less the same phenomena. Perhaps, one day. Perhaps.

 

In speech pathology there is frequently “non-compliance” with what the therapist recommends. Patients report back to the SLP that they can’t find a way to integrate the information they have been given into their daily lives easily, so the guidance falls away, and after a while, the person goes back to speaking the way they did before. Two famous people who had vocal intervention that did not stick are Rachel Ray and Bill Clinton. Right back to their old speech ways, it seems to me.

Why would compliance be so hard, when having vocal problems is so debilitating? Wouldn’t people who were motivated to seek out help be very eager to follow the suggestions they were given by the experts they have consulted?

Well, maybe, just maybe, the fault lies not with the patient but with the therapy.

I heard tonight yet again at a hospital presentation about the use of “diaphragmatic” breath support and “resonating the cavities of the head” by two different Speech Language Pathologists. In both cases, the patients had problems that did not go away and in at least one case, the person was looking to shift her job to something else in order to prevent herself from getting worse. She had a history of vocal problems.

What if the therapy worked with words that the patient did not have to “interpret” at all. How about not using the word resonance in relationship to voice use except when it is necessary (as in an unamplified operatic performarnce). Resonance therapy (bone conduction, placement of tone, etc.) is a very validated, very common approach to vocal production, and it is taught to many people as the standard of clinical care. But what, I ask, does “vocal resonance” mean to the average person? Is it something they can see? How do they know if they have it, when all sound carries some kind of resonance, (or we couldn’t hear it)? Why is one kind of sound “special” and how do you get it to show up all the time after just four or five sessions if you have been speaking or singing a certain way for decades? The answer is, of course, you do not. But for this, you get blamed, just like in singing. Does no one ever think to evaluate the language of clinical care and its usefulness to the lay person who has no idea of what the jargon means?

Further, does anyone really watch the therapy with the idea that maybe the idea of the therapy is good but the transferance of the information to the patient is lousy. Happens every day.

Maybe I understand how to bake a chocolate cake. Maybe I know several ways to make one. Maybe you would like to learn how to bake a chocolate cake that tastes good and that you don’t over cook, so you come to me because you were told I am a good baker and know what I’m doing. Maybe I learned to bake this cake studying with a very famous TV chef, who taught me step by step how to do it. Maybe I tweaked the recipe she gave me and now I have my own. But maybe, also, I talk in circles. Maybe I contradict myself. Maybe I wander in my instruction and don’t bother to ask you if you understand me or can remember to do any of the things I have asked you to do. There are a thousand maybes.

If you give people what they want, they will come back. If you satisfy their needs, they will recommend others. If you put them back into the driver’s seat of their own lives they will praise you for a long time. If you fail them, they will be reluctant to return to you, lest you be disappointed and lest you chastise them. Rather than put themselves through that kind of experience, they don’t go back.

“Resonance” Therapy is as meaningful or meaningless as the person using it. The words used to explain it may or may not make a difference to someone with a speaking voice issue. It has little to do with the patient and a lot to do with the therapist.

 

If you found something wonderful, and you were a good generous person, would you keep it to yourself or would you share it with others?

This profound principle is underneath all spiritual teaching. Generosity is a key ingredient in spirituality, regardless of whether or not one is religious. It is very hard to be a truly spiritual person and also be greedy and selfish.

If you look at what is typically called “character” and take in all the qualities that define what we would label “characteristics” most of them are timeless. They only take place over a period of time.

Loyality, perseverence, dedication, patience, honesty, generosity, kindness, truthfulness, endurance — all of these are only really evident over time. A “one time only” experience could just be a fluke. If, however, you are someone who is known to inhabit these qualities, then it would also be obvious that they are part of “who you are” or of your character.

Jealousy and envy of others is detrimental to those who harbor those feelings. In fact, any negative emotion held over time will eat away at you until it literally makes you sick. Negative feelings, especially about other people, are not only a waste of energy and time, they are literally time bombs if they continue to hang around. These two emotions assume that another person’s success is going to do you harm. It assumes that what others have you cannot also have. It also assumes that it’s good to be suspicious of others because they might be doing somethat could harm you. All of this is very sad.

Sharing something is a choice. Sharing information is not a requirement. Anyone who shares what he or she has learned through life experience, study and investigation is offering it as a gift. There is no real dollar value on life experience, but sometimes people do get paid for sharing the information because in our society that is one way we can balance the scales. It isn’t enough, sometimes, to say a simple “thank you” so paying for it is a convenient way to offer something in return. In my case, I choose to share what I know because I worked hard to learn it and want to help young singers to benefit from my experience. It seemed to me that my path was rather arduous and I hope that sharing what I have learned might help some seeker to have a slightly shorter, slightly easier path to the same goal……..wonderful singing.

Everyone is free to reject what I or others like me share out of a desire to be generous. Everyone can decide they do not need or want the information. People who stand in the way of allowing the information to go out, however, are a different breed. Those who block the flow of the information are afraid that it will harm them if it goes out to others who do not have it. They fear it will perhaps reflect badly on them because they don’t themselves have similar information to offer. People who deliberately present obstacles to block the flow of information out into the community are concerned with things other than the information itself.

The profession of teaching singing is fraught with individuals offering all manner of nonsense and “magic solutions” and, oddly, many of those individuals are free to sell whatever it is they have without opposition. In fact, many people think it is a mark of knowledge to have stuff to sell and that selling it is a sign of great success. The people who are less well-known but sometimes far more successful are cause for suspicion and fear and are often blocked in the profession just because they are successful. Crazy, but absolutely true.

Politics, meaning taking care of your own reputation by doing what is expedient for you, rather than looking at the greater good of the profession at large, is nothing new. Oren Brown, one of the great singing teachers of all time, was treated like dirt in both NATS and ASHA for most of his career because he was so far ahead of his peers. It didn’t stop him from finally becoming an internationally recognized expert who was revered for his contributions and he never let the opposition get to him, but it is a mark against the profession that the very people who stopped him from offering his expertise to the larger population of teachers of singing were themselves not particularly talented as teachers or singers. They resented Oren because of their own inadequacy. It was politics as usual with those folks.

That will likely never change.

I have been away, as those of you who read this blog regularly must have figured out.

While I was at the PEVOC 10 conference in Prague, attending presentations of all sorts by people from all over the world, I noticed that there is a great deal more diversity than there once was in what people are studying, voice-wise. That proliferation of information, however, doesn’t mean that there is more good information, just more information. It is amazing, but sadly not surprising, that there were people there who had the nerve to present papers that were not only poorly done but outrightly boring and/or stupid.

This is what happens when things expand and these conferences have multiplied all over the world. The idea is, of course, to be inclusive (a good thing) but when you include virtually everyone without criteria, or with very vague criteria, you are bound to encounter a situation where something useless eventually shows up.

In a perfect world, the senior scientists, clinicians and ENTS would have a forum where they could present the result of their work to and with singing and speaking experts and their students, so all could benefit. In the REAL world, you get students working on master’s or doctoral degrees, presenting because it is required in some programs, who have done research (of sorts) on other college students that presents inconclusive data or data that is so obscure as to be completely incomprehensible. You get people doing “research” that really isn’t much. Very frustrating to sit in a hot crowded room and come to that realization halfway through the session.

If you travel thousands of miles and pay quite a bit of money to attend, you don’t want to sit and listen to gobble-de-gook but you have no choice. You also have to struggle with listening to people speak English that is not their first (or even, in some cases, second) language using technical jargon. It’s wonderful that English allows me to attend (I couldn’t go if it were in any other language) but it makes it hard for those who present who don’t speak fluently to do their presentations and even harder for the audience members to follow the statistics and charts.

It was great to be on the last keynote panel of singing teachers from around the world, being asked to say what we would want next from the interdisciplinary exchange that is continuously moving forward. My first request was for research to be done on adult professionals of long-standing successful careers in CCM. So far, there is none.  The second request was for the presentations to be shorter, clearer and more to the point. The third request was that people who are subjects of research be skilled and representative of the best the professional has to offer, (else why bother to use them for research?) The fourth request was for my own profession to establish some guidelines regarding what is expected of a singing teacher. (Right).

The only way for things to get better is for these conferences to take place. Messy, yes —  chaotic, probably — but exciting nevertheless and over the long haul, still the best way for us to learn from each other. The only way out is to keep going and keep trying and see what eventually shows up on the other side………..decades from now.

If you have a career as a performer for 20, 30 or even 40 years, you gain experience that cannot be gained in any other way. You live singing, every day, you are a singer and you deal with whatever music you do, but you deal with traveling, with other performers, with musicians, with your own voice and health. You face multitudes of things that teach you about yourself and your own experiences singing. VERY valuable indeed.

If, then, you “retire” from singing (no real singer ever totally retires, if you ask me), and go into teaching, you may have only your own rich wonderful but very personal experiences to use as a basis for your teaching. This might serve you well in very general ways. If you have students who are similar to you in voice and interests, if you have students who will sing the same repertoire you sang, if you have to teach them to perform in repertoire you did, then it could work brilliantly.

If, however, your students are very different from you, if they have different voices, different bodies, different interests and requirements, you could be really lost. That might actually not be so bad, if you had a sense of your own limitations and could say that you were lost. If, however, you decided to hide from that fact (even to yourself) or camouflage it from others, you could be in big trouble. If you decided that you would plunge headlong into teaching anyway, regardless of what you have to offer and its applicability to others, you could be traveling down the proverbial slippery slope. If you take your student somewhere the student has no ability or desire to go, but has to go anyway since the person is after all, a student, you are highly likely to cause some kind of damage.

The advantage that a career teacher has is that the teacher has long decades of teaching study and experience. It allows the person to study pedagogy in depth and to acquire skills geared exclusively at teaching rather than just at singing. In other words, a career teacher knows many pathways to a destination, not just one. Someone who has decades of teaching under her belt knows what people do when. She has had time to observe trends, tendencies, pitfalls, obstacles, as well as short cuts, direct paths, and simple solutions. Assuming the teacher has also sung, and continued to sing, throughout her teaching career (an important ingredient), knowing what to do for each student, individually, in whatever shape or form the person and the voice may be in at any given time, is a skill that takes a long time to develop. If the teacher has also gone to all kinds of performances, to all kinds of venues and seen all kinds of singers, and has used the breadth of that exposure to inform the teaching, then the information gained adds to her toolbox.

In other words, performing does not mean you are a good teacher, even if you are a very excellent vocalist. All you have to do is watch American Idol and you will see that the performers who have become “judges” (if you will excuse the word), often don’t have a clue as to what to say to help a student other than platitudes or suggestions aimed at getting them to stop doing something they don’t like.

Having judged a number of classical singing competitions in my day I know for a fact that opera singers often have very strange ideas about what constitutes good singing and good singers.

In the end, being able to understand a complex process, which singing is, takes a lot. Many things have to come together in one person, at one time, and the ability to communicate from that base has to be accurate, precise, practical and clear. Is it any wonder, then, that there are so few actual masters of the process, even amongst those who profess to be?

I am in the midst of doing a presentation for the PEVOC 10 conference upcoming in Prague, The Czech Republic in two weeks. In searching YouTube for belters, going back to the beginning of the 20th Century, it has been amazing to see how many of the posts have belters of all sorts doing their thing.

Young people, if you do not know Kate Smith, go listen to her. She certainly was no movie star in terms of her looks. She was rather plain, heavy and, as they used to say, “matronly”, but she could certainly sing. She stood there, planted her feet and knocked the walls down with her high notes. SUNG high notes, not yelled. She was cut from the old mold that was unashamed to “sell the song” with gestures (something no one does now).

If you go find Christina Aguilera (or Carrie Underwood) you will see and hear something very different. Styles have changed so much over the past 50 years that the singing is now very exaggerated. It really is sustained shouting. Yes, it certainly is exciting and amazing to hear (especially in person) but I keep wondering, what’s next? Will the next 50 years see a mutation in the larynx? There really isn’t any kind of sound that is further out than this unless we start getting people who just make noise. Rappers aren’t really singing much of the time. Maybe that’s it — no melody? No actual singing in the old way?

I’m sure that Kate Smith could never have imagined the sounds that these young women are making routinely now. I’m sure, in fact, that if people made those sounds years ago, there were told to stop, because they were considered to be awful. It’s amazing how much the ear gets used to hearing things and then it comes to expect that sound.

So far, anyway, these present moment belters seem to be holding up well enough. I don’t know their individual vocal health history. Maybe some throats are better disposed to these kinds of sounds than are others. In the old days, people were told, “You either have an operatic voice or you don’t,” but I don’t agree with that. I do think, however, that growing up making these sounds is very different than learning to make them as a adult. And, I wonder how they will sound when they are 50, 60 and 70 years old. Kate Smith sounded pretty much the same throughout her long career. Ditto others like Ella Fitzgerald (who sang in chest, but wasn’t really a belter). Only time will tell.

It is true that each generation finds its own form of expression. Aretha was no Beyonce. Barbra Streisand was no Sophie Tucker. What’s next? ??????