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The only way our profession, the one called “singing teaching”, is going to go forward is by paying attention to voice science. We can’t live as if voice research doesn’t matter to what we teach and we can’t hide from what voice science is telling us about how we make sung sounds.

Many people, however, still think that science is science and singing is singing and never the two shall meet. That’s unfortunate. As long as we view things as being unrelated to each other, we will be at a disadvantage. We all have much to learn from each other and the free exchange of information is more important than any other activity we can cultivate.

If you have never been to a voice science conference, you should go. There are many now, all over the world, and they are valuable if you are serious about singing. Not every presentation at every conference is worth while or for everyone but there is generally enough information at them that you can come away with at least one new data point or exercise. It is also a way to meet your peers and share with them as well and that kind of networking grows over time. It is worth the effort to return and return to the conferences you enjoy, as the friendships cultivated this way can be lasting and valuable.

I wouldn’t trade my voice science conference attendance for anything. It is always a high point for me and it is much more interesting than the conferences offered by NATS. I typically find those not very compelling because they have topics that often don’t relate to the musical world I’m in or to the practical application of singing in my studio. It can be expensive to go but I view the expense as part of professional development and yes, even at my age, I am still developing. You are never too old to learn.

If you attend a voice science conference and you see a presentation you don’t understand, be brave enough to go to the presenter and ask some basic questions. You never know what you might discover. And, once you get the lay of the land, do some research yourself and submit it for presentation. You might get invited to stand up there yourself. Then you would be a voice scientist. Don’t raise your eyebrows! It happened to me.

Check out The Voice Foundation and investigate their Symposium: Care of the Professional Voice which takes place next week in Philadelphia. www.voicefoundation.org

 

Somatic Voicework™ The LoVetri Method should have the trademark symbol after the word “Voicework”.

On a Windows computer, it’s Alt+0153 on the number keypad (Make sure Num Lock is on.)

On an Apple computer, it’s Options+2.

For more information, including how to type the symbol on Linux, check out http://fsymbols.com/computer/trademark/

After introducing the full name of the method in an article, you can use the shorter form SVW™, but please include the appropriate symbol. A “(tm)” can suffice, but with a computer, you should be able to use the symbol.

Please note that “Voicework” does not have an s. Lisa Popeil’s Method uses the word “Voiceworks”.

 

 

What happens when you hear these words from a medical doctor or a speech language pathologist? What then? Do you just accept them and go home? How does this up end your life?

There are all kinds of illnesses and vocal fold injuries that can compromise the vocal folds, some have to do with the vocal folds directly and some are caused by disease or surgery that has had a negative impact upon their function.

Many people do not realize that the vocal folds’ primary job is to protect the lungs from foreign objects. If you have ever accidently swallowed something and choked on it, you know that the body will do its best to get it out of your throat by gagging and coughing. You really can’t stop that from happening, even if you are in a quiet, elegant restaurant and you would like to control it! They may also not know that you need the folds to close to climb the stairs, to carry something heavy and even to defecate. If your vocal folds paralyze in an open position, you will have trouble with these activities and with making sound. If they stop moving in a more closed position, you will have also trouble breathing.

You can have conditions which impact the ability of the vocal folds to vibrate along their length and that affects the way we control pitch. If the edges are compromised, you can end up with a weak, breathy sound. If the nerves to the vocal folds are damaged, you can end up with little control over anything vocal. And, if you have one or more vocal folds removed by surgery, you can lose your ability to speak forever, even though you may have saved your life in the process, perhaps by having a cancerous growth removed.

Vocal fold illness and injury is a profoundly powerful scenario to encounter. If you have ever run into the any situation in which this awful experience arises, you will know how distressing it is. Not only to lose normal speech but to lose the ability to do other things is often devastating. While medical science is working to develop new treatments and protocols all the time, there is much that allopathic medicine still cannot do. There only a few limited options that an MD or an SLP can offer and after that, you are on your own.

It has been my experience, however, that singing training can be helpful, perhaps in a way that nothing else can, and it would be great to have some studies done to verify if this is indeed so. Coupled with a positive outlook, a desire to trust and encourage the body, a willingness to do almost any reasonable exercise, and some meditation or visualization, people who have an optimisn about their situation can go much further than we now suppose. The body can respond at a deeper level than we give it credit for and things are not always as bleak as people are told.

Someday the doctors and speech experts may be willing to work with the many tools that are available to a singing teacher with a broad range of experience and knowledge in helping someone return to full vocal function after it is diminished. Right now, the individual has to be lucky enough to find someone to help through referrals or sheer luck. If you are searching for someone like this to help you, don’t give up! There are people out there who do know how to do that. Keep looking until you find one.

All repertoire is not created equal, and that includes music theater songs. I have implied here before that this is the case, but I well remember a conversation I had many years ago with a classical colleague who professed to teach music theater that the really difficult music was classical and the other stuff was, well, less demanding. Oh.

In my experience some music theater songs are very difficult. Sometimes that difficulty is musical, sometimes it is vocal, sometimes it’s emotional but if you have a song with all those factors, you can face some serious challenges.

What kinds of songs am I talking about? Songs that are loud, high, and long  are demanding — songs that are fast, frantic and repetitive are demanding — songs that ask you to be very emotional are hard because they run the risk of pushing the voice.

Are there classical songs that are simple? Of course. Many of the great art songs are not difficult until you begin to interpret them.  They can have simple melodies and lyrics (if you are not singing them in a foreign language), but any good classical singer will tell you that just because they are simple doesn’t mean that to do them well is easy. On the contrary, sometimes the simplicity makes the songs very challenging.

Defying Gravity is difficult, Gethsemane is difficult, Take Me, Baby, Or Leave Me, is difficult, Aldonza‘s song is difficult, I Am What I What I Am, same. There are many more. Rose’s Turn is a killer. Don’t Rain On My Parade, likewise. I could go one, but you get the point.

Of course, if you don’t do them the way they were originally intended by the composer to be sung, and you just sing them however you do, then they could be really easy, but they would be WRONG. Doing the song however you please because you are you doesn’t work. If you are a highly skilled vocalist, the songs might be easy for you, but not for everyone, and that matters.

There are no books of graded songs for music theater like there are for classical repertoire, although some books do give songs for young people. Those books, however, are not looking at the songs as being necessarily easier, just age appropriate. Someone will come up with a book like that one day, and make a lot of money. In the meantime, if you assign songs to students, be sure you understand what’s hard and why, because if you do not you will blame the student for not being good enough or trying hard enough and that would be tragic.

Eleven years ago I did my first Somatic Voicework™ training. At that time I was teaching alone and did not know how my work would be received by others. Since that time it has grown and now many people have participated in the courses, at Shenandoah during the full summer CCM Institute and at the other institutions where Level I training is offered: The University of Michigan Ann Arbor, The University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, The University of Central Oklahoma, Edmond and now at City College of New York this coming weekend. It has been amazing to me to see this work go out into the world and be useful to others. I had no idea that I would ever train teachers nor did I ever envision an Institute of any kind anywhere.

I have found that many of the people who have gone through the certification courses have been interested in deepening their knowledge of the principles of the work and have stayed in touch with me and with the training over time. Some of them have become very knowledgeable about it and are working with it as their primary mode of teaching singing. We have an association of teachers of Somatic Voicework™ now and will be building our community through various other activities over time.

I am now faced with the unfortunate situation of realizing that there are individuals who have gone through the three day Level I course, and only that course, and are using Somatic Voicework™ on their resume and on their websites as a way to tell others that they have been certified (which is true) and that they use the work, but they have had no further contact with me, with anyone else who is secure in the method and have not had any further training beyond that first level. Word has gotten back to me that some of those people are saying things under the banner of Somatic Voicework™ that I would absolutely never say, not to anyone, and would never want anyone else to say, under my banner or not, to a student of singing. This is true of others who have gone through Level II and Level III as well, which is unfortunate.

So, if you are someone who has taken the training and you have not had any contact me with, with the Institute through Post Certificate trainings, with a Somatic Voicework™ faculty teacher anywhere, and do not participate in the chat room, and if you are most particularly only a Level I grad, please know that I want you to finish the levels as soon as possible and stay in touch with me. Very soon, we are going to make that a requirement and in order to keep using the logo and claiming to teach Somatic Voicework™ it will be necessary to stay in touch in some significant but as yet undetermined manner.

If you are someone who reads this blog and you encounter a teacher who is a Somatic Voicework™ teacher, understand that I can’t at this time guarantee that the person is actually teaching Somatic Voicework™ in any recognizable way.

Just generally, if you take someone’s work into your own life and make it your own, in my opinion, you have an obligation to honor that work by following it as closely as you can. Unless you are very very unusual, you won’t know if you are doing that until and unless you check in now and then to find out. That goes not just for me but for anyone’s work.

 

There really isn’t anything that’s as beautiful as a human voice singing sincerely with no outside help. It is stunning to hear such singing and these days, all too rare.

We hear voices with so much help from electronics that we forget what it’s like to hear someone sing really well, at a professional level, spontaneously, with feeling. But it’s not that such people don’t exist, they do. It’s simply that the people pulling the strings in the music business aren’t much interested in them.

The music business is dominated by men. Producers, musicians, arrangers, managers, music directors are more likely than not to be male. It’s not that there are no women, but they are more likely to be artists and not to be in a position of power. The only exception to that would be those women who have succeeded on their own and have made their own production companies. They call their own shots.

It really isn’t possible to know what this does to the output we see and hear as “music” but I wonder how different things would be if the music business were dominated instead by women. Would pop music still be dominated by young women who are mostly screaming or being breathy and “baby” voiced? Would the dances you see in the big pop singers’ production numbers feature woman dancing in highly suggestive clothing making moves that would have been considered, years ago, as absolutely obscene.

I’m no prude, and I appreciate the young and beautiful just as much as anyone else, but sometimes the line between what is “sexy” and what is disgusting is hard to find. When a woman dances in multiple moves in which she spreads her legs wide apart while directly facing the audience — clothed or not — you have to wonder — would another woman ask for those moves?

I am a product of the 60s and we were the people who went naked at Woodstock, folks.  We were the generation of “let it all hang out”, so I am not hung up on propriety, but I have a problem with how female singers are presented because simple singing in simply talented singers isn’t enough. It could be argued that the men are making suggestive moves, too, since Michael Jackson was famous for, among other things, grabbing his own crotch, but none of these fancy maneuvers have anything to do with singing, and none of the men are dressed in their underwear.

Show business is the business of entertainment, yes. Singing is part of the entertainment industry, yes. But singing, plain and simple, ought to get a bit more attention in show business than it does.

If you go to YouTube and you look up any old TV variety show where singers came out and sang with some kind of musical accompaniment, and there are lots of examples of that, you will see that the vocalists sang and then left. There might have been a simple set, maybe there was some kind of back-up group, but not much else. You got to hear the voice, you got to see the face, you got to hear the song. I sometimes crave this and I don’t think it’s what you get in the auditions of American Idol, since the germ of what it means to sing simply is so much missing in the young people who are the auditioners. I don’t think Aretha Franklin or Barbra Streisand would ever have been able, or would have wanted, to do the things that Rihanna, Beyonce or Jennifer Lopez do in their shows, and if they were on the scene today, would they have careers at all if that were the case? And who are we missing now because they might object to the things I’m mentioning here?

We can’t go back. We can’t capture what we might once have had. I don’t know what will happen in the future as we go forward but I do hope that we find a way to leave singers alone and let women go back to being woman and not sex toys on stage. I know, don’t hold my breath, but I can dream, can’t I?

 

We talk about the singing voice and the speaking voice as if they are separate when we realize that we only have one larynx, one set of vocal folds and one throat. Why? Because we do not experience singing in the same way that we experience speech and that has to do with what happens in the brain.

The musical part of the brain is in a different location than the part that houses the lyrics. That’s why you can end up with “doo bee doo bee doo” while the melody just keeps going. Scientists are just beginning to address what goes on between these two sections in the brain (Oliver Sacks’ book, “Musicophilia” is fascinating on this topic*).

It is possible, over time, to develop a great deal of awareness over the process of singing in very precise detail. It is possible to develop a capacity to feel things that are not supposed to be easily felt and to perceive things at a level of awareness that most people could not imagine. This kind of perception actually becomes quite possible in skilled singers who are looking to develop it. It does not just “arrive” because you sing, however, no matter how long you do.

There are probably infinite ways to perceive things like singing, given that the mind is not limited. In addition to gross movements like how much the jaw is open or how the lips are shaped, it is possible to perceive small changes in kinesthetic things and also in the sounds as they are emerging. It is also possible to be aware of the body and what it is doing while singing and of your emotions as you are experiencing them while performing a song. It is possible to be aware of all these things and more simultaneously but without self-consciousness. It is possible to “ride on top of them” with just a mere wisp of awareness, knowing they are there but leaving them alone to be as they are.

Given that most training is externally driven…that is, goal oriented, it isn’t common for the training process to produce deep awareness of any kind. In Somatic Voicework™, however, we strive for a unity of the throat, the body, and the mind, because without that it is impossible to be an artist who can freely create through her singing. Somatic Voicework™ is a process-oriented teaching method. It gets to the goals through presenting a process. Learning this way is slower, but more effective in the long haul because once you learn it, whatever it is, you never forget what you’ve learned and that’s because it is taken in through so many senses and with so much perception that the complete experience is vivid, clear and accessible.

*musicophilia.com/