Posts Placeholder

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.