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If you are a singer and you know yourself as one, singing is part of your identity. This is true if you are a dancer, an actor, a painter or, in fact, in our society where work is a crucial part of one’s adult persona, if you are any type of professional in the arts. What you do and who you are, are one and the same. If you lose the ability to do what you have done, you also lose a part of yourself and that can be devastating.

Many famous singers have had episodes where they have lost their voices or become incapacitated. Sometimes, as with the recent case of Adele, the problem is acute, is addressed, and the singer recovers to go on, hopefully as good or better than new. Sometimes, as with Anna Moffo, a great voice and artist who lost her ability to sing never to have it return, the story doesn’t end so happily. While Ms. Moffo went on to become a patroness of the arts and do a world of good in other ways, her attempt at a vocal “come-back”, after years of not singing, was a dismal failure and she never again attempted to sing in public after it was over.

Voices can change a lot over time. They always darken and usually go down. Sometimes they get husky and frequently they lose range, both at the top and at the bottom. A few lucky souls like Tony Bennett and Barbara Cook, Sheila Jordan (and even Mick Jagger, who never sounded good in the first place) haven’t changed a whole lot since they were in their prime even though now they are considered “senior citizens”. Other people choose to give up singing because they can hear and feel that what was once there is no longer and they don’t want to be remembered for being less than they once were. This is a hard choice to make but sometimes it is the one that makes the most sense.

Because opera is the most vocally demanding style that also has the most exacting musical criteria, it is often so that opera singers retire from the stage while they can still sing but before they lose their ability to do repertoire at a high standard. Sometimes they can go on to have decades more life singing in other styles (quite a few have gone to Broadway successfully). It isn’t usually so, however, that a “retired” pop singer is going to move over to another vocal style, but some have been able to continue performing as actors who don’t sing. Julie Andrews is certainly in that category.

The famous people have more to lose in terms of their reputation, of course, but those that are not famous have a lot invested in their singing, too. It can be just as awful for someone who has sung for their entire life to lose that ability, for whatever reason, because of the deeply personal connection they have to the experience of making vocal music. Hearing yourself sing, feeling your voice make sound through music is a very unique experience and not having access to that joy, to that energy, is a big loss. For some, singing is the very fuel of life itself. It is the juice that makes everything “go” and the motivating force that drives life on a day to day basis. It isn’t easy to put into words what the loss of singing can be for those who call themselves “singer” but is can be a source of deep sorrow and mourning, not unlike the experience of losing a loved one. After all, for true singers, the voice and the song is the loved one, and it is a significant absence when it is gone, never to return again.

For those of us who are in the support professions, helping vocalists sing with freedom, ease and joy, it is imperative that singers who are experiencing any kind of voice loss be handled with the utmost respect, care, compassion and solid psychological support. If it turns out to be the case that the voice will never return to normal, surrounding the singer with loving understanding might be the only solace that can be offered. While we may not be able to make the problem disappear or even help it significantly diminish, it is within our capacities to ease the burden by acknowledging the singer’s suffering. The courage to go on might just come from the words we choose to speak to someone who can no longer say, “I am a singer”, and that could end up being the reason that life, even without singing, can still go on.

I am going to way out on a limb tonight (who, me?) and say some things that I absolutely cannot verify at all. They are 100% from my own perceptions and you can take or leave what I am going to write. If you don’t believe it, that’s fine. If you are willing to take what I say here as being “the truth” understand that this is based on my own perceptions and only on that.

It is my experience that we can, after a period of time, when we have developed sufficient mechanical skills, begin to isolate the various muscles in the throat and tongue through exercise. How I know this is because I can feel the individual muscles as clearly as I can feel my finger wiggling. For those of you who follow this blog, you will remember that last year about this time I went to Dr. Peak Woo telling him “something is wrong with my left vocal fold. It’s not responding”. I was correct. He confirmed that this was so. How did I know that? I could feel it.

In working to restore some of the function on the left side I have had to pay quite a bit of attention to the interior musculature and the feedback I get is quite clear. I know what I am feeling. I back this up by saying that in 1988, when I was in Stockholm, doing research on my throat with Dr. Johan Sundberg, he told me then (and that was a long time ago) that I had more control over the muscles in my throat than anyone he had ever encountered up until that time. The tracings of separate examples were exact duplications. That means that in two different examples, the lines showing the acoustic behavior were exactly on top of each other, making it look like just one example. In a human being this kind of accuracy is almost unheard of…..and I have learned a great deal more since then.

These perceptions allow me to coax very specific behaviors from a student, using the exercises as a catalyst. It is always true that one basic pattern of vowel and pitches can call forth a wide variety of responses, depending on where in the pitch range it is done, and at what volume. It can also be the case that the exercise is done in various ways on the same vowel and that, too, will draw forth slightly different responses. If you do the exercise properly and then repeat it enough times it will produce a result, even if the student doesn’t know what the result will be. I have to know where to go, even when the student does not. After the student has done the exercise successfully for quite some time it is possible to ask, “What happens when you do that? What do you experience”? Sometimes the student can’t answer as he has not been able to track anything specific, but often, if you go back and do it again, the feedback will be quite good. It is only in this way that the perception of what the exercise is doing to the sound and the actual singing/doing of the exercise can be unified and therefore become useful.

Lest you become confused here, I am not an advocate of having a student sing while trying to feel or move the muscles of the throat or interior muscles of the tongue deliberately nor do I ask them to think about this. Rather, I guide them to do an exercise (on a pitch pattern and a vowel sound, in a particular part of the vocal range, at a specific volume) and then wait for the response I am seeking to show up as an auditory shift. At that point, the exercise is beginning to do its job. Over time, sometimes over a lot of time, depending on how foreign this behavior is to the student, the exercises will condition the response so the student can completely forget about it and the result will still be there.

If you have weak stomach muscles, and I ask you to “hold them in” you might not be able to do that, or perhaps only do it a little and for a short period of time. If you do sit-ups every day, however, it would get easier to hold them in and keep them in for longer at each attempt. If you did a lot of them for weeks, months or even years, your stomach would hold itself it, even when you were not thinking about it. Vocal exercises should work in exactly the same way. When they do not either they are not understood by the student and the student cannot execute them accurately because of that, or they are not being configured properly by the teacher who does not understand what to ask for or in what way to adjust the exercise. In the first case, the teacher should adjust the exercise until the student can do it successfully, and not all teachers know how to do that. In the second case, the teacher needs to study more about what exercises do what, functionally. Come to my Level II at Shenandoah. We will teach you.

All of the words that voice teachers have conjured up over the decades have been to call forth these responses in some mysterious manner. Sometimes they work and sometimes they don’t. Mostly, it is hit or miss and it depends on how fixed a teacher’s ideas are about what they think they want to hear as to what kind of exercise she chooses. If you are looking for a shift in functional behavior, it isn’t so much about what you want to hear as it is about what you are looking to change. There is a different intention for each of these situations and that is a key distinction.

When the voice is working properly, the majority of the functional response is inside. The idea that you can make a good deal of sound without widely opening the mouth or dropping the jaw a lot is in many classical approaches and is aligned with the behavior of a ventriloquist. If the work travels into the external muscles the larynx will have a harder time doing its job freely and the sound will suffer accordingly. Everything from the strap muscles on the side of the neck, which are secondary laryngeal stabilizers, to the muscles in the base of the tongue, the jaw, or the back of the neck (a typical place for tension) should be involved in vocal production as little as possible.

It is paradoxical that you can have tension and freedom at the same time but this is true of all muscular activity that requires strength and flexbility in balance. In order to move quickly the muscular movements must be small. If you make large lumbering movements it is nearly impossible to go quickly and lightly, no matter what the task. Flexibility exercises for the muscles of the face, mouth/lips and tongue help counter exercises in which the mouth remains open for long periods of time, sustaining open vowels at moderate to loud volumes.

Flexbility in the back or base of the tongue is another matter altogether, however, and is much harder to access, because we don’t move those muscles deliberately. We do not much need them to do more than the minimum necessary for articulating normal colloquial speech. The larynx is suspended in the front from the muscles at the base of the tongue, so its flexibility is a key ingredient in rapidly moving phrases. Rapid melismatic phrases ask a great deal more of the tongue and it takes great patience to develop pitch accuracy and speed in a voice that is also easily full and loud because these movements in the tongue, that are not automatic, must be deliberately cultivated. Callas wrote about how much she worked on articulatory exercises with her teacher, Elvira de Hildago, who was a coloratura. Those drills served Callas well in her career, particularly in the Bel Canto repertoire.

In a beginning student with no previous singing training a great deal of time has to be spent on getting the person to allow the jaw to drop and the mouth to remain comfortably open (about the width of a thumb) without forcefully pulling the jaw down and holding it there rigidly. The muscles of the face, inside and out, have to lengthen through stretching, over time. As this work takes hold, if the student is also encouraged to sing with an enlivened facial expression, the muscles of the soft palate, which stretch across the back of the mouth, will also respond, lifting and stretching. The inside of a trained singer’s mouth looks very different than that of someone who has had little training. The musculature becomes defined rather than gelatinous and can be quite taut when activated. The muscles of the side walls of the throat that constrict it in order to swallow should be, as much as possible, at rest while singing. The problem, of course, is that thinking about this won’t help much, as the swallowing muscles operate largely below the level of conscious awareness unless we swallow on purpose. Most people who “swallow their sound” don’t do so deliberately and often have no idea that this behavior even exists.

As a vocalist gains more skill, it is possible to close the mouth (bring the jaw up) to a smaller opening while having the back of the throat (velopharyngeal port) remain lifted and open. The closing of the jaw releases it, releases the back of the tongue and allows the facial muscles more ease in changing position.  Asking a beginning student to do this, however, is usually counter productive.

This discussion leads us next to habituation versus conditioned response. Human beings can become accustomed to almost anything, even things that are very unpleasant and uncomfortable. Some people even find things that are painful to be rewarding. We call those people masochists. Behaviors we become accustomed to become habits, things we do without paying attention. Many people sing quite decently around chronic tension in any and all muscles that effect vocal output but that doesn’t mean that their vocal production is optimal. The best vocal production occurs when the larynx is operating efficiently, the rest of the muscles are free to move and adjust, the airflow is controlled by a balance of activity in the ribs and abdominal muscles and the lips, tongue and jaw are free to form vowels and consonants.

The training process is supposed to isolate habits that are useful from ones that are not. It is supposed to counter unproductive behaviors by developing opposite ones that are corrective or developmental. It is supposed to strengthen good habits without having them become predominant. Working from a functional place, the teacher has to know good function from bad. The teacher has to understand how to work one group of muscles until it is free from another and when to stop going in one direction to go in the opposite direction. The teacher has to understand what is manipulation and what is exaggerated behavior done for exercise purposes only. The teacher has to know. The  T E A C H E R.

In order to see a pattern, you have to look at it in a broad way. If you fly above a landscape, you can see the patterns of the rivers, trees, lakes and hills. On the ground, you can only see a short distance. There might be a river just over the hill, but you wouldn’t know it based on what you can see.

We live in a time of great unrest and turbulence. No one has a clear view of the future, of what is “right” for the most people, of what our steps towards the future should be. This is frightening for most of us. We look to political and religious leaders to guide us. We expect them to have more vision, more insight, more courage as leaders than we imagine ourselves to possess.

In order to get a perspective about singing, you have to see all kinds of singers in all kinds of places. You have to encounter singing in its many guises and you have to talk to the many people who sing and teach singing. Throughout my long career, I have been privileged to have this opportunity. It has allowed me to walk a path where no one else had been and where now many people can walk with some sense of purpose. In order to wager a guess about where we are going as a profession, in addition to spotting trends that are just arising, you also have to look at the things that have gone on in the past. It is necessary to see the biggest picture and spot the evolution of large groups of people who did  similar things in years past and extrapolate from the present where we will go in the future.

Long ago I stood in front of the New York Singing Teachers’ Association and said that in years to come all singing teachers were going to have to deal with voice science. I was scoffed at by almost everyone in the room. At that time, singing teachers regarded voice scientists as aliens from some distant galaxy. I, of course, regarded them as angels of information, sent to rescue singers from fairy tales and boogie men. (Insert some loud throat clearing here.)

I also said that the profession was going to have to address the so-called “non-classical” styles in a serious way. That was met with derision and ridicule. I said that they were going to have to be respected and treated significantly. Very few other people thought this made sense (one exception was Robert Edwin, who has been out there preaching this message as long as I have), and made a point of saying so. Now, the fastest growing part of the academic world is in music theater and CCM styles. New universities open programs in this area every year. (Insert more loud throat clearing here.)

Now, I talk about the necessity for all teachers of singing to understand functional training and to be aware of vocal health issues in relation to CCM styles (all styles, actually). I talk about creating master’s and doctoral degrees in CCM in all sorts of ways (and this is happening in several places as I write). In the not too distant future, some brave person will create a doctoral program in music theater or blues or vocal jazz (there are doctorates in jazz, but they are instrumental in design). It is coming.

Young people are quite comfortable with technology. The tools of the future will allow any singer or singing teacher to see the voice on various machines and to use other technology to help achieve a desired vocal result or goal. What all this will not do, however, is cultivate artistry, nor will it help a vocalist find his or her truly personal sound. That work has to come from the heart, not the head, and there aren’t many people interested in searching for this who are also strongly invested in technology.

There are patterns involved in singing. Each style has its own patterns of expression. There are patterns involved in each singer. Each individual has his or her own vocal gestures and expressiveness. There are patterns that can only be seen from a distance, but without losing the fact that in each moment, the local events (the present as it happens) are important, too.

If you are a student, find someone who understands this to teach you. Don’t give up until you find such an individual to be your guide.

I just heard that in order to get into one of our undergraduate programs for jazz here in NYC, you have to sing one song in two different keys a fifth apart. This is supposed to show some kind of “skill”.

Wanna bet the person who set these requirements was not a jazz vocalist?

Jazz singers, when they work alone or in combo with instrumentals who do arrangements suited to them, choose their own keys, which are usually where they are comfortable. If the people auditioning for  entrance into a jazz degree program want to know what range a singer has, they can ask her to vocalize. There is no earthly reason to go up or down a fifth in the real world, if you are singing alone, so what’s the point?

The point, of course, is sheer ignorance. Somebody made this up because……??? Because they were in charge and that was that.

If you want to have students work on music theater material and you want to create graded material, and you want to have it apply to skills that would a singer would need in the real professional world, (should they grow up to become aspiring professional vocalists), wouldn’t you think to go to Broadway itself and ask a few of its veteran vocalists to help with the selection of the songs? Or maybe a few conductors who have worked on a variety of different shows over a good deal of time – like for a couple of decades.

Well, Carnegie Hall, in connection with The Royal Conservatory of Music in Canada (I think this is right), has decided to adopt a graded system for music educators who want to have way to measure the progress of young vocalists. In looking to incorporate a music theater element, they have turned to classically trained teachers of singing to help them choose the music theater material. Excuse me? This assumes that no one on Broadway understands good singing. Where is the sense in that?

Not so long ago, Hal Leonard did the same thing and came up with editors who chose the music for their Music Theater anthology series. The choices in those books are not the best, and some of the music actually had mistakes. Someone with life experience would have known better, but without solid life experience, you could be lost and never realize it.

A few weeks ago I wrote about the loss of common sense when it comes to singing. It goes on.

Producers will hire a novice singer for a role in a Broadway show that has very demanding singing, very challenging music, and asks the actor to wear heavy or complicated costumes and say to the Music Supervisor, “Here, go get this kid to learn this song in a hour.” Doesn’t work. Sometimes they discover, after the fact, that they have decided to cast someone for looks, for or acting ability, or for dance expertise, and have actually picked an individual who has very little facility for singing. They expect the singing to “show up” because it does….after all, it’s “just singing,” as if it were another pair of shoes you buy on sale.

In the world there is ignorance everywhere. OK. People that are not involved in something are ignorant of it. The problems come when someone who is ignorant in a certain topic ends up in charge of it anyway. Happens, unfortunately, all the time.

That’s why it is necessary to  sometimes explain the obvious. The idea that “some people just don’t know this” is an important thing for a teacher to remember. If you grew up in a musical family, hearing singing from the time you were young, and you were taught music theory as a kid, and could play an instrument, and your voice was strong and accurate, and emotional expression was OK in your home, you could end up a very good professional vocalist if you were so inclined. If you have to teach someone who grew up in a family that rarely encountered or enjoyed music, and did not sing at all, and you got no formal music education, and did not play an instrument, and had a voice that was quiet and gentle, and who was told to “be calm” 24/7, that person might not be “a natural.” If such a person ends up in a college program where one of the electives is “singing class” and the voice teacher is the first kind of person, the teacher would have to be extraordinary in order to understand how to help the wannabe singer.

To that student, you would have to explain the obvious. To you, if you were the teacher, it might seem as plain as day. The difficult part is when you are not encountering a student, you are dealing with a peer, and that peer is as clueless as the above mentioned student. That’s tough.

It’s very hard to imagine what it takes to mount a Broadway musical if you are not involved in that world. It takes a long time, a whole lot of money, lots of patience, and many people. Commercial theater, anchored here in NYC by the 15 unions involved with it, is enjoyed by millions, but it is its own world.

In the process of putting together a show, many things have to happen before it gets into opening night shape. Along the way, actors are cast to do their thing, which in a musical means act, dance (usually) and sing. The singing may cover any kind of vocal production, so this ingredient varies quite a bit.

Those who do not tread the boards in a professional production do not comprehend how much  theater people live a life that cannot be found elsewhere. It is not found in small regional companies although something like it might be found in larger professional theaters. The “backstage mystique” that performers develop over years of being in many different kinds of shows is powerful. Opera has its own world, too, which is different. A few people manage to live in both worlds, but it is very difficult to go back and forth from Broadway to Lincoln Center on a regular basis successfully. They are only a few blocks away from each other, but it’s a long distance artistically speaking.

There have been many opera singers who retired from opera and went downtown to do a Broadway show, or maybe more than one. Ezio Pinza, Jan Peerce, Shirley Verrett, Spiro Malas……all did well on the Great White Way after they were no longer singing at the Met, but while on Broadway all of them also stayed in their original “operatic” vocal production. No one has gone the other way, from Broadway to the Met, nor are they likely to. There were rumors about Audra MacDonald and Kristen Chenoweth going but so far that hasn’t happened. We have seen Paulo Szot making the journey to music theater in South Pacific, and he is expected to return to opera (or perhaps has already), so perhaps he will establish a new cross-over trend. He is someone, however, who sang in the most legit of legit shows and did not need to change his vocal production one bit, in keeping with his older, earlier peers, so he isn’t exactly “crossing over”, he’s just crossing the street and going down the block!

If it were easy to sing really well in a completely classical sound and also turn around and sing in a variety of other sounds and do an equally good job, more people would have done so all along. Clearly, it requires a very special set of vocal skills to change gears in this way and most people either don’t have them, don’t want them, or don’t know there are skills to acquire in the first place. The “legit” singers on Broadway were the classical folks and there is almost no true legit singing left, even in the legit shows that are revived. The sound, on Broadway, is nearly dead except in revivals like South Pacific, where the sound is an integral part of the character.

Producers, of course want to have successful shows that make money. Given that the odds for doing a Broadway show are abysmal (75% of shows fail to recover their initial investment), they are always looking for something that will capture the audience’s interest and enthusiasm, and these days, with audiences being largely ignorant of both music and theater, the flashier the show, the better the chances it will succeed, even if it doesn’t have much going for it in the triple threat department. Spiderman got uniformly awful reviews but the show is doing well. It cost over $65 million dollars to mount (think about that, $65 million dollars!!!) and caused two very public law suits but people are going and it is making money every week. There are no stars, there are no really great voices or dancers. The cast is interchangeable, mostly unknown and mostly young. So why do the audiences go? Because they all know the character Spiderman from the comics and the movies and they have heard about the technology — the real star of the show, despite its dangers to the actors. It will probably run for a very long time.

The older shows, or ones that are written to be like older shows, don’t last nearly as long. The plain vanilla of great acting, wonderful singing and a good story brought to life by excellent actors pales in comparison to a huge set with flying people. And, in a society that values violence as much as ours does, saying that a show is “old fashioned” (sans violence) would strike many people as a strong condemnation.

The real world of Broadway isn’t something that you can read about in a book or a blog and understand. It is itself, unique in the world of entertainment. It has its own rules, folklore, expectations and weaknesses. The real world of music theater on Broadway is very small. The people who inhabit it live a special life and understand that the essence is not something that can be taught or written about, but has to be lived.

I ran into something this week that I haven’t encountered in a very long time. A noted teacher pointed out how ineffective it is to tell a student that he has tongue tension. He said that pointing this out would only make it worse and cause the student to become stuck.

Really.

Clearly, not pointing out to a student that he has tongue tension is pointless. Should the student sail along, having various troubles, thinking it is because he hasn’t quite yet mastered “making the tone float up into the cranial bones”?

Only someone who has no clue, and I mean no clue, about awareness and what it really does, could make such a statement. Given what I know of this person’s teaching, it doesn’t surprise me.

Thinking about something is not the same as having awareness. The intellect (our society’s prized capacity) is not “in charge” of awareness. Thoughts, in fact, have almost nothing to do with awareness and can get in the way of same. Awareness, for many people, is something they have not ever experienced because they don’t know what inner silence is. The only time their minds are quiet is, maybe, when they are asleep.

The mind can be wordlessly guided to pay attention. Wordlessly guided. You can be fully present at any time without thinking any thoughts comprised of words. If you have never learned formal meditation, you might doubt that this is true, but if you have ever looked at a beautiful sunset or the ocean or the sky, only to sigh and fall into peaceful rapture, then you understand what I’m explaining here, even if you have never labeled the experience as “pure awareness”.

Allowing and awareness are cornerstones of my approach to vocal technique. We allow the throat to do whatever it does freely and easily. We notice what happens when we do that. From this, all else arises. The exercises that follow in such a state arise from the body itself through and as the sound. The responses the body is making while the sounds emerge are spontaneous and will, when not inhibited, move towards natural movement because that is what the brain is wired to do in order to keep breathing. Since the vocal folds protect the larynx, if the body has its way, it will do its best to release tension, so it can more easily breathe. This isn’t always possible, since most of us are stressed so much  that our throats are squeezed with chronic tension, but if we rest deeply and fully, this response will surface, given enough time.

If you live by vocal mechanics alone, you can get pretty far if the mechanics are correct from a purely functional place. But if you want to be an artist, free to create, free to communicate, free to discover, you can never sing from a purely mechanistic place, because honest emotion can only be expressed in a freely moving and balanced mechanism.

Awareness is a bridge between watching and allowing. It is the place of poise where the singer is both making the sound and letting the sound emerge at the same time. It is the vehicle through which the magic of singing is married to the skill of singing. It melds the skill and the art into one unified whole. If you have never experienced this, reading about it will be completely meaningless and, if you are someone who thinks you have all the answers, you will dismiss this as so much malarky. Too bad.

There are quite a few people who understand vocal function very well but do not understand how to apply functional exercises. Some of these are the people who can quote you the latest scientific research from the most important books, and are the people who have the biggest reputation for presenting at conferences. Unfortunately, few pay attention to whether or not any of those same people can sing well. As a singing teacher, if you cannot find a way to apply functional information such that it helps you get better and therefore it helps you to help other people get better, then what good is it?

Conversely, there are people now and there have always been people in the past, who do not know a thing about function who understand what it means to be an artist, to sing and to be expressive. They know whether or not a vocalist is communicating through music and they know if the singer is doing a good job without hurting the vocal folds, even though they can’t exactly say why that’s the case. They know how to communicate in such a way that a singing student improves. That’s enough.

Clearly, people have learned to sing using imagery that we now know makes no sense, doesn’t apply to what we understand about how the body works and does no direct good when solving a physical problem the impacts vocal production. Talented people always find a way to overcome any obstacle if they want to do something. Imagery has worked in the past and, for some, it still works.

I am one of the people for whom subjective imagery was a waste of time. Perhaps because I always had a fertile imagination and was naturally emotionally demonstrative, I didn’t need help seeing images. They came with the music automatically. What I needed was guidance about the sounds I could make — all kinds of sounds — and why some of them were OK but others were not. The interface between them was something I did by ear alone and it got me into trouble functionally for reasons I never understood. None of my many teachers understood either.

If you belt enough, your throat can close up. It can pull you out of your high notes and make your throat close and your voice seem “small”. It can cause your throat muscles to hurt, your voice to fatigue, and your pronunciation to seem garbled. You may sound acceptable enough to get by and to do a decent job from a strictly musical place, but you could find that when you attempt to sing something that wasn’t a belt sound, you could no longer easily do what you once did. Conversely, if you find a way to sing in a classical sound and you spend time there, when you return to your normal CCM sound, you might find it weak, unsteady, and not particularly available. If you are doing both decently, you might not have a reason to suspect that anything is wrong with either, and that could actually be true. The fault lies with the crossing over or “mixing and matching” of the sounds when you don’t actually know much about how either is being produced or how either is affecting your vocal production overall. That’s a lot not to know. Imagery, no matter what it may be, in this situation won’t help.

The boundaries between understanding function, using functional exercises, understanding style, using things that interface between the two and being able to communicate about all of it in a meaningful way are very uncertain. Knowing that, however, is better than being totally clueless. Understanding that you are looking for something specific is better than not knowing what you are looking for at all.

Science is only useful to us as teachers of singing if it serves the art of singing by allowing each vocalist to sing freely and easily in whatever sound she wants. The information is only useful if the person dispensing it understands how to break it down for the vocalist into useable, practical bites.

Referencing the two productions I saw last week, “Cinderella” and “Hands On A Hard Body”, both on Broadway, it is important to note how much our expectations about singing have shifted in the last 50 years. The Rodgers and Hammerstein production allowed all the singers to sing in traditional pitch ranges, in a normal (but very professional) sound, and did not ask for any sounds that could be called extreme. The show by Anastasio and Green asked for some really high, really heavy duty singing of most of the characters, some of it also very emotionally demanding and involves a lot of physical movement. This could easily fall into the category of “extreme” vocal production, especially if compared to Cinderella. It is, however, now normal (expected, typical) vocal production for many shows and many singers.

We also have now “extreme” sports. The “Half Pipe”, aerial jumpers on skis, cars racing at hundreds of miles per hour,  teams of 7 foot tall basketball players, Ironman/woman competitions…..it’s a very long list. The line between what is a sport and what is a life threatening activity is blurred more every day. People are pushing their bodies harder and further and longer than ever before and this is not only tolerated by our society, it is lauded. People are not warned about the hazards, they are praised for taking them.

BUT, we are beginning to take a look at the cost, finally, because we have no choice. What may have at one time been an occasional injury that could be written off as “bad luck” or a fluke is now so common that the stats are impossible to deny. Head injuries to boxers and football players, destruction of knees, muscles and sometimes spinal cords show up often enough to have set off some alarms, despite the huge amounts of money that teams pay to turn down the volume on these issues. Remember, a man was killed in the last winter Olympics.

If we know that “average” people want to do “extreme” sports (and they do), wouldn’t it be assumed that these people would also need training for those sports that is also “extreme”? Where would such training be available? How much would it cost? How long would it take for it to help people be fully prepared? If they don’t get really excellent extreme training, how will they hold up in those extreme sports when they do them? Won’t the odds be much higher that there will be injuries, even serious injuries and maybe, in some cases, deaths? Seems like a reasonable premise.

If we look at singing, and take screaming out a very high, very loud, belt song eight times a week (microphone or no), as a vocal event, is this in any way “normal” behavior for vocal folds? The answer is, of course not. Has the body evolved to be able to do this for long periods of time without cost or consequence? Probably not. Is the likelihood that there will be vocal injury greater in these circumstances higher? You better believe it. Do people do it anyway? Do they still die of lung cancer caused by smoking? Do dozens of climbers die on Mt. Everest every year? Are there twenty-fours hours in a day?

Young people can get away with all sorts of things because they are young. They take chances, they feel invincible, they figure it will be OK and they will deal with it. They don’t think of long term consequences, or even short term consequences, especially when there is a lot of money or fame being dangled in front of them in the present moment. Those of us who are older and supposedly wiser are caught between a rock and hard place as we address the issues of how much things have changed and the very very brief period of time in which those changes have taken place.

We have evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to have vocal folds to protect the lungs from foreign objects and to somehow also make sounds when they close and vibrate. Singing cannot be explained from the standpoint of its having some kind of value to us for survival purposes. (Sorry, Mr. Darwin.) Nevertheless, up until only a few hundred years ago when formal music showed up, we had no need to make a sustained sound, on a specific pitch, at a particular volume on a regular basis. That we do so now in the form of music is  a kind of miracle. If we take that ability and extend it as much as possible, there are still limits to the elasticity of the vocal folds, of the recoil factors involved in breathing, in the anatomy and physiology of a human throat and neck and thoracic cavity, head, and the bones of the head and jaw, based on genetics and usage. We can never compete with an elephant, a robin, a trumpet, or a truck horn.

Any time we go far away from normal function and we stay far away for a long time, we are taking greater risks. Sometimes that’s a good thing. We all want to grow, we want a challenge, we want “to boldly go where no person has gone before” but most of us also want to come back and maybe go again. We want to keep going and coming back many times. Sometimes, however, we can go so far that coming back isn’t possible. Understanding that you might scream your vocal folds into a violent hemorrhage that may never heal properly and prevent you from using your voice normally for the rest of your life is something many young singers never contemplate. Young people may not discover that the risks they took were real, the consequences were serious, and their ability to come back to normal function might be gone forever, until it’s too late.

Just because you don’t know something doesn’t mean it isn’t there. Information may be the only protection that stands between a career and an abyss. Taking a risk is possible. Not understanding you are taking a risk is also possible. There is a huge difference.

It is impossible to discuss function intelligently without also discussing the muscles in the physical body that affect function. It is impossible to discuss those effects without understanding what the various muscles in the body do and how they do it. If you assume you know, and many people make that assumption, and you have not asked someone who teaches anatomy and physiology, and many people have not asked, you could be incorrect in your comprehension and be teaching from that place.

I have seen this over and over in my decades as a teacher. People have been told all manner of nonsense by “experts” who have “decided” that something is so because they say it is. It takes enormous arrogance to make an assumption like that but if no one challenges you, and mostly no one does, you can go blithely along, telling your students whatever comes in your mind, as if you were Oz, the great and powerful.

The Catholic Church told me that as a child. On matters of faith and doctrine the Pope had absolute infallibility….he could not be wrong. How’s that for stopping objections or even serious questions? Can’t eat meat on Friday? Well, no, because the Pope said God told him. [long pause here]

“My singing teacher told me………….” What follows could be incredibly wrong, but the student accepted it because the teacher said so. Yesterday, someone came in for a consultation (a one time only session) and he told me that he had taken lessons in Hungary and his teacher there had told him that he was afraid to exhale freely while singing, that he was “holding back” his breath. Well……….it’s hard to release your breath if your vocal folds are firmly closed. If you force the air out, it will make the sound breathy, and then you will have to correct that by squeezing something. When I explained that the vocal folds control the airflow, and we played around with breathy versus clear tone, he could see for himself that his breathy sound used up more air and his clear sound limited his ability to use up more air. Simple. No mystery. No nonsense. Yes, he needed better coordination over the breathing process, including more strength in his abs and ribs, but that is a separate and different thing than “being afraid to exhale freely”.

There are times when allowing more air to pass over the vocal folds is useful, even necessary. There are times when it is not a good idea and there are times when it could go either way, depending on what the vocalist was doing. The teacher should know functionally when to apply what, but mostly people apply what they were taught that worked for them. Oh.

The muscles of the throat are complex. They move in many ways. Up, up and back, back, back and down, and down. They involve or connect into the tongue, the side walls of the throat and the inside of the back of the mouth. They interweave with the muscles of the jaw, then the face (inside and out) and with the muscles of the neck on the outside. There is even an indirect connect between the psoas and the hyoid bone, through the fascia, and a connection between the base of the tongue and the back of the head. How these muscles work helps set up the framework in which the larynx settles and moves. They may not directly cause sound, but they can affect the vocal folds that do.

Constriction, or using the swallowing muscles while singing, comes into play in various kinds of singing, but it is typically a result of indirect work. Muscles must contract and stretch in order to have what we call “muscle tone”. If they do not work antagonistically with other muscles, or if one set of muscles is much stronger, then the antagonists will be much weaker. The ideal situation is one in which the vocal folds themselves close firmly, but comfortably, to resist various amounts of breath pressure (from a little to a lot) without taking the throat muscles along for the ride. That position, one of maximum balance and consistency, is the desired goal of functional vocal training. So, “good” constricton would include some things that traditionally have been considered useful to have: focus, point, masque resonance, brightness, ping, ring, etc. If, however, you have too much of any of these, then you could sound instead: tight, shrill, squeezed, harsh, small, tinny, edgy, white, or stuck. How do you know the right amount of these “qualities” to have? As a student, at least, you don’t. Some people have noticed that rock belting can be quite constricted and have then decided that teaching singers to deliberate constrict the throat to get this sound is a great approach. You can hear these people out there in the music marketplace. They sound like someone is torturing them, which is true. They are torturing themselves because some singing teacher told them that was necessary in order to have a career.

Not all singing comes from a balanced use of the system. Some kinds of singing are “extreme”, meaning they are way out of balance on purpose. Those kinds of singing require the vocalist to do things no one’s throat was ever intended to do. Some people become acclimatized to such extreme behavior and some do not. Having training designed to support the body in doing something out of the ordinary would be far better than having no training or having the wrong training. What good does it do to train for a warm flowing tone on a high A if what you need to do is belt the note instead? 

Functional training is about knowing which exercise does what, when to use it, under what circumstances to adjust it, how much and for how long to use it, and what to expect as results if it is done as correctly as possible, with an eye towards the goal of the artist in mind. Since most singing teachers have no clue about what exercises do, and the field itself is only just now thinking it should find out, almost no one has accurate answers. Hence, singing teachers just make them up, ‘cuz they can.

Be careful. Caveat emptor!