Somatic Voicework™ The LoVetri Method Teachers' Association

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"Good Taste"

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How many kinds of singing are there in this world? Do we really know?

How many kinds of singing are available to the average person who wants to listen? How about how many are available if you want to sing them yourself?

The truth is there are so many kinds of singing and so many kinds of music, it’s hard to know about them all. In addition to all the American styles there are world styles and many variation of all of them. If you include recorded music, going back about 100 years, there are historical recordings to hear, too. With all this diversity you would think you could find a wide range of vocal music 24/7 on mainstream TV and radio. You would be wrong.

In American popular culture on TV there are two styles: country and pop. You hardly ever hear folk music, or classical vocal music of any kind (including legit music theater), you don’t hear much by way of other styles except maybe R&B, or gospel music on religious programs. Contemporary Christian Music is a big genre and has millions of fans, but there is no special TV show that promotes it that on mainstream TV. Still, even there it is the same styles, over and over.

Who decided to narrow the field so much? Who was in charge of promoting only these styles? Where was it written that the people on American Idol, X Factor, The Voice and the other shows are the ones who have the right to decide what singing is? Where are all the other styles?

It is irking to think that the musical taste of American listeners is fed a steady diet of these narrow views of singing and music. Since some school systems have absolutely no music training at all and others have very little, kids learn about music by listening to the radio and watching TV. In the 50s, even cartoons had classical music. I remember a cartoon of cats singing on a fence that used the sextet from Lucia as the music. I didn’t know it, of course, as a kid, but I recognized it immediately when I heard it as an adult. The Lone Ranger’s theme song was the William Tell Overture. Mighty Mouse’s voice (on the theme song) was that of a classical tenor.

We live in a time when our popular culture has sunk about as low as it can go. It is nearly impossible to find decent drama on TV, to watch shows not permeated with horrible violence as a matter of course. Even “Law and Order SVW” had an episode in recent years about a serial killer of woman that showed such a graphic scene that was so upsetting I had to turn it off. All of the “Crime Scene” investigation shows are extremely violent. This in early evening, while kids could watch. Why?

It is easy to watch “reality TV” about the inside of prisons, prostitutes (Bad Girls), “low-lifes” of all kinds including mafiosi and crooks, and things like “Raw” which I think is about unrestricted fighting. The violence in football leaves many permanently injured, boxing sometimes kills people. We call this “sports”. We pay money to watch. Remind anyone else of the Colosseum in Rome?

If you complain, you are a prude. If you say nothing and allow it all, you are “supporting first amendment rights”, if you object, you are accused of encouraging censorship.

That’s not true. People can do whatever they want creatively, but that doesn’t mean all kinds of content  should be treated with equanimity, regardless. If you are getting rich from making shows about cooking, that’s a bit different than getting it from making shows about how the mob lives day to day.

Music, too, is the same. If all you can give the world is more of the same old thing, if you have no taste yourself and you enforce the same lack of taste of others because you can, what does that say about you? That you are ignorant, not sophisticated. That you don’t help the culture, you just ride on it. Yes, you are getting very rich, but, honestly, so what?

I don’t see any of this changing any time soon. The more disgusting, gross, disturbing, violent, dark, revolting something is, the more people promote it so they can make money from it. That’s possible because the public actually likes it and is willing to pay money for it. Those of us who turn it off, walk away and hope for something better are in the minority and no one is going to cater to us any time soon. It remains a personal statement. That which is beneath me does not deserve my attention.

The possibility that there will be a mainstream TV show that allows singers to sing in virtually any style is very very small. Too bad. We could use one. We are all guilty of fostering the shows that would be better off going away.

How about you? Are you watching Honey Boo Boo?

Never Too Late Never Too Early

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I have two students, both middle aged men, who came to me with no background in singing who wanted to sing and who, two years into the process, now sound very good. They practiced, they were disciplined, they were dedicated.

I write this because there is an idea out there that a person can be “too old” to learn to sing, especially technically. This is nonsense. Anyone can learn to do anything if they really want to and put in the time. True, not everyone is going to end up at a professional level, but you can come close in people who are hard workers, naturally musical and have determination.

This is also true about people who “can’t match pitch”. I’ve heard all kinds of teachers complain about how hard it is for their students who can’t match pitch to learn to do so. That’s because the teachers are always trying to fit the poor hapless student into their pre-existing box instead of going to the place where the student lives and seeing what’s in their abode. Doesn’t work. I can usually help someone sing a five note scale in a half and hour. Hm.

Teaching any skill requires that you understand not only what the skill entails but how the various ingredients fit together. People who are naturally good at something don’t make very good teachers. That’s because they are “talented” meaning they can “just do it” right off and don’t struggle to get the basics. They get them easily, quickly and with little conscious effort. Until and unless they have a severe problem and have to re-learn the skills, they may have no clue as to how they did what was so easy.

In learning theory experts have studied how we learn things. Experts have also figured out the processing of kinesthetic awareness in terms of how the brain works and how new information gets processed and stored as it is taken in. There are certain sequences that work and others that don’t in the way that makes it easiest to learn. Do you think anyone who teaches singing knows about this? You could probably count them in the entire profession on just one hand.

We also have out there the idea that it’s bad to teach children to sing. Why would this be so? There is no research to back up this claim and certainly not scads of children who have been trained only to later be unable to sing. This is an old wives tale, but it persists. As long as the training is functionally grounded and the kids sing in an age and style appropriate manner, the training is not only not harmful, it is beneficial. Marilyn Horne took lessons as a kid from her father, ditto Sutherland and Pavarotti. They did pretty well, no? Garland sang as a child, so did Andrea McArdle, so you don’t have to learn classical music – other styles work well, too.

Teachers light the way. They shed light on the dim places, the hidden places and light up the darkness of ignorance and blindness. They inspire by explaining things in ways that make sense and work. They guide others because they have walked in the dark themselves and they remember the steps they took to get to the light. They tell the truth as they have discovered it, but they have dug deep to be sure that their own subjective experience has something universal in it, understanding that the next person’s path might need to be a slightly different one.

Just as with anything else, it’s never too early or too late as long as you know what you want, you have a willing and experienced teacher and you can put in the time to take the information you are given and make it your own.

Lenny Bruce

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Lenny Bruce was arrested a number of times on charges of obscenity. Compared to what comedians get away with now, what he did was minor, but back then, it was a big deal. He broke the rules and it was because he did so that comics like Richard Pryor or George Carlin had it a little easier when they broke rules, too.

Bruce said that it was necessary for a few people to “push the envelope” and he was right. In every case whenever anyone came along to challenge the status quo, that person or group was seen as being a threat — to stability, to decorum, to standards, to security, to ……… Yet, because that person had the guts to break through the accepted barriers, those who came after had a new path to follow. In time, the renegades become the heroes, the trendsetters and the “important” influences. It’s ironic that some of them don’t live to see this happen.

In a field where there are no accepted criteria, and teaching singing is certainly one in that category, it is difficult to “push the envelope” because not many people even know there is an envelope. The world of learning to sing in a formal sense only began in the USA at Juilliard in 1938. Before that, you had to take private lessons if you wanted to be a professional singer. For a long time, there were very few places you could go to study in a school. Now, of course, all that has changed.

When Juilliard started its program, there was no discussion of training singers for other styles because (a) styles as we know them now didn’t really exist. There was jazz, folk and maybe country music, but only jazz was a national phenomenon. Music theater was still heavily influenced by opera and vaudeville. Rock, pop, gospel, rap, and their variations didn’t exist so there couldn’t have been a pedagogy in a school. Then, (b) experts who would have been needed to teach other styles would have had to have been coaxed from the musical world to become academicians and to create codified “norms” for testing and grading. None of this would have been very feasible in l938, so training stayed classical and only classical for singers who wanted to attend a college for a very long time.

Finally, in the 1980s, colleges began to realize that there was money to be made by allowing students to sing “musicals”and began asking the faculty (all classical) to teach music theater repertoire as a part of the degree programs. It took a while longer for a few colleges to offer bachelor’s degrees in music theater, and now a very few offer master’s degrees in music theater, but they are not vocal performance  degrees in music theater, but general degrees in which singing plays a part.

It would have been hard to “push the envelope” of singing training in any of the prior decades because there wasn’t much to push. You can’t push beef stew. Now, however, with the many vocal degree programs at various colleges, both classical and music theater, as well as some few jazz degrees, the “envelope” seems ripe for a fracture. Why not train singers to address the many and varied technical demands of each style as if those differences were real and mattered?

First you have to recognize that there is zero agreement about what a “classical” sound is amongst those who sing it and teach it. Problem there. [Yes, we know it when we hear it, but we can’t write it down in a way garners agreement from multiple parties, so what can we really say about any of it?] Second, you have to acknowledge that there are no accepted criteria regarding training in terms of developmental parameters or functional applicability. Third, there is no way to test for teaching effectiveness except by noticing how many singers studying with any specific teacher are working in the music marketplace as vocalists. That can be misleading, but I suppose it’s better than nothing.

Then, in order to “push the envelope”, you have to establish that there is an envelope, that it has certain contents and that it needs to be pushed. In other words you need to have a sense what the “big picture” (the envelope) is. In terms of classical vocal training that would mean knowing what it typically entails, where it takes place, who teaches it, what kinds of things are taught, why they are taught, and why any of the preceding matters. Not many people are familiar with all these parameters. Sometimes not even the people who are teaching in the colleges see the bigger picture. You have to go into those programs but be outside of them in order at the same time to see the whole with some degree of perspective. If you can make an assessment from this vantage point and you see that a whole lot of things are missing or just plain don’t make sense, you have to get that envelope ripped open. You have to push it until it yields.

Who are the Lenny Bruces of singing teaching? I know a few personally. They aren’t going to be arrested, but if there had been any “voice police” I’ll bet they would have been locked up a long time ago.

No Resources

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Recently, I was called upon to give a talk to an mixed audience of teachers (new and experienced), classical and not, speech language pathologists, students (all ages), and interested amateurs. During the breaks of the seminar I again encountered people who came to me to say, “I’m so glad you are saying these things. This is my experience exactly!” Meaning, they related to what I was saying, in several ways. In fact, two young women (early 20s) sat with me at lunch and explained how they had been told never to sing anything but classical repertoire even though that was not their primary interest because it would “ruin their voices”. I was told that too, nearly 50 years ago. What profession has not progressed in 50 years? That of teaching people to sing.

Although there is far less prejudice than there was decades ago, it certainly is not gone and it isn’t hard to find someone who is being told that classical vocal training will prepare you to sing anything in spite of the very clear evidence that there are vocal fold, airflow and acoustic differences between classical and CCM styles in research done by many people on many different subjects. It’s as if they insist the world is flat because that’s how it always has been and it’s so because they were told it was so.

As to “ruin your voice”, that’s nonsense. It might interfere with your technique, especially if you are going to sing various styles, so you have to know what you are doing when you change gears, but it won’t “ruin” anything. You can easily ruin your ability to sing by studying with a teacher of classical music who has no clue about vocal production, and believe me, there are lots of them out there.

There persists, too, the idea that you “just warm up” and then you can sing any kind of repertoire. If you are getting ready for a performance, you do a few scales and arpeggios, then you work on the song and hope that it sounds OK. That idea is found quite a bit in choral groups. The extent of the technical work is “use support”, “open your mouth”, “pronounce the consonants” and “don’t go flat” (think “high” on the pitch). It is, I suppose, better than nothing, but it is mostly useless insofar as getting a person to sing outside their own vocal habits, whatever they may be.

Talented people always find ways to learn what they need to. They dig until they get what they were seeking. Talented people who can sing and want to be singers will somehow or other find a way. That they do doesn’t always have to do with training, in fact, it can happen without any training or with very little. The people who are interested but only moderately able, however, need genuine help to improve. They need guidance and encouragement and appropriate repertoire. They need teaching.

The people who can barely sing can learn, as long as the teacher thinks of the training as “special needs” and is incredibly patient, supportive and clear. Not everyone is cut out for that, but it should be that there are special needs singing classes for teachers. There are none, as far as I know.

And, there is no research that compares the vocal health (long-term) of working opera singers with that of working CCM singers, and that would be a welcome study. There are no books of “graded belt songs” for students who are fledgling belters. There are no studies on the evolution of American CCM styles insofar as their development decade by decade in relationship to the expansion of other media. By that I mean, in the 1920s when amplification came along, singing changed. When the movies came along, it changed again. When radio came along, it changed again. During the war, it changed. When television was available in the average home, it made a big change. Meanwhile, classical music was going through some stages of its own. Now, in this present climate, the line between styles continues to blur and what was “hard to hear” in the 70s seems not so jarring now. Our ears have gotten used to all manner of music. Surely there is an enormous area here for scholarly research of all kinds, as well as scientific investigation. It would be great to have something to draw upon for further intellectual comprehension.

I teach from over 41 years of life experience working with all kinds of people in all kinds of styles. I have all that to draw upon and, really, sometimes think I have seen and heard it all. This kind of life experience isn’t very common and it would be great if I wasn’t in a situation where I can only pass on what I’ve observed and learned through my own years as a teachers in small dribs and drabs. I am repeatedly asked for a book, but you can’t learn to teach singing or to sing from a book. Nevertheless, one of these days, maybe I will attempt one. Meanwhile, we need more resources. Young people, are you listening???

Working With A Conflicted Student

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Fear of success, fear of failure. They can exist in one person. If they do, they will surely prevent the person from getting anywhere, no matter what they attempt or say.

Unfortunately, we can encounter these two psychological states in any student. It takes a while for a teacher to discern these patterns, but after a long enough time, they begin to show up. It could be that after a particularly good lesson, the student cancels the next lesson or is sick, and then takes a while to get back to that good place. When she finally gets there again, another cancellation happens or she has to postpone the lesson because of other urgent matters. If there is a third occurrence of this cycle, you can start to be suspicious. Fear of success is lurking around the corner. “Too good” is frightening.
If you have a student who wants “extra lessons” or “extra time” and practices up to and including being hoarse, and who wants to learn really hard repertoire and audition for every possible show, and doesn’t seem very patient with the process. If the student is always talking about famous singers and maybe disparaging those who “don’t have it all together”, and they read every book and article and ask a million questions, and this goes on for a long time, put up your antenna, fear of failure is in hot pursuit of your student.
Self-sabotage is real. People who have deep seeded “issues” create reasons to fail. Regardless of ability, interest or talent, and regardless of motivation, finances or stated goals and desires, make no mistake, these students are out there and they can be a cause of great sadness and frustration for teachers.
I had a student who worked with me for two years towards a classical recital. She was a graduate student, transferred from a school that was very demanding. She had had to drop out due to contracting a serious illness, never going back to complete the degree. She decided to work with me privately toward a recital-oriented competition. She prepared the full recital program with a good deal of difficulty, and at the last minute failed to get the aria into shape. This disqualified her and made all the time and money she had invested go up in smoke. When she returned, she decided that she wanted to switch from doing classical music to doing music theater. We re-worked the technique to make that possible but she missed many lessons due to severe sinus problems. She had a car accident. She got engaged and then broke the engagement. Still, she swore that she was serious about singing and having a career, even though the lessons were not consistent. Then she decided that she had been wrong in choosing music theater and wanted to go back to classical. So we returned to lessons in that vein. In between she had other jobs to earn money and lived with her parents and her aunt, commuting between NYC and Long Island. After doing this dance for about three years, I began to lose patience, but she had sinus surgery which helped, she got work in a small theatrical company and she seemed to finally be singing consistently. I urged her to work with a good classical coach because she was approaching an age that would preclude her being in apprentice programs or competitions for younger singers. I urged her to see a good friend who is a classical coach and teacher to polish up her repertoire and get out there.
She told my friend that she had never learned to practice properly [?]. She couldn’t sight read or work on music on her own. Her languages were poor. She had no rep. None of this was true, although she wasn’t the absolute best at any of these things, both the accompanist for recital and I had heard her sing enough to say that she was at a good professional entry level in all capacities. When I was told by my friend what she said, I was astounded. What had she been doing in undergrad training, in graduate school and with me?
Nevertheless, being very diligent, my friend, her new coach, started over again with her, working on all these things, building them up, assisting her with repertoire choices and vocal problems as part of helping her get ready for opera auditions. She tried to help her by getting her small jobs and other opportunities to launch her career. But things started falling apart. Missed lessons, excuses, lack of keeping up with the planned activities. Finally, the student stopped going for her coaching sessions. We heard via the grapevine that she had gone on to a new teacher, probably to start all over again.
She had a beautiful voice. She was a fine performer, she could dance. She was smart, she was very attractive and personable. She could have been successful at either classical singing or in music theater, but she will never succeed at either. She was afraid of both success and failure. She wasted my time, the accompanist’s time, the other coach’s time and her own time. And lots of money.
If you are an open, trusting teacher and you have a student who presents to you as being talented, motivated, willing and capable, it’s hard not to become at least a little invested in their success. It’s hard not to give the person a break if they get sick, or have personal problems that interfere with their lessons. It’s hard not to want to boost the student up after a bump in the road and encourage them to go on, trying again, to reach for the gold.
This story did not happen decades ago, it happened within the last 7 years, while I already had over 30 years of teaching experience behind me. I describe it because sometimes you can’t know that the student standing in front of you by the piano is not ever going to be able to use anything you are doing, hear anything you are saying or come anywhere near their stated career goals until you have gone down the road for a long time. It will always be frustrating when it finally becomes clear that there are problems bigger than those which can be addressed as part of singing training. Sometimes it will actually be painful emotionally to face this. It will catch you by surprise but it will happen again. Such is the price we pay for being trusting, and trust is required if we are to teach well.
Working with a conflicted student has no map. You will not read about this is anyone’s book, but if you teach for a year or longer, you will have this experience. Just know you are not alone.

Cross Training Too Early

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If you can hardly sing at all, is it good to try to sing a little bit of everything all at once or just do one thing?

We really don’t know the answer to this question since the idea of cross training (in an athletic sense) hasn’t really existed before, in terms of singing. We don’t much know what goes on with kids who grow up singing in several styles, and continue singing them well and for a long time into adulthood, most particularly if one of those styles is classical.
My guess is that a lot depends on the individual, the type and amount of training, and the goals of the student and teacher. We don’t have any literature in the field to guide us, nor research. Too bad.
Writing strictly from my own personal experience, I would say that it is probably true that most young singers benefit from what has been the generally available approach in classical training. That’s pretty simple, actually:
Stand up straight, breathe in “down low”, tighten your belly as you exhale while singing and aim the sound “towards your face”. Relax your jaw, open your mouth and keep the sound steady, looking for your preferred version of “resonance”. Learn rep, in the monster yellow book first, then add the Germans and the French. Maybe, also, add the Brits and a few Americans. Go sing.
A well developed head register usually has to be cultivated deliberately and takes some time to really work. Most people are chest register dominant, so finding head register and making it work is usually a good idea, as it will help balance the sound overall and prevent chest register from causing problems.
If you are going to sing other styles, however, you also have to make sure your lower or chest register functions well. If you go by one of more typical approachs to teaching CCM styles, you simply stick closely to speech, get louder as you go higher, put in the consonants, aim the sound “into the nose”, and don’t worry about sounding “ugly”. Learn songs.
If you want to sing anything else, just do whatever you do, learn to “support” and hope for the best.
If you have any trouble with any of the above, especially in working them back and forth alternately, good luck. You either figure it out or you get into trouble. It’s up to you how to put the divergent styles together and make them partners rather than enemies.
Not a way to cross train, I would say.
If you want to learn about singing you have to learn about making vocal sound across the board and about the interface between speech and song. Sometimes they are related and sometimes they are not. What David Daniels does has very little to do with normal male speech. Likewise Diana Damrau. No normal adult female speaks in the pitches above C6 or high C but a coloratura soprano sings there quite frequently. Most high belters are singing in a pitch range and at a volume level that is far away from speech, too. And, if you speak at a conversational level and in a typical pitch range you are far away from what a trained actor would do with her speech in a play. There is much to learn and much to cultivate. What kind of interaction is most beneficial in learning more than one approach at the same time?
Again, from a purely objective point of view, we don’t know.
What I think would be ideal is for the student to sing in just one style for at least two years without having to deal with anything else. Then, slowly, other functional parameters could be introduced. Typically, however, there isn’t that luxury of time so we see a lot of students learning technique (not necessarily function) and classical repertoire from classical teachers who also have to teach them music theater songs (but who are not necessarily also teaching a different kind of function) at the same time. Sometimes the students also sing, gospel, rock and pop as well.
There are also many occasions a student who is a great belter has to learn to sing “classically” in order to get into a college music program or voice department. It can take time to do that, too, but it’s certainly possible. Is there a “best way” to do this? And, if the kid wants to be a big fat belter but the parents require that the young woman get a college degree “in music”, is it a plus to disrupt naturally good belting just to learn “An Die Musik”?
In the long run, the more the teacher understands what he or she is doing, and what the goals of the training process are, the better the odds are that the student will succeed. The more the student is motivated and has decent ability at the outset, the better the odds are, also, that the student will succeed and that, in a few years (2 to 3), the capacity to sing decently in a classical sound and a commercial music sound with equal success will emerge. The ability to specialize, though, might not be possible unless the singer has some clear goal of a career in a specific field and knows what the expectations of that field are in terms of the vocal quality and style.
The potential for the vocalist to end up like scrambled eggs also exists in this approach. The student can easily be confused and the voice can end up exactly nowhere. That often leads to discouragement and to giving up, particularly if the teacher blames the student for this “failure” as is typically the case.
If you find yourself in a position of having to train young singers in more than one style, most especially including classical styles, you need to really know what you are doing. If you guess or just dabble you run the risk of really disturbing the equilibrium of the student’s voice and psyche. Remember, first, do no harm.

Change

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Everything evolves but some things evolve faster than others. Classical music does change but not very much. The tenors today don’t sound all that different than the old recordings of Caruso. The current sopranos don’t really seem all that different than Rosa Ponselle.

CCM styles change more frequently, probably about every decade or so. The “popular” music of the 1930s bears very little resemblance to our present moment pop music. 60s rock doesn’t have a lot in common with most of our present moment rock bands.
Broadway goes all over, however. We have revivals that very much resemble their originals (How To Succeed) and we have revivals that are hardly recognizable (On A Clear Day). It used to be that being a lead on Broadway made you a star……..you went on the Ed Sullivan Show, you made a hit record, and you went to Hollywood to do movies, then maybe TV. Now you have to do that in reverse. You make a movie or maybe a TV show, you maybe have a record (or not) and then you get put in a Broadway show regardless of whether or not you have the ability to sing, dance or act. Christie Brinkley as Roxy in Chicago……..a dream come true.
Broadway revivals are a rare breed of entertainment. They have their own universe. It is true that auditions are pretty much the same now as they were 50 years ago. You walk in, you sing your 16 bars with the pianist, you go home. If you get called back, you do it again, maybe for a longer time, you go home. If you get called back again, you sing, read, act, dance, whatever until they are able to decide, then you go home. You either get the job or you don’t. Been the same for decades and decades. Why? I’m sure no one knows except that theater folks really respect tradition.
If you are able to stay in touch with the world as it moves and changes you will somehow understand the expectations of those in each style in terms of what is expected professionally. If you do not, you might just be stuck in the way it was when you were a student or a young performer. If all your students ever performed were traditional Broadway revivals, that could serve. If not, that wouldn’t be so wonderful.
If you are teaching classical singing it’s probably not such a big deal if you haven’t changed much. That field hasn’t either, so nothing is lost.
If you teach both, you need to know both. CCM and Classical are different and that matters.

Holding Down The Fort

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I have written here recently about economics and how it influences everything.

Politically, I could be described as a screaming ultra-liberal Democrat, which I consider myself to have been since the Vietnam War. The world I would have liked to have seen now absolutely doesn’t look like the world that we have actually created since all those protests back at the end of the 60s.
Economics rules the world. Profit-making, even at universities, has just about taken over.
If the job of schools, universities and conservatories, is to make a profit, there is an increased pressure for them to offer music theater programs because those programs draw in students and parents will pay for them. There are new degree programs every day, both bachelor’s and master’s programs (although no doctoral programs yet in anything other than classically oriented topics) and the number of young people who graduate with training aimed at music theater and jazz increases accordingly. Hundreds, maybe even a couple thousand students, graduate looking for work as vocalists in some style, every year.
If you have that many new people looking for work and only a few professional jobs available, eventually some of these individuals are (a) going to go back to school to get a degree in another profession so they can survive, or (b) going to decide to let performing be a hobby, and sing on weekends, in the evenings and on vacations, or (c) going to end up teaching somewhere, either privately or in a school setting.
You find out soon enough after you graduate, particularly if you come to New York or any other big city, how hard it is to get paid for doing what your education was supposed to be training you to do. You could also find out, painfully, that what you learned wasn’t what you needed to learn and that your training was almost useless. You might find out, too, that you are not cut out for the really competitive, sometimes cutthroat world of show business or entertainment. You might have been the cute soprano lead in your school’s musical or the young guy who always got a good solo or attention from your department, but in NYC, you are just another one of thousands of talented, attractive and motivated people looking to get a job. It’s very hard to set yourself apart and get a chance to work, and consequently to gain experience and exposure. Yes, a few lucky people do manage to do that each year but it is far more the exception than the norm that you come to NYC, go to an audition and get the job, get paid a decent amount of money, get good reviews and go on right away to another job and another in succession. In fact, doing so would qualify as a bonafide miracle.
I don’t know that universities keep track of their stats — of who graduated and went out and had a career in performing but I know they brag about those that actually do make it. I wonder, however, if they look at how many they graduate who do not succeed. The percentages have to be that many more fail than make it. In some cases, keeping track of these failures would seem like a reason to look at what the training program/degree actually offers a student, and then, perhaps also be a cause for adjustment of the training programs themselves. Of course that does happen, but not in all cases.
The people who hold down the fort in university training programs are often interested (understandably so) in getting tenure, having good benefits, purchasing a home, and building a family. Once they get these things, they are loath to lose them. In order to keep their jobs going, they must learn to work in cooperation with the university’s Dean or other administrator in charge, with others in the department and with the students. They have to find a way to get their students through the bachelor’s requirements, or master’s degree programs, and hopefully do so with some semblance of honesty and integrity. It is my experience that most (yes, most) of the teachers I encounter do just that. They are working hard to maintain not only professionalism (in a profession that has not even one regulating body or set of criteria for what “professional” actually is) but also a sense of caring and commitment to their students’ overall mental and emotional well being.
We all know, however, that there are teachers and even entire departments that are a mess and shouldn’t be doing anything with music or education because they are completely unable to provide even basic information that has to do with the requirements of the profession outside of school. They teach to some imaginary model made up by the department chair who might not have been involved in anything professional outside of school for decades, or in some cases ever. They try to teach to some “in-house” idea of what the person in charge wants the students to learn, sometimes for reasons that may not make any kind of sense. The teachers attempt to do this because they are stuck in a situation that isn’t easily adjusted and might be unable to do anything else to earn a living. In the most extreme cases, the teachers dare not protest what they know to be an awful situation but must put up for a long time….sometimes for their entire careers. The person in charge may be there for a very long time, too, so nothing changes. Sometimes the persons in charge can refuse to hire teachers who are excellent, lest it make them look as bad as they actually are. Sometimes they actually fire people who are good because they are……good. I know this to be true because I have seen it happen more than once.
At first when I encountered this situation I found it to be rather shocking. Now, when I find out about it I still find it unsettling and disturbing but not surprising. It’s hard to know what to say when I have a young person come to my private studio telling me he has “just graduated with a degree in music theater” who can’t sing the repertoire at all, and in fact, knows nothing about theater or music that would be useful to him in pursuing a career here. If the student seems open and willing to learn, what can I conclude except that the school is to blame?
The teachers who somehow manage to hold down the fort by being excellent, caring, up-to-date with standards outside of school, who have integrity and are dedicated, make an enormous difference, even as we see them being pressured more and more by the needs of the schools to make a profit, regardless of what that entails. If you are in such a situation, pat yourself on the back for doing a great job. Hold on fast to the idea that your personal contribution might be the one thing that allows a graduating student to know something that he or she can actually use when out in the world looking to become a professional vocalist in any style.

Doing What You Said You Would

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We live in a time when people do not really have much interest in “keeping their word”.

Not so long ago a handshake was considered a valid legal agreement because it meant that you had “given your word”. Now, because we live in a time when there is no one reliable source of information that is always honest, no one really knows what is true. If you read the papers and listen to the news, you hear one thing one day, another the next. Nowhere is this more true than in terms of what we are told to eat or not eat or in the larger political arena.
If you give anyone or anything your “promise” you are making a binding contract with yourself to do as you have said you would. If you take that seriously, meaning that you will do whatever you can to make sure that you carry out your promises, ultimately, it will have great benefits in your life. People will know that you mean what you say, you do what you say you will do and you are as “good as your word” in that you are reliable, dependable and honest. In these times, that’s a lot.
If you adjust what you do, after the fact, thinking it doesn’t matter, but you do not go back to the situation or the party involved and say that you have to change your original agreement, you might get away with it, but you can’t do that too often or it erodes your reputation.
Integrity is being true to yourself, true to what you say, true to how you behave over time. If you do what is convenient instead of what you know is right, you will eventually pay a price.
I know, we live with this kind of behavior every day in every kind of situation. That’s one of the reasons the world is such a mess. People don’t listen to what they say, they don’t care what they say, they just talk. People don’t take a stand and back it up with their actions. They take a stand and then, when it’s difficult to remain steadfast in that position, they back away. They “adjust”, even if that adjustment flies in the face of all that they profess to believe.
The words that come out of your mouth cannot be taken back. If you value your word, if you tell the truth as you see it, you will think before you make a promise, particularly if it is one that involves other people and has larger consequences. The more care you give to what you say, they more people will listen when you do speak. And, the more your word carries with it the weight of responsibility, the more you have to take responsibility in how you use it.
We are in a time when people will say anything just to get their way. There are few consequences for “flip flopping” or for just plain lying, but that doesn’t mean that it works in life to behave that way. And, if you promise to do something that you can’t do, for any reason, and you do not go back to the person to whom you made the promise and fix that broken agreement, you will lose their trust, and rightly so. If you give away your own integrity because you don’t have a clear set of values to live by, or you don’t care how people see you from one day to the next, you have nothing. Without your own integrity, you are lost.
What does this have to do with singing? EVERYTHING. If you sing, you magnify what you are saying, and if you do not sing the lyrics with a sense of purpose and truth, your voice will not carry with it authentic authority and power. People truly respond to vocal sound that is coupled with depth of meaning. They experience the impact of that sound at a cellular level. If that were not true, great artists such as Luciano Pavarotti, singing an entire evening of music in Italian, would not have attracted half a million people to his Central Park Concerts. Many of those people were not opera fans and certainly most of them were not fluent in Italian, but there they were, listening to his amazing voice filled with conviction in his singing. It carried great emotional power in every phrase.
If you sing and you never look at your own voice as it extends out into the world in the other aspects of your life, you should. If you promise things lightly and never get around to doing them, if you say you will do something and you don’t, but then pay no attention to that, don’t be surprised if other people make promises to you that they don’t keep either. They find out soon enough that you don’t really care by observing your own behavior.
If you sing, take a look at what you are singing and understand it in the fullest sense of the words, what they are literally, what they mean, what they imply, what they would do out in the world if you were not singing, but living them in life. It matters.

When Economics Drives Everything

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It’s helpful when the people who are in charge of an artistic endeavor have knowledge, experience and skill. It’s helpful if they have developed tastes and a broad perspective. It’s very helpful if they look at their art as an opportunity to make a contribution to the world by shaking things up, by allowing the audience to be touched or moved, or by transforming life through the creation of the artistic expression or through it’s execution.

When the artist Christo executed “The Gates” in Central Park, people got to look at and walk through those gates and “experience” what that did to them and to their perception of the park and to the others who were also there at the same time. It allowed them to feel something new and different and react to it, and there were all kinds of reactions from being thrilled to feeling a sense of disgust. Such is art.
If the idea of art shifts to being one of making money, things change. If you are designing an artistic product with the idea of “this will make us rich” as the underlying motivation, you will have a different attitude, different goals and different criteria.
About 75% of all Broadway shows lose money. That means that if you invest in a show, you have to be a very brave soul or someone with a lot of money that doesn’t care if it goes up in smoke. If you give money to an artistic organization, you have to hope that it doesn’t get squandered on on things that are peripheral to the project itself. If you value art for art’s sake, you have to understand that not all art is going to make money, or be “successful” or be “popular”.
Artistic organizations in this country continue to struggle with less and less government support, with less interest on the part of audiences, and with difficult issues about the trends in artistic creation. They are more and more turning to investors or backers to help them create their work. In some cases, the investors are content to sit back and watch what the artists develop. In other cases, however, the investors want input into the artists’ process, and can even try to exert influence on what is created. That can be a recipe for disaster.
When economics drives everything, we all lose. Forcing art to be a “money-making endeavor” isn’t a good idea. Allowing creative minds to find avenues to expression is valuable in itself. It’s true, sometimes an artistic idea will end up making a whole lot of money for lots of people. When that happens accidentally, that’s great. But when it doesn’t happen and people decide that not making a profit is a reason for the art to go unsupported, that’s not great.
I passed the Multi-Plex movie today. All the movies showing there were clearly made for 14 year old boys who love the technology or for little kids who like cute cartoons. The market research has decided that this “market slice” is who spends the most money and that these movies, without much plot or dialog, are the easiest ones to sell overseas. The artistic output isn’t as important as the format which has been shown to bring in the most profit. It is, in fact, astounding that other kinds of movies get made at all. It’s an interesting situation.
When economics drives everything, we all lose. Art should exist just because. When we have to turn art into a profit-making enterprise, regardless of what that does to the artistic process itself, we are going in the wrong direction. Too bad the people who have money to give or invest don’t always have that feeling.