Somatic Voicework™ The LoVetri Method Teachers' Association

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Because They Can and We Can’t Stop Them

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Something that singing teachers do that is truly detrimental to the profession, and something about which I have written here many times, is label what they do in lessons as if no one else in the world has ever done it before.

Seriously, people, there are only so many sounds human beings are capable of making, given the formant frequencies of a human throat. The vast majority of adults stick to a small pitch range, limited volume under most circumstances and not a great deal of variability. Even trained singers are typically limited to about three octaves of range. The voice is a reflexive instrument, meaning that it responds to the desires of the singer indirectly through the mental images the singer has of what he or she wants to do vocally. If you directly manipulate the muscles of the throat (and many people teach just that), you will never ever sing freely or expressively because holding the throat into a place prohibits such emotional expression. This is a big, big deal and it is completely ignored by many teachers of singing. It is not my idea, it is based on the ability of the body to both breathe and swallow and allow free movement of all the vocal muscles so that the mechanism can easily inhale and exhale without effort. You cannot override Mother Nature without paying a price. If you work in concert with our gag reflex, you can learn to direct the sound without suppressing anything.
What happens typically is that someone finds a certain kind of sound she likes or that he feels is the “right” sound for a certain kind of music. They decide (without checking with anyone from voice science) that this is THE ANSWER, and they teach it as that. They behave as if no one else has figured out how to manipulate the throat, the breath, or the “resonators” in the same way they have and then, sadly, that’s how they set themselves up to teach.
Susan Warblebird has discovered that she and only she can do things with her throat that no one else can do and, by golly, she is going to teach you to do those same things! Yep. Maneuver Number One is sliding the larynx down into the trachea, Maneuver Number Two is hiking it up into the sinus cavities, and Maneuver Number Three is pulling it back into the back wall of the throat where it sticks into the soft tissue. These Maneuvers will make you are fabulous opera singer, a great rock singer and give you the ability to out rap every rapper who’s wrapped up in rapping. Of course, she is in conflict with Wilfred Wobblethroat who has discovered a way to prove that vibrato arises out of the movements of the diaphragm. He has done research on himself to establish that by wiggling his belly button in and out he can jiggle his diaphragm until it makes the pitches go up and down, up and down, like horses on a carousel and presto! The vibrato is right there. This is the famous Wobblethroat Method created by him and only by him. He can teach you to do it, too. (For a price, of course.) You can also purchase his videos, his CDs, his DVDs, his tapes and books, and watch him on YouTube. Unfortunately, he sounds when he sings like he is close to vomiting. A pleasant sound.
Truth be told, all anyone can ever do is organize what we know about human sound-making into a relatively cohesive whole and discuss how that applies to making whatever sounds one needs in order to be able to sing effectively and expressively in any style of music. Calling the things we “discover” plaid or pineapples is of no consequence if we do not understand that what we do isn’t unique, special or even new in any way. Speaking about it in plain, simple English, in a way that makes sense to many other human beings without translation or further explanation is the only way to proceed.
Somatic Voicework™, my method, is an approach to singing Contemporary Commercial Music. It is not and never will be THE approach, the RIGHT approach, or the ONLY approach, and it will continue to evolve and change as we learn more from voice science about how things work. It will always be concerned with the human and artistic factors of making music through singing. I am not ever going to be interested in making “human sound robots”, no matter how important it is for people to sing from a functionally correct place. The terms I use are, by and large, as accurate as I can get them to be and are taken from voice science or long accepted (as in a hundred years or more) pedagogical concepts from classical singing training, or from the marketplace, primarily Broadway. I did not make up one single term myself.
Yet, when I speak to other teachers of singing, particularly those who have a method they are selling to the public, they all have their own jargon. Most of them do not want to let it go because it is theirs. The phrases belong to them. No one else can have them. No.
If you want to understand what they mean with their “coined” words, you have to study with them so they can explain them to you and let you experience them as sound so you can comprehend their label and make it meaningful. It precludes having a discussion amongst equals. It precludes being able to discuss insights about various approaches that are broad based and equal, but different from each other, because the creator of the new terminology is married to the words and the “special” approaches he or she has created.
I have asked a few of these people to change to a more objective terminology in the interest of benefitting the profession at large and of the students who seek to sing in the best possible way. I am always met with the same resistance. “I don’t want to give up my terms because I created them, they are mine, they work and they make sense (to me).” This is a lost cause and very sad. They won’t budge because they don’t have to.
So the profession lumbers along, stumbling over the use of made up words and terms and their relevance to modern day demands placed on singers’ voices in a career.

Everybody Sounds The Same

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When I was a child and heard classical singers on the radio or TV, they all sounded alike. I could recognize that they were singing “opera style”, but to me, one voice was just like another. I also knew that Tennessee Ernie Ford sounded different than Dinah Shore (giving away my age here, folks) and that Perry Como sounded different than Dennis Day.

After I had had some good amount of training, I began to recognize individual classical artists. I began to hear the difference between Leontyne Price and Joan Sutherland (a pretty big difference, but not to me at the time). Much later, after decades of work with classical singing) when I was with other skilled listeners we would play “drop the needle” and see who could identify the singer in the fewest notes. Sometimes it only took one long one to say, “That’s Corelli!” His voice was so distinctive.
The idea that classical singers all “sound the same” has to do with the resonances they must generate in order to heard over a full orchestra without electronic amplification. That similarity is a requirement in all but the highest sopranos, whose voices carry because they are often up on very high pitches which do most of the work of “carrying” the voice. It is the case, however, that there is such a thing as generic training for classical singing and it makes all voices sound pretty much the same: loud, indistinct or imitative. In other words, lousy training makes for lousy sound. When the person singing’s can be described as being “woofy”, “barky”, “hooty”, “over-darkened” or just distorted, you can’t really hear the voice for itself. You hear the vocal production which is off balance or manipulated.
Free singing brings out the individuality of the voice. It encourages the uniqueness of each person’s vocal production. It allows for the vocalist to find through exploration how he or she sounds over time, while learning and performing various kinds of repertoire. Teachers who have a preconceived notion of how the voice should sound even before the vocalist has a chance to wiggle around and try things out are not helpful. Many teachers have a fixed sound in their mind and they bring the student to it, regardless. Guess what, all the students of these teachers sound the same. Is this a surprise?
In CCM styles, it is the same. The people who teach yelling make all their students sound the same because that is their main tool. The people who tell belters to make whatever sound they equate with belting (a squeal, a grunt, a yell, a shout) end up training singers to approach their songs with a “rote” response and then everything sounds the same. If you listen to the great CCM singers, however, who very likely had no training, they sing with real expression, with variation, with a connection to both the musical line and the words, with little effort.
In order to serve a student’s highest good, a teacher must bring out the entire voice and balance it without distorting the vowels. The breathing should be deep, full and easy on inhalation and regulated on exhalation, adjusting the use of the belly muscles to the firmness of the ribcage during phonation. THEN, and only then, should the teacher begin to train the student toward a specific vocal production. Doing it before skews the instrument and will make it nearly impossible for the vocalist, if she is young, to get away from this production on her own later in life, unless she works with a skilled technician who can help her solve this problem.
If you are a student, listen to the pupils your teacher has. If they all sound like the teacher, if they all have “funny” vowels, if they are all hard to understand, if they all have bad high notes or low notes, if they all sound thin and tinny or big and overblown, be suspicious. A group of individual singers can’t all have the same characteristics. The more the training is good and useful, the more the person is recognizable as herself. The mechanical behavior melts into free singing and the ingredients necessary to sing any song in any style become a comfortable default that doesn’t get in the way of either individuality or expressiveness.
When everybody sounds the same, something is wrong.

Exhausting

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It can be exhausting to push against something that is stuck and resistant. Trying to unlock a door that has been rusted shut is tough.

It’s easier to let the door stay closed and walk by, not being curious, not caring what’s there.
Recently, I heard about a treasure found in India in the basement of a temple that has been cared for by the same family for 400 years. There were rumors that it contained a vast store of riches but no one wanted to investigate lest it disturb the god for whom the temple was built. Somehow, finally, someone insisted, and against great resistance from the family and from some of the local officials, the locked door to the deep basement storehouse was opened. When it was, indeed, it contained jewels, gold and silver in great amounts. Quite worth the trouble it took to upset the 400 year old status quo. Of course, after the fortune was discovered, there was a great deal of “discussion” about what to do with it. I think that’s not settled (will it ever be?)
The point is this. One man had to push and push hard to get to the treasure. He encountered resistance of various kinds and it took both persistence and perseverance to get the door unlocked, but in the end, he was victorious. It only takes one person with this kind of determination to turn things around.
Some people are blessed with an enormous amount of determination and a very strong will to go against very heavy odds. Christopher Columbus was one of those folk, and Nelson Mandela is, too. Those individuals who have gone to jail, suffered persecution, been maligned, and seen their families suffer have had to sacrifice so much to accomplish their goals. People sometimes forget the price these individuals pay for paving the way to something new, something often much better. This has been true since the beginning of recorded history. Socrates took hemlock. Joan of Arc was burned at the stake. St. Thomas More was beheaded. John Brown was hanged. Martin Luther King was shot. Resistance can be very dangerous, but it certainly isn’t new.
I think that people who have a vision of how life could be if there was less selfishness, less close-mindedness, less attachment to greed, power and money, sometimes despair because their view of life is seen as being “too pie in the sky”, “too abstract”, “too Pollyanna-ish”. Yet, without the people who see things through rose colored Utopian glasses, nothing would ever evolve. Looking toward the far distant future with optimism is not always easy but some people manage anyway.
I hope that each person who reads this blog will do his or her best to be a harbinger of change. If you are a singer or a teacher of singing, hold the profession to the highest possible vocal standards — the highest standards for teachers of singing, the best possible approaches to blending music, voice and soul into a cohesive whole one person at a time. Do not succumb to mediocrity. Do not fall into “being OK.” Do not let yourself hide in ignorance or arrogance. Seek always to put the music and the voice first.
If you grow exhausted from “fighting the good fight”, take heart. Rest, renew and then go forth again with vigor knowing you are fueled by the best energy and highest purpose. Just do what Winston Churchill advised: Never, never, never give up.

Danger

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The idea that singing in different styles is dangerous has been around a long time.

I guess it’s dangerous to be in a triathlon or a decathlon, too. I would venture to say that dancers who do several kinds of dance are probably at risk. Maybe instrumentalists who play classical music and jazz are also playing with fire. Actors who try Shakespeare and TV sitcoms are probably in trouble, too.
Scary stuff.
No, not because any of this is true but because people think it is. To me it’s just as bad as the people who used to say that “women’s bodies are just not made for sports” and had the “research” to prove it. Same for the people who claimed that African American’s were “not very smart” and had the “research” to prove it. And there are always people who say that the world is flat and that they can prove it. They are standing in line next to the folks who believe that humans were alive at the same time as the dinosaurs only 6,000 years ago because that’s how old the Bible says the earth is.
There is no evidence of any kind, from any credible source, that proves or even indicates that singing more than one style of music is harmful to the voice. In fact, there may even be a possibility that the people who sing more than one style hold up better and last longer than those who only sing one. It isn’t the styles that are causing problems, it isn’t the music. It is the way that the music is being sung that could create difficulties. In other words, if you don’t know what you are doing and you blunder into something that you do not understand, you can certainly hurt your vocal technique and perhaps also even your vocal folds. That is not, however, a function of diversification of vocal function. It is a symptom of vocal ignorance, and of failing to understand how to coax variable vocal behavior from your own throat through exercise over time.
Someone I have known for a very long time recently suggested to me that jumping around from one style to another is “extreme” and not good to do. He suggested that vocal problems could develop from such risky behavior. The man in question has had technical issues for 40 years and has never understood his own vocal production. He is still taking technical lessons because he can’t manage his voice without assistance. Think maybe fear is underneath that somewhere?
Fear is underneath all of these negative assessments. Fear stops most singers from really trusting the throat to do whatever you want it to do. Some few souls, however, do not have such fears and can, indeed, sing this and that with equal ease and sound appropriate, musical and expressive without any unwanted side effects.
If you are afraid to try something vocally lest it “steal” your skill away, take a look at that. If you think it will hurt you, look at how you are attempting it. If you believe that you will somehow be “changed” and not able to return to your own true self, stop and think. You cannot lose who you are unless you don’t have a good solid idea of yourself and your voice in the first place.
The only authentic danger in singing a variety of styles is falling in love with all of them and not having enough time to learn all there is to know about each one.

Rock and Roll Is Here To Stay

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Some day, maybe 50 years from now, there may be no “classical” training left at colleges, except perhaps for “speciality courses” that keep “historic music” from disappearing.

Broadway is dominated by rock music now and that isn’t like to change. The songs are sometimes very challenging because they are badly written, uninteresting or just plain stupid, but sometimes very good interesting music does show up. The “form” of the songs could be formulaic, it could be repetitive and it could have little to do with “traditional” theatrical values. This is because so many of the composers are from the world of rock. They have no background at all in theater, and some have not much formal classical training, coming from jazz instead. If you also have directors who are barely in their 30s (and there are quite a few) who are not interested in “holding up the old ways”, you end up with shows that are flashy, splashy and often entertaining but not necessarily memorable.
Almost all shows rely on two things: stars (read that as celebrities from TV, recordings and film) and special effects (read that as flying people, objects or both). Some also have bells and whistles like theatrical smoke and unusual costumers (animals, superheroes). Audiences do not need to be musically sophisticated to enjoy shows like this, they just need to be entertained. It can end up making the show have an almost “circus-like” atmosphere, but it keeps audiences happy and seats filled.
These audiences are not “hard core” theater goers – the folks who are more likely to go to a straight play, frequently a drama or maybe also a comedy. You don’t get many people going to “experimental theater”. The only audiences who like and promote such are people in the industry who think it’s cool (and it can be) or people who are investors who think it shows good taste (and sometimes it does). Mostly they don’t last long and lose a lot of money.
It may take another lifetime, but sooner or later, if the schools are going to keep up with the real world, they are going to have to deal with music theater as being rock-based. For all the revivals of shows from the 40s, 50s and 60s, there are more and more shows that have been written in the last 40 years that are not in the style of Cole Porter or Rodgers and Hammerstein. Stephen Sondheim (and his second generation children, Ricky Ian Gordon, Jason Robert Brown and Adam Guettel) not withstanding, the music that has had the greatest impact and the most commercial success has been written by Alan Mencken, Jonathan Larson, Stephen Schwartz and Andrew Lloyd Webber.
The gap between what is taught at colleges and what is sung on the stages of the Great White Way continues to widen in most places. Even in schools which have music theater degrees, there are very few teachers who have encountered rock in a way that allows them to teach it with any degree of reliability or confidence. (That doesn’t stop people from trying to teach it anyway, unfortunately). The younger teachers, many of whom were required to get a Master’s Degree or an Doctorate of Musical Arts in order to enter a tenure-track job in a good university program, are forced to study classical repertoire and pedagogy because that’s all that’s available (with the exception of Shendoah’s CCM Master’s), even if they know they want to teach rock styles. Therefore, for the most part, even this generation isn’t being prepared, pedagogically speaking, to go into teaching with a full, secure and wide ranging tool kit that deals with rock vocal production.
No one really knows what anyone can get away with in terms of CCM styles at their most extreme. It might be that being a dramatic voice with a body to match is a very important requisite. It might be that you can be small and wirey and still scream out high E, Fs and Gs as a female rock belter 8 shows a week. It is a “one person one voice at a time” equation.
Doesn’t bode well for the future of teaching. I always want to ask the finalists on American Idol or The Voice, how much classical training have you had? Did it help? In what way?

How Repertoire Effects Technique

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If you have a good solid vocal technique, and you know that you can rely on your voice to do what you expect it to do, congratulations! Not everyone gets there.

If you sing in a specific style, whether it be classical, rock, jazz, country, or another one, and you sing material that is more or less in a certain “groove” or “fach”, you may not go very far away from your comfortable home base most of the time and your technical “chops” likely will remain steady and reliable as well.
But if you are out there singing, unless you write all your own tunes and never write anything that’s vocally or musically challenging, sooner or later you will encounter something that shakes up your technique and starts to pull at your vocal behavior. It wouldn’t necessarily be something that causes you vocal health issues (although it could lead to them over an extended period), but it could make your voice feel “not quite right”, even though you can certainly still sing and most people would hear you as being “just fine”.
What’s to do, then? Should you avoid material that “messes up your machine”? Should you not do new or challenging repertoire? Should you try to find a way to do only what’s most comfortable all the time? If there is a way to do that, I would be happy for you to contact me and tell me what it is because I would be happy to know. It could be, though, that in the real world of performing there is no such place or state of being and you are going to have to contend with this issue if you want to have a continuing, valid and successful career.
If you are really in touch with your heart when you sing, good music will pull on it and ask you to go where it wants you to go. If you follow your heart (and, really, you must) then you have no choice but to let yourself sing the music the way you feel the music should go and find a way to marry it’s call with the parameters of your vocal expressiveness. Not to do this is to live in a protected state and no real artist wants to do that for very long. We are by nature a restless lot, always looking to “what’s next” in our exploration of our art. Finding the path is a daily discovery — tricky, arduous, fatiguing but exhilarating when we experience the satisfaction of creating what we had hoped we would.
If you do a song that is powerful, heavy, dramatic and long, you will find that it gives you vocal strength, a solid delivery, stamina of breath and phrasing, and a sense of rootedness in your body. You might also find that it makes your voice heavier, sluggish, less responsive, less willing to sing softly or smoothly, and less happy to move around quickly. The reverse is also true. If you sing something that is light-hearted, delicate, intimate or short, you will find that it gives you a sense of freedom and ease, a feeling that your voice moves like quick silver, and a delight in singing softly and in higher pitches. You could also discover that it gets harder to sing a full, rich sound, it gets harder to hang on to long loud phrases, especially in mid or lower pitch ranges, and that you seem to have a slightly less steady feeling in your body. If you sing music that goes all over — something that is high and low, loud and soft, rangey but with shorter segments mixed in here and there, and asks for a range of communications from happy to sad, angry to frightened, you will find that it expands your capacities to sing in many different ways and pushes the boundaries of what you can do past the limits you had become accustomed to. It can also take your voice apart, make it a chaotic mess, weaken the top, the bottom, or the middle, or even all of those places, effect your vibrato, your breath support and your ability to control both loud and soft phrases. It could also effect your mental state.
If you do not understand that about repertoire, and believe it or not, many people do not, you could incorrectly assume that it was you or your voice that was the issue. You could assume that you need to change your technique because what you had been doing was inadequate. You could decide that you should never ever sing things that are unfamiliar or difficult because they are dangerous. Any of those things could be true, of course. You could also just take responsibility for the fact that repertoire is going to pull you where it does and that you have to re-group after you have done something new to get back to home base. That’s just normal.
I once had a chance to ask a question of the great Mirella Freni about her career. I asked her how it was that she sang for so long, so well. Given that she started out singing “Susannah” and ended up with “Elizabeth” in Don Carlo, that’s a wide and long journey to make. She answered that she always followed a heavy role with a lighter one and never agreed to sing something until she had learned it and “put it in her voice” for quite some time to see if she felt she could safely manage it. Many other artists have done similar things. Leontyne Price sang Mozart alongside Verdi for most of her career. James Morris sang lyric roles alongside dramatic roles until he tackled his first Wagner.
Artists in CCM styles may not think this way, but they should. They should evaluate repertoire in terms of what it does to the voice and make adjustments accordingly, particularly after they are no longer doing that repertoire. The voice should always have a balanced “home” to return to, so that it, and you as the vocalist, do not get lost.
If you don’t have such a vocal home base, go get one. If you lost it, work to get it back. If you don’t understand what I’ve written here, ask yourself why not.

Perfectionists and Control Freaks

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I’ve noticed that the people who don’t like detail are quick to call those who do “control freaks” or “perfectionists”. The people who like detail can easily fire right back that those who “go with the flow” and “let it all hang out” (cool 60s phrases, young people!) are sloppy and disinterested.

Actually, I find the truth somewhere in the middle. You have to have a clear idea of what you want and a strong desire to get it but you also have to be willing to adjust as you go and work with what shows up. Some people can do one but not the other, some people can’t do either. The people who succeed are the ones who can manage both.
Developing anything unique requires quite a bit of study, research, application and a willingness to “work out the bugs” as you go. It asks for tenaciousness, perseverance, dedication, and a strong determination. It requires a resilient spirit, a hopeful attitude and a constant willingness to re-group and re-organize without becoming discouraged. When and if you finally do get where you wanted to go, others will want to join you there. It’s as if you have summited the mountain. Afterwards, others will want to climb to that summit as well, because you have said it’s possible. If, then, you were to advise others about the safest, easiest, most practical way to ascend, you would think the travelers would want to heed your advice. Don’t count on it. Some of them, at least, might just tell you to mind your business, because they will figure out their own path, thank you very much. If the mountaineer offers advice freely or makes comments about the best way to climb to the top of the peak, some would-be climbers would, rather than taking that advice, tell the mountaineer to be quiet and stop being a “control freak”. They might see the mountaineer’s advice about making sure that all the climbing equipment is checked, and guidance about what to pack, what to expect, and what to avoid, as being “too perfectionistic”.
Such it is with singing. There are people who sing well, who have a track record as artists who have performed successfully. There are people who also understand the process, because they have had to work it out as they made their journey. They may be people who actually paid attention to what worked and what did not. It would seem only logical and practical that those people would be the beacons of light to whom others would turn. Not always so. It would seem that the profession would be interested in learning what those artists have to say. Wrong again. There are actually others in the profession who are against taking advice or guidance from people who have been successful at singing or teaching singing because they don’t want to be perceived as people “needing” guidance. Crazy, huh?
I was always interested in learning from those who knew more than me. I was willing to sit at their feet and absorb what they had to teach me, knowing they had done something well and successfully that I also wanted to do well. It didn’t occur to me to tell my teachers that they were trying to “control me” when they expected me to conform to their criteria. It didn’t occur to me, either, that they were “perfectionists” if I had to do something over and over in order to get it right. It seemed reasonable to me.
Understand then, people who are very good at something are perfectionistic, because if there were not, they wouldn’t be really good. They work to get the details right because they know that’s what makes the difference between ordinary and extraordinary. People who are successful pay attention to the details, even the smallest ones, because they know that its in the small details that the task is completed thoroughly and with nothing left undone. Every Olympic athlete worries about the hundredths of seconds that can be shaved off a swim, the small twist that could be eliminated from a high dive, the precise landing of a gymnastic dismount. Every successful business owner finds the last dollar in the bank statement and the annual report. Every glamorous model has a perfect presentation from head to foot when she steps out on the runway or out on the town.
Being “so-so” is easy. It’s what most people do. Being amazing requires perfectionism and precise control over whatever it is that can be perfected and controlled. Knowing that things change all the time and that nothing can ever exist in that imaginary state of “perfect” doesn’t stop one from trying to get there every minute of every day.
If you are not that interested in making sure the details are handled or in holding to the standards that matter in your work (singing or anything else), don’t expect others to look at you with high regard. If you are one of those “whatever” folks, be aware of the labels you put on the people who have actually achieved something. Don’t assign them too quickly. You might have to go back one day and take those labels off and find newer, more accurate ones to use instead. In fact, if you really get your goals accomplished, you might find other people calling you a perfectionistic control freak and you might not agree with that label at all.

Damaged Voices That Work

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Not so long ago Dr. Robert Sataloff presented at his immensely helpful annual medical lecture at the Symposium: Care of the Professional Voice (www.voicefoundation.org) some photos of various singers’ vocal folds. Some of them looked like they had been through a “vocal war”. Messy, pink folds with raggedy edges.

The mind immediately thinks, “Boy, these vocal folds aren’t going to function!” But Dr. Sataloff, wise man that he is, played us the voices that went along with those folds, and they would have blown you away. Amazing singing. So much for preconceived notions.
I have also seen presented at the Symposium a study of a man who was a professional singer who had had multiple surgeries for cancer whose vocal folds, also, were far less than normal. This man sang in a classical sound that was impressive and there was no indication that anything was wrong, even though his vocal folds were not in great shape.
There are other kinds of vocal fold behaviors. Sometimes the folds look normal to an ENT but do not function normally. Usually this is diagnosed as spasmodic dysphonia, but it can be other neurologic conditions that are hard to pin down. You would think, looking only at the folds, that the sound would be just fine, but it’s not. Sometimes its very bad. You would only know by listening.
There is much we do not know yet about how the voice works, in all its myriad ways, and how it doesn’t work when it doesn’t. We know next to nothing about elite singers with long careers in any kind of style, and we know next to nothing about vocalists whose voices either mysteriously “disappeared” or were in some way compromised but either fully recovered or recovered enough to go back to some kind of professional singing career.
There are all manner of dysfunctional voices out there in the professional world. Here’s an “off-the-cuff” list: Harvey Fierstein, Cat Stevens, Tom Waits, Joe Cocker, and, of course, many of us remember Janis Joplin. There are others: Louis Armstrong, Jack Klugman (in recent years), Jimmy Durante, and a foggy baritone Carol Channing. Strong careers, all, no? There are probably many others who would fit in this category, both speakers and singers, who do very well on what seems to be not so good.
Only in classical singing, and maybe also on Broadway, does a vocalist’s sound need to be pristine and powerful at the same time. In almost all other styles, a slightly gritty, funky quality can actually be an asset. It usually indicates damage, but not necessarily the end of career.
Those of us who teach need to be very cautious when we make pronouncements about what is or is not possible with those who come to us for help. We do not ever know what a human being’s spirit is capable of addressing.
I have known individuals who have faced personal tragedy in their lives that most people would find reason enough to give up on life altogether. These people faced their circumstances with nobility and courage, with determination and perseverance, and frequently, not only made lemonade out of their lemons, but shared that good beverage with others who had a deep thirst to quench. Even people with laryngectomies, who speak through a mechanical device, still have a voice, even if it isn’t the one that came with their body.
Let us all remember that we are here for only the blink of an eye and that each day brings with it another day of adventure, mystery, and unknowns of all kinds. Your voice is one of your most precious assets but it isn’t your entire life. You and it can always find a way.

Pushing and Pressing

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Since rock music is so prevalent on Broadway now, there are a lot of people singing that push and press, thinking this is OK. It does sound more like rock singing, but many of the people who are on Broadway now are graduates of vocal training programs at the various universities and colleges. If you know how to listen, you can hear the training they got in their vocal production. This often becomes the only option they have to sounding “less classical”.

The men fare better than the woman most of the time, especially if they have good strong voices. The woman are often expected to be able to manage the “high chest belt” category which distorts the vocal musculature towards a lopsided top where all the acoustic energy lies above C5 (or C above middle C). The sounds between C5 and F5, in a mix/belt, are absolutely pressed or they would flip to head. The average vocalist who has been trained to sing in a classical sound can’t easily get past the C in a chest driven belt without strain.
The saddest thing, to me, is that there are natural belters who can go up pretty far in a good healthy sound but those (girls, mostly) don’t get into the voice programs because they can’t manage “An Die Musik” or “Caro Mio Ben” in an audition without sounding wrong. If they are forced to sound “classical” on top of their pop belt/mix, without retraining the middle voice first, they end up in a big mess that can’t be fixed until and unless they go back to the beginning and retrain the whole machine. Then, they would have to find a teacher who knew how to do that, and there aren’t many who do.
Chest register, used this way, has nothing whatsoever to do with chest resonance. Operatic people get them confused. Generally, it also has nothing to do with a deliberately lowered larynx which is fixed in a low position, which is currently in vogue in classical circles because it makes the sound warmer and darker. In a young voice however, it pretty much guarantees that high notes and soft tones will get harder and harder to do. That makes everyone a baritone and mezzo by default.
In order to sing in an “edgy” and stylistically appropriate “high belt or high chest/mix” you really have to know the difference between register and resonance. One is source the other is filter. Surely, they interact, but they can be uncoupled. The factors involved in mitigating the pressure on the vocal folds in a high mix/belt (or belt/mix) are many but include the head position (slightly raised), the mouth position, (jaw down, face lifted, corners of the mouth widened), the neck muscles (not pulled in or stretched up) and the tongue inside the mouth, (raised but not too much). The other ingredient is the clarity of the tone (it has to be very clear, at least initially), the volume, (moderately loud first, then louder after it is established), and the vowels should always be bright but not deliberately nasalized. Above all, the sound should be as comfortable as possible, and not stuck. It is close to, but not the same as, shouting. The vibrato should not go away permanently.
What all this has to do with classical training is: not alot. And, the breathing patterns are such that a beltier sound needs good pressure from the belly muscles but doesn’t use up a lot of air. You can hold on to a pressed sound for a good long time, and in so doing, you can pretty much guarantee that the vibrato will disappear until the end of the duration of the pitch, when it will return. It isn’t “added”, it shows up, because the high breath pressure is dissipating as the air pressure in the lungs goes down.
Some of the Broadway women are still singing in a “head mix” in the upper range because they can make that loud enough and bright enough to camouflage the headiness so that the sound still does the job by being “edgy”. They have register issues at the higher break, but no one cares much about that as long as the other ingredients are strong enough to “finesse” the music. Sometimes you find a female who belts to the D or E above middle C and then has a disconnected head register above it that sounds thin and weak, but some top out and have nothing above a certain pitch (that’s not good, but quite possible).
The people who do best in today’s shows on Broadway are those who have a naturally robust voice, good posture and are physically in good shape. Little weak voices and people don’t hold up in rock music. Even the robust people can get into trouble but it takes a while to show up. For everyone who is capable of managing the enormous output necessary to do a belty rock show eight times a week there are many others who can’t manage. The pressing and forcing (which is stylistic and which comes from the sounds made by untrained singers who were the originators of rock and roll) is a way to compensate for strong production that is “too resonant”. This harkens back to the idea that the pop singers don’t want to sound “too Broadway”. Heaven forbid they sound like they actually have good solid chops and can really sing……that would be “too old fashioned”.
So, as the standards drop for vocal health and uniqueness, and they will continue to as they have since the early 70s, and as everyone on Broadway is expected to sing everything (all styles, all pitch ranges, all vocal qualities) and survive, the responsibility for each individual performer to find his or her own way, melding the training from classical college vocal programs with what is necessary in any given role or song will increase exponentially. Much is left to the individual artists and only the strongest and most clever survive. Too bad.

Who Decides?

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Does any one singing teacher decide what the standards in the music industry should be? Does any producer? Does any music director, or publicist? Does any one person decide who will be the next big opera star? rock star? Broadway star? TV star? movie star? What happens in the “real world” to shape our music industry standards? How is it that some people have a lasting, significant influence on the music business and others don’t?

Do the schools that teach classical singing decide what a classical singer should sound like or is it the opera houses, or perhaps it is the audiences? Maybe it’s the conductors in the opera houses? Maybe it’s the managers of the singers? Do the magazines and newspapers, through their reviewers and their writers, decide who will have a blazing career and who will be a dismal flop?
What about the people who [claim to] disdain the whole thing? They don’t do the publicity, they don’t do the things that others do, but somehow, they succeed anyway. There have always been celebrities who claim “I never wanted any of this. I never intended to be in show business,” but there they are.
Can you purchase a career? People have tried. Maybe some have succeeded. It’s not something you typically know. I have had a few students who had plenty of money to spend and spent it, only to end up at “Don’t Tell Mama’s” with all the other wannabees, no matter how grand their budget was. I remember well Pia Zadora, whose husband was a multi-millionaire. He bought her whatever career help he could and she did sing a few times on the Tonight Show. Wonder where she is now?
How does anyone keep in touch with what the music industry standards are at any given time in any segment of the industry? How do you know what’s expected in Nashville? How do you know what they want on Broadway? How do you find out which people are the latest big hits in jazz?
We all know about the pop singers. Adele, Beyoncè, Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber. It’s hard to miss them. Beyond that, you really have to be a “follower” or “fan” of a particular segment of the music industry to know what’s selling and who is “hot”. Some artists stay popular for years, or decades. Tony Bennett, Angela Landsbury, James Earl Jones, Betty White. All artists with lengthy careers but also individuals who are well respected by their peers in each area: singing, acting and TV entertainment. Some artists are popular for one season on TV or have one (and only one) best selling recording. Some people do one Broadway show and never get hired again.
When I have spoken at singing voice conferences about sticking to the “industry standards” I have been stared at, wild-eyed, by the teachers, as if I was talking about Martians invading New York. One school actually brags that they “don’t teach to the marketplace” even though they also brag about bringing in casting directors and agents to meet their students. (Think they might be a tad conflicted?) When I suggested at one of these conferences that those of us who work with successful singers with careers in the various areas of the business have to know what those areas of the business expect and/or want, I was told “well, it’s only your opinion”. Actually, the music industry doesn’t consult me to see if I have made my decision about what should be popular this week. I don’t think it checks with any of the other singing teachers here who have successful Broadway performers, opera singers, or jazz artists in their studios, to see if the teachers have decided what the standards should be, either.
Truth is, no one knows how these things evolve or who is going to be doing what where. It just happens, slowly, that things show up, some people get attention, and the music industry keeps on keeping on. There is a new crop of performers every generation, and some of the older singers hang on, doing what they have always done. There are people who stop performing and people who try, succeed and then fade away. No one can explain any of it.
If you teach singing, however, and you expect those you teach to sing in public anywhere, and if you do not pay attention to the current trends in the music business, including the opera houses and recital halls, you are not doing your job. Even if you are a tenured professor of voice at a university or conservatory, you have an obligation to stay on top of what’s happening in the real world of music outside your school.
You need to know that the “music industry” is deciding every day and you need to know what those “decisions” are and how they impact what you are doing with your students.