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What is musicality? The dictionary says it means “fond of or skilled in music”. That doesn’t make it, really. Most people who are musical use the word musicality to mean something much more than that. Musicianship is the skill of being a good musician, one who understands how to read and play music. You can be a skilled musician but not be very musical by nature and really not have much musicality at all.

Someone who possesses musicality is one who has a deep, visceral connection to music that has a 3-D effect on her existence. A person who is deeply musical doesn’t need someone to explain or teach what the music is “about”, they just seem to know, feel, understand and freely express what they perceive. This is probably a gift or some kind of special DNA encoding. Maybe there is a “musicality” gene. It certainly would seem that whatever this mysterious “musicality” thing is, it is a vital part of being able to communicate what’s there in the music to others.

Perhaps this goes along with being emotional or very expressive or very sensitive in a specific way. Perhaps it has to do with the ability to be demonstrative, or dramatic, or vivid. Perhaps it has to do with a keen sense of imagination or the ability to visualize music in connection with other senses, like someone with synesthesia.

There is some remarkable film footage of Glenn Gould, working with Leonard Bernstein, both of whom we can readily agree were highly musical musicians. Lenny Bernstein, someone with very definite ideas about music, deferred to Gould on the specific project they did together because Gould’s idea was that the music “didn’t go” the way Bernstein thought. It was a rare surrender on Bernstein’s part. Quite a meeting of minds, I thought. Each was clear that the music had a “way to be expressed” but it wasn’t the same thing for the two masters. This isn’t surprising to others who are themselves innately musical and also good musicians, but it might seem paradoxical to unskilled observers. How could both men be so responsive to the music and not agree on what the music contained?

This brings up the question of how a skilled musician can sometimes miss entirely what’s there in the music. Doesn’t the music itself cause emotions to flow, images to appear in the mind, movements to surge through the body? Doesn’t it seem to have a magic and a power all to itself that weaves a spell over the mind of the vocalist or instrumentalist who is performing the piece? How is it that the obvious shapes and colors inherent in the phrases or the patterns don’t jump out and make themselves dynamically clear to someone who is creating the sounds? Truly, how can you be a good musician and miss being musical? How can you be completely lacking in musicality? Unfortunately, it is all too common an experience to find someone who is a recognized musician (and this includes vocalists who are trained musicians of singing) who doesn’t have a clue as to what any of this is about and, in fact, thinks it is just so much nonsense.

I have no answers but I do know quite a few highly skilled musicians who are not in the least musical in the sense I am discussing here. They have little musicality, and they do not find it easy to swim in the responses of music that are an essential ingredient of expressiveness. They have to wonder what the music is about, and ponder how it can be evocative. They must strive to respond in a deep, authentic or meaningful way to music, so that something beyond mere notes can be communicated in a performance. They can gawk in amazement at their colleagues whose own immediacy of contact with the core of the music’s soul is effortless, true, clear and energized. And, those who are the other side of the fence, in the world of ecstatic musical bliss, can also only stare back at their compatriots wondering how they can miss what seems so obvious, so lovely and so simple. If someone is very musical, it is all so easy. If they are not, it is all so elusive or even unreal.

What inspires you?

What makes you feel better, lifts you up, gets you to expand and think positively about yourself and life? What is it that gives you courage to go forward towards your heart’s desire, your highest dream, your greatest goal?

The word inspire means both to stimulate to activity and to inhale. Why would that be? Because, as I have previously discussed, the ability to breathe is also the ability to be alive. It allows us to fully feel, to be fully present, to know we are in a body that moves all the time and that we are both recipients of life and participants in life. The breath moves in and out on its own but it is possible to learn to bring it under your conscious control (up to a point) if you work at it. It symbolizes the fact that life is given to us (by however you wish to think of “the higher power”) but we are also in charge of what we do with it, which could be anything from nothing to a whole lot.

This is true, of course, of other things one of which is also the voice itself. You can live with the voice you have and leave it alone. As long as nothing goes wrong with you or it, it will serve you well enough for most purposes. If, however, you need to place demand on it, particularly a lot of demand, it is well to develop some deliberate control over it, so that it is not only more responsive but has more stamina under stress. Somehow, working with the voice, which requires working at the same time with the breath, puts it all together. If we are to be vocally expressive, we must also breathe deeply and fully and learn to ride on the exhale while making sound with just the right balance of the two.

This activity, taken seriously and worked on diligently is, in itself, inspirational. Learning to inspire on purpose, for a purpose (vocal communication) is inspiring. I like that idea. It can give you fuel for other things, both creative and necessary. It can teach you about your body and your mind. It can challenge you deeply, as all physical activities do if we push our own limits. It can fill you up with satisfaction and peace, and with contentment just being involved in the activity of breathing and sounding for its own sake. One of the nicest things about this is that it’s free and you can do it whenever you chose. It’s completely portable and will always be yours. Barring something unusual, it will last as long as you do.

Inspire yourself. Be inspirational. Be fully of breath, life and sound. It’s a joyful way to spend your time.

Each week millions of people watch American Idol, The Voice, Glee, The X Factor and MTV. That means that millions of people watch others sing. In fact, there is a lot of singing on TV right now, but it doesn’t cover very much ground. You don’t hear Broadway songs, you don’t hear much folk music, you don’t hear a lot of country music, you don’t hear too much jazz. You do hear lots of pop/rock, R&B, and maybe some rap music (now and then), but you never ever hear classical singing (at least not in the USA), unless you watch a PBS station. The narrowness of the styles chosen by the people who run these shows is based on what sells the most –what brings in the most money from the marketplace. That’s how they sell the advertising time to sponsors. It’s a double bind, of course, in that the audience might start buying the other styles of music if they had a chance to hear them, but we’ll never know because no one wants to take a chance.

The problem with a lot of pop songs is that they are relatively simple, musically speaking. They rely on few chord changes or simple melodies with lots of repetitions. They have a “hook” that usually is considered “catchy” so you remember it, and sometimes there are key changes for the sake of “excitement”. Because the music listening public is so completely uneducated musically speaking, their tastes seem to reside in music that does not take a lot of “figuring out”. What happens is that a lot of pop songs end up sounding like a lot of other pop songs and pop singers end up sounding a lot like other pop singers. It is really unusual when someone who is truly different comes along and changes things. It happens once in a while, but less frequently than it did decades ago.

The way pop music works is that the song usually has a “high part” which is usually sung very loudly in a belt sound. This is supposed to convey emotion, but often it isn’t clear what emotion. The vocalist is supposed to sound good, but this can now be done through electronic/acoustic enhancement. Most people who listen don’t know who has been enhanced and who has not but they probably wouldn’t care even if they did know.

In this atmosphere, someone with a truly great voice (a unique distinctive instrument) who is emotionally open and musical, hasn’t got much chance unless he or she learns to do a good job in R&B or pop/rock music. If that’s not what the person wants to sing, they might (like Susan Boyle) break through with Broadway songs, but that would be the one in a million person (as she was) and not the norm. Mostly, the good singers are invisible, and are placed alongside the not so good singers as equals and hardly anyone knows the difference. They’re in plain sight but no one sees them for what they really are.

Since we have no easy way to educate the general public about what good singing is or isn’t, from the standpoint of a general or overall understanding of what makes a great voice great, of what’s makes a great voice in a great song great, this situation isn’t likely to change any time soon. Nevertheless, it is a worthy goal for those of us who teach singing to do our best to educate anyone whom we may encounter because having the information out there is better than not. Yes, things change, and yes, everyone has their own take on what they like, but some of the things that have allowed singers to be recognized for at least 100 years are the same as they ever were and those things should not be ignored. Those of us in singing have to keep trying to pass on what we know to those who don’t know so that we can keep the art of singing, in all its styles, going in the best possible way.

These days there is increased awareness about how the body functions in both sports and dance. Many approaches to both work with body mechanics in order to increase efficiency and lessen the possibility of injury. There are also sports psychologists who work to make the mental attitude of those who compete at the highest levels ready for the stress of the battle and the aftermath of failure. There are people in dance that help professional dancers ease out of dance and into other careers.

So, do we do this any of these things with singers? As Ralph Cramden used to say, “Hardee har har.”

Singing is mostly still in the 19th century, hardly acknowledging the 21st, mostly stuck in mystery-land where teachers are arguing about belly in or belly out breath support or back muscles or expanded ribs, and lots of various “resonance strategies” be they in the forehead, eyebrows, hard palate, nasal passages, or some other spot in the head (never anywhere else). The idea that the voice (or the muscles involved in making sound) can be trained to do several different kinds of sounds on purpose, or that those tasks involve different responses in the mechanism is still, believe it or not, heresy in some places. This is analogous to the idea that runners should run in patent leather shoes or that swimmers should be competing with bloomers on, meaning it makes no sense but people do think it helps in spite of that.

How would it be if we did high speed photography of world class singers who have had careers for 20, 30, 40 or even 50 years, in any style, just to study the outside of their bodies while they sing? Maybe we would see similarities, in terms of styles, or voice types, or genders? How would it be if we asked a few people to have short video X-rays of their upper torso while singing, to see what is moving inside? How about having professional singers of all ages and backgrounds make recordings of the same two or three short songs, in several specific keys, just to compare whatever could be compared in a computer analysis? Why are we not looking at really efficient vocalists to see what we can learn from them about how they sing?

Because.

Most of the money available for research is aimed at vocal fold health. It goes to the university medical schools where the MDs study unhealthy throats. The money for acoustic research on healthy singers is next to nil, but what little there is also goes to schools that have research labs. In those cases, you get research done on college students or maybe college faculty, not on high level, long-term-career professional singers. There is money for speech pathology research because they do that work on unhealthy speakers, and for research on children with speaking issues. Is there money for research on a large group of professional singers who have been highly successful singing in any style for a long time? You can hear Ralph again with his mocking laugher……”Hardee har har”.

So, is it any wonder that we stay stuck in the 19th century? Is it any wonder that when we talk about singing voice function most singers and teachers of singing are in a kind of “huh” mentality?

Will it change? We can hope so, but I have no great idea of how unless some really wealthy singer decides to create a big lab and give it lots of money for the research I’m talking about. Hardee Har Har.

The primary and most significant instrument is the human voice. It costs nothing. It is always available. It is capable of making a very wide range of pitches, vowels and sound qualities and volumes and carries within it all the emotions that human beings experience.

A person is known by her character. This is the sum of her actions, her words and her expressions and the day to day events of how her life is lived. When we speak of someone with a “strong character” we might mean someone who is influential through their personal integrity or through their example of overcoming adversity. We speak of someone who can be counted on when the going is rough, someone who is responsible even when that responsibility is difficult, someone who is able to think not just of herself but of others, sometimes more of others than of herself.

A person who tells the truth, even when doing so is hard; a person who stands up for what is fair and unbiased; a person who understands what it is to suffer and experience pain, a person who knows great joy just from seeing the sunset or hearing a child laugh; such a person is a treasure to others — a person like this leaves the world a better place just by being alive.

There is much now in the world that is not good. Lying, cheating, stealing, hatred, anger, great amounts of fear, all manner of suffering, illness, pain and struggle. There are those who feed on these dark emotions, making other’s lives more unsteady, all the while claiming to be the people with “the truth”. Arrogance, ignorance, hubris, self-aggrandizement, self-centeredness, greed, betrayal — the list is long. Sometimes people get so confused they can no longer tell true from false. That is a dire situation indeed.

What has this to do with a fully connected voice you may ask? Everything. Someone who has developed the human voice to its fullest, which takes years of diligent work and practice, brings forth in it every aspect of sound. It is then and only then when it can reflect fully the wide scope of human experience. It is then that it is strong, powerful, clear and moving.

When words are spoken by such a person, while that person feels deeply what it being said, the effect is always commanding. The words ring out with a special kind of energy, one that is hard to describe in words. When the sounds are sung, this effect is magnified many times over. The sound of an open, alive, vibrant voice singing words that are connected to deeply felt emotion and communication leave an impression like none other on earth. It is not for nothing that many really famous singers have been able to transcend nations, languages, politics, ages, and styles. When Luciano sang in NYC’s Central Park, half a million people would come, and for Streisand as well. Pavarotti mostly did not sing in English. People didn’t care. He mostly sang opera. Also, people didn’t care. They came for that SOUND and the emotion it always carried in it.

If you work on your voice, you must also always work on your body, and if you work on both, you must also work on who you are. It’s a package. The vocal development becomes a spiritual path. And, eventually, you discover your voice. You discover what it is you want to say, what you HAVE to say, in this life that is your message and yours alone. You uncover the vibration not just of your voice, but of your deepest soul desires.

And if you succeed in this, you find a place that cannot be any of the small, closed things I wrote about above. It becomes nearly impossible to be greedy, mean, narcissistic, arrogant, or anything else dark and horrible. You find that you fall in love with the human race and the planet on which we dwell and that your voice blends with the sound of the wind, the ocean, the birds and the laughter of children just as surely as it sends out messages of music and mind.

The power of a fully connected voice is the same power as that which called life into existence. It is that nameless something that is in everything and of everything which we know as life. It is one of the most powerful forces in the world.

If I had a dollar for all the referrals I’ve made in my life, I could retire. I have sent countless students to other teachers for all kinds of reasons. I don’t get any money or publicity for doing this. I do it because it is the right thing to do. Sometimes the student wants a teacher who is close to home, sometimes they are looking for a teacher with a certain type of expertise, sometimes they are trying to find a teacher who is available on a certain day or at a specific time, sometimes they want a teacher who is male or female. There are all kinds of reasons.

Since I made it my business to meet as many of my colleagues as I could a long time ago, I often have a good selection of teachers to recommend and do not hesitate to give several names. These people are known to me to be long-time teachers with good reputations amongst their peers and with a solid group of students who have gone on to work. Here in New York City where a private practice teacher has to be good in order to survive, you have a lot of competition. Only those who are dedicated and reliable continue for years and years. There are a good number of people and we mostly know each other. Yes, some are “competitors” but there are always more than enough students to go around, so why worry?

Of course, I have had lots of referrals, too, from all kinds of people, not just my students. Word of mouth is strong once you have demonstrated both your expertise and your attitude. Isolated teachers may still have lots of students, but that’s just not the same as being part of a community of experts who all want to do something altruistic. They want to help their students learn to sing well.

I have been around the vocal medical community long enough to know that even the highest level specialists disagree. They have different points of view about what is best for a patient and what is the most effective treatment option. They do seem to be willing, at least from an outsider’s point of view, to discuss these differences in an open forum such as a meeting, conference or panel discussion. I wish the same could be said for singing teachers, but this has not much been my experience, although I do think it is better now than it was 30 or 35 years ago. Because more teaching is based on science and function there is less “personal mystery” involved in teaching and this levels the field. That has to be a good thing. One’s approach to teaching, however, is more than a way of explaining the process of singing, it is also about how the information is presented and how it is taken in by the student. We have all known very bright people who could not communicate or relate socially to others.

If you are teaching, particularly if you are just starting out, make every effort to be a participant in your community of teachers, musicians and performers. Get to know them, appreciate them and let them know you. In time, if you are consistent and patient, many good things can come from these associations. Do not be afraid to give your time to a common cause. In the end, you may get many referrals and one day, like me, you may also be able to refer students to other teachers because it is the right thing to do.

Muscle Tension Dysphonia or MTD is a rather newly labeled diagnosis of vocal function aberrant behavior. It is common in those who are professional level singers, sometimes very high level singers with long successful careers.

The symptoms of MTD are wide ranging. It can be hard to get this diagnosis if you are seeing an ENT who is not familiar with professional voice users or the demands and requirements of professional level singing. A typical issue is the loss of the ability of the voice to match pitch. Sometimes the singer can be a full half step flat. This can be very unsettling, in that the person is clearly hearing the pitch and striving to reproduce it, but it just won’t come out accurately. Further, sometimes the voice just “shuts off” at a specific pitch, meaning that it no longer goes above or below certain notes, no matter how much effort the vocalist exerts. This can cause all kinds of compensatory behavior including pushing, forcing and ensuing vocal fatigue.

If the problem causes other issues like instability of vibrato, inability to sustain pitches, loss of control over volume, or loss of range, it could incorrectly be assumed that the singer is experiencing vocal technique problems. In the case of a very experienced singer, however, with lots of career success and life experience, the likelihood that the person will somehow “forget” how to breathe or “match pitch” or “create resonance” is small.

Because this condition was recognized by the medical profession not that long ago, it can go undiagnosed and that can cause the vocalist to believe that he or she is a hypochondriac or that he has experienced some kind of mental/emotional breakdown. The lack of ability to sing, when one’s identity has been intricately wrapped up in singing, is highly distressing. The complete lack of explanation for this situation having biological or neurological roots is even worse. Further, because the vocal folds generally look normal in MTD, if the ENT does not have the instruments to examine microscopic vocal fold irregularities, which requires expensive equipment and a very skilled eye, just visiting just any ENT may be no help. They must also examine the pharyngeal behavior for squeezing and compensation, and that means they must look not just at the folds but at the entire vocal tract. We have a growing number of throat specialists who understand these vocal function syndromes but they are not necessarily to be found just anywhere. Further, if the vocalist with the problem does not explain it well or understand that MTD could be a possible diagnosis, he or she might not ask useful questions of the MD or provide vital information that could lead to a correct evaluation of the problem. Medical tests pinpointing what’s wrong and where it shows up can be very helpful, but it might take a while to find someone who can provide this kind of diagnosis.

And, if you are given the diagnosis of MTD, you should be sent to a qualified Speech Language Pathologist who has experience dealing with professional singers with this problem. Not all SLPs have that kind of training and experience and without it, things could be very difficult indeed, in that many times singers can speak well enough, but they cannot sing. It’s not really clear why this would be so but my guess is that singing requires a much higher level of function than does conversational speech. In a sense, you can walk, but you can’t run. If you do not have assistance with speaking you really do not know if the way you are using your speaking voice is having a negative impact on how you are attempting to sing. If the SLPs is not familiar with singing, however, the sessions could be limited only to speech and that may not ultimately get the person back to singing again.

Therefore, if you or anyone you know has any kind of similar symptoms and they do not seem to respond to normal vocal technique training, and the person was functioning at a relatively high level for quite some time before the problem existed, you should yourself or they should be diligent in getting the right kind of help. It is very possible to encourage the vocal folds to return to normal function, as long as you know what you are doing, but it takes time, patience and perseverance. Looking for a Singing Voice Specialist who has successful experience helping to resolve MTD is very important.

I have had great success with some very recalcitrant vocal fold issues in singers at a high level who “just lost” their ability to sing and were totally distraught at this development. (Who wouldn’t be?) How I learned to be helpful was through trial and error, observation of SLPs, work with medical doctors and lots of years of life experience singing and teaching. I also have a good deal of “intuition” that helps me and that was cultivated deliberately as well, although I had some strong natural tendencies at the outset. Please help spread the word that MTD is real and that is can be addressed by a team of skilled and experienced voice care professionals.

When tackling a tough vocal technique problem you cannot go in a straight line. It is very much like sailing into the wind — first you sail to the right, then you make a sharp turn and sail to the left, but always on the diagonal. It takes longer, but you get there.

If you attempt to get rid of deeply buried tension straightforwardly, you will likely make the tension you want to release worse. Since the remedies you use (from Somatic Voicework™, of course) work well on most people with simple problems, you will wonder, what’s wrong here? You might even start to blame the student/singer for not trying hard enough, for not being motivated, for not wanting to “let go” and a dozen other things. You could get frustrated and confused, and that would surely not help the vocalist.

It isn’t easy, as a singing teacher, to address such issues, but it can be done. The idea is to take your time, progressing slowly through several stages. If you are going to dismantle a building, you start with the things that do not support the weight of the structure. You don’t take down the support structure until the very end.

With vocal problems of this nature, you must first relax whatever you can see on the outside of the body and get a free response of movement there as well. That means that the torso, the neck and shoulders, and the head over the shoulders, should not only be free of visible tension but free of “holding” or “striving” as well, especially during the exercises. You need movements to be small, simple and gentle, for a long time (say several weeks, not several minutes), but you must vary them gently so neither you nor the student gets bored. You must work to create a wider arc of movement, using exaggeration and “tools” like the straw and the cork, and you can also have the student do gentle self-massage and other maneuvers.

In between each exercise, you must go back (at least in your mind) to the auditory balance between chest on the low pitches and head on the upper pitches and the kind of vowels you are getting. An unconstricted, open and balanced throat will produce an undistorted set of vowels, particularly if the singer has been encouraged to learn what undistorted vowels are along the way. Vowel distortion that shows up consistently when you are asking for a specific sound in someone who understands what is being requested occurs because the throat shape is distorted through tension. That is true of pitch as well, especially in someone who can hear the difference between being flat or sharp versus someone who does not. Those who have poor pitch sense will learn to hear better as they go along, because function will get better. Getting them to the ball park of the pitch, as you get the throat to be in the ballpark of openness and freedom can be tedious, unless you love humanity and you love singing and want to give another human being the opportunity to do something spectacular, like singing, by sharing patiently what you know. Then, it could never be tedious. It can in fact, be wondrous.

If you want the high notes to be “warmer” and “more open” and have a “fuller sound”, you have to create more space in the vocal tract. The way to do that is by going to the bottom of the range (low pitches) by singing in a relaxed “foghorn” sound on /o/ or /a/ for a while at moderate volume until the tongue and jaw are very relaxed and the larynx can rest low in the throat without manipulation. If you are working with a female, and then gently carried this sound up across E/F just above middle C, and back down again, over and over, gently and slowly, and gradually allowed it to get louder, that would be next. Then you would have to slowly increase the volume. The pitch range would vary with males and females but not the activity.

At just about the time this is all working, you would have to STOP and do something opposite. Why? Because if you do not, then you make the alternate behavior a destination not just a resting place and that’s not a good thing. Using the above example, you would then have to shake things up, going to tongue/jaw activities, because all constriction of the interior muscles of the throat causes tongue issues. It is your job, NOT THE JOB OF THE STUDENT to shake those tensions lose. There are a whole bunch of exercises that would be appropriate and work, but you would have to understand what to do with them and be patient while they had an effect.

Then, you would go to a small vowel, like /i/, but much higher and lighter, striving for head, but NOT open — closed — as this should be slightly easier. Staccati or rapid scales would be useful. Other exercises in this vein might be necessary, in succession, and there would also always have to be, in the back of your mind, the idea that you are listening to both register balance and vowel sound accuracy. You have to play with vowel sound shapes, with volume and with both slow sustained exercises and well as fast ones. Then you could go back to “foghorns” for a while. Zig zagging back and forth until you are close to the opposite shore in your sailboat.

Finally, you could do open octave slides on /a/ at about mezzo forte, rising slowly from mid range. If the breathing is good (and that would have to be addressed along the way, too), then there would be a very good chance that your student’s high notes would suddenly “pop open”. Ta-da – you are at the dock!

This entire process can take A YEAR if the person is an older person who has been singing for a while, and that’s with lessons not less than twice a month and consistent practice in between. During that time, the student/singer would be more or less “discombobulated” or go through a period of vocal “limbo” where the old habits were not always apparent, but not necessarily gone yet, and the new ones were not yet stable and taking over automatically. This is a scary and upsetting time for the singer and the teacher has to support this with explanation and encouragement.

If you want to read more about this get “Psyche and Soma” by Cornelius Reid. It’s out of print, but you might find it on line somewhere. He talks about functional vocal training at length. Just remember that he wrote for classical singers only and I took his work and stood it on its head, so to speak, to make it work for CCM vocalists. Somatic Voicework™, my method, is functional training but it includes the body as being part of the process, and the heart and mind as vital ingredients in making a vocal artist.

Most singing teachers are alone in their studios with their students. Most singers are alone when they practice. This isn’t a particularly good situation for either.

If you are in a big city, you can do what I am doing now, which is renting a studio in a public studio rental location. I am in mid-town Manhattan, in the theater district, at a place that has auditions, rehearsals, and lessons going on all day every day. It is similar to being in a university conservatory where all the practice rooms are right next to each other and some of the sounds being made in each studio bleed through into the studios alongside. I am renting space, instead of teaching in my apartment, because I am in the midst of changing some things at home. I haven’t done this in three years, and it’s always a good experience because it startles me into being more in touch with the real world of teaching singing.

It’s hard not to be totally distracted by what I hear through the walls. Yesterday I heard a young soprano running through some classical piece I didn’t recognize. The sound was disconnected from any semblance of emotion or communication and had a fairly wide and uneven vibrato. Even through the walls it wasn’t something you would ever want to have to pay to hear. Down the hall, there was a man singing one of the Verdi arias. He was a baritone but he was singing in a wooden heavy sound that wasn’t too bad at full volume in mid range but his high notes were belted, without modified vowels. I could hear a faint voice, (no words) mumbling something in between, (I assumed this was the teacher or coach) and then he would begin again in the same way. Today, I heard a young woman with a female speaking in between. She had a boy soprano sound, thin and high and started out well enough, although the sound would only have been useful if she had, indeed, been a boy soprano. It gradually gave out on her, tightening more each time she repeated the vocal exercise she was doing, until finally the high notes were off pitch and then just cut off as she attempted them. This was followed by her working on “On My Own” from Les Miz. A worse song you could not possibly find for someone with this voice to attempt to sing.

I assume that these vocalists are paying for teaching/coaching and maybe also for the room. I can’t help but think that none of this has to be happening. Things would be quite different if we had a world in which truthful information about creating new vocal behavior was as easily available as information obtained on the web on all kinds of other topics. Of course, it’s true that there is “information” about singing available in cyberspace, much of it is less than useless.

Exercises for the voice are stimuli. They are meant to elicit a response and therefore lead to new or different vocal function. The exercises have to be used correctly and the teacher has to know what response he or she wishes to prompt in the student’s throat or body in order to choose the appropriate pattern of pitch, vowel and volume. Most teachers just guess. Others assume they know what the student should be doing, so they attempt to go there directly. This usually causes manipulated change, not genuine freely produced vocal adjustment.

If you live in a city, see if you can rent space where you might sit in the middle of a bunch of singing teachers and just listen for a while. If you live in an area near a college or school, ask if you can observe some teachers. If you can go to a conference where you will watch people teach, attend as many teaching sessions as you can. You will see and hear all kinds of things that purport to be singing instruction and you will realize that much of what passes for teaching is just guessing. Sometimes, if the student is intelligent and musical, motivated and creative, guessing can work. Trial and error is valid in certain circumstances. You will also encounter lots of things that are nonsensical, useless, confusing, convoluted, unnecessarily complex, and just plain stupid that are perpetrated on unsuspecting singing students. You will find hapless students who are paying to struggle with instruction that is not illuminating their path (educate comes from “educare” which in Latin means to draw out or point the way), and in fact makes things obscure and mystifying. Do this so that you will remember how important it is for you who teach to know what you are doing.

Lest We Forget: Above All DO NO HARM.

Breathing is the most significant activity of the human body. No one has ever committed suicide by holding her breath.

Your limbic brain is programmed to get the oxygen in and the carbon dioxide out no matter what obstacle it has to overcome to do so. It is the reason people drown, because sooner or later, you will inhale. People have trained themselves over years and years to go as long at 15 minutes without breathing, but they are very rare. Most people can barely hold their breath for a minute.

Breathing shuts down when you are frightened. It is part of the “flight-fright” programming in the limbic brain. It works the same for the animals. When they are frightened, they freeze. For us, our breathing gets very shallow, the blood flows into the core of the body leaving the external areas cold and the forehead also gets cold and clammy. You cannot override this response. If it is strong enough, you will go into shock. The whole system shuts down.

Deep breathing is often a response to relief. We let out a big sigh. Sometimes it is a result of deep relaxation and contentment. In all cases, it is the fuel which allows the body to best do its job of being alive.

Aliveness is the capacity to experience life through the body through the five physical senses. We experience the physical world through what we see, hear, smell, taste and touch. The phrase “being spirited” usually connotes the idea that an individual is full of life, exuberant, and spontaneous. Having “high spirits” would mean being optimistic, energized and happy. In some traditions breath is equivalent to spirit. In the Catholic Church, receiving the “Holy Spirit” is evinced by a feeling of grace, humility and inspiration. The word inspire means to “fill someone with the urge or ability to do something”. [Oxford English Dictionary, 2006]

The lungs are the vehicle for the breath to enter and leave the body. Oxygen is converted there to energy which goes into the blood stream. It is used as fuel to run the other organs, including the heart, until the blood returns depleted of oxygen and full of carbon dioxide, where it is released into the air, and the cycle begins again, thousands of times a day. For the most part, this breathing process happens on its own, without any conscious direction or effort. We can, however, learn to breathe very deliberately. Singing is an activity that asks us to do just that.

Inhalation is largely related to postural stance. The rib cage needs to be strongly open and expanded and it takes quite a few muscles in the body to accomplish this effectively. A “deep breath” is one in which the air goes all the way down into the lungs, filling them up to the bottom, where they are widest. A comfortably lifted, open rib cage, without shoulder tension and without tightening or shortening the pectoral muscles, allows for the fullest, deepest inhalation; one in which the lungs are fully expanded to maximum capacity. Since the body doesn’t do this on its own without being stressed (like running in a race), learning to elicit this behavior deliberately, while standing still, takes time. And, doing it repetitively is also not something the body does without vigorous physical activity, so one must learn this as well. Controlling the exhalation requires that the ribs remain stabile, and not collapse, (this is a very weird behavior to teach the body) and that the abdominal muscles simultaneously engage during exhalation to keep the pressure level consistent even though it is dropping inside as the lung volume decreases. All of this is learned behavior as well.

If you do not fully inhale and exhale, you will inhibit your ability to feel and experience deep, free emotions, and to release them. If you doubt this, watch any young child. Emotions flow through them all the time. Happy one minute and sad the next. They make no effort to “control” their feelings. Since emotions are meant to move (like waves) through the body, as physical sensation, any attempt to suppress emotion will suppress feeling. Suppression is done through shallow breathing, so if you don’t feel you don’t breathe and if you don’t breathe you don’t feel. They are equal partners. Since singing is about being expressive (unless you want to sing like a robot), you need to learn to ride on the exhalation, as sound, guiding it, but not holding it back. The deep equilibrium that one acquires after training the voice for a while allows the larynx to stabilize the vocal fold response such that the folds allow just enough air to pass through them for an appropriate sung sound to emerge. The final effect is to blend emotional expression, musical expression and vocal sound into a seamless whole.

We are in an epidemic of emotionless singing. Jazz is filled with insipid, breathy singers who don’t really feel much of anything. A great deal of what ones hears is effect. It is, unfortunately, all too rare to hear a full throated, emotionally passionate jazz vocalist because the trend of singing only softly (which is wrongly read as being “sexy”) is so popular at the moment. The other thing that’s popular in other styles of music is various kinds of screaming. Pop, rock, gospel, country, R&B, all kinds of styles equate loud screamy singing with emotional passion. It is, in fact, the exact opposite. The brain eventually rejects the continuous onslaught of sound as being “too much” and just registers it as all being “intense”. Intense what? You can’t tell. Loud for loud’s sake is not being expressive. And, believe it or not, the continuous vocal response to this screaming is to tighten and close the throat making it less and less possible to take in air easily. Over time, the capacity to inhale deeply becomes increasingly difficult. As a consequence, it is less and less possible to really deeply feel anything, especially subtle differences like melancholy rather than full blown despair, or frustration rather than high intensity anger. The larynx rides high in the throat, the breathing becomes shallow, the rib cage collapses and the genuine deeply felt aliveness that should be part of singing just slowly diminishes. It is insidious, but it is reliably so.

The way to be expressive is to be fully alive. The way to be fully alive is to fully breathe in and out. The way to sing authentically and uniquely is to be in touch with your body and your feelings while you sing. Nothing else can substitute.