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We all get lost. It’s part of the process. If we did not risk getting lost, we would live without adventure, without risk, without challenge. People in the arts truly cannot afford to live that way. Maybe if you work on a line in a factory, doing the same thing over and over, you take different kinds of risks (at the race track, at the card table, on a ski slope) than artists do, but if you are a performer, you have to always be risking going over the edge to find the new you. Sometimes that new you can be in hiding. That’s not fun.

It is really frightening and frustrating when you are trying your best to “let go” and whatever it is you are trying to let go of refuses to follow your intention. It keeps hanging on and on, like gum stuck to the bottom of your shoe, and even if you understand that this is part of the process, it doesn’t make it easier or more pleasant. It would seem to be easier to give up, much easier. In the case of singers, it looks like it would be easier to just stop singing or performing in public. Hide at home, no one will care if you are not “famous”. But, you cannot hide from yourself. The only place the journey happens is inside your own consciousness. You either grapple with your own foibles or you hide from them, but hiding absolutely does not make them disappear. On the contrary, sometimes they grow like mushrooms incubating in the dark, only to poke out of the dirt and remind you they are still there.

If you come to a peaceful place about changing something and it really is a calm, solid and definite choice that makes you happy, then you know. But if you stop something because it was hard or unsuccessful, you always have that experience in the back of your mind……maybe, if I had tried that one last time……..maybe, then, I would have had a breakthrough.

Adults have more to lose here than students. The kids don’t really have the life experience to understand all that is involved. Mostly, they are open to new experiences unless they have been traumatized in some way. Adults, though, have lived through enough things in life to know what it means to succeed and to fail, to arrive or to miss the plane. Adults have to gather their courage in order to jump in one more time, trusting the unknown. How many people really do that? What kind of fabric are they made out of when they do?

Singing seems like just this nice, easy, pleasant way to have fun, and it is that. But singing in the deepest and also highest sense, when taken as an artform, is very hard. It is subtle, powerful, vast and finite all at the same time. And, even if the teacher is a good, experienced one, the journey of making the sounds is always one that we make alone. No one can get inside your throat and produce the sounds or tell you how to find them, even when you seriously need to be guided. Finding one’s true ownership of his or her own voice is a lonely dark night of the soul experience because you have to decide something that no one else can decide for you or guide you to know. Who am I? Is the sound I am making the one that belongs to my heart and soul? Is this the real me? And, if it is not, where is the real me in my sound?

The people who do not deal with things this way, deal with them through music. Is this song for me? Should I sing it this way or that way? How should I express the words or the music? What’s the best key or arrangement? Should I sing it with a piano or a guitar? How will I know if this is the essence of the song coming through me or just a facade?

I have only the highest regard for artists who really delve deeply into the meaning of life as it is expressed through their art. I think singing is, for me, the one “true” place, (although I know for others, it varies), and it is the thing that drives me, keeps me alive, buoys me when I am down, knocks me out when it is difficult, and saddens me when I am away from it. I know there are many people, just like me, who feel the same way. Are you one, too?

There is a big difference between can (am able to), should (what would be right) and ought (duty or correctness). We need to remember that.

Yes, a 15-year-old can belt the last G in “Defying Gravity”, but should she? Yes, you can teach a person to “scream” without being hurt, but is that what they ought to be doing? Yes, we can all sing all kinds of sounds but does that mean that we should all sing all kinds of sounds? We ought to know the why, when and what of some things before we rush to a quick decision.

Human beings make sounds. We cry, we laugh, we whisper, we yell. We moan, we whimper, we coo, gasp, and giggle. Almost everyone can sustain sounds and cover a certain number of pitches, go faster or slower and make them louder or softer. Doing this is part of normal human communication and does not generally take special skills. But just because we can make all kinds of sounds doesn’t mean we should make all kinds of sounds. It depends.

If you were to spend your days making every kind of sound there was to make, over and over, most people would think you were a fruitcake and your vocal folds would probably decide that they were having none of it. Just because you CAN doesn’t mean you should.

If you know that you are training your voice to do something that is out of the ordinary, and that you will have to do this on a regular basis, and that you might even be paid to do that, then you OUGHT to train yourself and your voice to be ready to do that in the best possible way. The training SHOULD help you to do what you want to do efficiently. If you know that you can scream once a night while performing in a play, then you should be doing certain things to make this easier, and you ought to realize this.

Every now and then someone thinks that everyone SHOULD learn to belt (like everyone should take a vacation to the Bahamas), but the reason for that is unknown. Why? Because it is possible? Yes, everyone who really wants to can learn to belt, but should everyone be a belter, should every voice learn how to belt just to know how? Is it so that if you do not belt, you are lacking in some way, vocally speaking? What about the reverse? Should you learn to sing classically because it will establish good vocal habits for any style? Just because you can learn to sing classically, should you? What if that is not what you want to sing? Do you do it because you ought to? Should you do something else just because, well, you can?

Sometimes teachers get ahead of themselves. They go from thinking classical singing is the “be all and end all” to thinking that everyone should learn to be a belter in the blink of an eye. Sometimes they forget that it isn’t always in the best interest of a 15-year-old to teach her how to sing that famous last “me” in Defying Gravity in Wicked, even if you (and she) can manage it. Sometimes they don’t connect the dots and look at the person, their long term goals, the feasibility of teaching a young person something that even an Olympic level vocalist is going to have to work hard to do, let alone keep on doing. Sometimes they lose track of the difference between can, should and ought. You can drive at 90 miles an hour, drunk, on a winding road in the rain at midnight, but that doesn’t mean you should. You ought to know better. You ought to know that just because you can doesn’t mean you should or you ought to.

I wish a had a dime for every person I have had to “untrain”. They come to NYC, graduates of some program in some school, singing like Wagnerians, badly, and can barely manage a music theater song written after 1965. The voices are HEAVY, thick, immbolized and very ponderous and they struggle with high notes. The breathing is often confused and imprecise but they are working hard to “support”.

After we get the voice re-organized, it’s not uncommon to hear, “Gee, this is so much easier.”

Then, when I listen to a piece of rep, it’s also not uncommon for me to ask, “Why are you making this sound and not some other sound?” Often, they don’t know. I have to remind them the reason they are making a certain kind of sound is because the person singing is expressing his or her feelings or intention and THAT is what guides the choice of sound. That runs counter to what they have been taught. Making sound for sound’s sake is the name of the game.

The same goes for standing still. I’ve written about this before. These students sing from the head up. Arms hanging limp like wet spaghetti, bodies drooping, feet planted as if stuck in a mudslide. “This is what I was told to do,” is the reply I get if i ask about why this should be the case.

The idea that the human voice can make all kinds of sounds in a free and healthy manner can come as quite a surprise to someone who has never been told and who has never had that particular experience while singing. The idea that the color of the sound, its texture and quality, comes from inside, reflecting the communication of the piece of music being sung is often a surprising one. Even classical singing is supposed to connect to real life, however exaggerated the vocal production might be. Stanislavsky worked with opera singers not Broadway performers.

Where does this dis-connect begin? Great artists somehow avoid it. Surely our great singers have been great communicators, in whatever style they sang. The artists who touch the hearts of the audience draw people of all ages and backgrounds, regardless of whether or not the listeners understand the language of the music being sung. There was a reason why half a million people would come to a concert in Central Park when Luciano Pavarotti sang……his voice was always totally filled with emotional communication, and of course, the sound itself was magnificent. On the other hand, Willie Nelson fills stadiums, too. He has almost no “voice” in a traditional classical sense, and no one cares. He communicates.

You cannot lose track of real life in art. Art is supposed to reflect life. There are all kinds of people, unfortunately, who are in the performing arts who should have kept their day job. If they end up in a powerful position, woe to everyone, and of course, there are many of these people in all kinds of places, unfortunately. People like Robert Wilson fit in this category. He is very famous opera director with a big international reputation. Wilson has stated publicly that he feels no obligation to honor either text or music and that his personal “stamp” on anything is enough. Nevermind that his productions regularly get booed loudly by the audiences. Nevermind, that he makes a bajillion dollars directing operas all over the world because opera companies think he is “cool” and “different”. If you have ever seen a Robert Wilson opera, you will know how dis-connected this man is from anything except his own ego, which is alive and well and the size of Chicago. But his presence makes for a good argument, to some people, that art can be anything, regardless, and that there is no such thing as “values” except those that the artist chooses to have in the moment. Well, OK, but then do we teach that — do we teach that art has no inherent value? That isn’t particularly teachable, if you ask me. And, if that’s so, why is it that the stuff that has LASTED, sometimes for hundreds of years, is that which is beyond the personal? Something which has universal relevance, beyond the present moment, beyond one person’s narrow perspective of his or her own importance.

It seems to me that what audiences want, what human beings want, is to see, hear and feel the human condition, their condition, reflected back to them. They want to know that what they are experiencing, others have also experienced. They want to know that there is hope, they want to be reminded that we all struggle, suffer and can triumph, or not. If we do not teach our students to sing in a way that allows them to delve into their own depths, and to express all that lies there, perhaps unknown to them, then we are not giving them legitimate tools. We are not preparing them to make the world a better, more illuminated place. We are not giving them a doorway to shed some light on the human condition so that we can all learn and grow.

If all we do is train students to make big fat sounds that are “impressive”, we aren’t teaching them anything at all. What they will learn is that they will have to undo this training in order to return to being in touch with the ordinary, plain, simple condition of being human.

Integrity is defined in the Oxford dictionary as being “honest, fair and good”. We all hope that those who teach singing are that, and that they put the welfare of their students above their own. We hope.

Of course, teachers would have to actually monitor themselves on a somewhat regular basis, asking “what’s the best thing for the student here?” Sometimes, of course, isn’t clear cut or easy to know how to answer that.

Many of the teachers who are teaching Somatic Voicework™ are people who care about integrity, they care about what the student needs and they care about being honest, fair and good. In practical terms, however, doing that in a vacuum would be quite difficult, so we have a chat room where we can discuss difficult issues or questions and be honest with each other. Sometimes there is disagreement, sometimes not, but the exchanges are fair and that makes them good.

Deep work requires integrity. Without integrity, it is very hard to be a teacher that does what teachers ought to do — light the way. You cannot create trust if you don’t tell the truth in a kind manner. You cannot ask someone to risk doing something vulnerable (a feeling that arises frequently when we try something new and difficult), and you cannot ask someone to open to their own inner workings, if they know ahead of time they will be judged or condemned for doing so. You cannot ask someone to look at their weaknesses or failings, even if they understand that is what is necessary in order to grow, if they don’t know for sure that you are also willing to look at your own. Having integrity means that you wouldn’t ask the student to do something you yourself wouldn’t do. It means seeing yourself as part of the equation and owning up to what you really do not know just as much as what you do.

I have never heard any of these issues discussed at The New York Singing Teachers’ Association meetings, and I have been a member since 1978. I’ve never heard them discussed anywhere by any organization of teachers of singing. The only place these issues are raised is in the CCM Vocal Pedagogy Institute at Shenandoah Conservatory in Winchester, Virginia, in Level III of Somatic Voicework℠ The LoVetri Method. I take the word integrity very seriously and want the people who are certified in Somatic Voicework℠ to take it seriously, too. The functional vocal work we do ultimately recreates the default position of the mechanism all the way down to the responses in the vocal folds, and as that takes place, it changes the mindset of the singer at the same time. This is work that will last because it is done slowly, and it is work that is profound, because it honors the sacredness of each voice and person. This is work that is always unique even though we do the same thing all the time. The integrity of the teachers, and the safe environment they create for their students in their studios is paramount. We live the values of honesty and fairness and we work always to be good, as teachers, as guides, and as vocalists on the path of self-discovery. We encourage everyone to think about integrity. It’s a good thing.

Integrity is something that everyone needs. You don’t get a textbook

When I was a child, my father used to tell me stories. I liked the ones he made up that were about “Jack and Orey” (Daddy, tell me a story about Jack and Orey). He concocted some characters named Oompha-Oompha and Itchy-Scratchy who were always doing funny, silly or tricky things. I don’t remember the details but I remember his stories made me laugh. He made up a bird, too, called the “Pithacanthrope Directus” who flew backwards so he wouldn’t forget where he has been. Sometimes the three ended up in one place. That was fun.

When I started singing lessons, I was 15 years old. My teacher at the time was a local person. She taught me to open my mouth on high notes and tighten my belly, to keep my ribs up and still and to roll my tongue forward and out on an /i/ vowel. That’s about all she taught me. The rest was pretty much me, since I sang decently on my own. She was my teacher until I went to college where I seemed to have entered the world of Oompha Oompha.

I attended Manhattan School of Music when it was still in East Harlem on 103rd Street off Lexington Avenue. I had never set foot in Harlem except to audition there until the first day of school when I was left to deal with the subway and bus system and the streets of that funky New York neighborhood and my first day of college all at the same time. Next, I got to meet my voice teacher, a week into things. She was a German Wagnerian soprano, who taught me in her apartment on West 86th Street, off West End Avenue. She scared me to death. She had no use for my little bird voice and I was so frightened that whatever I had learned simply departed my poor quaking brain. She concluded, and was quick to tell me, that I had little talent, whatever I had learned was completely wrong, that I couldn’t breath and that I couldn’t count, either. Nevertheless, she said she would “see what she could do with me”. We spent the next three lessons with me on her couch pushing the phone book on my belly up and down with inhales and exhales. Oompha Oompha had never been in such a wild jungle as I and she had Itchy-Scratchy to help her around whatever exotic places they were in while I was absolutely alone. I was very very lost.

By the end of that year, I could barely sing. My throat seemed frozen or piled up with heavy bolders. I was decidedly unsuccessful in “placing the tone into my forehead” or “vibrating the bones in my face” (I still can’t do that). I was unable to “release my breastbone” and “keep my ribs wide” (I could barely find my ribs, let alone make them do something on purpose). I had been convinced (without much resistance) that I was an untalented wretch with a little insignicant voice. I was not thrilled with Spanish Harlem as a place to hang out after school, either, and the thing that put me over the top was spending the night in a tenement with a fellow student who had taken an apartment nearby the school. We could hear the rats in the walls, we slept with a big knife under the bed, for protection, and the entire tiny place smelled like stale cooking grease. I turned myself into a Pithacanthrope Directus, and flew myself backwards back to Connecticut to reconsider my future.

Once home, I recovered and decided to venture out again. This time I returned to the Big Apple which now felt to me as I had imagined Oompha’s home to be…..big, strange, wild and dangerous. The denizens of this turbulent noisy place seemed to want to trample me into the ground, eat me up and spit me out and laugh all the while. Still, I percevered and found another singing teacher. She was on 39th or so, off Park. Her apartment was quite fancy. I found that I didn’t need to bring Itchy-Scratchy with me, as she told me in every lesson how remarkable I was, how talented and expressive. It caused me to wonder if it wouldn’t be better to feel a little more like Itchy-Scratchy and a little bit less like Little Mary Sunshine. Surely, being told I was good was a definite step up from what I had been told previously, but being told I was always only terrific, when I was barely 19 years old, was just suspicious. TIme to be a Pithacanthrope again. Flying backwards to the land of safety and home.

Adults who want to learn to cross over, or go from singing primarily in one style to another, have special challenges. They have more life experience, which is useful, and that can make it easier for them to understand what is needed in their “cross over” training. The musculature, however, can take more time to change, the old vocal patterns not only are deeply ingrained but there are psychological things to deal with in changing technique that can be daunting.

You cannot proceed too slowly. Both the body and the mind need time to assimilate changes, especially those that effect the deep muscles in the throat, and the vocal folds themselves. Sound is very personal. We are all used to hearing ourselves a certain way and changes made to a singer’s sound can be very traumatic if they are not done gently. Nevertheless, the vocalist has to go out of his or her comfort zone sooner or later or no change will take place.

The spiritual aspects of voice training are real. The spirit, or the innate essence of what makes each of us who we are, are inseparable from the physical aspects of breathing, moving and making sound. It is very hard to remain silent, and it is very hard to be completely still, and it is impossible to stop breathing (on purpose). Any sound we utter arises from the larynx. The command comes down from the brain’s central nervous system passing through the spinal cord to the nerves that cause the vocal folds to close and vibrate. There is no other way to make voiced sound except through the larynx, by the vibration of the vocal folds. Sometimes we forget that because we feel the result of that process, not usually the cause, except indirectly.

If the spirit of a human being is part of her character, then all the qualities one would want to see in a human being will be needed in exploring, training and developing the voice. There will be a need to have curiosity, patience, courage, perseverence. There will be a time for probing, exploring, and calmness. There will be elation in times of success (a perfect high note) and despair in times of frustration (why can’t I sound better?) There will be a need for critical evaluation of intellectually chosen goals and a need to abandon rules and regulations. In fact, finding and expressing vocal sound, especially vocal music, is challenging in every way. In the end, singing stands to make us each better human beings, with more that is good to contribute to the world. It matters not how any individual voice sounds, there is room in the world for all kinds of voices. It matters that the vocalist makes the journey and keeps being challenged by it, all through life.

Learning to cross from one kind of singing to another as an adult takes spiritual courage, intelligence, dedication, desire, patience and diligence, not to mention a lot of hard work. Even though many of us were told it was “not possible” or “dangerous” to sing more than one way, that is simply an old wives’ tale. Every day adults stick their vocal toes in the water and see what it’s like for themselves to learn to sing with new sounds, in new styles, with new patterns and learn, too, what it takes to go back to the more familiar old ways, the old friends, and thank them for being patient while we looked at new territory.

A very common occurance: Kid grows up singing with the radio/TV/internet, all the popular songs of the day (Top 40s). Kid decides he or she likes singing and wants to learn more. Kid gets ready for college, has to go either for classical or music theater training (done by classical teachers) or jazz (also done by classical teachers). Kid gets into a school and gets assigned a singing teacher.

Singing teacher has to teach “art songs”, in English and Italian, maybe German, French, Spanish or some other language, and maybe also music theater songs. Singing teacher imparts whatever knowledge he or she has to the student. Student does not “get better”. Student gets blamed. Student tries harder, manages to force the voice to do something along the lines of “resonance” (pick a place in the face/head) and “breath support”, that the teacher accepts. Student learns rep, manages to graduate (or quits school) and tries to go out and get a job singing (see previous post). Singer has “problems” and maybe manages anyway, but can’t quite get his or her voice to do what is required, or what she wants. Hmmmmmmmmm.

This is a COMMON scenario, not a rare occurance. Why?

Because you cannot layer a classical vocal technique over a voice that has grown up singing pop music without making it worse. You cannot get the proper resonance, range, power and flexibility out of a voice that is solidly locked into a “chest dominant” mid-range (which is easily camoflaged unless you know how to recognize its characteristic behaviors), no matter what kind of classical training you might have or teach. You can tell the student to “bring the sound forward”, or “resonate in the masque” (whatever that means), or your can tell her to “vibrate the bones in her face”, or you can tell her to pull her belly in (or up, or push it out or down, or all of those) to “support” the tone, and she could still “not improve”. You could tell her to “make the sound seem to go out from your eyebrows” (that’s a doozey) or “lift the tone over the back and spin it out” (even more of a doozey), or you could ask her to support from her public bone (do bones contract?), and she could still “sound wrong”.

You can ask and ask and ask and the student might finally, if she is musical and determined, sound “better” but she won’t feel free, she won’t really know how the mechanism can work if it is properly balanced and she will never experience the sheer unmitigated joy of singing a completely free sound, and for that, you can thank her instructor.

You cannot layer a classical technique over a CCM mechanism. It can never work.

You can take the CCM sound apart, rebalance the instrument, and put into place coordinated muscular responses that could not possibly arise on their own. This takes patience and time but it also takes a keen ear, good solid information about function, and lots of skill. After the sound (and the physical responses that create and effect it) is correctly organized, the student will not only be able to generate appropriate resonances and manage breath support easily, but she will also be able to go back and sing the CCM stuff (whatever style it may be), with authenticity and ease as well. It just won’t be with the same behaviors that she uses in the classical repertoire.

I have worked with many highly skilled professionals who have never been able to sing the way they knew they could because of this very real problem. Some of them have had good careers lasting for decades. All of them, however, kept seeking “the way out”, as their deep intuition knew that something wasn’t happening that should have been happening, or vice versa. If you are one of these people, there is hope, don’t give up! You need Somatic Voicework™. If you are a teacher and you have a student who “won’t improve” but seems to work hard, you need SVW™, too. Barring a vocal pathology or a deliberately passive/agressive personality disorder, if your students do not improve in a classical training program, question what you do, how you do it and why. Question yourself, not the student.

Those who can do, and those who can’t, teach.

How about those who can do and those who can’t, could have.

There are many people in the world of the arts who had “the goods”. They had talent, training, and the discipline to do something with their particular art. They may even have had a burning desire to be an artist — dancer, actor, photographer, writer, painter, or singer — and understood they the had to make the backend, the business element, also work.

But, a lot of these people never got to do what their heart really wanted to do. They tried as hard as they could, they used every resource available to them, they persevered and fought discouragment, but they did not succeed. It might have taken a long time, but sooner or later, a decision had to be made. Continue indefinitely, no matter what (some do), or call it quits, regroup, and find something else to do, like teach?

I know people here in New York who kept going with their attempts to become professional singers well into their 50s, not being successful, but not giving up, either. These people were unwilling or unable to accept that the world wasn’t going to allow them to make a living doing what they had most wanted (in this case, sing) and that if they were going to be able to earn a living, they were going to have to do that by doing something else. I also know people who “got” rather quickly “this isn’t working” and who then either got good “job jobs” or went back to school to study another subject, and made peace with making music at night, on weekends and during vacations. I also know a few people who backed into teaching, more or less because they felt it was “better than nothing”, and managed to come to some kind of balance with it, after the fact. Some of those who became teachers actually discovered that they liked teaching, and made an effort to learn more about it, to improve their skills, and, eventually, went on to be more successful as teachers than they had ever been as singers.

I know others, much less talented, who were able to carve out careers as singers simply because they had a lot of money and spent it on vocal training, excellent top-drawer musicians, on PR, on marketing, and were able, mostly due to sheer dollars spent, to “purchase” a career of sorts. This is galling, but I have to tell you, I have seen it more than once. And, after the person gets “launched” there are audiences for them. The key here is having lots of money. LOTS. Another key is being so ignorant or numb as to not know or care that you are not talented in the first place.

And then, of course, we have the folks in the category, “those who can’t, teach”. I have written about them here very frequently. The people who went to school, got a master’s degree, then a doctorate, then stayed at the same school to teach, and NEVER ever set foot on a professional stage of any kind. Some of these people have never been to New York to the Met or Broadway, or to a top jazz club, or a rock concert. Some of these people haven’t actually done anything much but study and then teach others what they have studied. I have a problem with that. Yes, I know, they have decided they are better off teaching than trying to be in “the marketplace”, but singing is NOT an academic subject, it is an applied subject.

If school is supposed to prepare you for life and if training at a school is for an applied music degree (playing or singing after school in a professional manner), then training at a school (at any level) is job preparation. If you have never actually HAD a job, then how are you going to prepare someone else to have that same job? And, if you do not understand the difference between actually dealing with singing “in the marketplace” from a first-hand direct experience platform, you cannot possibly prepare a student to go straight into being a professional.

And, if we have reached a place in our society where life experience is not better than, or at least equal to, book learning, particularly in the applied arts, then we are indeed in a sorry state of affairs. When a college or an accreditation board is willing to put someone with a brand new doctorate and no life experience above someone with decades of life experience who does not have a doctorate (and that happens every day), when dealing with an APPLIED profession, such as singing, then everyone is in trouble. The POINT of training is prepare a singer to go out into the world and earn a living singing. They may not succeed, but they should have a chance to try, and that chance can be enhanced or stiffled at the hands of the people who do the training. The person might not succeed at becoming a full-time professional singer, but at least it would not be because of lack of proper training, or lack of talent, or lack of desire, of lack of discipline, or lack of perseverence, or lack of realistic expectations, it would be because the world simply said “no”. There is nothing to do about that except come to terms with it.
The halls of academia have to answer to the profession of SINGING, not the profession of training for singing. There is a big difference.

Those who can do, and those who can’t, teach.

How about those who can do and those who can’t, could have.

There are many people in the world of the arts who had “the goods”. They had talent, training, and the discipline to do something with their particular art. They may even have had a burning desire to be an artist — dancer, actor, photographer, writer, painter, or singer — and understood they the had to make the backend, the business element, also work.

But, a lot of these people never got to do what their heart really wanted to do. They tried as hard as they could, they used every resource available to them, they persevered and fought discouragment, but they did not succeed. It might have taken a long time, but sooner or later, a decision had to be made. Continue indefinitely, no matter what (some do), or call it quits, regroup, and find something else to do, like teach?

I know people here in New York who kept going well with their attempts to become professional singers well into their 50s, not being successful, but not giving up, either. These people were unwilling or unable to accept that the world wasn’t going to allow them to make a living doing what they had most wanted (in this case, sing) and that if they were going to be able to earn a living, they were going to have to do that by doing something else. I also know people who “got” rather quickly “this isn’t working” and who then either got good “job jobs” or went back to school to study another subject, and made peace with making music at night, on weekends and during vacations. I also know a few people who backed into teaching, more or less because they felt it was “better than nothing”, and managed to come to some kind of balance with it, after the fact. Some of those who became teachers actually discovered that they liked teaching, and made an effort to learn more about it, to improve their skills, and, eventually, went on to be more successful as teachers than they had ever been as singers.

I know others, much less talented, who were able to carve out careers as singers simply because they had a lot of money and spent it on vocal training, excellent top-drawer musicians, on PR, on marketing, and were able, mostly due to sheer dollars spent, to “purchase” a career of sorts. This is galling, but I have to tell you, I have seen it more than once. And, after the person gets “launched” there are audiences for them. The key here is having lots of money. LOTS. Another key is being so ignorant or numb as to not know or care that you are not talented in the first place.

And then, of course, we have the folks in the category, “those who can’t, teach”. I have written about them here very frequently. The people who went to school, got a master’s degree, then a doctorate, then stayed at the same school to teach, and NEVER ever set foot on a professional stage of any kind. Some of these people have never been to New York to the Met or Broadway, or to a top jazz club, or a rock concert. Some of these people haven’t actually done anything much but study and then teach others what they have studied. I have a problem with that. Yes, I know, they have decided they are better off teaching than trying to be in “the marketplace”, but singing is NOT an academic subject, it is an applied subject.

If school is supposed to prepare you for life and if training at a school is for an applied music degree (playing or singing after school in a professional manner), then training at a school (at any level) is job preparation. If you have never actually HAD a job, then how are you going to prepare someone else to have that same job? And, if you do not understand the difference between actually dealing with singing “in the marketplace” from a first-hand direct experience platform, you cannot possibly prepare a student to go straight into being a professional.

And, if we have reached a place in our society where life experience is not better than, or at least equal to, book learning, particularly in the applied arts, then we are indeed in a sorry state of affairs. When a college or an accreditation board is willing to put someone with a brand new doctorate and no life experience above someone with decades of life experience who does not have a doctorate (and that happens every day), when dealing with an APPLIED profession, such as singing, then everyone is in trouble. The POINT of training is prepare a singer to go out into the world and earn a living singing. They may not succeed, but they should have a chance to try, and that chance can be enhanced or stiffled at the hands of the people who do the training. The person might not succeed at becoming a full-time professional singer, but at least it would not be because of lack of proper training, or lack of talent, or lack of desire, of lack of discipline, or lack of perseverence, or lack of realistic expectations, it would be because the world simply said “no”. There is nothing to do about that except come to terms with it.
The halls of academia have to answer to the profession of SINGING, not the profession of training for singing. There is a big difference.