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We have a new video clip for you to see. It’s an edited version of the interview I did with Theo Bleckmann. The entire video was 40 minutes long so this is just a little tidbit but it contains both vocal exercises and shots of Theo’s vocal folds during some outrageous sound-making. It’s cool, so please take a look.

For every Renee Fleming, Bryn Terfel, Thomas Hampson, Anna Netrebko, Stephanie Blythe or Juan Diego Flores, there are hundreds, no, probably thousands of wanabee opera singers who don’t make it. There is also a group of people who work constantly in opera, sometimes in leading roles, who are not stars. Some of these people can really sing. They may be equal to their famous counterparts in terms of sheer talent, but lacking in some key ingredient that makes a career take off big time……vocal prowess, personal charisma, lack of drive and ambition, lack of money to sustain themselves, or lack of the ability to keep going in spite of success without fame. It takes all of these ingredients, plus luck, of course, to put fire under a career and make it “world class”, even if you are a very good singer.

There is yet another group. Those folks are the ones who manage to have careers, big and small, in spite of the fact that their singing isn’t really very good. These people manage to show up in major houses, and in major roles, all over the world, and when you hear them, you wonder, “how did THAT person get to sing at X?”

Of course, one can say that about any and all of the other places where people sing, and of all the CCM styles. There are plenty of people who don’t sound good (have “good” voices) with singing careers, perhaps because the sound for its own sake isn’t so important in CCM. A good voice is helpful, but it may not be enough, especially in certain styles. Sometimes a style doesn’t want a good voice…..what good would it do someone singing heavy metal?

But opera is supposed to be about “bel canto” if you read the articles, even if the people singing are in a “verismo” production, or singing Monteverdi. No one who is just bellowing or wobbling or woofing is singing in a beautiful manner, but you can hear voices like that in just about any operatic production. Go to any major house and really listen. You will hear for yourself.

I have a theory about why this might be so and it is that many people are taught to deliberately manipulate their sound for the sake of resonance. They believe that the only way to sing is to make the voice go where they want it to go, and consequently have no idea that it can be freed, emancipated and released. They do not understand that the muscles involved in vocal production should not be held still or squeezed while singing but rather think that this is what a singer is supposed to do. Classical singers can be very diligent about producing a certain kind of “ringy” resonance at the cost of other things, up to and including not actually noticing that the sounds they end up with are down right ugly. (Heaven forbid that they actually be encouraged to listen to themselves).

Another reason is that people can start out sounding good but think they no longer need to work on their instrument and its technical capacities once they are working. If that happens, over time, habits creep in, and before you know it, what was once a great voice is a not-so-hot voice and the person singing doesn’t even notice.

I remember once attending a debut recital here in NYC of someone I knew who had coached with some very high power people — experts in art song and opera that were recognized world wide. She was herself a fine linguist and pianist and had worked long to get her mezzo soprano ready for this big event. I was eager to hear her and was hopeful that this would “put her on the map”, but from the moment she opened her mouth all I could do was think “gee whiz and oh dear”. The voice was caught, cloudy, merky, and unpleasant sounding. She had clearly been taught to get those vocal muscles to go to that “resonant spot” without the requisite adjustments to make the voice lovely and beautiful. The recital was nice, all the songs properly sung, but nothing came of it, as without a radiant voice, frankly, who cares? The saddest thing was that it didn’t need to be the case. All voices can become beautiful, if the teacher knows how to guide the student there and the singer is willing to go and is patient.

Some of the people who don’t sound very good and manipulate thinking “that’s the way it’s done” do not have careers on the stages of the world. They go instead, to teach. They go to faculties large and small where they pass on what they do not really know or understand to their students. Because they have studied, have pieces of paper to prove it, and because there isn’t any standard about hiring teachers who actually sound good as teachers, this mis-information gets perpetuated. It ain’t the real thing, but the poor students don’t know that.

I think that is very sad.

Now that Peter Gelb is at the helm of the Met, we can expect that opera is going to go in new directions, whether people like it or not. Expect electronics to invade the Met, and all opera, and by that I don’t mean just amplification of the voices. I mean composers from the worlds of rock and contemporary music are going to be asked to write operas and the operatic voices are going to sing them, and what in the world will we call THAT? Operock? Popera? (No, that’s saved for the likes of Il Divo). How about Rockera?

Don’t laugh. Thirty years ago I was asking the voice scientists “Why don’t you research other styles of music?” THIRTY YEARS AGO. Now, it’s happening all over the world. The scientists are finally entering into the 21st century. It won’t take long for the rest of the musical world to catch up and then, when the singers are asked to do whatever we call it…….operapop?……who is going to train them and how will that training look? Won’t we need both our classical roots and our CCM Pedagogy?

Thirty years from now I will either be dead or too old to care, but I hope that this statement rings in the ears of those who are threatened by change. I hope that it will be seen by then that the arts must stay alive to be meaningful and that the human voice is never EVER limited in what it can do or express. Technology can help us or hurt us, but that decision is up to us.

In 1977 when I wrote in my journal that I wanted voice science to understand what happens when someone sings “pop” music, I was 28 years old. I was viewed as an upstart, I suppose, by the scientists, but they treated me nicely, anyway, in that I was at least interested in their work. The voice teachers who came to the Symposium in those days used to stand up and say to these researchers that they were “way off base” in thinking they could try to figure out the “art of singing” by making those “funny charts and graphs”. They were wrong. The scientists were much more tolerant of the teachers than vice versa. Now, when there is so much partnership between the various voice disciplines, the people squawking about science not being “in touch” with singers are the ones who are looked at as being “weird”. Time passes, things and attitudes change.

To those young people who are reading this, remember, the future is unimagined, and you never know where your vocal folds will fly. Never say no to what comes your way. Find a healthy, happy and truthful way to sing it, and grow into that creative experience. You never know what you will end up being able to teach to the NEXT generation!

Classical students at colleges and conservatories are still giving graduate recitals as a pre-requisite to getting their degrees, both as undergrads and graduate students. They still do recitals in traditional forms. Perhaps some of them are allowed to put in a music theater piece or two, most likely in a “legit” or “mixy” vein, but that is certainly not a requirement. In some programs, no music theater is expected and may even be prohibited.

Doctoral students MUST sing classical recitals. There are no doctoral degrees available in any kind of vocal study except classical.

The music theater students, however, are frequently required to sing classical songs as a part of their recitals, regardless of whether or not they will be singing in any classical repertoire after graduation. This is to prove that the students have been “properly trained” and learned to sing classically, because not to have been trained in this manner is to imply that their training would have been insufficient or incorrect.

Raising the question, “why should this assumption be made?” is not a simple thing. It challenges long and deeply held premises and asks that the entire idea of voice training for singers be re-examined.

If all classical students were required to sing in at least one other style in a recital, not with “classical” vocal production, but with something else, then asking the music theater students to sing “classically” would be fair. Since this is not the case, there continues to be a double standard in the schools, which makes the music theater students (and maybe jazz students, too) have to learn two kinds of vocal skills in the same time frame that the classical students have to learn only one.

AND

If someone graduates with a degree in a language, say French, we would expect that the majority of the student’s study would have been in the French language and culture. If, however, you graduate with a degree in any kind of vocal performance, what your emphasis was on is unknown. Some schools rely heavily on acting training, some insist the singers study musicianship skills, others give dance instruction, some require piano studies, some train the speaking voice, and some require various things from this list, but not all of them. Nonetheless, pretty much across the board, the student is going to get a one-hour voice lesson once a week –sometimes less. Yes, there may be other singing going on in classes or choirs, in rehearsals or in performances, but lessons all over the world in schools of all levels are most often given once a week for an hour. That means they get less individual voice training than anything else. Is this reasonable?

Wouldn’t it make sense for the student to get a lesson every day? That way, practice is supervised daily and there is much more chance that the student will progress consistently and safely. (Luciana Pavarotti studied every day with his teacher for seven years before he sang his first performance. I wonder if that’s why he sounded so amazing when he first began his career). Perhaps it would make sense for students to study in class as well….two or three hours in a voice/rep class every day. The acting students at NYU/Tisch spend 8 hours a day three days a week in acting class, so it’s not a crazy to think that the vocalists could get more time than they do.

Why don’t we do that? Why don’t we want to look at a variety of ways that might be better than the one we have universally accepted as being “the standard approach”? I know there are both economic and time constraints that press upon the schools, but nothing HAS to stay the same. It takes agreement on the part of many people for these kinds of standards to remain intact.

I don’t have an answer here, I am just making an observation. I do think, however, that until and unless these issues get discussed at Singing Congresses and meetings, things will plod along as they are. Those who suffer most from our inability to address the inequities of the “system” are the students. Just because it’s what we got when we were studying doesn’t mean it has to go on, and just because the only way to have been trained for the past couple of hundred years was called “classical”, it doesn’t mean that we can’t have recently developed new methods that are appropriate for today’s music that are just as effective but different. We aren’t saying that classical training is bad, or even that it shouldn’t be the basis for vocal study if it is thought of more as functional training rather than training aimed at specific repertoire. We are saying that it’s time for some adjustments in all sorts of places. It’s up to us to be the changers.

Little Christina Aguilera, with her Blonde-blonde locks, in her rail thin body, sang the “you-know-what” out of “It’s A Man’s World”, made famous by the Godfather of Soul, James Brown, at the 2007 Grammy’s. You can see it on YouTube if you want.

She sang very well, and she didn’t hold anything back. I wouldn’t imagine that her rendition of the song would stand up to 8 shows a week on Broadway, but for a once-in-a-lifetime performance, she used everything she had. I would like to ask the teachers of singing who think that the 24/26 Italian Arts Songs are necessary to developing a strong vocal technique how those songs would have applied to what she was doing or helped Christina be OK. I would actually like to ask her, too.

I wouldn’t have thought that this song could bring an audience to its feet when sung by a caucasian female, and I would have been wrong. I want to know if she could sing “Nessun Dorma” (like Aretha Franklin did) and get the same reaction. Probably not, as those who know the song would still be disturbed by this kind of rendition and those who don’t wouldn’t know the difference……

I write this, yet again, because we had another discussion the other night with some colleagues about classical training being all you need, and classical training being different than any commercial sound because of a style, or the singer’s talent, or the formant frequencies shifting (by themselves, I guess). No amount of arguing changes their minds. Even aural examples are heard as being “almost the same” (when they were totally not the same). My head spins.

If you have the “talent” to sing like a pop singer while training to be an opera singer, good for you. That’s like learning golf so you can be better at tennis. It might work, in that they both require good eye/hand coordination. But if you are like most people who want to learn to be good at tennis, and you approach a tennis teacher who takes you out to a tennis court and puts a tennis ball and raquet in your hands, you would feel better, no?

Here in New York we have quite a few places to see and hear live performers, beyond Broadway, Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall. We have Off-Broadway, off-off Broadway, jazz clubs large and small, a few cabaret places, a few rock clubs, conservatories and school recital halls and “the fringe” — small theaters in private lofts or other odd places. On any given night (and some days) there are literally dozens of possibilities to hear someone sing live (miked or unamplified). And that doesn’t count the boroughs or the burbs, if we want to travel just a little bit.

We who live here forget how unusual this is. In many places attending a performance to hear singers live might be a very hard thing to accomplish. Large churches and synagogues usually have good music programs with skilled vocalists, and large towns and cities also have concerts of all kinds, as do the bigger schools. That still means, though, that a lot of people have the opportunity to see and hear live vocalists of professional caliber only rarely.

If it weren’t for TV, radio, film and now the internet, there are millions of people who might never hear singing at all. And there are probably a few people who will hear only “canned” singing in their lives. Those of us who sing know only too well that you can mess around with a recording in all kinds of ways, especially now, and that what one hears on a recording doesn’t always reflect the live sound well. If you have never had the opportunity to hear Renee Fleming live you wouldn’t know that her voice in person is much more radiant and “present” than it is on any of her recordings. In my opinion, it just doesn’t record well. You might also lose entirely the complete lack of power in Cecilia Bartoli’s voice. Expressive though it may be on recordings, at Carnegie Hall you notice how she performs and what she does with the music but not much the voice itself, as it is just plain unimpressive.

It is difficult to teach singing without live aural models. As I have said many times before, you can’t sing what you can’t hear. There have been many excellent blind singers but none that were deaf. If you grow up listening to voices that have been altered in the recording studio (and most are tweaked at least a little during the mastering of the raw sessions) you never know what the person would sound like in the room standing next to you.

A well trained classical voice of a mature adult who has a dramatic instrument is a “thing of nature and a wonder to behold”. A well trained belter can have a similar effect but not for the same reasons. Other voices may or may not have enough presence to be heard acoustically, but that would depend quite a bit on the place the singer is in while performing. If might be fine in a resonant hall but not even audible in a “dead space”.

In addition to listening to recordings, it is important that singers and teachers of singing listen to live singing of the highest quality available. It is also important that singers and teachers of singing have good models on which to base their own sounds. Just as I advocate making the sounds, I also advocate having someone who sounds good in those sounds as a guide. If you try to sing like Satchmo without understanding that his voice is not one to imitate, you would get in trouble in a few flaps of your false folds.

If you do not have such live singing available in your town, and you are teaching singing, of any kind, you MUST go to the nearest big city at least once or twice a year and hear professional vocalists of all styles live. There is no substitute for this. If you are serious in your teaching, you must come to New York at least every five years and go to a Broadway musical, a concert at Carnegie Hall, an opera at NY City Opera or the Met, and a jazz gig at one of the famous clubs — minimum! You ought to also be singing live at least once a year (if you are not doing this as a matter of course) so you don’t forget what that experience is like, for as long as you teach.

What is all of our training of singers for if not to perpetuate the vocal arts? If we don’t support live performance and study it as well, and if we rely only on recorded music to give us our criteria, we are living in a false world. Remember, the art of singing is about communication and what kind of communication goes on between you and an iPod or a boombox?

A number of years ago, I heard the great operatic baritone, Håken Hagegård, speak and remember well his topic, as it was startling. He described how he operates during a performance. Having heard him at Lincoln Center sing the famous Schubert song cycle “Winterreise”, which was gorgeous but truly chilling, I could only say that he ranks amongst the finest singer/actors I have ever witnessed, and I was eager to hear his talk.

I can’t quote him exactly but the gist of his message was that he sings to the audience. He said that if someone falls asleep in the 7th row, he sings to the people next to that person, looking directly at them, until they wake up the guilty party. (Which he said they always do!) He wants to bring the song to each and every person in the audience. At his school in Stockholm, “HåkeGården”, they train young singers an actors in all kinds of approaches to performance so that they can capture an audience. The ability to do that is a GIFT.

WELL

If you are in New York and you want to study acting, sooner or later you will encounter the version of Stanislavski’s training for actors called The Method, as all of the great acting schools here were started by one of his disciples (Uta Hagen and Herbert Berghof, Sanford Meisner, Stella Adler, Lee Strasberg, and others) and that’s pretty much all there is here to study, (unless you bump into someone teaching Shakespeare). In any one of these training programs, you find out in short order that there is no audience. There are the three walls of the stage and the fourth wall separating the performers from the audience — the fourth wall that would be there in a room in real life.

There are other things you learn. Actors “practice the craft of acting”. They must be “organic”. They do not “act” or “portray” emotions. They must always be specific, and they must NEVER EVER play to the audience or try to entertain.

Singers are encouraged in these schools to sing with their arms hanging limply at their sides and move only when the “movement arises from within”. In the act of standng there like a wet noodle, waiting for some overwhelming urge to move to overtake you like a Tsunami, you are taught to disconnect from the very impulse that would help you get where you need to go. The body becomes a mast and the arms become the unfurled, empty sails. Stanislavski never intended that.

The incongruity of singing an animated song with a droopy body doesn’t seem to bother anyone at these schools but it surely bothers me. Singing as if all emotion was experienced from the neck up is unnatural, but that is often what I see in students. In an effort to get these young people to be calm and believable, the fact that they are standing up in front of an audience, who came to be moved and entertained, is deliberately thrown out. Theatricality is considered a sin.

Irving Berlin and his contemporaries wrote lots of songs for Vaudeville. The songs were done by great performers like Al Jolson, Eddie Cantor, Phil Harris, George Burns, and Beatrice Lillie, Fanny Brice, and May West….entertainers all. Most of them went on to have successful careers in film and on TV and my guess is that NONE of them had any interest in a fourth wall. Look at old shows of Ethel Merman singing to a full house. She knew how to “put a song over”. No fourth wall there.

When I sing I know who, what, where, when and why I am singing any particular song, but I also know I am singing to an audience, and I want to bring the song to them, just like Hågen Hagegård. There is a time and a place for the “fourth wall” but it isn’t in a vaudeville tune from Tin Pan Alley. I don’t want to stand there waiting for my arms to move, and I don’t want to sing to my mental image of something that is so personal that I cause the person in the fifth row to wonder who I’m staring at in the distance. I don’t want my students to do that either, but when I guide them to perform, I meet resistance. It isn’t what they are trained to do, or to respect.

I have great admiration for the actors of our time who have been trained in “the method” and who have left an indelible mark on theater, film and TV, and there are many. If, however, I was sending my son or daughter to a school to learn how to sing well enough to go out after school was over and work in Show Business, I would want that child to know how to sing to and for the audience. If they can’t do that, they won’t get a job. That’s reality, not academia. If you remember any singer in your life whose performance was compelling it wasn’t because they stood and sang with their arms hanging limply at their sides while they hid behind an imaginary fourth wall.

Just came back from a truly glorious quasi-staged version of “My Fair Lady” at Avery Fisher Hall in Lincoln Center. Stars were Kelsey Grammer, Brian Dennehy, Kelli O’Hara, Marni Nixon, Meg Bussart and Philippe Castgner. There were minimal sets, but nice costumes, great choreography, a great chorus, and, of course, the Philharmonic was the Philharmonic. Everything was wonderful and they got a well deserved standing ovation.

I kept thinking, “This is where the classical training belongs. This is the music that was written for operatically trained voices and it works when the singers are good, when they sing with clear diction and natural vowels.” Yes, it was amplified, but not too much, and it was just fine that way — the system is similar to the amplification that has been put in place at NY City Opera. It’s not intrusive at all.

I don’t think for a minute, however, that any of the principles, or even the members of the ensemble could jump in and sing “Jekyl and Hyde” or “Wicked”. There wasn’t one voice that would have been right in that music, unless the singers can sing in very different vocal qualities than were used in tonight’s production.

Classical singing teachers responded in our 2003 research that the biggest difference between classical and “non-classical” singing is the style of the music itself. No, I don’t think so. If you take opera singers and have them sing “in the style of” rock, gospel, or jazz, and they take their operatic vocal production with them when they do, they will sound silly in the music, no matter how well they understand the style, or how good the arrangement may be. It may be true that the vocal differences are slightly less obvious for males than females, in that men generally sing more in chest register, but you can’t generalize. Many females sing in a chest dominant quality and there are certainly men who have light, heady voices, and counter tenors who sing in head dominant falsetto. If you took David Daniels (one of our most well known counter tenors who is having a major classical career) and asked him to sing Val Jean (as a counter tenor) in Les Miserables, would that work? That’s a contemporary show that is mostly “legit”. He would be singing “in the style of” with the wrong vocal production and it wouldn’t work. He wouldn’t keep his job. Why is this hard to understand?

Yes, we still need good classical voices for all kinds of music, and we need people who can act and dance and we need singers to have good solid technical resources in all of those art forms if they are going to have viable careers. We do not, however, want to continue the notion that classical vocal training will prepare the voice to sing any kind of music, UNLESS the training is geared more to varied vocal production and vocal health than to one kind of music or one “resonance strategy”.

It is painful to hear someone struggling to sing music in a way that isn’t suitable, but it’s wonderful to enjoy beautiful voices and music that are matched up perfectly, as that’s the best situation one could ask for — having the sound live where it belongs.

Every voice teacher with a private studio has had a call that starts out with the following statement: “I just want a few lessons to help me with…….” If you have been teaching for a while, you have probably also gotten a call that begins with “could you tell me how much you charge?” And, of course, there is the inspiring “I’d like to find a teacher in my neighborhood” person who starts with “where are you located?”

You know before you get to the second sentence that these conversations are doomed, as you are dealing with someone who has no idea what learning to sing entails. You have to decide if you are going to take the time to educate the person about how the process works and, if you do, you know you still risk having the person tell you something like “Oh, I didn’t realize. I guess that’s not what I want after all”.

While people absolutely have a right to search for teachers they can afford and who are located in a place that is accessible to them, neither of these criteria is the best for making a choice in terms of choosing a singing teacher. One would hope that the potential student would be interested in the teacher’s background, approach, philosophy, and experience teaching. It might also be hoped that the person would be looking for someone who was willing to work with a student who had their qualifications — such as beginners, professionals, people with vocal health issues, people singing only specific styles, etc.

If I had a quarter for all of the phone conversations I’ve had with people who started out with the above sentences, I would be set for retirement. I use my “educated guess” barometer when deciding the type of response to make (long, short, simple, detailed). A lot depends upon my mood and the amount of time I have. I try to be open, polite and helpful whenever possible. I might end up referring the caller to a colleague or giving other kinds of advice. I do this because the person calling can’t help that they don’t know and because we want all aspiring singers to get whatever help they need, and if facilitating that happens to fall to me, then I have to be responsible. On the other hand, it isn’t really my job to elaborate, and it is well within ethical standards to simply be respectful and brief. This is a judgment call to be made by each individual teacher.

If we had a society that promoted study of music in general these questions might come up less frequently. Perhaps in our work, especially through those teachers who can and do write about training singers, we can help educate the public about what goes into learning our wonderful vocal art. In the meantime, when you get one of those calls, remember, you aren’t alone!

Why can’t we just think our way into the right sounds? If you just get everything lined up perfectly, isn’t the sound you are looking for “right there”, and won’t it be there every time, because your mind has it worked out precisely?

Nope. You can think until you are blue but if you don’t put the work into the system, the system isn’t going to give you what you want.

If you are a dancer and you don’t spend hours and years stretching your body, your legs aren’t going to extend to the sky, no matter what mantra you repeat, or what lovely image you think. If you are a pianist, your hands aren’t going to fly across those keys playing a gazillion notes if you haven’t sat there playing for days and weeks and months and years in preparation. If you are a golfer and you want to hit a hole in one but you only play golf once a month, you can picture yourself playing below 70, but you will have to be very lucky, indeed, to get there and stay there just by visualization.

Why, then, is singing any different? How is it that we think that we can find the one right way to sing and stop there? How many of us have a perfect “place” for the tone, a perfect target for the sound, the sweet spot where we always aim the voice? What kind of singing does that create?

Nothing complex, which singing certainly is, can be learned in a few quick lessons. Real singing requires just as much work as any art, or any physical skill, and it requires a lot of thinking, too, but not just looking for the one piece that will complete the puzzle. That is limited thinking, and not useful in learning to be a great vocalist.

We must all learn to look at how we think and what we think about, and why, and what we expect those thoughts to do. We must learn to digest, review, discuss, examine, probe, explore and experiment in order to understand our thinking process and evaluate what, exactly, we are seeking. What do voice teachers think about and why? What should a singer think about? These questions are not simple and they cannot be answered with simplistic responses.

When we discuss CCM, we are discussing something that has never been seriously examined in a scholarly manner before. When we look to enter upon a research project in any CCM style, we are setting up exploration that is very new. When we ask that CCM be taken as an equal to classical music, we are posing a new paradigm. It is important to recognize that old answers, stock answers, will not do.

Formulate dynamic questions about the process of learning to sing in any style. Give yourself permission to linger before coming to an answer, to be adventuresome and curious as to what the possible responses to the query might be. Before you decide that you have “arrived”, wonder a bit longer about whether or not the journey need have an “end”. Enjoy the pondering. Questioning is good. Be willing not to have an answer, just a map. See where you might take a new route.

Your mind doesn’t know as much about singing as your body does. You can only discover that by allowing your body, your breath and your throat to be your teachers. Questions are teachers, answers can be dead ends.

You cannot think your way into the “right” sound, but you can use your mind to find sounds you never knew existed.