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It’s very sad to give someone half a gift. It’s like giving half a birthday cake, or half a vacation, or half a train ticket (go, but don’t come back?). Giving half a gift is almost worst than receiving half a gift.

I have had occasion to work with students who are making great progress, who seem to be excited about what they are learning, who ask questions and take in whatever information or guidance I offer and then, with no explanation or warning, just disappear. I’ve talked about this before.

It pains me when this happens, and it causes me the most grief when I know that the person leaving didn’t really get the full picture, although they may have thought they did. Perhaps they thought that the whole enchilada wasn’t important, or that half of my enchilada would be a great mix with someone else’s half a pizzaburger. We might have a voice that is getting freer, more responsive, stronger, higher, whatever, and a singer who is learning to go more deeply into her or himself, mining their own inner landscape, and then they fall off a cliff.

I recall a few students who left because they wanted to study with someone who was an opera singer or someone who is classical, and, conversely, students who left because they wanted to work with someone who was “more pop oriented” and less classical. None of these people actually asked me about my own training and background, they just left, and I heard subsequently the reasons for their departure from others. I have had students leave because I was too technical, even though I clearly state that this is what I do, and because I am not helping them find good songs, when I make no bones about that not being one of my interests or strengths. I have had a few students take one or two lessons only to discover that they are out teaching others with my approach, only it really ISN’T, because you can’t learn that in one or two lessons.

The people that say “this is what LoVetri teaches” when it is only half (or less) of what I teach or tell their students “do this exercise”, without knowing that I do the same exercises with many students, but not necessarily with the same intention or for the same reason, make me very unhappy.

It is one thing to decide to stop training because you don’t like what you are doing, or what is being produced in your singing, and you are clear about that. it is another thing entirely when you stop because you think you know everything about someone else and their approach, when you don’t and can’t possibly.

None of this is peculiar to me, or new. It is part of being a singing teacher working in the professional world in a big city and it isn’t going to change. I thought that expressing more about my frustration over the situation might be encouraging to new singing teachers, who will certainly experience their own stories along the same lines.

One can only sing as well as one’s control over the voice allows. If there is a weak place, or places that are tight, the singer will either be limited or sing badly. Period. The reason to work on perfecting technique is because it allows the singer to sing, and sing freely, with artistic expressiveness.

Emotionality in music, or the ability to allow the voice to actually carry genuine emotion, should be the goal of any good singer, no matter what style they sing. This is what people respond to, what makes the music alive and vital, and what makes for unique and memorable performances. Anyone’s voice can be emotional if they are experiencing strong emotion and making voiced sound, but using the voice healthfully in a powerfully emotional manner, over and over, in musical phrases that can be demanding on many levels, isn’t something the voice generally “just does”. It requires conditioning of the vocal muscles and the breathing mechanism, else the emotions cause strain and abuse of the vocal folds. Singing “with emotion” isn’t necessarily easy.

Musicality is the ability to find the expressiveness and emotion in music and allow it to move through the sound. It isn’t the same thing as being a good musician, although it certainly is hoped that those who are professional are both. Most people would rather listen to a singer who is musical (although the audience wouldn’t necessarily know if the person was a good musician or not), than to someone who is an excellent musician but is emotionally flat in delivery. Talent has to do with many ingredients, but musicality is certainly a strong component in any talented performer’s lexicon.

Classical training should set up the voice to allow great emotion to pour through the sound, but often this is not the case. There is often so much emphasis on the sound for its own sake, and so much attention paid to various versions of “correct placement” or “ringing resonance” or on breathing that actually feeling emotional during a sung phrase may never happen. Making a lot of sound is impressive, but I am not won over by such displays. I would rather be moved or touched during a performance. That happens when the voice is at the complete disposal of the artist and when the artist is willing to go deep within to a place of truth while singing. Simple but very hard.

Certainly some music, and some kinds of styles and performance, isn’t meant to be continuously profound, and the various levels of intensity that any performer feels may vary quite a bit. Emotion can be expressed through many avenues, in addition to the voice alone, and sometimes a simple delivery of words and melody is enough to make for a fun or light-hearted and entertaining performance. There are also performers who do not want to risk feeling really emotional while singing, lest the emotion overtake them and the voice, and make for chaos. That is what training is for, and it is a shame that such individuals don’t know what could be available if they were to look for it.

Teachers of singing should always find a way to investigate whether or not the student is in touch with actual, real feelings while singing, and whether or not the singer is capable of being emotionally free but in control while performing a song. The training process needs to be harnessed to feeling, and feeling happens in the body as both sensation and emotion. When these ingredients exist equally, it could be said that the singer posesses perfect vocalism.

A few days ago I wrote a piece from the “opposition” point of view. I thought it was telling that some readers didn’t know if I was serious or not. I wasn’t. I couldn’t possibly have the beliefs I espoused in that piece. I was trying, obviously with limited success, to point out what the time-honored assumptions of my profession have been and to a large degree still are, which are to me, at least, no longer valid when applied to any style of CCM.

In questioning beliefs (about anything, not just singing) that have been around for a long time, and which are considered to be “the truth” for many of the believers, one is bound to cause both upset and confusion. Counting on the ability of individuals to use common sense and apply a “trial and error” attitude toward any ideas or philosophy is a crucial element in the hope for change. The attitudes I have toward singing and the teaching thereof are NOT based upon “believe it because I (the authority) say it is so” but upon the notion that one should accept as beliefs only those which have been confirmed by personal experience and experimentation. The other core assumption I put forth is that it is possible to be in touch with one’s own body at a profound level and that such awareness calls forth wisdom which is deep and irrefutable, and not necessary explanable in a rational intellectual manner, but is valid, perhaps required, nonetheless.

Singing is a part of human vocal expression, albeit a unique part. We, as sound makers, have limits to what we hear and can execute, but within those limits an enormous amount is possible, and possible for most people under most circumstances (even if that does not seem to be evident). Various types of singing have been organized according to assorted criteria, sometimes in a deliberate manner, but mostly by happenstance and accident. Value judgements about what these organized criteria are or should be are made by those involved and by those outside. I don’t have any idea why rock, country, rap, R&B, folk or other styles were created, or why the artists singing in these styles have a certain acceptability within each style, but I do know that these labels for each style exist and that people claim to recognize the various styles as being individuated musical expressions, even if the boundaries are constantly in flux. In other words, a self-proclaimed country, rock, pop, or folk artist knows that he or she is one because they say so and others agree.

If we don’t recognize that each style exists within its own world, and that there is no such thing as universal vocal training, we are going to remain confused and teach from a state of confusion. Applying the values of verismo to Mozart will get you in trouble. Applying classical vocal qualities to rock music will do the same. Taking the values of “good singing” that apply to classical training and applying them wholesale to other styles is a sure way to go nowhere. We must understand what the individual artist needs and what is required of the material that is being sung and guide the training accordingly.

Therefore, question everything anyone says, including me, until and unless you prove to yourself that it is worth holding as a tenet.

This week I have worked on two sides of the same issue. One singer came in with a lifetime of singing with a natural vibrato. She wanted to learn how to eliminate it and had done so by the end of the session. Another singer, who told me not so long ago that she had never had a vibrato and couldn’t find one even when she tried, sang today with a nice steady vibrato which we have coaxed into showing up and that is continually getting better, which pleases her a great deal.

Vibrato is one of those things that is “somewhere”. It is a functional response of something to something else but science has not yet resolved exactly what makes the singing voice vibrato arise in those who have one, when it clearly isn’t there when those individuals are speaking. The research I did with Dr. Titze, wherein he had electrodes placed on my vocal folds so that he could run electricity through them, certainly made it clear to me that it was the vocal folds that were making the vibrato, but, sadly, the research wasn’t definite even if my own experience was.

Like a lot of professionals and skilled amateurs, I can sing a straight tone in all registers, I can sing it breathy or nasal, and I can turn it off and on at will. In my classical singing, I can, with some attention, keep the vibrato from being too slow. The vibrato rate is definitely different in classical than in CCM, although I don’t make that happen deliberately.

I have found that people with strong voices often have powerful vibrato responses and that they find it harder to subdue or inhibit it than do singers with more lyric, lighter voices. That’s just a tendency, though, not an absolute. The styles that use straight tone either a lot or all the time (Barbershop, Early Music, and Jazz), can end up affecting the natural vibrato of someone who has one by making it go away and stay gone. That is only a problem if the person singing wants to do other styles where the vibrato is expected, as for instance, in most music theater songs.

It is hard to speed up a big wobbly vibrato, slow down a machine-gun fast bleetly vibrato, or create a natural unmanipulated vibrato for the first time, but hard doesn’t mean impossible. Generally, the whole vibrato function is best left to Mother Nature’s domain most of the time, but learning to deliberately affect the vibrato for stylistic or expressive reasons is certainly possible and not a bad thing. This is contradictory, but true. Ah, the human body! Such a great and mysterious thing.

I’ve been thinking that it would be good to take on the position of those whose attitudes I dislike.

SO…

I believe that singing opera can be helpful to anyone who wants to learn to sing. In order to sing opera, one must learn to breath efficiently and deeply, using the diaphragm and the abdominal muscles to help support the tone one is producing. In a talented singer, who can stay on pitch and has a naturally good voice, developing resonance is best approached by suggesting that the student produce a tone that vibrates in the bones of the face and head at all times. The vowels should remain in the most forward position in order to help increase these vibrations, and the resonance should be uninterrupted by noisy or drawn-out consonants, although an effort should be made to pronounce all words intelligibly. The student should be encouraged to sing in Italian, as the vowels in Italian are musical and pure and this will help the English, German and French vowels follow that same path. The tone should have a vibrato which is not too fast, too slow or irregular, and it should not be artificially manufactured.

It is appropriate for the student to begin with Italian Art Songs or other similar art songs in order to learn how to sing a flowing musical line (legato) and to spend time on vocal exercises of various kinds to strength breathing and resonance.

When doing material that is not classical, students should be encouraged to carry over as much as possible all of the above skills that have been developed by doing classical music. All music in any style should be sung with as much consistent resonance as possible, with legato, vibrato, and clear, undistorted vowels. Consonents should be used minimally so as not to effect the vocal line, but they should be audible and crisp. Students should work to create a beautiful sound in whatever style of music is being performed, and use the sound itself as the main vehicle of communication.

Problems which arise in the music should be addressed through breath support work, correction of resonance positions (placement), and through changes in the concepts of the sound and the images that accompany those sounds. Students should be encouraged to stay within material that is comfortable and easily done until the voice and body are very secure in those behaviors.

Anyone who has mastered the above skills will have drawn out the best of their singing voice, and can go on to develop as an artist while learning more about music history, style, interpretation, performance practice and stage deportment.

OK, what do you think of that?

I continue to receive personal reports, one at a time, from various teachers of singing who are at university, that there is a “war” between the departments of music and drama, and that within the departments of music, there are many problems between those that are “strictly classical” teachers of singing and those who teach music theater, jazz, or other CCM styles. Since this is something I have had to face for more than 31 years here in New York, as well as a master teacher all over the planet, I am not surprised, but I am sad to know that not much has changed except that the number of confrontations is increasing. (We all remember that I was strongly verbally attacked in Minneapolis at the NATS Convention in July for pointing out that we don’t sing gospel, rock, and belt songs with the same sounds used in Schubert and Fauré).

Since the CCM teachers are often in the minority, sometimes isolated, and frequently need to work within the guidelines of a school in order to keep their jobs, the resistance they are forced to face is all the more troublesome. ( I am exempt from that particular worry, since no one can fire me, having always been in private practice). CCM teachers end up having to defend themselves and CCM repertoire, something which should be unnecessary, if things were fair, and which is, in point of fact, offensive. The drama departments often want their students to sing well, but find that the singing training, being almost exclusively classical, does not always support the needs or parameters of music theater material. This is true in jazz schools, too. Even there, the vocal training is classical, which strikes me as being even more paradoxical. How does learning “Caro Mio Ben” help you sing music “Mood Indigo”, written by Duke Ellington? (It doesn’t, as I sing both, and anyone else who does both also knows that is true).

I have heard from quite a few people that their “Bel Canto” training has helped them sing in whatever CCM style they do. Surely, good breathing, easy production and resonant vowels are helpful things for any singer to understatnd, but true Bel Canto style (florrid singing as written by Rossini, Donizetti and Bellini) must carry with it far more than that in order to be correctly executed. The inability to separate what is style from what is vocal production fuels the silly notion that singing an aria from “Lucia di Lammamoor” would somehow be a good stepping stone to singing “And I’m Telling You I’m Not Going” from “Dreamgirls”. Cheech!

Speaking out and speaking up to dispell such nonsensical notions ought to be a good thing, but it is often most unwelcome, and even controversial. Martin Luther King, whom we remembered yesterday, said something like “not speaking out is the beginning of death” and he knew whereof he spoke. We must remember Dr. King’s courage and steadfastness and know that, although singing CCM isn’t at all in the same league as an issue as is racial discrimination, it has its own kinds of arrogance and ignorance to confront.

The value of this blog, and of the chatroom, is that we have each other, and that we are not alone. Please know that this is a “battle” that is necessary and that each person, teaching wherever and however he or she may be, adds to the changes in teaching singing that will someday be standard behavior everywhere. The balance of the scale will tip when there are more of us. That this will happen is certain. Each of you contributes to that global shift. Don’t forget.

What does it mean to respect a piece of music? Does respect mean treating it the way one treats a person? Do the same kinds of values matter when one is in relationship to an artistic creation as to a human being?

A good deal of what would constitute respect is connected to knowledge. You have to have some kind of information before you can be respectful. Without it, you might be disrespectful and not even know it. That could be a problem. The knowledge would probably be some kind of context for the piece of music — where did it come from? Who wrote it? When? Why? What else was going on at the same time, both musically and in the world at large. What is known about the composer and/or lyricist? What is known about the style of music in which the piece is written, and the style as it was or is represented by other composers of the same era? What is known about the composer’s intentions, based upon how it was done originally, or anything that has been written about the piece?

Artistic license says that anything is possible, but we do have to get permission from a composer and author of a published piece of music before we change any of its written notes or words, unless the changes are very small. If the piece is changed so much as to become unrecognizable, it can be considered to have been destroyed. This isn’t artistic license, it is criminal, and can be prosecuted in a court of law by the copyright holders.

Therefore, when someone is arranging a song for a jazz artist, for example, the arrangement can be creative and unique but the arranger cannot re-write the song. Knowing how far to go is a judgment, usuallly made by someone wise enough to have been around the music world long enough to know by exposure what appropriate musical and artistic boundaries are acceptable.

Taking a song completely out of context can certainly constitute disrespect. Not liking certain styles of music but performing them anyway, is disrespectful. Squeezing certain songs to fit one’s own limited ability to sing is also an abuse. (That’s why taking a gospel song and singing it with an operatic or classical sound is repugnant. No matter how schooled the singer, any music is not “improved” by changing it’s character because the vocalist has only one way to sing it).

One of the most amazing attitudes to encounter amongst voice teachers is that of profound ignorance. Teachers of CCM who don’t even have the minimum amount of information about any style of CCM to know that they are being disrespectful to these styles abound. This only matters because the music deserves to be respected. We’re still a long way off from having this be the gold standard in terms of training and performance.

Over the holidays I got sick with a head cold (not unusual). I sang at the holiday concert I mentioned a while ago, with 90% voice, the Handel piece, “Let The Bright Seraphim” with trumpet and organ, as well as two other songs (one a capella). Although it was not one of my best performances (understandment), I received very complementary feedback from several people, so I think it was a decent, professional job in spite of my vocal problems. After that, I thought I was over the hump, on my way back to health, when I received surprising bad news and found myself instead with a developing chest cold. Not good. The coughing is very bad for my vocal folds. I can manage a head cold but it doesn’t take much coughing to give me laryngitis. So… I take cough syrup which suppresses the coughing well enough but makes me sleepy. I drink caffeinated tea to stay away, and this makes for a balancing act, and not a good one at that. After three days, just one day before I took my holiday break from teaching, at the end of the day, I had a really bad coughing attack and I went from functional to completely hoarse in about 5 minutes.

I knew immediately that my voice was “blown out” and that I was in trouble, as this has happened to me twice before, when I had bronchitis, and once before, when I was recovering from a normal cold. I thought I had either broken a blood vessel on one fold or that I had severe swelling. I cancelled teaching the next day and went to my throat specialist. He looked at my folds with a strange expression and it made me nervous. He has been my doctor for 20 years so I know his reactions.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

He said, “I think you have a dislocated arytenoid.” I was stunned.

For those of you reading this who do not know what that means, let me explain. The arytenoids are the moveable cartileges to which the vocal folds are attached and which assist in moving them apart so we can breath and together so we can make vocal sound. If one of them gets dislocated, the folds don’t move properly and the sound can be very bad (as mine was). This is about as serious an injury as one could have. I could see for myself, on the video monitor, that one fold wasn’t moving and that when the folds came together one fold seemed to be slipping under the other, rather than meeting together in the same plane. There is no remedy for this situation. Either Mother Nature moves the arytenoid back to its correct place or not. Sometimes surgery is done to help get better closure, but you can imagine that this doesn’t work in terms of producing the kind of quality necessary for a professional singer.

In truth, I saw my life flashing before me. I thought, “Well, wouldn’t this be an ignominius end to my life as a teacher of singing! I coughed myself out of a job and a life!” I ran through possible other things that I could do…..type (I go at about 100 words per minute), cook, clean, dance…..not a lot of options. My doctor suggested that I go to Dr. Peak Woo for a second opinion. As fate would have it, I was on my way there anyway, to deliver my holiday gifts to his family, as they are personal friends. In the cab I prayed. “OK, Lord, I don’t think I am supposed to have this karma, losing my voice. If there is anything you could do to fix me up, I would be very grateful.” I had been given a shot of prednesone, a steriod to reduce swelling. My doctor said that sometimes that allows the artyenoid to go back on its own. I kept my fingers crossed.

I arrived at Mt. Sinai about 20 minutes later in my Santa hat (which I had been wearing all week) and the receptionist looked at me very dubiously when I croaked to her that I was a personal friend of Dr. Woo’s. Fortunately, he greet me warmly and welcomed me into his office where I scratchily said that I had just been given a diagnosis of a dislocated arytenoid. “What?” he said. “Let me see.”

He palpated my throat in several places, asking as he did, “Does this hurt?”

“No.” “No.” “Uh-uh.”

“Sit down and wait,” he stated, so I did. Two hours later he examined me and I could again see for myself on the video monitor that both arytenoids were moving uniformly and that my vocal folds were swollen. I was quite surprised.

“You just have bad laryngitis. You have hot dog vocal folds. Go home, take the prednesone and be quiet.”

I was never so grateful to have a diagnosis of laryngitis in my entire life.

This was four days before Christmas. I couldn’t possibly be quiet over the holidays, I knew, as I can never keep my mouth shut under any circumstances, but I was very very careful. My voice came back slowly and by Christmas day I sounded almost normal, although I still felt weak and didn’t try to speak loudly. I absolutely could not sing.

I attempted to sing for the first time the day before New Year’s Eve. I knew it wouldn’t be pretty, but I had to try. This is where words don’t do any good. My voice was just awful. Sustained tones were impossible. The sound stuttered like an old car with a bad carburator. I had no volume, no vibrato, little control and a hole at both the break and the top. The middle was stuck. Even my husband said “Gee, sweetheart, your voice sounds bad.” He didn’t mean it as a criticism, but as a sign concern, that it was so far away from normal.

I wish I could tell you then I just did a few warm-ups and then all was fine. Fortunately for me, I have not only taken myself through this sorry situation three times, but I have walked countless others through it over the years. It is a very scary experience and I think that I would have been hysterical had it not been for my previous experiences. The first time it happened, I had to return to teaching while in rather bad shape, and teaching slowly coaxed my throat into its normal function. I couldn’t pay too much attention to my own troubles (just as well) and the constant quiet examples I sang throughout the day allowed my poor folds to heal themselves until I began to sound normal. It took more than three weeks for me to feel that I could sing vigorously, but I learned a lot in the process.

It was four days before I could do any kind of crescendo. In the meantime, every scale and exercise was “sticky”. The pitches were unstable, the top was a squeak, when it came out at all, the middle was not a middle but a hole, and everything made a lot of noise. I couldn’t practice for more than 15 minutes at a time, but I pushed through, as not to do so was not an option.

At some point my husband suggested that I write about this on this blog.

My husband asked, “How could anyone go through this alone? Wouldn’t they be frightened and worried? How would they know that this was a normal phase? Even the doctors might not know.”

I thought he was right. It is important to know that my voice came back. I can sing now with little problem, although I have lost all the “being in great shape” that I had before I got sick. I will get it back again as I start teaching next week, and then practicing full out, but I might not have been able to make that statement if I had let the way I sounded the first few times I tried to sing have a more significant impact than it did. I can’t help but wonder if that’s what happened to Julie Andrews that caused her to think she couldn’t sing after her surgery. Too quick a judgement caused by lack of experience. I will never know.

The point is, I am 57 years old. I am no spring chicken whose vocal folds just pop back into shape because they have nothing else better to do. They get there because I have a lifetime’s worth of keeping them healthy and because I understood how to guide myself back into a good place. Perhaps this knowledge isn’t so unique. Maybe other singers understand this, too. I don’t know. Perhaps the doctors like Peak Woo can tell them that the return of the singing voice takes time.

I just wanted all of you who read these pages to know that something as unspectacular as a cough could be the “end of everything” if not handled wisely, and that normal singing can and does lag behind the return of normal speech even in a veteran.

I am still grateful that things are OK now. I absolutely did have moments when I was practicing in those first few attempts, where I was worried that perhaps this time, it wouldn’t be OK. That’s the way the mind works, I suppose, trying to find the worst case scenario. I hope this event in my life might be a roadmap for you and for your students. If ever you find yourself or your students in a similar situation, be patient, “wait for the bus”, do the work, and trust that the results will show up. In the meantime, appreciate your voice when it is healthy, as really, we never know what could happen, do we?

As I see it, my job is to get someone to make a sound that he or she has never made, and therefore has no concept of. It’s my job to trick the person’s throat into some new behavior that has never occurred so she can say, “Gosh, I never made that sound before”. I consider that kind of comment a mark of success.

This does not involve the idea of remembering anything…..a common practice in teaching someone to sing. Make an [i] and then remember that feeling and make an [a]. That idea never helped me, I couldn’t really do it. It worked better for me to just bring my tongue up and forward in the [a] while I was singing the [a] and let go of the [i] when I wasn’t singing it any longer. If I can get a student’s tongue to be able to come up and forward, that’s helpful. Some people have trouble with that, so you have to work at it in stages. When it is finally an accomplishable task, this gesture alone is sufficient to affect the sung [a], so no “remembering” of anything else is necessary.

Register change, the primary adjustment in vocal quality that is available to humans, is a response, or a reaction. For instance, a light lyric soprano can’t just decide to sing in chest register if she doesn’t have one, or much of one. Chest register has to be cultivated, slowly, if it is going to become active, through various stimuli, such as the “fog horn” or the “Santa Clause” exercises. “Thinking” chest register would just be silly. You can’t think yourself into a sound, no matter how clearly you imagine it. (I can imagine singing C above high C, but I can’t sing it, and I never will). Singers must be guided to make sounds, in shapes and patterns that are different from their normal “default” patterns (usually based upon their speech), so they can discover these sounds, and the sensations attached to them, in order to gain awareness of both processes. Only then can the new sounds be replicated through practice until they become part of the individual’s permanent lexicon of vocal gestures.

The teacher’s job is to provoke the responses from the singer through exercises, used effectively. The singing student’s job is to attempt the exercises until they are done correctly and repeatedly so that the response can surface. Patience is required on both the part of the teacher and the student, as the throat and/or body doesn’t always respond immediately. Even if the stimulus is doing its job, the amount of time that it will take for it to create the desired result in the sound will depend upon the length of time the patterns being changed have been in place, and the amount of change that needs to take place between the situation at hand and the one being sought in the person’s singing behavior.

It’s fun to get someone to sing in a brand new way. It’s a thrill to watch someone’s face when they hear something they have never heard before. It’s also exciting to see if such sounds can be discovered along the way. It makes teaching an adventure, rather than a chore.

We all have all kinds of sound within us. Never stop looking for new ones, as you never know what you will find.

I was teaching for a long time — years — before it occurred to me that I was in a service profession. I knew I was a singing teacher but that was as far as I thought. When it finally dawned upon me that I was providing a service, I was somewhat surprised. “Imagine that,” I said to myself, “I am a business woman providing a service, not just an artist sharing her art”. Da Dum.

I then took it upon myself to investigate what “being of service” was about, as clearly it was part of my own spiritual goals to be of service somehow or other. I understood serving, as my first job (at 16) was as a “busgirl” in my uncle’s Italian restaurant, where I was “at the service” of the entire place: my uncle and his son, who ran the place; the bartenders, the waitresses, the kitchen staff, and the customers. I was the bottom of the heap (for minimum wage and no tips, thank you very much), and took orders from everyone. That was some learning curve! After that I had all sorts of other part and full time time jobs while still in school, all of them insignificant. After I got married I learned to take dictation and got a job as an “executive secretary” (that’s what we now call an “administrative assistant”). In all of these situations I had no instruction in how to be useful, I just did the best job I could and hoped I was succeeding. I admit that it was hard for me to draw a line from those jobs to teaching singing, as typing a financial report didn’t seem to relate much to teaching “Caro Mio Ben”, but I did understand that I wanted to help my students sing and also to help them find joy in music and in their own voices.

Slowly, after a lot of reading of various spiritually oriented books, and some considerable amount of reflection, I concluded that what I wanted to be most of all was useful. I wanted to be of practical, down-to-earth use to the people who came to me to learn how to sing. I wanted my instructions to be simple and clear. I wanted people to be able to grasp what I was talking about without feeling confused or stupid. I wanted singing to seem accessible and rewarding and not just something that was so special that only certain people could do it well.

As I realized over time, each person came to singing lessons for their own reasons, with their own ideas about singing and about his or her individual voice. Each person came with a history, both personal and vocal, and with various tendencies and abilities, limitations and talents. I began to see that I had to accept and work with all this as the ground or fabric into which I fit the training, or it didn’t work. Either I lost the student’s interest or I just lost the student. It became clear that the student’s goals had to become my goals for the student, unless I thought the goals were harmful, in which case I had to find a way to say that (didn’t happen often). I realized that I had to convey to the student that he or she was doing the teaching, and that I could only comment from the outside, offering suggestions that I thought might save time or effort. It came to me that sometimes the student was looking for something through singing that had little to do with singing.

Some people came hoping to find their voice in life. They wanted to be heard as people. They wanted to have something worth while to say and a way to say it.

Some people came looking for a path into their own heart. They wanted to learn how to fall in love with music and let that love heal them and open them.

Some people came searching for a way into their bodies. They were seeking a way to become one with the breath, and with sensations that were powerful and potent, so that they could feel more vividly alive.

Some people came to let go of a secret. These people were the most difficult yet the most compelling to teach. It was only if they stayed that this motivation showed up, and sometimes when it did, they left, as the realization was too overwhelming to be faced straight on. Perhaps it was also, in the beginning, because I was too young and inexperienced to create a safe place for the secret to be revealed.

Some people came because they had been told not to come. (Don’t sing. You sound awful!) They were rebelling against the restrictions that had been placed upon them in some way, and they wanted another human being to challenge them to let go of the bindings that they no longer wished to accept.

There were a million reasons while someone wanted to learn to sing, beyond wanting to learn to sing. In order to be of service, I discovered I had to find a way to honor all of these reasons, and use scales, exercises and songs as the tools to reach into each singer’s mind, heart and body.

Later, I also realized that I had to create a sense of “professionalism” because I wanted to honor my work and myself. I had heard and seen singing teachers opening mail during lessons, talking endlessly on the phone in a lesson while the student tried to keep singing. I had heard of teachers talking in lessons about other students whom were better than the one singing, for less than great reasons. I knew of singing teachers who took money from students whom they felt were untalented and boring, but the teachers needed the money so they “tolerated” the student anyway. I created a “Singing Student’s Bill of Rights” in my head (I will tell you what it is, but not here). I wanted to avoid all of these attitudes and behaviors and others of similar ilk, if at all possible.

As I got this worked out, and it took over a decade to do so, I realized that living in an atmosphere of “being of service” freed me of trying to prove anything. It allowed me to be vulnerable, spontaneous, and human — to stumble, to be stuck, to “not know” and to be a student of the entire process even while being the “person in charge”. It became clear that I was a guide, and that was all, but it was more than enough.

In all the years I have attended singing teacher events, conferences, seminars, courses, and gatherings, I have not ever seen or participated in even one on “Being of Service” or even “Being Effective in a Service Profession”. Things like “customer satisfaction”, “customer service”, “quality control”, “delivery of services” can and should apply to us as singing teachers, no matter how lofty our artistic lives may be. Running a successful private practice or school program involves just these things, even if at first glance they may seem irrelevant.

Since Somatic Voicework® The LoVetri Method is a body-based method of vocal training, with a service-based approach, was generated by me and therefore has inherent in it my point of view, I thought I should share these thoughts with you. I look forward to your comments.