Somatic Voicework™ The LoVetri Method is an organized method of vocal training for Contemporary Commercial Music (CCM) styles, (those styles that used to be called “non-classical) based upon somatic (physical) awareness and aural discernment. The training is presented in three Levels that must be done in sequence.
Level I:
Level I is called “Basic Application” and includes the following: introduction to functional principles of voice science and medicine. It guides singing teachers to enhance their own qualities as the “building blocks” of The LoVetri Method. It looks at terminology and at objectively describing vocal behavior. It also addresses attitude, intention and appropriateness of the interaction between student and teacher. Level I states that the teacher must have a clear intention for the vocal exercise when it is given. The teacher must know (a) either what is missing and needs to be added or (b) what is wrong and needs to be corrected, such that the student’s singing will somehow improve. It rests on vocal function, vocal health, and on traditional pedagogy, but it is also meant to help singers be marketable. There will be a vocal health lecture to instruct the teacher how to listen functionally, to hear aural distinctions and relate them to responses.
Level I Learning Objectives:
- Participants will be able to describe methods for effective communication with singers and singing teachers.
- Participants will be able to describe musical vocal production, the way in which stylistic parameters impact voice production, the relationship between speaking and singing voice production, music industry terminology, and industry expectations for voicing style and vocal load.
- Participants will demonstrate that they are able to listen “functionally” to singers’ voices both from a vocal health and a musical perspective, including the distinction between hypo- and hyper-functional singing in Contemporary Commercial Music (CCM).
- Participants will demonstrate the ability to assess the intention/purpose for any given sung vocal exercise.
Level II:
Level II is called “Advanced Application” and is largely devoted to exploring how singing exercises work, what they do and why. It examines the age, background, and desires of the students and how those things relate to the teaching process. It enhances the teacher’s ability to evaluate the students in terms of vocal behavior and aptitude. In Level II, the teacher acquires greater skill in choosing exercises that are appropriate and adjusting them to meet the level of ability of the student at any given point. There is also greater exploration of the many CCM styles, examining performance aspects that may impact vocal health. The main objective of Level II is understanding how to use vocal exercises functionally.
Level II Learning Objectives:
- Participants will be able to describe teachers’ rationales for choosing specific voice exercises in the singing environment and also how to evaluate the functional appropriateness of those exercises for individual patients.
- Participants will be able to evaluate singers’ vocal responses in the context of age, background, past vocal training, and natural aptitude.
- Participants will be able to verbalize at least two distinct ways in which specific Contemporary Commercial Music singing styles interact with vocal health.
- Participants will demonstrate basic competence in guiding a sample student through a sequence of Somatic Voicework™ singing exercises with supervision by LoVetri Institute faculty.
Level III:
Level III addresses “Repertoire, Problem Solving, and Voice Medicine”. It will feature a music theater expert who will conduct a master class in audition skills with chosen participants. Level III also touches upon acting for Music Theater and provides an excellent and quick approach to teach pitch matching for anyone with that problem. It promotes interdisciplinary interchange, i.e., the need for fellowship with Speech Language Pathologists and Medical Doctors. It also supports the idea that teachers should acquire the ability to read, understand, and possibly even undertake research of interest to those in voice disciplines.
Level III Learning Objectives:
- Participants will be able to verbalize at least two considerations for communicating and collaborating with their patients’ singing teachers to support their progress during therapy and transition back to the lesson environment on discharge
- Participants will be able to state at least two potential impacts of vocal disease processes, injuries, medications, and phonosurgery on singing voice function.
- Participants will be able to verbalize at least two physiologic voicing demands that are specific to singing at the professional level in the Broadway environment.
What Is Underneath and Behind Somatic Voicework™, The LoVetri Method?
Somatic Voicework™ seeks to bring the voice, the person, the emotions and the mind together. It seeks to illuminate the path of vocal artistry by conveying objective information about vocal production based on what is currently known and understood in medicine and science. It supports inter-disciplinary exchange. It is an open system. All premises are subject to improvement and personal adaptation. It honors and respects the styles of music called Contemporary Commercial (CCM) and believes that all styles of music have value and worth.
Somatic Voicework™ rests on respect for the body and allows it to take its time adapting to various stimuli while new responses emerge. It works with compassion, allowing artists to face difficulties, overcome issues and recover abilities even in the face of a diagnosis of pathology or damage. It treats every singer, young or old, famous or unknown, talented or talent-not-yet-tapped, the same. It allows teachers to say, with perfect integrity, “I don’t know. Let me ask.” It recognizes posture and breathing, physical coordination and kinesthetic conditioning, aural acuity and visual feedback and asks only that singers address all aspects of singing function through reasonable, consistent and sustained training and practice.
Somatic Voicework™ teaches “whole people” not larynges or throats or vocal folds, not time slots (the Tuesday noon tenor, “what’s his name” or the “A5 soprano with the wobbly middle voice, Something-or-other Smith”). It incorporates physical, emotional and personal stressors as being factors in living an artistic life and does not diminish singers for having to address these things while training and/or performing. It recognizes that we are not mental health professionals but we are all human beings and that life can sometimes be messy but it is always worthwhile. It teaches careful use of language and its impact on students and taking full responsibility for the learning process as the flawed but passionate people we all are.
Somatic Voicework™ is for those who want to dig deep. It is for those who are not looking for the “10 quickest tips so you can be on American Idol” or the “12 best ways to get really great high notes by next week”. It is not concerned with helping people get tenure, being smarter than people who want to squeeze the throat, position the larynx, vibrate the vocal folds on purpose or with proving that all voices should sing the same way in every circumstance.
Somatic Voicework™ is simple and complicated. It is easy to understand but takes a long time to master. It is available to anyone who wants to investigate it but can only be completely assimilated by those who use the concepts on their own voices over time in many ways. It is up to each individual how much or little the concepts in Somatic Voicework™ matter in their own lives but, as teachers, in order to be both ethical and appropriate, it is imperative that teachers know about all voices, and all musical styles, not just their own or the ones they sing.
Somatic Voicework™ is a method of vocal pedagogy that grew out of the life of Jeannette Louise LoVetri, known as Jeanie to her friends and colleagues. It is the result of decades of singing; training for singing; study, investigation, experimentation of myriad disciplines and philosophies; and thousands of hours spent teaching singing voice lessons for 48 years. She shares the work with an open heart hoping that it will be valuable to others and perhaps help them avoid difficulty, struggle, sadness, frustration and self-doubt, all of which she had to endure to learn what is in the course. It is not presented as “the way” or “the best way” just one way. She invites you to make it your way, if that would be of use to you.
Core Principles
The following are the core Principles of SVW™ , and some of the basics of the approaches used in SVW™ CCM training:
- The vocal mechanism needs to be strengthened and made flexible in order to work optimally.The process is best done slowly and gradually with an eye and an ear to detail.
- Singing is a craft, learned as a physical skill, increasing in virtuosity as the physical body strengthens and the voice coordinates with it.
- Healthy, free singing requires good posture (alignment).
- Proper breathing requires strong upper body and abdominal muscles.
- Singing requires strength and coordination in both the ribs and the abs together to sustain the pressure of air during exhalation.
- The purpose of functional vocal training is to prepare the physical instrument to stand up to full, free expression of emotion through text and music.
- The primary goal of functional singing training is freedom of sound making in any application and expression of meaning through song.
- Some individuals have more natural capacity than others in various areas of the process of making sound while making music. (We call this “talent” but it may just be good coordination and sensitivity to music.)
- Anyone with normal speech and hearing can learn to sing.
- Anyone who can sing can learn to sound pleasing.
- It is possible to sing healthily in a wide variety of styles and vocal qualities.
- All vocal skills can and should promote vocal health and hygiene.
- The human voice is capable of making a wide variety of sounds, qualities, textures, pitches and levels of volume (intensity) freely and healthfully.
- A healthy sound is a free sound, and vice versa.
- Singers are only able to sing a song to the level his or her physical co-ordination and skill allows them to. Technical limitations become musical and expressive limitations.
- The purpose of singing is to express deeply felt, authentic emotions through various kinds of music.
- When a student can’t sing something the problem lies with the instruction, not with the student or the student’s ability.
- You can’t sing what you can’t hear.
- Pitch problems are almost always problems of physical coordination, not of the mind’s ability to hear pitch accurately.
- The physical body can contain blocked or deadened areas, which lack awareness of sensation, and these areas must be awakened and developed in order for the sensations and emotions to be available.
- The process of developing singing in this manner is a way to help each individual be more authentically who they are. It is meant to enhance each individual’s intuition about what is right with his or her voice and body.
- Singers can and should hear themselves at all times and must be encouraged to develop the ability to listen functionally while singing.
- Each person is always doing his or her best.
- Everyone is capable of greatness.
- The singer always knows best about their own body and sound.
- The body has its own wisdom and always goes toward health whenever possible.
Jeanie LoVetri – Founder
Jeanie LoVetri is a recognized expert on Contemporary Commercial Music (CCM) Vocal Pedagogy. She created this term in 2000 and the first college course for CCM in 2002, and has taught thousands of singing teachers worldwide since that time. She has been on five college faculties as a singing teacher and is the recipient of the Van Lawrence Fellowship bestowed by NATS and the Voice Foundation. She is author of 15 articles in both pedagogy and science in the Journal of Voice and the Journal of Singing. Trained as a classical soprano, LoVetri began performing leading roles in musical theater at age 17, and came to New York City in 1975 where she sang at Lincoln Center, Rockefeller Center, Riverside Church, Marble Collegiate Church, at the Henry Street Settlement Theater, the late “Village Gate” in New York’s Greenwich Village and in classical and CCM repertoire up until 2020. LoVetri’s singing has been called versatile, unique and expressive by the New York Times. She encountered voice science in 1978 at Symposium: Care of the Professional Voice sponsored by the Voice Foundation where she is now on the Advisory Board. Her ground-breaking work has had a broad impact on the profession at large, leading the way to significant changes in pedagogy. She initiated multiple topics that have since become standard practice in teaching across the globe. Her students have appeared on and Off Broadway, at Carnegie Hall, at Lincoln Center and at concert halls, on TV, in film and theater and on recordings and at international venues all over the world but also locally in small churches, schools and auditoriums throughout the USA and internationally. Many of her professional students are Grammy and Tony winners and are recognized in a wide array of styles and are also teachers of singing. She has lectured or presented at many colleges and universities and at British Voice Association (BVA) Pan European Voice Conference (PEVOC), National Association of Teachers of Singing (NATS), Australian Association of Teachers of Singing (ANATS), as well as at Centro Estudo da Voz in Sao Paulo, and in hospitals and medical centers in the USA, Canada, South America, Australia and Europe and presented at the newly formed Israeli Association of Teacher of Voice in 2023. She is a reviewer for the Journal of Voice and the Australian Voice Journal. She shares from her 53 years of teaching and training all that she has learned in the hope that it will inspire others to grow and succeed at accomplishing their own singing goals.
She is the founder of the LoVetri Institute for Somatic Voicework™ at Baldwin Wallace University Conservatory in the Community Arts School and is now retired and acting as a Consultant for them. Somatic Voicework™ is a method of vocal pedagogy that has been taught at universities in the USA, Canada, South America and Australia.