Michael Hanko: The Art & Science of Singing

Reducing throat tension - my new bodywork method for singers

2010-12-31T10:48:00.001-05:00

Hello again, readers. Did you wonder where'd I'd been all these weeks?

Well, I've been busy studying anatomy texts, taking new bodywork courses, reading books on singing physiology — in short, I've been creating a new throat-freeing procedure! I've been offering my students what I call Voice-Enhancing Bodywork all along, but recently, I've been developing a new sort of mini-protocol to use at the beginning of a voice lesson. Unlike a full session of VEB, this new protocol takes as little as 15 minutes to perform.

So far, I have been astounded by the effectiveness of the new protocol: some students who could produce a pure falsetto only with great difficulty and constriction are suddenly able — after only one short session on the table — to sing in falsetto more freely, at greater volume, and in an expanded range. In other students I have observed an immediate stabilization of the larynx, which is no longer being pulled in unhelpful directions when they sing.

In short, the new protocol [I am seeing that it needs a name. . .let's call it IVB, for Instant Vocal Balance] removes undesired tensions from the vocal apparatus, leaving an environment of balanced tension in which all the parts can perform the subtle and delicate and complex movements required for singing. It clears neuro-muscular "noise" from your throat so that you can sing at the highest level permitted by your current technique. There is no longer any reason to keep trying to sing through vocal tension when you can now sing without it.

Here's how IVB works:

First, you have to realize what a complex environment your vocal cords live in. Take a look at the following greatly simplified diagram of the structures of the larynx, remembering that many other structures have been left out, like the muscles, tongue, jaw, esophagus, lungs, etc. IVB addresses all these other structures too, but the simplified diagram will convey the basic principles of my new technique.

Notice how the structures shown form a kind of "stack" or totem pole. Also notice the connecting tissues between the more solid structures, like the sheath connecting the hyoid with the thyroid cartilage or the ligament connecting the thyroid and cricoid cartilages. All these structures, to work most effectively, must enjoy free movement between themselves and any other structures to which they connect — not just the adjoining structures in the "stack," but any other organs or tissues to which they have a physical link.

Using IVB, I can identify areas of reduced mobility in these structures, then encourage them to release. For instance, in a student who had been having problems making a hooty pure falsetto sound, I discovered a restriction between the thyroid and cricoid cartilages. Once this excessive tension was released (which took about 10 minutes), the student could immediately make the pure falsetto sound formerly unavailable to him. This new freedom allowed him to achieve a far better registrational coordination than we'd achieved in several years of lessons. Not bad for a few minutes' work!

I am hoping that all my students will experience similar removals of roadblocks that have been standing in the way of their vocal coordination. You can go only so far, after all, singing with a mechanism fraught with excessive tensions. Vocal lessons alone might in time bring about the removal of these tensions, but I am optimistic that my students will no longer have to take that long route to vocal freedom.

Let me be clear that IVB is intended to address mechanical tensions existing in the body, NOT tensions brought about by faulty technique in the act of singing. Once tensions of the former type are removed, however, you stand a greater chance of noticing and correcting the tensions you are bringing about unintentionally when you sing.

Wishing you all the very best for the new year. Want to make a resolution to experience greater vocal freedom in 2011? If you come for a paid lesson during the next 12 months, I'll give you one complimentary 15-minute session of IVB as a gift. To take advantage of this offer, just leave a comment below and I'll get in touch to schedule your IVB session.

In gratitude for your readership,

Michael Hanko

Book Review: Daniel Coyle's The Talent Code: Intriguing neurobiology, disastrous and illogical conclusions

2010-10-25T07:00:00.001-04:00

One of my students recently recommended that I take a look at Daniel Coyle's book (Bantam Dell, 2009), The Talent Code: Greatness isn't born. It's grown. Here's how. Like my student, I was fascinated by Coyle's description of an emerging scientific model of skill development. Apparently, recent research has suggested that myelin, a fatty substance that gets deposited around neurons as brain connections develop, not only provides insulation to the neurons, but also both strengthens and speeds up particularly well-practiced neural connections. It seems that the more frequently a neural pathway is used, the more layers of myelin get deposited, resulting, as Coyle writes, in a "broadband" effect which increases the effectiveness of the nervous system in performing the skill set under development.

The biological facts that emerge from the research Coyle describes help to explain how learning happens — how we develop skill — and why habits are so hard to break. Firing a neurological circuit causes myelin to wrap the neurons involved, which is how skills get built up as we repeat the associated actions. Coyle further reports that there is no mechanism which undoes this wrapping (other than aging or disease), which means that, once you develop an enhanced neural pathway, it is there for life, waiting to be triggered whether you desire it or not. (Unfortunately, Coyle glosses over this inescapable and critical phenomenon in one short paragraph and never returns to flesh out its consequences.)

Once he has laid the (greatly simplified) neurobiological groundwork for his book, Coyle goes on to draw conclusions and make recommendations that 1) do not follow from his premises, 2) are largely irrelevant to both students and teachers/coaches, and 3) perpetuate a prevalent but detrimental attitude towards learning that can be summed up as "you gotta try hard to succeed." In the following paragraphs, I'll address each of these weaknesses of Coyle's arguments in turn.

1. Coyle advocates a way of working that he calls "deep practice," which is "mistake-focused," that is, based on performing an activity over and over, making copious mistakes all the while and then re-doing the activity a little bit better each successive time. He admits that this approach is difficult and unpleasant, but claims — without supporting data — that such struggle is a "biological requirement." In Coyle's deep practice paradigm, progress is achieved through "a rhythmic pattern of botches" as well as "a taut, intense squint [that] caused [the learning children] to take on. . .an unaccountable resemblance to Clint Eastwood."

None of this makes sense at all in light of the research Coyle cites. If performing an action myelinates the associated neural pathways irreversibly, wouldn't it make sense to minimize the mistakes? Otherwise, you'll just be strengthening the pathways that lead to the mistakes — and to squinting.

F.M. Alexander (the man who developed what is now known as the Alexander Technique), with no knowledge of myelin, recognized over 100 years ago the importance of intelligent practice that would maximize the percentage of successful repetitions while minimizing the mistakes. Here (in his best-known book, The Use of the Self), he describes what happens in a typical case in which someone is trying to learn a new skill by trying over and over again:

" [H]e will react to the stimulus to [get it right] by the same [habitual] misdirected use of himself. . . .This process is repeated every time he tries. . .with the result that his failures far outnumber his successes, and he becomes. . .disturbed emotionally, as always happens when people find themselves more often wrong than not. . . ."

Alexander discovered that trying to get something right tended to invoke in people an inefficient state of excessive tension, which interfered with their skill. He had no way of knowing about myelin wrapping, of course, but he noticed that, in attempting any activity, people were likely to use their habitual muscular tensions (highly myelinated pathways), the more so if they were trying hard. Unlike Coyle, Alexander did not shy away from this difficult realization, but made it his life's work to discover how to overcome the persistent force of habit. He eventually came to the astonishing conclusion that "the act of prevention was the primary activity" — in other words, you have to spend more of your mental effort in preventing the old habit, not in trying to bring about a better new response. In fact, as Alexander was fond of saying, if you prevent the wrong thing from happening, the right thing does itself. (A full discussion of Alexander's concept of inhibition of wrong impulses is outside the scope of this review, but is available in any of his four books. I have written about inhibition many times on my blog, not necessarily naming it as such every time.)

2. Alexander's decades-long experimentation all took place in the realm of what was observable by him — and by anyone else who bothered to pay attention, for example, to the state of tension in his or her neck while rising from a chair. Conversely, the research Coyle writes about requires extensive laboratory equipment not available to the average person to peer into the microscopic universe of the biochemical processes of the brain. Furthermore, the process of myelinization in the brain is not accessible to anyone's direct observation. Coyle admits, "Myelin is sneaky stuff. It's not possible to sense myelin growing along your nerve fibers. . . ."

This non-observability means that, while the research mentioned in the book might provide a very good explanation of the mechanisms behind observed learning behavior, it does nothing to guide a person interested in improving his or her learning process. (Similarly, much modern neurobiological research validates Alexander's observations and discoveries without giving us any better way of achieving psychophysical improvements than what Alexander himself proposed a century ago.)

Trying to increase your skill in an activity by understanding the myelination of neurons is tantamount to trying to bake a more delicious loaf of bread by studying how yeast fungi convert sugars into carbon dioxide. Interesting, perhaps, but ultimately devoid of usefulness to the baker. It's a matter of intervening in a problem at the wrong structural level. In the practice room, on the playing field, you must intervene in the learning process at the behavior level, not the molecular level, because that is where our senses — and thus, our intelligence — are usable.

If you're not convinced of the incongruity of a molecular approach to skill development, ask yourself how many of the successes Coyle mentions — Mozart, Einstein, the Brontë sisters, Anna Kournikova, for example — understood or even knew about myelination while they were honing their skills. If there is any performance-enhancing benefit to understanding myelination, it is that it might make you more mindful of the need to maximize the percentage of correct repetitions, which is exactly the opposite of what Coyle is proposing in his deep practice!

3) For maximum skill development, Coyle proposes a program of learning arduous in many ways. To his way of thinking, high-level progress requires squinting, the effortful making of and correcting of mistakes, long hours of practice every day for a decade, in a word (his word), STRUGGLE. It is unfortunate that, given scientific data that imply just the opposite, he has leapt to illogical conclusions that play right into the popular misconception that is often expressed as "no pain, no gain." Most people seem to believe that high achievement requires intense concentration and struggle. Our whole educational system is set up to inculcate this logical-sounding, but ultimately erroneous belief, so few people escape its influence. But how many, other than the relatively few who faithfully practice Alexander's principles, have given the alternative a chance?

The alternative is not a quick fix. As Coyle mentions, citing the well-known "Ten-Year Rule" (that it takes 10,000 hours of practice, or approximately ten years, to develop a high level of skill in any area), skill development takes time. A long time. But not as much of that time as you might think needs to be spent actively practicing skills. Regular supervised sessions during which the student, under the teacher's guidance, rehearses new neural pathways are needed, along with intervening stretches during which the student avoids performing the activity at less-than-optimum levels and gives time for the body and mind to integrate the learning. Over many years of this kind of approach, which involves much inhibition of the wrong pathways so that the right thing can do itself, the student's skill level will rise higher and higher. Progress is inevitable, but it requires great commitment and patience, especially during the long stretches of "doing nothing" during which the student feels negligently inactive, but which (like sleep) are required for integration and re-organization of the body's resources.

Coyle incites his readers to panic over taking time off their mistake-focused practice, claiming that if they miss a month of firing of their circuits, their skills will "evaporate." (But doesn't he also claim that myelin never unwraps?) Anyone who has ever hopped back on a bicycle after months or years of not riding will disprove this claim. In fact, I have noticed just the opposite effect: when I return to voice lessons after a month of vacation or a several-week bout of the flu, I usually find my voice in better shape than when I last sang. I believe that this happens because of the greater importance of not singing wrong over singing right, which largely does itself when I am able to inhibit the firing of those wrong habits.

Happily, there are some modern pedagogues who preach the alternative approach. The well-known voice teacher Cornelius Reid was fond of saying, when his students came to their lessons apologizing for not having practiced since their last lesson, "Well, then you haven't sung incorrectly all week!" His attitude was "practice makes permanent." Similarly, Terry Laughlin, the developer of the Total Immersion swimming method, gives this warning to his students: "Don't practice struggle." Both of these teaching geniuses knew intuitively what the myelin scientists are now corroborating: every repetition of an activity locks in a little more securely the particular way you performed the activity. It's not what you do, but how you do it that is crucial.

It's your choice, ultimately, how to spend your Ten Years striving to get great at something. You can follow Coyle's advice to myelinate the pathways leading to mistakes, squinting, and struggle, or you can emulate F.M. Alexander and myelinate the pathways leading to perfection and ease through gentle, intelligent practice under the guidance of a worthy teacher/coach.

Under Construction

2010-10-14T09:39:00.000-04:00

When a highway is being resurfaced, you have to find a temporary alternative route. In a similar way, the new vocal technique you are working on in your lessons may be not available for "real" singing for some time.

This inaccessibility of your best resources can be downright frustrating, as my students D. and C. found out recently. They both have begun working with me in the past few months, hoping to address some inconsistent results that arose in performance situations. Both of them have a high degree of musical intuition, so they have been able to achieve a much-improved register balance during their lessons in a relatively short time. Both of them have experienced the effortlessness and beauty of sound brought about by a well-coordinated vocal mechanism — while singing exercises in my studio.

Both of them have also experienced a demoralizing return to the problems that brought them to me when they have sung songs outside their lessons. What is going on here?

In a voice lesson, I set up conditions conducive to improved vocal coordination. Distractions are minimized because we are working alone and unobserved. The exercises pare down your mental and physical responsibilities to highlight the issues on which we are working — often, an entire exercise will consist of a single vowel sound and no complicating consonants. My guidance in the lessons helps you to keep your focus where I think it will be most helpful. It's easy to make your best sounds under these supportive conditions.

When you are singing a song, or perhaps even performing a song in the real world, many distracting stimuli compete for your attention. First off, the simplest song is much more complex than the exercises we use in your lessons: you have to attend to rapidly shifting vowels sounds, intervening consonants, rhythms, emotional content, and stage movement, among other aspects of performing.

Even more potentially disconcerting is your desire to sound good, especially when others are listening, which can overwhelm your desire to pay attention to your technique. Particularly when the technique is new and not yet habitual, it is easy to revert to the comfort of your "old" technique in moments of pressure, because the old technique still feels right to you. It takes a great force of will in the midst of performing to choose a new technique that feels unfamiliar over an old technique that still feels right.

I have two ways of helping you to deal with this conundrum:

1) Over the long term, we will practice your new technique in your lessons many many times, until it becomes your new habit. At that point, it is likely that even in performing situations, you will more or less unconsciously choose the new technique, even when I'm not around to help you maintain your focus.

2) If your lessons include Alexander Technique (which I strongly recommend for all singers), you are getting practice in the skill of choosing the unfamiliar. That way, your brain will get more comfortable with the disorienting feelings that arise when you are changing conditions in your life, more example, when you are developing an improved vocal technique.

The reversion to old habits when the pressure is on is the central problem F.M. Alexander was exploring as he developed his technique. Even after he had learned how to use his body in a new, healthier way, Alexander noticed his tendency to call upon his old, habitual way of using his body, which became even stronger under the stressful conditions of performing on stage. Alexander called this tendency "end-gaining" (focusing on the end result rather than the process), which means going with what feels right instead of paying attention to implementing your new technique, which very likely feels wrong at first.

It's a very human tendency, this end-gaining! Recognizing it in your own life and learning to deal with it will save you a lot of frustration.

Have any of you readers ever had trouble accessing your new-and-improved vocal technique outside of your lessons? How have you dealt with that?

Levels of Intervention

2010-08-30T09:25:00.000-04:00

(While I'm on vacation — from teaching and blogging — I hope you enjoy this piece from my website archives.)

As a youngster, I was a bit of a smart-aleck. One of my sisters would ask me a perfectly legitimate question: “Do you know where my pink hairbrush is?” “Yes,” I’d answer, with my characteristic supercilious pursing of the lips guaranteed to drive my siblings insane, “I know where your hairbrush is — it’s in the world.” I delighted in wasting my sister’s time by providing information that was not specific enough to actually be helpful.

Other than by annoying my little sisters, I liked to amuse myself with nerdy activities like writing out my return address on envelopes in what I fancied to be its properly complete version. Writing the tiniest characters I could manage, I crammed all of this onto the upper left corner of my envelope:

Mike Hanko
5403 Rolling Rd
Springfield, Virginia
USA
North America
Western Hemisphere
Earth
Solar System
Milky Way Galaxy
Universe

Now I was wasting my own time (and ink), by providing much more information than the Postal Service needed to get a letter to me. (Not that it wouldn’t serve me in other situations to comprehend my precise place in the scheme of things.)

Most systems — those pertaining to everything from residential addresses to locating hairbrushes to the flow of energy in my body — can be viewed at varying levels of hierarchy. We have to decide what level of this hierarchy gives us the most useful information about the problem we are trying to solve.

For example, if I have a new student who asks for directions to my teaching studio and I provide a picture of the Milky Way Galaxy with a little arrow pointing to the location of our solar system, I will be waiting a long time for that student to show up.

If, on the other hand, I give the new student my address, and then go on to tell her that when she enters my front door she will take six steps to the left and enter the studio door, take three more steps, and then take a seat in the chair that is 3 feet from the window and 4 feet from the bookcase, she will probably seek out a different teacher. Even though I have given her usable information, it is too precise for the situation. I come off as an anal-retentive freak.

Let’s say I have figured out the proper degree of positional information to provide my new student, and she’s sitting in my chair, ready for her first lesson. Now I have to make a choice as to what level of her energetic organization to deal with.

I know that ultimately, all her energy comes down to the states of vibration of the subatomic particles making up her body, but I do not know how to perceive this vibration under my hands. Nor could I hope to change these vibrations through my intervention, too gross by many, many orders of magnitude. I might as well try to determine the weight of a sesame seed using my bathroom scale.

Many other hierarchical levels of my student’s structure are beyond my perception and intervention: interactions between her atoms, molecules, cells, even organs. Though I believe that by working as an Alexander teacher, I can bring about changes at these levels — improving digestion, refining the firing of motor neurons, maybe even tweaking the uptake of neurotransmitters — I am not conscious of directly acting upon her small intestine, her neurons, or her molecules of serotonin. Thus far in my development as a teacher, these phenomena occupy a level of subtlety beyond my grasp. (Note: Since writing this, I have learned how to work directly with a person's organs using a technique called Visceral Manipulation. I've gone a level deeper!)

At the other end of the hierarchical range, I can err by intervening at too crude a level. Walter Carrington (a respected teacher taught by F.M. Alexander) warned against this mistake, advising teachers not to attempt to bring their students into visual symmetry or to directly reposition a student’s spine or other body parts. Into this category of overly crude interventions we can also put such misguided breathing advice as asking our students to breathe into particular parts of their torsos or to breathe in a particular rhythm.

Between these outer ranges of incomprehensible subtlety and brutish over-doing lies the hierarchical level (perhaps levels?) at which the Alexander Technique enables us to bring about change for our students — change that will potentially encompass ALL the levels of a student’s hierarchical structure, from the rhythm of her breathing to the rhythm of vibration of her atoms.

Carrington instructs us that the proper level of intervention for us is our students’ state of “going up.” Through our hands we can identify when a student is going up and when she is not. Through our teaching we can then intervene in her thinking to produce changes in her body (and her energy) that we can feel, see, and otherwise experience through our senses.

Alexander has given us a means to indirectly bring about change for our students — real change that permeates every level of their being. Our entree into this complexity is at the relatively easily perceptible level of postural reflexes. We mustn’t waste our time — or that of our students — by attempting to intervene at the wrong levels of our students’ systems.

The View from the Mountaintop

2010-08-23T09:10:00.001-04:00

(While I'm on vacation — from teaching and blogging — I hope you enjoy this piece from my website archives.)

Have you ever become so engrossed in a book that you completely lost track of time and eventually looked up from your reading to realize that you’re a little achy from sitting for god knows how long in an uncomfortable position? Or have you ever zoned out into auto-pilot mode while driving home from work and somehow gotten to your destination without any recollection of the trip?

Lately, under the influence of Missy Vineyard’s excellent new AT book, How You Stand, How You Move, How You Live, I’ve been contemplating this kind of situation, in which my awareness shrinks, leaving me with only a partial picture of my experience.

What constitutes complete awareness? I distinguish at least three aspects of any moment of experience which my awareness may encompass: my Self, my activity, and my environment. While recognizing that my awareness exhibits a fluid, delicately shifting balance among these three aspects of experience, my goal is to neglect none of them and favor none of them above the others.

My Self includes the whole psychophysical ME — my thoughts, my emotions, the level of tension in my muscles, my breathing, etc. In my moments of complete, expanded awareness, I strive to view my physical self as if from outside of myself, allowing me to see the whole of me — what all of my body parts from scalp to soles of feet are doing. Habitually, I resort to a much more restricted focus, often becoming absorbed in a particular part of my body that is moving or tensing or experiencing pain. Or I lose track of everything except for my thoughts, which frequently have nothing to do with the present moment. One recent glorious late-summer evening I was taking a walk to restore myself after a long day of teaching. A few minutes into the walk, I realized that I was mentally reviewing my schedule for the next teaching day, completely oblivious to the sensory smorgasbord at hand: the clear sky and sultry breezes of this mid-September evening that felt more like mid-June, the passing people with their variety of gaits, adornments, and facial expressions, the flowering window boxes, the joyful sensations of my arms and legs swinging as I walked, the smell of just-baked cupcakes at Billy’s Bakery, the rich soundscape of Eighth Avenue on a warm evening. How much richer and more restorative my walk became when I came out of my frantic, worried thinking into the actual world of sensory stimuli around me.

My activity comprises that in which I am engaged as well as any objects or living creatures required for that activity. An activity could be as simple as standing on the floor or as complex as keeping my Chihuahua from lunging after a discarded bagel on the ground while looking out for turning traffic as we cross 23rd Street, all while carrying on a cellphone conversation with my mother, as I explain why I can’t stay more than one night when I go down for my sister’s birthday celebration. I find that in general, the activity predominates in my awareness over Self and environment, this effect intensifying as the difficulty of the activity or my interest in it increases. Wasn’t I even encouraged throughout my school years to “concentrate,” i.e. focus on an assignment while purposefully ignoring all other stimuli? (I will return to this wrongheaded pedagogical attitude in a bit.)

My environment is made up of concentric fields in space; I can allow my awareness to include as many of them as I wish to (or am able to) through my sensory channels. At a minimum, I wish to take in my immediate surroundings, such as the space surrounding the chair on which I’m sitting as I type these words. Depending on my intentions, though, I could expand my awareness to take in the whole room, my apartment, this floor of my building, the whole building, Chelsea, New York City, the United States, the world...up to the entire Universe. (I am not yet able to take in the entire Universe.) While I’m typing, it’s usually sufficient to be aware of the room, but if my activity is disposing of a dead battery, I may wish to consider the effects this action will have on Earth’s ecosystems, well beyond my personal space. (How many problems of our modern world have their roots in someone’s short-sighted awareness, in someone’s failure or unwillingness to consider the ramifications of their actions outside their immediate situation?)

Were you, too, encouraged to assume tunnel vision sometime in your educational history? Did a teacher ever advise you to shrink your entire world down to the contemplation of an algebra problem or an essay on Chaucer? (0% Self:100% activity:0% environment) Did a coach ever admonish you to ignore the signals from your body and run through the pain? (0% Self:100% activity:0% environment) Did a voice teacher ever have you so wrapped up in thinking about your diaphragm that you couldn’t breathe at all...let alone sing? (100% part of Self:0% activity:0% environment) Did a tour guide ever over-stimulate your enthusiasm to take in the beauty of a work of art to the point at which you bump into benches and slowly develop aches and pains in your poorly-attended-to body? (0% Self: 0% activity:100% environment)

It occurred to me that — unlike over-attention to Self or activity — people generally recognize the inadvisability of becoming too involved in attention to one’s environment. “Hey, watch where you’re going!” is how this viewpoint is usually expressed, for example, when you ram your grocery cart into someone’s heels while ogling the luscious hamburger (or other) buns across the aisle at Whole Foods.

But think of how we are taught to be in amused awe of the absent-minded professor who is so wrapped up in his research that he “loses” the glasses that are on his head or forgets to eat. Or how we lionize our opera/rock/Broadway divas whose uncompromising career focus leaves no room for living normal off-stage lives.

The beliefs underlying these ways of being and approaches to learning are that 1) we will absorb more information by narrowing our focus, and 2) we are unable to process multiple levels of awareness simultaneously. My experience of teaching the Alexander Technique has proven to me over and over the inaccuracy of these beliefs.

Expending Effort Wisely

2010-08-16T09:10:00.005-04:00

(While I'm on vacation — from teaching and blogging — I hope you enjoy this piece from my website archives.)

Many people have the misconception — and I have to admit to my own deeply ingrained version of this misconception — that the Alexander Technique is about relaxing. Don't we all want to live with the minimal amount of muscular effort? The answer, perhaps surprisingly, is not really. At least, not minimal effort in the way most of us mean these words.

There are actually at least two different kinds of effort that we employ as we go about our activities. One is familiar: it's the effort we expend to perform various actions. We expend effort to lift a stone, to sing a note, to walk across the room. The other kind of effort goes largely unrecognized for most of us: it's the "background" effort that supports our bodies in response to gravity. It takes a certain amount of energy to be upright to varying degrees in standing or sitting or even lying on a couch. (Dr. Wilfred Barlow, one of the first teachers trained by Alexander, attibutes to him "a vision of a way of life in which the body was to be used well and actively during even the most sedentary of pursuits." [Italics mine])

I'm beginning to tune in to the inverse relationship between these two types of effort. It seems that if I expend a little more energy to organize myself into a more dynamic uprightness, I actually need to expend a lot LESS energy to perform the lifting of stones and singing of notes, etc, that make up my daily activities.

Of course, this extra effort has to be wielded intelligently. Just pulling myself up with blind force creates interference, not ease. (This is what generally happens when people try to "sit up straight.") Employing Alexander's principles helps me to invoke the strongly supportive system of oppositional muscle forces in my body — an available resource that it's easy to neglect. But if this system of forces is not activated, I have to use far more "local" effort to lift things and move. (Local as opposed to global; I have to tense my biceps, say, to lift a book, rather than letting my whole body cooperate in this effort.)

When I think of relaxation as the goal, I am reluctant to expend the beneficial effort to bring about the oppositional forces that can support me and make all my activities easier. With this much vitality of energy coursing through my whole body, it can feel as though I am working harder just to be here — and in a way I am. (Every activity becomes a whole-body toning exercise — I especially notice more engagement of my abs.) I have to remember that the energy savings will accrue as I begin to move and to do things, which will take less effort.

Sometimes, I do like to let down completely, relinquishing my oppositional energy for true relaxation. After a yoga class, for example, I may spend a few minutes in corpse pose, releasing as much muscle tension as I can. But I need to remember to "turn on" my oppositional support system before moving out of this pose, or I risk exerting effort unwisely, putting local strains on my body and potentially injuring myself.

Alexander developed a procedure — which he rather unimaginatively named "hands on back of a chair" — to develop a person's sense of oppositional organization in activity. (Maybe sometime I'll make a video about HOBOC.) Ask me to explore this procedure with you at your next lesson. . .learn how to tone your abs while you work at the computer!

The power of intention

2010-08-09T08:29:00.000-04:00

(While I'm on vacation — from teaching and blogging — I hope you enjoy this piece from my website archives. It's from a few years ago, for those of you who may be wondering why Willy doesn't get a mention. He hadn't been born yet!)

The skill I've developed through my Alexander work in manifesting intentions paid off in an unexpected way today.

I have been running with my dog, Freddy, for a few months now. Several times a week, we jog down to the river park along the Hudson and back--perhaps 3-4 miles in all. Freddy is faster than me and has far more stamina (who knew Chihuahuas were so athletic?), so he always tended to run a bit ahead, barking all the while. I interpreted this behavior as wanting to go faster and greeting everyone we passed.

Yesterday I began reading a book by the "Dog Whisperer," Cesar Millan, on dog psychology and training, Cesar's Way, and learned enough to realize that Freddy was running ahead of me because he considered himself the alpha dog in our "pack" and he was barking to alert his pack of perceived threats--bikes, buses, other dogs and runners, etc.

This morning, I changed my intentions for our run. I decided to actively take on the mantle of alpha dog, designating myself the leader in my own mind and taking the responsibility for alertness and judgment that comes with this role. I noticed that the change in my thinking brought about an immediate if slight change in my carriage and my confidence, which Freddy apparently picked up on.

Today on our run, without my having to give any commands or corrective tugs of the leash, Freddy stayed slightly behind me and automatically changed his pace to match mine whether I was running fast or slow, walking, or pausing altogether. He barked about one third as much as usual, and the barks were quieter and less insistent than usual. Most surprising was his behavior when we passed other dogs walking with their owners. Instead of his usual mad scramble to approach the dogs and sniff and play, he ignored them--as I was modeling--and continued silently following me.

Cesar Millan reintroduced me to a concept I know deeply from my years of Alexander study: "energy and power can be focused and controlled. Biofeedback, meditation, yoga, and other relaxation techniques [and the Alexander Technique!!!] are excellent for learning about how to control the energy you project.... Learning to harness the power of the calm-assertive energy within you will also have a positive impact on your own mental health--and on your relationships with the humans in your life."

See what happens today if you decide to take on the role of alpha dog. (You can try this even if there are no dogs in your life.) Just decide to be what Cesar calls calm-assertive: "A calm-assertive leader is relaxed but always confident that he or she is in control." You can pretend to be someone who has these traits--Oprah, James Bond, or Rin Tin Tin--if you don't think you possess them yourself.

Let me know about your experience in a comment to this blog entry.

Am I leading a recycled life?

2010-08-02T10:51:00.000-04:00

Happy August, Readers!

In honor of this hot and lazy month, I am taking off from teaching starting this weekend until after Labor Day. I'd like to make this month maximally relaxing, so in lieu of active blogging, I'm going to be recycling some entries from my now defunct former blog, starting with this entry from May of 2007, entitled "Am I leading a recycled life?" (How ironic.)

And if you're intrigued by the topic of this essay, head over to my partner Peter's blog, where today he brings up some closely related issues. Browse around while you're there; he's a brilliant and often brilliantly funny writer.

Am I leading a recycled life?

One of my students came in for his lesson this week with a fascinating account of how he had become aware of a set of habits associated with seeing pretty girls on the street. This seeing-a-pretty-girl habit pattern included muscular tensions that interfered with his freedom of movement. We discussed various ways he could address these habits, from removing the stimulus altogether by maintaining a more internal focus —with the unfortunate result that he would not get to see pretty girls — to applying the principles of the AT to the situation, allowing a new kind of response to evolve.

Since teaching this lesson, I have become more aware in walking around the City of myself having a set response to various types of sensory stimuli. I seem to have developed sterotypical responses to seeing cute dogs, overweight police officers, and trash lying in the street; of hearing sirens, a British accent, and Madonna songs; of smelling pizza, hyacinths, and homeless people. My habitual responses include physical elements, like forming my mouth into a certain shape or tightening to pull up my chest, and mental elements — these are what really astounded me — like thinking "Oh, what a cute puppy!" or "Mmmmmmmmm" or "Is that policeman really going to be able to help me if something goes down?"

The astounding part is how similar my thoughts were every time I encountered a particular kind of stimulus. I realized that instead of allowing myself to notice how a new situation, object, or person could affect me, I mentally assigned the situation, object, or person to a pigeon-hole category and called up a stored response from my mental archives. So before I could experience that pug puppy for what it is, I was running my "Oh what a cute puppy!" program, thus preventing myself from noticing what unique about this particular puppy. Considering the limited range of response I was allowing myself, I might as well have been seeing the same puppy over and over.

As unfortunate as it may be to not experience a puppy or a hyacinth for what it truly is in the moment, how much worse to stereotype a person, whether it be a chubby policeman, a sexy athlete in tight running shorts, or a mother pushing a stroller. And yet I find that I have a set response to all these "types" and more. I find it unpleasant to recognize that I have distilled an entire person into a body weight, or a uniform, or a nice set of abs, or any other characteristic. And I find it unsatisfactory to not allow myself an authentic range of response IN THE MOMENT to all these stimuli.

How much of my life has been half-lived by recycling old responses?

To create some change, I have been exploring applying the principles of the AT to my walks around the neighborhood. INHIBITION has been particularly helpful: if I (initially) withold consent from having any response at all to seeing a person on the street, I can block the habitual response from arising long enough to enable the current situation to register authentically on my whole system. When I go through this process, I create an atmosphere of non-judgment; I feel less inclined to assign people and things to existing categories or to rate them according to my inner scale of sexiness, smelliness, or worthiness.

Granted, this way of experiencing requires more of me: I can no longer walk around half-aware, allowing my prior judgments to take the place of seeing, feeling, noticing what is happening right now. But when I commit to this process, I've noticed that it leaves me feeling more peaceful and gives me a sense of connectedness with the world around me. It's also more interesting — I'm noticing more and more details about everything, including myself.

Welcome, Classical Singer readers!

2010-07-22T07:33:00.001-04:00

I'm very pleased to announce that Classical Singer magazine has published an article I wrote in their August 2010 issue, which is now on sale. (Non-subscribers can read this article — called "Beyond Posture: the Alexander Technique for Singers" — on my blog. I posted it in four parts starting March 22 of this year.)

If you're coming to this blog for the first time after reading about it in the magazine, I'd like to specially welcome you and thank you for visiting. I'm hoping you'll browse through past posts for topics of interest to you. . .and that you'll leave comments about your own experience as a singer or as a teacher.

You are also welcome to write with questions or topics you'd like me to cover in future posts. You may leave these as comments to this or any other post or email them to me at michaelhanko.nyc@gmail.com.

May you feel a part of a community here — a community of singers and teachers and others interested in perfecting our craft, exploring the mind-body connection, and supporting each other.

All the best,

Michael Hanko

Coming this fall — new teaching format!

2010-07-18T14:56:00.000-04:00

Hello, dear readers. I'm back from Fire Island, where, as planned, I did nothing much other than rest and take the dogs for romps on the beach.

I figured that something productive would come of leaving my brain free to romp unleashed as well for a few days. . .and I was right.

Towards the end of our time in the Pines, during that delicious half-conscious state following a lazy afternoon nap, a stunningly constructive idea popped into my head: I will start teaching in GROUPS! Both Alexander Technique and voice!

My neurons must have arranged themselves to form this idea after unconscious contemplation of several recent and rewarding group learning experiences I've had, in both the teacher and student roles. There are many reasons that learning in a group environment is valuable — here are 10 random ones:

TOP 10 REASONS FOR LEARNING IN A GROUP:

You learn not only by experiencing, but by watching others.
You get time to integrate between intensive learning moments.
You get more learning time for your money.
You can more easily observe changes in others than in yourself.
You get practice performing in front of others.
You get feedback from a variety of observers.
You meet other like-minded people.
By expanding your learning contexts, you deepen your learning.
You sharpen your observation and hearing skills.
You enjoy fellowship and camaraderie.

So. . .starting after Labor Day, I will be adding 6 small-group classes to my weekly teaching schedule. Each class will be limited to 4 participants to maximize your "hands-on" time with me. Some classes will be dedicated to Alexander Technique and some to voice. In the voice classes, we'll explore vocal technique, performing issues, and repertoire.

You'll be able to try your first class at no cost. Then you can decide if you'd like to switch completely to the group format or to supplement your private lessons with some classes. I'll be sending out information about pricing and scheduling towards the end of August. If you have any requests for topics or particular times, you could email me or comment to this post.

Thinking vs. feeling: the eternal conundrum

2010-07-11T14:21:00.000-04:00

We decided to take a later train and ferry to get to Fire Island this evening, so I find myself with a couple of extra hours to write a blog post. I am challenging myself to use this windfall time to tackle a tricky and crucial question posed by my reader Jack over a month ago — I've been avoiding it ever since, but now I'm going to face the music.

Jack's question is one inevitably encountered by serious students of the Alexander Technique. His particular version of this age-old conundrum came in response to my posting about how I'd recently made the mistake — twice! — of trying to feel my way into change:

If I ask myself "is my neck free?" isn't that attempting to get a feeling? How could this properly be converted to "thinking"?

Great questions, Jack! This topic deserves a book-length treatment, but I'm going to focus today on just two potential paths to understanding.

I'll start with a pithy aphorism attributed to F.M. Alexander (this is my own wording, however):

When you think you're thinking, you're feeling. When you think you're feeling, you're doing.

Obviously, it would be helpful to define some of these terms. The kind of thinking Alexander was discussing here was what he called "direction," which can be thought of as setting intentions for the body. For example, "I allow my neck to be free" is a direction. Note that very important word, "allow" — Alexander used that word to emphasize that this phrase is like a wish, not something to be carried out. All we can DO in response to the phrase is contract a muscle, which is just adding more tension. But feeling to see if we have indeed managed to free our necks is also counter-productive. It's likely to make us anxious or discouraged or confused and brings about a far-too-localized form of awareness.

What Alexander intended is that we state the "wish" — out loud or mentally — and then trust that it will get through to our bodies. Of course, the degree to which it gets through improves with practice and with repetition. (And you may at first require outside assistance to experience what Alexander meant by these words — they're not exactly self-evident.) So my first recommendation is that you phrase your directions in a way that encourages you to treat them like wishes, not instructions.

Onto my second recommendation, which is the hard-to-describe part I've been putting off for the past few weeks. . . .

Despite Alexander's emphasis on thinking over feeling, it is NOT the case that we are better off not feeling at all. There are at least two different kinds of feeling, and learning to use one of them appropriately is largely what the Alexander Technique is all about. The other one is deceptive and unreliable (which you will have experienced in virtually any lesson if you've studied AT) and better left out of our self-analysis.

Do not use your sense of what a particular activity feels like to guide you in doing it well. As I've experienced countless times in my life, whenever I manage to perform an activity (singing, walking, whatever) in a freer, better-organized way, it feels very different both from my previous experiences of this activity and from my expectations. The wrong way of using your feeling includes "putting" parts of your body where you think they should go as well as trying to recreate how a movement felt in the past.

So what kind of feelings are helpful to use in changing our habits? With minimal guidance, almost anyone can register pretty accurately the difference between ease and non-ease. The feelings involved in perceiving ease are far subtler than the feelings of gross muscular movement; they perhaps indicate the body's potential for movement, which can then occur or not, according to our choosing. When the movement happens under conditions of ease, it is likely to feel unfamiliar. With skill and consistency in allowing ease to prevail before we move, every single action of our lives has the potential to feel new and excitingly different.

After a decade and a half of Alexander Technique experiences, I still feel daily the exhilaration of a movement performed in a never-before-felt manner. That is one of the primary reasons I love my life, even during those weeks when I'm not at the beach.

How to elicit students' vowel awareness

2010-07-10T08:22:00.003-04:00

Wow—has it really been a month since my last posting? It's ironic, but since I started blogging and otherwise increasing my web presence as a teacher, the increased number of students it's brought me has left me with little time to continue blogging. So I'm having to learn about managing a larger practice, but this is a welcome challenge, no doubt.

Oh yes, and the high temperatures of summer leave me feeling mighty lazy. When I have a few extra moments of time during this part of the year, I usually just stretch out next to the chihuahuas on the couch, where they like to take the sun.

Peter and the dogs and I are all headed out for a week at the beach (Fire Island Pines) starting tomorrow. There's apparently little wireless coverage out there, so we're going to leave blogging behind. We'll return bronzed (well, whatever color one turns with SPF 70, perhaps a darker shade of cream), relaxed, and ready to dig back into sewing, blogging, teaching, and chewing on bones, respectively.

Anyhow, before I leave, I wanted to respond to a reader (Chaz) who posed the following question on one of my past postings about vowels:

Can you say more about how you teach students to discern the quality of their vowels? Some of mine have a "natural" ability to hear, and others seem to have no awareness of what seems so obvious to me. Is relentless repitition the only way?

Well, Chaz, I can empathize with both your frustration and that of your students! Even though I apparently possess the necessary gifts for singing — Cornelius used to say that I was very musical and had a good ear — it took me literally years before I could hear myself inadvertently altering my [ah]'s. Cornelius, of course, could hear it straight off, and would inform me that, once again, I had sung [ah] - [ah] - [ah] - [UH]. I would just nod and think to myself, "This man is insane; I'm not changing my vowel!" One day, I finally heard it myself, a real "duh" moment. Once I identified the change, it seemed so obvious. But until had I reached that point, it seemed that one of us (Cornelius or me) must have been crazy.

In my own teaching, I want to get my students as quickly as possible to the stage of being able to perceive their vowels accurately. (Both to facilitate learning and so that they will not go on thinking me insane.) Here are a couple of techniques I've found helpful for this:

1. Have the students sing exercises using a wide variety of vowels. Not just [ah], [ay], [ee], [oh], and [oo], but different shadings of each. For example, [ah] can be shaded from the very bright to the very dark, and you can even request a whole exercise be sung on the [uh] which is intruding into [ah] exercises. By these means, the students will become attuned to the subtleties of vowel shading and will be more likely to recognize when they stray from their intentions.

2. Incorporate kinesthetic information, which some students can pick up on more accurately than what they hear. Remind them that, once they have set the shape of their oral/laryngeal cavity for a vowel, they should not change it during the course of the exercise. Most students can recognize how they alter the position of their tongue, palate, throat, or lips as they sing, even if they can't yet hear the resulting differences. This is one of the areas in which Alexander Technique experience is so helpful to the singer: AT develops your ability to "leave yourself alone" in the performing of activities, i.e., not moving muscles unnecessarily.

Remind yourself when things get tough that EVENTUALLY, your student will hear herself altering vowels unintentionally. Here's a quotation from Daniel H. Pink's recent book, Drive: the Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, which I am currently reading: "Mastery requires effort. . .over a long time (not a week or a month, but a decade)." I wouldn't have chosen the word "effort," but I agree that we need to be reminded in our get-rich/thin/famous-quick culture that worthwhile skills develop gradually over long long long periods of time. In this sense, relentless repetition is part of the process: on perhaps her 12,343rd octave arpeggio sometime during her 239th lesson, your student will stop and laugh and say "Oh my god, I AM changing my [ah]!"

Feelings...nothing more than feelings

2010-06-09T11:13:00.000-04:00

It's a very human characteristic to want to finally figure something out: "Now I've got it!"

Unfortunately, the moment we think we have figured something out is usually the moment at which our relationship to that particular thing becomes set in stone, and thus not amenable to further development. In this way, unconscious habits are formed.

What I want in life is to maintain a constant state of improvement. I have come to realize that the aha moments that occasionally come along and delight me represent not a permanent figuring-out of how things should be, but more like a provisional state until I reach the next phase of my development. (This next phase may come 2 seconds or 2 years later.)

I forgot my own wisdom twice this week, allowing moments of improved functioning in my lessons to evoke a now-I've-got-it state of mind. In both instances, I fell into the mistake of abandoning my thinking, reverting to trying to feel my way into an activity.

In recent Alexander lessons, my teacher (Mio Morales) has been helping me to achieve a greater ease in my body. When I engage in thinking that produces such a state of ease, my movements feel very different: lighter, easier, freer. The change in feeling is the result of the thinking process, but during my last lesson I forgot this and got caught up in trying to make my body feel the way it has in the past when I experienced ease. Because the conditions in my body were different from those during my last lesson -- in particular, I had pulled a neck muscle during an over-enthusiastic session of butterfly at the pool -- it made no sense for me to try to recreate the same feelings I'd experienced in the past. Once I recognized this (with Mio's help), I could re-engage my productive thinking, which reliably produced an increase in my ease. In a few minutes, even my pulled neck muscle had let go.

In my last voice lesson, my teacher (Donna Reid) was helping me to free up my lowest notes. After a few minutes of exercises, which subtly shifted my thinking process, I'd started getting a clearer sound in this range. Singing these tones felt different, of course, and I memorized this feeling, without being aware that I had done so. Donna went on to work my falsetto awhile, which created further improvements in the freedom of my singing. When we returned to my low range, I was frustrated to notice that these notes were not as free as they had been a few minutes earlier. Then it came to me -- d'oh! --that I had been unconsciously trying to make the low notes feel the same way they had earlier in the lesson. But with the further improvements Donna had elicited in working with my falsetto, the conditions in my throat had altered, making the approach of five minutes ago no longer valid. As soon as I gave up trying to make the notes feel a particular way, they became more stable and resonant. And they felt different too, but I'm not going to try to recreate that feeling today!

I've been experimenting with shifting my mental role in my own activities to one of observer rather than do-er. This approach helps me to stay in the realm of continuing development and to avoid solidifying into set habits based on feeling. It's especially effective when I am able to let go of my expectations of how some movement or note is going to feel and to observe how it actually feels.

Arm, arm, ye brave!

2010-06-03T17:58:00.000-04:00

In singing or any other activity, we get the best response out of our bodies when they are well coordinated. This means that all the muscles of the body are pulling against each other in a state of harmoniously balanced tension. Anytime that there is a "pocket" of over-slackness somewhere in the system, meaning certain muscles are not participating in the web of coordinated tension, this creates a drag on the whole system. This drag forces the body to work harder to do anything, even just to maintain its uprightness. It's like having an idler in a team of workers: when someone is not pulling his weight, his coworkers must work harder to compensate. This imbalance -- in the team of workers or in your body -- creates tension and stress!

Even the non-participation of a seemingly insignificant muscle group can wreak havoc on the responsiveness of our bodies. I've written before about the importance of allowing the facial muscles to stay "activated" when we sing. If your cheeks go over-slack in the middle of a phrase, the resulting downward tendency of the face snowballs into a detrimental downward force along the entire front of the body, including the area of the vocal cords. The state of balance of the body is delicate, so any force that offsets the balance even a little can cause strain as the other available muscles struggle to take up the slack.

Whenever a part of your musculature is under-energized, you can be sure that somewhere else in your body other muscles are over-working to compensate.

In my recent Alexander Technique investigations -- exploring how to bring about better coordination in my students and in my own body -- I have discovered that virtually all of us share a common area of under-activation in our bodies: our upper arms. By "upper arms," I am referring not only to the arms themselves, but also to the shoulders and armpits and all the associated muscles. Many important muscles involved in posture terminate in this area, the trapezius and the latissimus ("traps" and "lats") in particular.

I've been using baby-like movements to retrain the musculature of my upper arms and those of my students. Starting face-down on the floor with palms flat on the floor to either side of your head, the student can look up, lifting her gaze and eventually her head, and her arms will engage in a certain, beneficial way to assist her coming up. (The correct coordination may not spontaneously arise -- the student's habits may interfere -- but with a little verbal and hands-on coaching, I can encourage a more effective muscular pull in this activity.) Here's what it looks like in a professional baby:

Note the dynamic pull to the elbows, the opening across the baby's upper chest, and the freedom of its head to balance atop the spine. These are just the qualities we are hoping to achieve in our own coordination!

With every singing student I've tried this recoordinating procedure with so far, there has been an immediate and dramatic improvement in resonance and volume along with a reduction in effort needed to sing. In my own last voice lesson, I experimented with activating my arms to improve my overall coordination, and my teacher (who didn't yet know I was experimenting) was stunned at the improved quality of my singing. After I let her know what I was doing, she remarked that the changes I'd brought about by using my arms in this new way had allowed me to break through to a higher level of vocal coordination. Subtleties in registration and resonance towards which we'd be working with only moderate success could now happen spontaneously in my newly coordinated body.

Re-awakening the activation of my upper arms has also improved the uprightness of my posture while making it easier and more comfortable and revamped my weight-lifting workouts and my swimming. I even feel happier in general, as it feels physically as though a great weight has been lifted off my chest.

Is it worth it?

2010-05-30T09:00:00.001-04:00

This past week, my student Jake asked me if I thought this quote represented the truth:

"No matter how many specific ends you may gain, you are worse off than before, if in the process of gaining them you have destroyed the integrity of the organism."

(It's a statement attributed to F.M. Alexander, as reported in Frank Pierce Jones's wonderful book, Freedom to Change. My student Danielle, about whom I wrote a few days ago, had found the quote while reading the book and brought it (back) to my attention. It clearly reflected what Jake and I had been exploring in his last lesson, so I passed it along to him. Do you think Alexander ever suspected that one day his wisdom would be shared among his followers via text message?)

Well, Jake, my own experience supports F.M.'s conjecture. Even though it goes against "common sense" and against most people's expectations, it seems that we are better off paying a bit MORE attention to the integrity of our bodies and a bit LESS attention to the specific goals we are trying to achieve. Not surprisingly, when I pay more attention to the ease and organization of my body, I feel better and my body works better.

What is really astounding, however, is that this shift in focus away from the achievement of the goals I am pursuing actually improves my performance of these goals as well. It is as if paying attention to the ease in my neck (for example) keeps my brain occupied so that it can't (badly) micromanage the use of my body in carrying out my goal-related tasks. Actions over which I'd otherwise struggle seem to "do themselves" with far more skill and efficiency than I'd be able to consciously call up. I have noticed this effect improving my performance in singing, swimming, running, dog behavior management, and arguing, among other activities.

Alexander contended that in our thinking, attention to the ease and expansion of our bodies must be PRIMARY, attention to the specific movements we are wishing to carry out, SECONDARY. He called this non-habitual shift in focus "attention to the means-whereby." The opposite situation, in which we concentrate on our goals, probably ignoring the conditions we are bringing about in our bodies as we do so, he called "end-gaining." One of the central aims of Alexander lessons is to learn how to stop end-gaining in your daily activities.

Our traditional educational system has instilled in all of us the belief that if we try harder, we just might succeed. My Alexander explorations have suggested that this is a bunch of baloney. Trying hard makes me tense; concentrating on a task narrows my focus and encourages me to forget the very body that is trying to carry out the task. (And even "mental" tasks are carried out by a physical body.)

Paying attention to our Alexandrian means-whereby is often challenging to new students: the ease of your neck is a subtle quality indeed, and your attention to it is easily overwhelmed by the much more easily noticeable movements you may be trying to carry out. For this reason, I sometimes create a "fake means-whereby" for my student to attend to while carrying out a task. Until such time as she is able to effectively monitor her ease, this at least gives her an opportunity to observe the result of NOT focusing so closely on her immediate task.

You can try this out for yourself in your own singing practice by following the procedure I describe below. It is particularly useful when you find yourself trying harder and harder to accomplish a "difficult" passage. (I put that word in quotes because often the difficulty falls away when you stop end-gaining.) I have an advanced student who is working on some arias with fiendish coloratura passages. When she concentrates on getting each note perfect, she slows the tempo down inadvertently and her vocal coordination suffers. I can see this detrimental mental shift occurring in her rigid, unfocused gaze and her loss of body mobility. When I observe these signs, I suggest the following mind-shifting process:

Move your eyes in a big circle, as though you were looking at all the numbers of a huge clock in sequence (or reverse sequence). Let your intention be to move your eyes as smoothly as possible. That's your (temporary) means-whereby. Now sing the "difficult" passage as you attend to moving your eyes around the clock. Let the smoothness of the eye movement be your aim, letting the vocal process take care of itself for now. What did you notice?

My advanced student invariably notices that the formerly difficult passage now rings out easily and accurately, as if someone else had sung it! This student is also getting skilled at using the Alexander Technique; she is increasingly able to beneficially distract herself by focusing on Alexander's real means-whereby, which he once put down as something like: "Allow your neck to relax, so that your head can move a bit forward and up, so that your spine can lengthen, and your back widen." (An Alexander teacher can guide your body into these movements -- impossible to accurately represent in words and easily mis-interpreted -- with his hands. Use the clock principle or some gentle head movements to practice shifting your focus until you are able to work with an Alexander teacher.)

It may seem in life, especially when things get really hectic, or when we are engaged in some activity that we find particularly important, that it would be helpful, perhaps just for a little moment, to ignore our bodies and push through some task. But is it worth it?

You'll have to determine the answer for yourself. We are all by training experts in end-gaining. Many people have never experienced what it is like to pay attention to the means-whereby. You can experiment with it by asking yourself the following question before and during your next difficult or important activity:

"How free is my neck right now?"

Hello 12, Hello 13, Hello Voice Lessons?

2010-05-25T07:51:00.000-04:00

I recently received an email from a young man named Alex wanting to know whether he should start voice lessons now, while his voice was still changing, or wait until puberty has finished.

The usual advice in this situation is to wait, but if a young person has a passion for music, I would not want to squelch his (or her) enthusiasm by refusing to give lessons. So here is what I am going to recommend for Alex:

1) As you might suspect, this is not the time for extensive technique development, since your bodily conditions are undergoing dramatic changes. Over-stressing your vocal organs right now would only interfere with their healthy development. Also, whatever control over your mechanism you manage to achieve now, you will only have to relearn when things in your body have finally settled down. Don't bother with technique lessons until you are 17 or 18 or even older. (I did not start voice lessons until I was 22.)

2) Focus now on learning other things that will stay with you throughout your vocal career:

Take piano lessons. I started piano at age 5 (Thanks, Mom and Dad!) and have found that the musical skills I learned at the keyboard have served me well as a singer. With my piano-playing ability, I can read music, better understand the musical structure of pieces I'm singing, learn new music on my own, and even accompany myself while singing. It's invaluable to not have to rely on someone else to teach me music.

Sing through music that interests you, without worrying too much about your puberty-induced cracking and yodeling! Listen to recordings of singers you admire. Become familiar with the repertoire you eventually will be working on yourself. Read books on music theory as well as biographies of musicians.

If you are planning on singing repertoire in other languages, learn these languages, at least at a basic level. You will polish your pronunciation and become more effective in conveying the meaning of lyrics if you actually understand them yourself. (As a classical singer, I have had the opportunity of singing in English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Hebrew, and Latin!)

Take Alexander Technique lessons. Learning at an early age to use your body efficiently and without unnecessary effort will enhance your life in many ways. I waited until my late 20's to begin Alexander lessons, when they became imperative to un-do chronic back pain that never would have occurred if I'd had AT lessons earlier. You don't have to wait until you have developed harmful habits that will interfere with your comfort, not to mention your singing: learn good habits now!

So, Alex (and other young singers out there), do feel free to come to me for lessons. At this stage, we will not be focusing on technique development or muscle-strengthening. We will devote these early years to the cultivation of musicianship and of ease in everything you do. Your lessons will include lots and lots of Alexander Technique to counteract any bad habits that are already settling into your way of using your body and to help prevent bad habits from establishing themselves as you mature.

Thanks, Alex, for inspiring me to write about this important topic. I hope to see you soon for some lessons!

The Danielle Principle

2010-05-21T09:21:00.000-04:00

My student Danielle had the opportunity a few days ago to take a lesson with her former voice teacher. It seems to have been a real eye-opener for her. . .and led to her coming up with a brilliant and individual way of applying the Alexander Technique.

During this lesson, Danielle's teacher suggested many of the same manipulative techniques she'd always relied on -- "unhinge your jaw," for example -- but with her new Alexander/Reid perspective on singing, Danielle was noticing that these recommendations were producing more tension in her technique, not less. She realized that her former teacher's approach was no longer valid for her.

Danielle told me that the detrimental instructions were causing her frustration to mount along with her tension, until she experienced a sudden shift in thinking. It started with an Alexandrian pause; she gave herself a moment to stop responding with tension and frustration. This inhibitory moment allowed Danielle to come up with a more beneficial approach.

Danielle noticed that the teacher was not watching her, but engrossed in playing the piano, so she realized that the teacher would not be able to see whether or not she was incorporating the manipulative instructions. She then thought to herself, "Let me see how I can please my teacher, but first, let me please myself." (That is the new formulation of the Alexander Technique that I found truly brilliant.)

Armed with this new thought process, Danielle proceeded to "translate" her teacher's suggestions into more sensible ideas along the lines of what she and I have been exploring in her lessons. In this way, she improved her own singing, and apparently pleased her teacher as well!

[Note to self and other voice teachers: It might be a good idea to watch your students as they sing, to observe how well they are carrying out your intentions! We cannot afford to waste any potential source of information. I rely on my ears, my eyes, my hands (thanks to my Alexander training), and even a sort of empathetic "sense" through which I can feel in my own body a reflection of my students' ease/tension.]

One of my greatest satisfactions as a teacher is to discover that my students have taken what they got from my lessons and gone beyond it. Thank you, Danielle, for sharing with me your recent "proud moment"! May it inspire other singers, too, in their own explorations.

On further thought, I am realizing how valuable the Danielle Principle is in all areas of our lives. Let us see how we can please others, yes; but first, let us please ourselves. (In the sense of refusing to abandon our commitment to ease in our actions.)

Smiles, everyone, smiles!

2010-05-14T07:47:00.001-04:00

Toni asked me recently to explain the concept of bocca ridente, Italian for "smiling mouth." This is an old term, first used by singing teachers in the bel canto era.

Like a lot of teaching concepts, bocca ridente contains a kernel of validity along with the potential for misunderstanding and misuse. I guess the originators of the term were acknowledging that in good singing, the facial muscles (along with all the rest of the muscles of the body) engaged in a particular energetic way, similarly to the way they engage in an authentic smile. Good singing technique, therefore, produces a smile-like engagement of the facial muscles.

It's unfortunately easy to get this the wrong way around, thinking that smiling can produce good singing technique. Like any localized attempt at muscular control, putting on a smiling mouth can imbalance the delicate whole-body muscular coordination we are after, eliciting tension and self-consciousness in the process. The opposite situation -- a frowning mouth, or under-engaged facial muscles -- is just as harmful to singing technique. Without enough tone in the facial muscles, the face sags, putting downward pressure onto the larynx and creating imbalance throughout the body. If a muscle is not doing its job, if it is under-energized, another muscle must over-work to make up for it. What we are after is balance, which can occur only as a whole-body, simultaneous pattern. You can't possibly command each of your muscles to pull with the appropriate amount of force, which in any case changes from moment to moment. This impossibility extends to your smiling muscles as well.

Let's do a little experiment to test the differences between a smile that arises spontaneously and a smile we consciously produce.

All you will need is some images that delight you, and these can be mental images. I will provide a selection of actual images for anyone who needs a little inspiration. (Moderation is key here. We are looking for a state of delight or mild amusement. If your image is too uproarious, it may over-stimulate your facial smiling muscles, which will be counter-productive. You know how your face hurts after seeing a particularly hilarious movie? This is not the state of ease and balance we're after.)

Think of an image of something delightful or mildly amusing, something that brings a real smile to your face. (You may even feel the smile behind your eyes when it is authentic.) Here are some images that delight me:

A fondly remembered day at the beach in Puerto Rico:

A beloved entertainer in one of her classic skits:

A couple of attractive underwear models:

Whichever image you are contemplating, notice the effect that this has on your face. You may feel an energized engagement of muscles above your mouth, up into the cheekbone area or even beyond. (This is a smile.) Notice also the mental state that accompanies this physical shift. Perhaps you feel relaxed and happy. Well, all these physical and mental conditions are perfect for singing! Try out a phrase or two of "Row, row, row your boat" as a test.

How did that go for you? I felt joyful during my test run and noticed a sense of ease to my singing. Very pleasant, indeed!

Now plaster a big, fakey Miss America smile onto your face. You know the kind I mean, you've seen them on every contestant during those cheesy opening numbers just before they cull the first 40 losers. You just know that behind those toothy grins those poor girls are thinking "step to the right, step to the right, turn, and.......clap" -- the choreography they were taught the day before filming.

[Note: if the idea of participating in the Miss America pageant is truly delightful to you, this exercise may produce the authentic kind of smile we already tested in part 1. If this is the case for you, use instead the kind of smile you make when unwrapping a horribly ugly or inappropriate gift. I will end today's blog with the story of the worst gift I ever got. . . .]

Got your fake grin in place? How does that feel? Kind of tense, right? and stiff? Not to mention the accompanying emotional tones. Want to sing? Well, sorry, sweetheart -- just keep on smiling and perform a chorus of "Row, row, row your boat" anyhow.

How was that? I found it disagreeable to sing in this state. My face, locked into its fake smile, would not easily move into the various positions needed for the consonants. I felt over-aware of my face to the exclusion of the rest of me. My singing sounded forced and tense.

Your experience might not be the same as mine, of course. Try out both parts of the experiment again, ending with whichever version you prefer. And take off that tiara already, for goodness' sake.

Here, as promised, is the story of the worst gift I ever received:

The setting: Bremerhaven, Germany, 1987. Carl Schurz Casern, to be specific, the Army base where I was stationed as a new lieutenant. Yes, I was in the Army. This revelation surprises even me, and I knew it was coming. This was before Don't Ask, Don't Tell, and I, a mildly effeminate and very insecure young man, was living in constant fear of being discovered as gay. I didn't really care about being forcibly discharged from the Army -- in fact, I would have preferred it -- but I wasn't sure if they would then require me to repay my college tuition, which the Army had covered as part of my ROTC scholarship. How could I possibly come up with the cost of four years at Princeton? In any case, our story requires you to know that I was in the Army, gay, and trying desperately to pass as straight.

My job was "Custodian of Postal Effects" at the local Army Post Office. I was in charge of the whole financial operation of the APO, in other words, and had several civilians and a platoon of soldiers under my command. My authority was tenuous at best. The soldiers all knew I was gay (how could they not, based on the amount of product in my hair and the fact that I was living with my boyfriend) and knew that that meant that according to the silent codes of the military, they were under no obligation to respect me. In fact, I was treated with barely concealed contempt by everyone from the lowest private to my commander's commander's commander.

Anyway, the civilians in the APO (mostly women) all adored me. One of them -- I'll call her "Carmela" -- returned to her home in the Philippines during a vacation and returned laden with gifts for everyone in the office. She was proud of having chosen just the right gift to suit everyone on the staff, and commented over and over and very publicly how my gift in particular was fitting to me. She kept tantalizing me by saying how much I was going to LOVE the gift she'd brought me.

By the end of the workday, everyone was eagerly anticipating the unveiling of my gift. We all, civilians and soldiers alike, gathered around my desk. Carmela distributed her many packages, starting with those for the lower-ranking workers. In turn, each employee unwrapped Philippine specialty foodstuffs, native crafts, t-shirts. Eventually, all eyes were on me and my largish gift-wrapped package. Finally, we would all get to see the perfect gift Carmela had chosen for Lieutenant Hanko. I looked around to the faces staring back at me -- some friendly, many contemptuous. At least I could soon console myself and assuage my loneliness in a wonderful gift.

I slowly undid the ribbons on the box, as everyone watched, wondering along with me what was about to be revealed. I finally got to the last layer of packaging. I removed the sheets of tissue paper to expose. . . .a thick, foot-and-a-half-long, wooden penis sculpture. It was strangely heavy for its size and anatomically rather accurate. There were even large wooden testicles in a huge wooden scrotum. I wish someone had captured my face at that moment on film; I'd have been interested to see my expression of horror and embarrassment and the color of red my cheeks must have turned. The craziest thing was that Carmela continued behaving as though she had not made an enormous social gaffe. She seemed not to be aware of the sexual connotations of the, um, penis, or that it might possibly not be something you'd give to your (gay and trying to hide it) boss in front of the staff. She had always come across as sweet, slightly religious, and proper to the point of dullness. What a shocker! I can conclude only that in Philippine culture, the penis must be a symbol of gratitude and respect.

All these years later, my heart still races as I type these words. I can't summon even a fake smile onto my face. I will not try to sing "Row, row, row your boat" in this state. I think I'll go make an appointment to see my therapist. . . .

Bridging the gap

2010-05-13T18:10:00.000-04:00

Toni has requested that I blog about the passaggio and about bocca ridente. I'll cover the former in today's post.

The passaggio (Italian for "bridge") is the area in the voice range in which a transitions from the chest voice into the head voice occurs. The exact note at which this transition happens is called the break; the passaggio includes the notes which lie a couple of semi-tones above and below the break.

The break happens at around the same pitch for all singers, male or female: the E above middle C. (The break for basses and baritones may be a semi-tone or so lower, and for some higher voices, a little higher.) This means that the break appears near the bottom of women's vocal ranges, near the top for basses and baritones, and right smack in the middle for tenors. Sorry, tenors, this makes things most challenging for you! Other singers, unless they are singing wide-ranging music like opera, can largely avoid having to negotiate much through the passaggio, but tenors (and all classical singers) must figure out how to sing here with elegance and ease.

It can be challenging to sing smoothly in the passaggio because your vocal technique must make rapid and (ideally) undetectable shifts between the two opposing registers. This requires your two registers -- chest register and falsetto/head voice -- to work together efficiently. As you come up from below your break, your chest register must gradually cede its precedence to the head voice, which takes over little by little as the notes ascend. The converse must happen as you descend in pitch. Such a delicate give-and-take can happen only when both registers are free of tension and equally strong.

The main reason that it is difficult to negotiate pitches in the passaggio is that in this tonal region, the chest voice is extremely powerful and the falsetto relatively weak. It takes skill to balance the two in a range in which their relative strengths does not match. Figuring out how to do this smoothly and easily is one of the main objectives of voice lessons. (As I see it.)

I learned from Cornelius Reid that an ascending octave exercise with the top note taken quietly helps to get the two registers operating at a similar strength level. Starting on the low pitch activates the chest voice. Going up the octave brings in the falsetto, and taking this note quietly lessons some of the power of the chest voice so that it can match the pull of the falsetto without overwhelming it.

Until your two registers are cooperating nicely in this way, you will have to resort to less desirable options for singing in the passaggio:

1) You can sing in the chest voice up to the break and then switch into falsetto for all the notes occurring above the break. The produces an unfortunate "yodeling" effect, which you may actually decide to use occasionally in comic passages.

2) You can sing everything in chest voice, pushing it higher than Nature intended, which results in shout-y high notes and an inability to sing quietly in your higher range. You hear this mostly in untrained male singers. You would have heard this from me if you attended any of my high school choral concerts.

3) You can sing everything in head voice, which makes low notes weak or unavailable and eliminates the throat-opening, stabilizing effects of the chest voice from your entire range. Since most of their notes lie above the break, many women, even accomplished opera singers, sing this way, not realizing its damaging and limiting potentials.

4) If you're a tenor without the ability to coordinate your registers, you can sing lightly in a well-developed falsetto, which has the same limitations I listed in #3. Or you can play the saxophone instead of singing.

Here's a clue to getting your registers to coordinate: they play together most nicely when you downplay their opposing qualities. For instance, the chest voice, which is by nature bright and clear, combines more easily with a bright, clear head voice (as opposed to a hootier, breathier one). I have had a lot of success getting a bright falsetto on the [a] vowel (as in "cat") to coordinate with the chest voice. Or, to go in the other direction, you could bring more head-voicey qualities into the chest voice by singing in the low range quietly on [oh] and switching up the octave above with a less overtly chesty approach which may more easily cooperate with the head voice.

A willingness to experiment is helpful. Have fun playing around with your passaggio! Go quietly at first, however, in this range; a forceful approach will never help. Let me know how your experiments are going. . . .

Different Singing Styles

2010-05-10T10:14:00.001-04:00

This post is a response to the following query that came emailed to me from Toni in Washington State:

"Michael, I don't want to sing opera in particular but I know that most training is based on the classical way to sing. I really want to sing jazz and soul/r&b. I have lots of ideas going through my head on the songs I would like to sing and record. My question comes into play here. The way [my voice teacher] makes me sing I would never sing in soul or any other music but classical. Is it enough to just know how to breathe correctly or do I really need to know proper placement of vowels?"

I love these questions, because they allow me to address a fear shared by many singers -- that lessons will make them sound different from what they want. I hope to show you that, with my approach to teaching at least, this fear is unfounded.

Let's start by listening to some duets, each sung by one classical singer + one pop singer. I think that all the singers here remain true to their own personal styles as well as to the spirit of the music they sing.

So, what makes the difference between classical and pop "styles"? To a great extent, it has to do with the temperament of the performer, but there are technical differences as well. With a well-developed technique, you can sing any piece within your range in the style of your choice. Not everyone shares the same tastes in applying musical styles outside of the repertoire in which they're normally encountered. Here are a couple of examples that might grate on some people's nerves, although I personally find them both charming and interesting:

Singers have a range of options in approaching a given song, and the better their technique, the wider this range will be. The two main technical adjustments available to make singing sound more "classical" or more "pop" are resonance and vowel sound. Classical singers normally develop a greater resonance (amplified within their own throats and oral cavities) than pop singers, who tend to rely more on electronic amplification.

The gradual increase in microphone use has caused an increasing polarity between classical and pop styles. In the early days of Broadway, there was a lot more crossover, as the singing techniques required for opera houses and musical theater halls were more similar. Nowadays, in pop music -- and, sadly, in opera more and more -- voices unable to produce sufficient natural resonance are simply miked, allowing a more "natural-sounding" (i.e., non-operatic) resonance to be heard throughout the theater.

To focus on the positives of this situation, using a microphone (or performing in a small enough space) can allow a singer to adopt a singing style that is closer to speech sounds. Many listeners prefer the resulting vocal effect, which seems more intimate and less artificial to them. Once you've developed your natural resonance, however, it's hard to give it up, because it feels so good and because it represents a high degree of skill. This is why classical singers sometimes sound so ridiculous when they do pop music -- they are unwilling to adjusting their resonance back to "normal" levels.

Vowel sounds are the other sound characteristic that singers can easily adjust to alter the style of their singing. Vowels for classical singing tend to be darker and more rounded, whereas vowels for pop singing tend to be brighter and broader. (Think of Renee Fleming vs. Ethel Merman.) The difference is similar to that between the "plummy" British English of the Royal Family and the way native New Yorkers speak. Most of us would pronounce the same word differently in different musical contexts: the [ah]'s in "Maria" change depend on whether you're doing Schubert's "Ave Maria" or "How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?" from The Sound of Music.

When I am teaching voice, my aim is not to make all my students sound like opera singers. Or like heavy metal vocalists, for that matter. I aim to give them a solid technique so that they can produce the widest range of sounds their instruments will permit. That way, they can choose the appropriate sound for each song, phrase, or even note they sing. In all cases, good technique is good technique. Style is a matter of making choices from within your personal possibilities, which should be constantly increasing as you learn.

Open throat, take two -- with a more positive attitude

2010-05-06T09:30:00.001-04:00

My friend Nanette (who, in 11th grade, introduced me to the magical world of THEATER) recently commented on this blog that my continuing emphasis on the difficulty of learning to sing without a teacher was becoming discouraging. On rereading my recent post about opening the throat, I could see her point. So I promised her to rewrite this piece with a more encouraging tone and to make an effort to continue blogging along these new lines.

So, Nanette and other dear readers, here is my revised post. (Only the last few paragraphs have been changed.) I would love to hear reactions from anyone who cares to chime in.

My friend Toni sent me an email with this eloquently expressed plea for understanding:

"I still don't anatomically understand why as you go up the register your throat starts closing. I keep telling [my teacher] that I am so longer able to sing that high but she keeps telling me to open my throat. I keep trying to open my throat but it still seems to elude me. The higher I get my throat just starts closing up and I feel like I am straining. What to do? It is really frustrating and I feel that I am in a sort of conundrum. FRUSTRATING!!!!!!!"

Can't you just feel Toni's frustration? Probably most singers can relate to this issue, which is one of the central challenges of learning to sing: how to maintain an open throat throughout your entire range and at all volume levels.

Let's start by clearing up possible misconceptions. First, the feeling of an open throat is largely an illusion. What you are feeling when you sing with an "open throat" is the absence of constricting tension. I'm sure that we all experience that lack of tension differently, but for me, it feels as if a passageway several inches wide has opened up in my larynx. Obviously, there is not room in there for anything several inches wide to take place; the minute muscular adjustments that take place when I sing well -- probably on the order of millimeters of movement -- create the illusion of a huge cavern opening up.

We get into vocal trouble when we try to create this huge cavern on our own. This brings me to a second misconception: you cannot open your throat. The muscles are simply not under your conscious control. . .you may as well try to beat your heart. That doesn't mean that you can't affect their operation; we'll get to how to do that shortly. But if you try to open your throat, you will just contract some muscles in your throat that produce a feeling of opening. It is highly unlikely that this approach will bring about the subtle adjustments of the arytenoid and other muscles that truly "open the throat."

Trying to feel your way into an experience involving involuntary muscles is pointless. Until you experience the new coordination, you won't know what it feels like. I have been hugely surprised at a number of milestone voice lessons to find that singing correctly felt NOTHING like what I had expected -- so different, in fact, that I may as well have called the other activity I'd been aiming at something other than "singing." It's hard to express the degree of self-delusion that arises in these situations. It's a little like finally meeting someone you've only spoken to on the phone and finding out that they look nothing like what you'd been picturing.

Anyway, when you eventually learn to sing with an open throat, trust me that it will probably feel dramatically different from what you expected. In the meantime, trying directly to do what you suspect open throat feels like will get you frustrated. (See Toni's heartfelt outburst, above.) You must indirectly stimulate an open-throated response from your voice. This process requires the clever use of the vocal registers in "tricking" your vocal organs into a new coordination. Since Nature loves balance and ease, once your system has experienced a better coordination, it will be more likely to gravitate towards that in the future.

Maybe it's a little over-optimistic for me to try to explain in a blog posting how to recoordinate your registers, but why don't I give it a shot anyhow? First, we must establish that in well-coordinated singing, the two registers (chest voice and falsetto/head voice) oppose each other in an equilibrium of delicately balanced tensions. One of the functions of the chest voice mechanism is to keep the throat open. It does this easily in your low range because the falsetto is only gently engaged here. But as you rise higher and higher, the chest voice mechanism must brace against an increasingly vigorous falsetto action, as the vocal cords are stretched thinner and thinner as you ascend.

If your chest voice is not sufficiently strong to maintain its pull against the falsetto for your high notes, your throat will shut down. Alternatively, other, less appropriate muscles will get involved to try to force your throat to stay open. As you can imagine, this creates constricting tensions, making your sound as effortful as it feels. Another possibility is that your chest voice is strong enough, but poorly coordinated, so that constricting tensions that were not noticeable in your low range because of the relatively lower tension requirements become amplified in your high range to the point of making you uncomfortable. In all these cases, you need to recoordinate and/or strengthen your chest register.

Chest register development normally begins on low notes, where this register is most easily accessible. Often, it helps to start by isolating the chest register from the falsetto momentarily, to make sure it works well. You can elicit chest register response by choosing patterns of pitch, loudness, and vowel conducive to it: loud single tones using the [ah] or [a] (as in cat) vowel on low notes are perfect.

Once the registers are working well independently, you can choose other patterns of pitch-loudness-vowel to encourage them to work together. I often use octave leaps from loud low notes to quiet high notes on [ah] for this purpose. (In this particular exercise, developed along many variations by Cornelius Reid, the combination of the low range of the starting pitch and the [ah] vowel elicits the chest voice. Going to the higher note more quietly, but with rhythmic spontaneity, brings in more head voice without -- keep your fingers crossed! -- knocking out the chest voice action.) If you try this on your own, do your best to maintain the integrity of the vowel throughout and to not be too strongly influenced -- and misled -- by how it all feels. When a new, open-throated coordination presents itself, it will likely surprise you by the unexpected sensations accompanying it. It will also likely delight you in how good it feels!

Thank you, Toni, for giving me the opportunity to revisit this crucial singing issue. . .and good luck!

How do I open my throat?

2010-05-03T08:19:00.000-04:00

My friend Toni sent me an email with this eloquently expressed plea for understanding:

"I still don't anatomically understand why as you go up the register your throat starts closing. I keep telling [my teacher] that I am so longer able to sing that high but she keeps telling me to open my throat. I keep trying to open my throat but it still seems to elude me. The higher I get my throat just starts closing up and I feel like I am straining. What to do? It is really frustrating and I feel that I am in a sort of conundrum. FRUSTRATING!!!!!!!"

Can't you just feel Toni's frustration? Probably most singers can relate to this issue, which is one of the central challenges of learning to sing: how to maintain an open throat throughout your entire range and at all volume levels.

Let's start by clearing up possible misconceptions. First, the feeling of an open throat is largely an illusion. What you are feeling when you sing with an "open throat" is the absence of constricting tension. I'm sure that we all experience that lack of tension differently, but for me, it feels as if a passageway several inches wide has opened up in my larynx. Obviously, there is not room in there for anything several inches wide to take place; the minute muscular adjustments that take place when I sing well -- probably on the order of millimeters of movement -- create the illusion of a huge cavern opening up.

We get into vocal trouble when we try to create this huge cavern on our own. This brings me to a second misconception: you cannot open your throat. The muscles are simply not under your conscious control. . .you may as well try to beat your heart. That doesn't mean that you can't affect their operation; we'll get to how to do that shortly. But if you try to open your throat, you will just contract some muscles in your throat that produce a feeling of opening. It is highly unlikely that this approach will bring about the subtle adjustments of the arytenoid and other muscles that truly "open the throat."

Trying to feel your way into an experience involving involuntary muscles is pointless. Until you experience the new coordination, you won't know what it feels like. I have been hugely surprised at a number of milestone voice lessons to find that singing correctly felt NOTHING like what I had expected -- so different, in fact, that I may as well have called the other activity I'd been aiming at something other than "singing." It's hard to express the degree of self-delusion that arises in these situations. It's a little like finally meeting someone you've only spoken to on the phone and finding out that they look nothing like what you'd been picturing.

Anyway, if you've not yet sung with an open throat, trust me: you can have NO IDEA what it feels like. Trying directly to do what you suspect open throat feels like will get you frustrated. (See Toni's heartfelt outburst, above.) You must indirectly stimulate an open-throated response from your voice -- preferably with the help of a functionally oriented teacher. This process requires the clever use of the vocal registers in "tricking" your vocal organs into a new coordination. Since Nature loves balance and ease, once your system has experienced a better coordination, it will be more likely to gravitate towards that in the future.

Recoordinating your registers is beyond the scope of a blog posting, but let's examine the process briefly. First, we must establish that in well-coordinated singing, the two registers (chest voice and falsetto/head voice) oppose each other in an equilibrium of delicately balanced tensions. One of the functions of the chest voice mechanism is to keep the throat open. It does this easily in your low range because the falsetto is only gently engaged here. But as you rise higher and higher, the chest voice mechanism must brace against an increasingly vigorous falsetto action, as the vocal cords are stretched thinner and thinner as you ascend.

If your chest voice is not sufficiently strong to maintain its pull against the falsetto for your high notes, your throat will shut down. Alternatively, other, less appropriate muscles will get involved to try to force your throat to stay open. As you can imagine, this creates constricting tensions, making your sound as effortful as it feels. Another possibility is that your chest voice is strong enough, but poorly coordinated, so that constricting tensions that were not noticeable in your low range because of the relatively lower tension requirements become amplified in your high range to the point of making you uncomfortable. In all these cases, you need to recoordinate and/or strengthen your chest register.

Chest register development normally begins on low notes, where this register is most easily accessible. Often, we will want to start by isolating the chest register from the falsetto momentarily, to make sure it works well. We can elicit chest register response by choosing patterns of pitch, loudness, and vowel conducive to it: loud single tones using the [ah] vowel on low notes are perfect.

Once the registers are working well independently, we choose other patterns of pitch-loudness-vowel to encourage them to work together. I often use octave leaps from loud low notes to quiet high notes on [ah] for this purpose, although the possibilities are nearly endless. (In this particular exercise, developed in many variations by Cornelius Reid, starting on the low range and singing on [ah] elicit the chest voice. Going to the higher note more quietly, but with rhythmic spontaneity, brings in more head voice without, we hope, knocking out the chest voice action.) As the teacher, I continually monitor the student's sound to discern whether the desired coordination has been achieved, altering my approach as we go on in response to what is actually happening. (This takes a highly sensitive ear as well as experience in knowing what registrational situations different vocal sounds indicate. That is why I am not going to recommend that you try this on your own. Also, on your own you will likely be too strongly influenced -- and misled -- by how it all feels.)

Thank you, Toni, for giving me the opportunity to revisit this crucial singing issue. . .and good luck!

One step back, Two steps forward

2010-04-29T08:33:00.003-04:00

New York City -- and it seems my neighborhood of Chelsea in particular -- is in a perpetual state of renewal. To exercise my dogs, I walk around a lot and am continually amazed by the number of scaffoldings and construction sites to be seen.

I've noticed that a "construction" site usually starts out as a demolition site. Before a new, glitzy building can be built, the old, decrepit structure must be destroyed and the debris removed.

For example, this hideous monstronsity housing a useless opera company

was fortunately destroyed so that the good citizens of Chelsea could fill their bellies with cheap, hormone-enhanced poultry, deep-fried onion flowers, and neon-blue cocktails at Dallas BBQ:

My opinions of "modern progress" aside, it is clear that the process of rebuilding often calls for a period of tearing down of the undesired structures already in place. This goes, metaphorically anyway, for personal growth as well as for urban renewal.

Let's return to yesterday's example of relearning how to walk. Many of my Alexander students, when initially experiencing a more easeful way of walking, lose their balance or trip over their own feet or bump into my furniture. I interpret this phenomenon to mean that their brains, used to managing their walking movements in a physical environment of tension, are initially unable to accurately process the sensory information coming in because they are still compensating for tensions that no longer exist.

Fortunately, our brains are very "plastic," or receptive to change, and very soon learn to accommodate to the new conditions. In the case of walking in an Alexander lesson, students are normally enjoying steady balance and increased gracefulness within minutes. We had to destroy their old tension-based system of balance in order to allow a new, improved, ease-based balance to come about. Perhaps this transition occurs so quickly in the case of walking because most of us walked freely at some (early) stage of our lives. The neural pathways for free walking already exist. They just became obscured over time, and are easily re-established once the tense-walking pathways are eradicated.

Since most people have never sung with a free technique, the transition from the destruction phase to the new, improved, ease-based technique phase can take longer to accomplish. After tearing down the undesired tension-based technique (metaphorically -- there is no violence involved!), there is no underlying correct technique to reassert itself. We have to start building your new technique from scratch.

Having no technique, albeit temporarily, can seem even worse than having a bad technique, but only if you take the short view. In the long run, once you discard your tension-based technique and address yourself to the process of discovering how to make sounds healthily, you will eventually enjoy an effortless production, an increased range, and a more beautiful sound.

It takes a lot of fortitude in the meantime to refuse to sing according to the "old way." But each time you strain for that high note, you are re-establishing an undesired neural pathway. As Cornelius Reid used to quip, "Practice makes permanent."

Or in the words of Terry Laughlin, the founder of the Total Immersion swimming method, "Don't practice struggle." You'll do yourself the most good by committing to ease in every phrase, in every note you sing.

Aren't lessons supposed to make me BETTER?

2010-04-28T08:35:00.001-04:00

If you tracked any process of self-improvement over a long period of time (your progress in the gym, say) you would probably not observe a smooth and uninterrupted upward trend. You would be more likely to see brief spikes in improvement interspersed with plateaus during which not much seems to be happening. You would even see the occasional backsliding, when things get temporarily worse before improving again.

And yet, you will probably be able to discern in among all the ups and downs a general tendency in the direction of progress. Your good days will get better and better and your "worst" days aren't even all that bad anymore. You may even reach the point at which your worst performance these days is better than your best attempt of a year ago.

If you are feeling temporarily discouraged by a rough patch in your development, you may be reassured by taking the long view. Don't compare today's seeming failure with yesterday's triumph. Consider an average current performance in relation to one from 6 months or a year ago. Our personal evolution, just like our evolution as a species, is observable only over the long term. (Although for us as individuals, we are talking years, not eons!) Your parents and their parents and their parents all looked a lot like you, but if you go back enough generations, you will eventually find in your family tree some ancestors with a lot more body hair and smaller brains. In some families, you don't have to go that far back to see this effect.

But I digress.

My main point today is that you do not need to feel bad about backsliding in your lessons. In fact, I'm going to go out on a limb and state that in many cases, getting worse is a prerequisite for getting better, and therefore something to be welcomed, or even celebrated. Or, if you're feeling a little grumpy this morning, at least tolerated.

I'm going to discuss two reasons why you should take heart when you're feeling as though you are making negative progress in your lessons. First, your feelings of deterioration might be inaccurate. Second, even if your performance is truly deteriorating, this may be the necessary first step in a radical overhaul of your technique.

Let's use walking in an Alexander lesson as an example. Walking is something you learned to do as a toddler. Back then, you probably walked with freedom, joy, and ease. But by the time most of us become adults, our walks get corrupted by a lot of unnecessary effort and tension, with a resulting decrease in the level of joy we experience in this activity. We might even hurt when we walk. So we go to an Alexander teacher for help in relearning how to move.

Very often, when an Alexander student first re-experiences what it's like to walk without all that unnecessary effort, it feels weird and foreign, and therefore wrong, to him. He misinterprets his improvement as an error. Freed from extraneous movements that formerly corrupted his walk, the student feels as though he were too stiff. "I feel like Frankenstein" is a frequent remark at this stage. Even the emotional impact of walking can initially feel uncomfortable. Students often feel as though they are gliding gracefully but pompously about like kings and queens and wonder what people will think if they dare to walk around like that in the real world. In actuality, they usually look elegant and confident, but it still feels like a mistake to them.

(I have written before about this same effect in the context of a voice lesson, in which students often cut off their most freely sung notes, misinterpreting the new experience of freedom as an error.)

So, before you agonize over declines in your progress, make sure that they are not actually improvements that merely feel like declines. To recognize the difference, tune in to your sense of ease. An increase in ease almost always signals an improvement in technique. If you're not confident in your ability to make this distinction, try some Alexander lessons, which provide training in the recognition and cultivation of a state of ease.

Tomorrow I will continue with the second reason for not regretting back-sliding in lessons.

My lessons are going so well -- why can't I sing that well in my songs?

2010-04-26T05:42:00.001-04:00

Singing even a simple song is a act of incredible complexity. You have to produce a well-coordinated tone on pitches that change frequently, often jumping around from one vocal register to another. You have to manage your resonance as the vowel changes from word to word, while interspersing these sung tones with all the proper consonant sounds. You have to honor the composer's or conductor's or your own intentions in matters of volume, tempo, emotion, and tonal color. You have to maintain ease in your body and manage your breath per the demands of the piece you are singing. You have to convey the meaning of the lyrics, communicate with your audience and any fellow performers, and be poised enough to respond to any unexpected snafus.

Oh yes, and you are expected to look great all the while.

It's not easy to learn under conditions of such complexity. With so many variables changing all the time, your brain cannot easily analyze the subtleties of your technique and recognize what is and is not working for you vocally. This is why in your lessons we simplify the situation using exercises.

In an exercise, you normally keep most aspects of your technique constant, while only one or two elements change. For example, I may have you sing an arpeggio on [ah]: the vowel, the resonance, and the volume stay the same while only the pitch changes. Or I may have you sing a sequence of vowels on a single pitch: [ah-ay-ee-oh-oo].

With the situation simplified in this way, you can more easily focus your awareness on the single changing element, making learning easier.

Sometimes, after a certain amount of exercises, a student is able to jump right into "real" music, effectively transferring what she has learned. Sometimes, however, this transition is too abrupt, and the student in desperation reverts to habitual patterns of technique. When this happens, I know my teaching approach needs to be more step-wise rather than skipping immediately from the very simple to the very complex. Then I invent gradually more challenging exercises using material from the piece of music my student is practicing. I find this kind of work to be lots of fun and very satisfying to my need for pedagogical creativity.

You can do this yourself when you practice. Let's go through the process using the opening phrase of the U.S. National Anthem—the one that goes "Oh, say, can you see. . . ." while traversing a broken chord extending over an octave. Depending on your range and technical proficiency, this can be a challenging phrase, dipping as it does down into perhaps your lowest notes and giving you a potentially challenging [ee] vowel on an awkward transitional note. (Let's say that you are an adult male singing in the key of B-flat, which means that the phrase starts on the F below middle C, dips down to low B-flat, then rises to the B-flat an octave above on the word "see." I'll describe one possible sequence of increasingly more difficult exercises on this phrase:

Sing this arpeggio on [oh]: low B-flat - octave higher B-flat - (descending to ) F - D - B-flat
Same arpeggio, starting on [oh] and changing to [ee] for the second and following notes.
Ascending B-flat arpeggio, starting on [oh] and changing to [ee] on the top and final note.
Sing the phrase of the song on the vowels only: [oh] - [oh] - [ay] - [a] - [oo] - [ee]
Same as #4, but add repetitions of the third and of the final note on the appropriate words: [oh] - [oh] - [ay] - [say] - [say] - [say] - [a] - [oo] - [ee] - [see] - [see] - [see]
Sing the phrase on the words: Oh-oh, say, can you see

Depending how each step goes, you can proceed to the next step or add other intermediate steps to help you practice elements of the phrase that are proving troublesome. (Often, for example, adding in the consonants with a faulty technique causes singers to lose their laryngeal stability, thus deforming their vowels.)

Try this with a phrase from one of your songs or arias that causes you trouble, and write a comment to let me know if it helped!

When teachers misbehave

2010-04-25T08:45:00.001-04:00

Last Friday, the voice lesson of one of my students—let's call him "George"—ended on a sour note. . .and I'm not referring to any of the sounds that came out of George's mouth. In a difficult pedagogical moment, George and I both reacted in an unconscious habitual manner that turned our normally pleasant and productive way of working emotionally and physically tense. I've learned a lot from going over in my mind how we got off course, and I'm blogging about it now to explore some important issues that arise in learning singing or any other skill.

First, let me describe what happened in the last minutes of George's lesson. We had spent about half the lesson on exercises and then turned to a group of songs (all about misbehaving!) that George is preparing as a set to perform together. In the course of rehearsing Cole Porter's "Why Can't You Behave?" we had noticed that George's voice was not as free as it was in some of the other songs and much less free than in the exercises.

I could see that during the song George was tensing his neck and suspected that this was contributing to the effortful vocal technique. (Tensing neck muscles excessively not only puts constriction on the larynx, but also pulls the weight of the head downward onto it.) Using my hands as an Alexander teacher, I helped George to release some of the tension in his neck. He was able to maintain these less constricted conditions while whispering vowels and singing some tones.

But when we returned to the Cole Porter song, it soon became evident that George was not able to maintain the freedom in his neck while singing in his higher range. He could either sing the high notes freely, in which case they "popped over" into falsetto OR he could sing these notes in a less-than-optimally coordinated chest voice with lots of effort and tension.

At this point, George's outlook as the student diverged drastically from my outlook as the teacher. From his viewpoint, he could suddenly not sing many of the notes of the song in a performable sound. FRUSTRATION!!! From my viewpoint, he had begun to learn how to sing high notes without pushing and we were now in a position to begin "rebuilding" the high notes in a new, freer coordination. EXCITEMENT!!!

Well, it was now the final minute of George's lesson, and everything broke down. We both let our emotions run away with us. George stopped paying attention to the state of freedom in his neck and began to try the most difficult phrases of the song over and over again, struggling harder and harder to make the high notes work. I stopped paying attention to the state of freedom in my own neck and tried to get George to stop practicing the bad coordination, raising my voice higher and higher and getting tenser and tenser in the process.

My exhausted state after George's departure let me know how badly I had misused myself in this interaction. But sometimes what feels like a failure can be a powerful learning experience. Analyzing this embarrassing experience (The Alexander teacher tensed his neck. . .while teaching!) has helped me to better understand these issues which I will cover in my next few blogs:

Why can I sing so well in the exercises and not in "real" music?
How end-gaining interferes with our learning. ("End-gaining" was Alexander's term for paying attention only to your goal and not to how you are using yourself in achieving it.)
Why it sometimes seems as though we are getting worse instead of better as we learn.

The 5 stupidest things I ever heard from voice teachers

2010-04-19T22:11:00.001-04:00

1. To hit high notes, pretend there's a marble between your butt cheeks and squeeze it. (From my high school chorus teacher. After my 10th grade year, my family moved from Fairfax County, Virginia, which has one of the top school music programs in the US, to an Army Base in Germany, where one minimally talented woman struggled to run a marching band, a chorus, and an a cappella singing group. I signed up for all of them, naively expecting something similar to what I'd left behind. When I showed up on the first day of school, first period, for the chorus class, I discovered that I was the only boy to have enrolled.* Luckily, I played the piano, so they made me accompanist. Luckily, this saved me from singing with the "marble theory." Unluckily, the same woman led the a cappella group, where I learned to strain after high notes with the rest of them.)

*I didn't yet know that in Army society, males don't participate in the arts. This ugly truth was driven home to me many years later when I was in the Army myself. I had won a regional talent competition by singing a duet from West Side Story with Toni--hi, Toni!--and qualified for the All-Army Show, which toured Army bases all over the world. My commander denied me the authorization to participate, letting me know that if it had been a sports championship, of course I would have been allowed to go. Well, I got back at them by not Telling when they Asked. Twice.

2. Just sing. (From a teacher whom I met in Bremen, Germany, and worked with for maybe a year. She gave me this supremely vague direction whenever something wasn't working in my voice. At least it spared us having to deal with difficult issues like registration, resonance, and vowels.)

3. To achieve a properly lowered larynx, grab your adam's apple between your fingers and pull it down while singing. (Another teacher in Bremen had me doing this. He, a tenor, assured me (falsely, as it turned out) that I was a tenor too. I managed to scream up to high D's while tugging on my larynx, so I guess he thought he was onto something. I feel lucky to have any voice at all after submitting to his bizarre practices.)

4. When you breathe in, your torso should contract. (From a very well-known American soprano who had a long career at the Deutsche Oper in Berlin. She was a marvelous, marvelous, marvelous singer, but a worse than worthless teacher, who had no idea how she did what she did. I could see when she demonstrated her technique to me that she was not doing what she thought she was doing, but if I even dared to question this, she became furious and threatened to throw me out for not trusting her. My breathing became so damaged by my attempts to carry out her nonsensical instructions that I completely lost my ability to sing. In one audition, when I attempted the opening phrase from an aria from Wagner's Tannhäuser, only a breathy sort of croaking noise came out of my mouth. They told me that I could possibly join the chorus in a very, very small opera house.)

5. To support the tone, your back muscles must engage so strongly as to become hard. (From another well-known American singer at the Deutsche Oper, their leading Verdi baritone, in fact. In my lessons, he had me put my hands on his back muscles while he demonstrated their strength. I believe he enjoyed this very much, as I was in my twenties at the time, and probably pretty cute.)

Thank goodness I eventually found my way to Cornelius Reid, who showed me the way to vocal truth and sanity.

Does anyone out there know of any area of knowledge more fraught with misconceptions and bad advice than singing?

What I learned from my parents

2010-04-18T09:54:00.000-04:00

The title of this post does not refer to those life-lessons we all (at least us lucky ones) learn from our parents during our formative years. (But thanks, Mom and Dad, for teaching me to read, brush my teeth, and say "thank you" when I'm given a piece of cake. And don't worry, I've gradually recovered from the false wisdom you imparted, like "you'll go blind sitting so close to the TV" or "no, dear, that green jeans suit looks perfectly wonderful on you.")

I'm actually writing today about what I learned from my parents yesterday, when they came up to the City to take lessons with me. Teaching my parents, which involves a reversal of the standard parent/child roles, highlights the stimulating shifts back and forth between the student and teacher roles that occurs in virtually all of the lessons I give. Simply put, I often learn from my student at least as much as I am teaching. This effect seems to be even greater when my student is one of my parents.

Perhaps we're programmed to learn in the presence of those who bore and raised us. Even well into our fourth decade of life.

Here are my mom and dad:

After religiously reading my blog since I began it, my dad eventually emailed me to say he'd like to try an Alexander lesson sometime, to see what it was all about. Since my mom was coming up yesterday for a voice lesson, we decided that Dad would have his first Alexander lesson then as well.

It's usually easier to introduce Alexander concepts when new students have prepped themselves with some prior reading. (If you're contemplating lessons, you might take a look at Alexander's best-known book, The Use of the Self, before meeting with your teacher for the first time. . .or just read my blog, as my dad did!) Dad's familiarity with the indirect approach of the AT and potentially unfamiliar sensations that AT lessons can bring about helped him to approach his first lesson without preconceptions. When he commented that he knew better than to expect that he would immediately understand everything he was experiencing, I knew that he would be open to learning. Yes! This is the ideal mental state we Alexander teachers hope to lead our students to, and my dad arrived with it already in place.

One of the most important things I learned from working with Dad yesterday was that I can not expect my words to be meaningful, or to convey the meaning I intend, to everyone. Dad's facility with language and him courage to admit when he is not understanding something allowed us to dialogue about terms I often assume everyone understands. (It's easy when you teach a subject to forget that not everyone has the same familiarity with that subject.) During yesterday's lesson, I casually tossed off phrases like "bring your awareness to this place in your body."

Instead of pretending that he knew what the heck I meant, Dad admitted that my words were just about devoid of meaning to him. That forced me to analyze my intentions and figure out exactly what I was trying to convey. I ask students every day to "bring awareness to" various parts of their bodies, but had I ever really considered what I am asking for? In discussing the phrase with my dad, both of us offering our point of view, we came up with a possible meaning: bringing awareness involves consciousness of a location and a quality. In the example I have been discussing, the location was the junction of the head and neck, and the quality was ease and lightness. I gained clarity about my intentions in teaching and will be less likely in the future to assume that my words--however familiar to me--are being received clearly by my students.

From Mom's voice lesson, I gained insight into the relative roles of the registers in singing. Mom, who has a solo-quality instrument, has done more choir singing than soloing in the recent past. Like many women in choirs, she has unconsciously neglected the development of her chest voice, concentrating rather on producing a sweet-toned sound with a preponderance of head voice that blends imperceptibly with the overall choral sound. Unfortunately, since the chest voice muscles are what keeps the throat open in singing, this type of head-voice-only singing forces other, ill-suited muscles to try to keep the throat open, making singing effortful. Mom came yesterday with the request to develop her stamina.

First off, I was amazed with what Mom was able to do with only her head voice, basically only half of her instrument. She vocalized up to coloratura range and down to the C below middle C (!), albeit with more effort than desirable and a slightly veiled tonal quality. It was initially challenging to get Mom to make the bold, brassy sounds of the chest register--it went against her training and her ear, which had gotten used to the softer-textured head voice quality. Only when I "gave her permission" to sound like Ethel Merman would she belt out the bold (and beautiful) chest voice sounds I was asking for.

Once we got her chest voice activated, it combined easily with her already-developed head voice, producing an easier production throughout her entire range and a more soloistic, earthier quality that we put to lovely use in "I know my redeemer liveth" from Messiah.

Thanks, Mom and Dad, for giving me the chance to learn more about teaching. Also for your willingness to assume the student role to one of your offspring.

And also for brunch at Tello--a Bloody Mary toast to the greatest parents I've ever had!

The Everything Whisperer

2010-04-12T09:26:00.001-04:00

I think I'm going to have to add a fourth "main influence" to the Art & Science of Singing: Cesar Millan, "The Dog Whisperer."

Originally, I was drawn to Mr. Millan's TV show and books for their substantial help in creating the kind of behavior I wanted in my "pack" (Freddy and Willy, the Chihuahuas). But I have found benefits well beyond the realm of dog behavioral training: becoming a pack leader has led me to some pretty significant personal development in other aspects of my life.

Many of Cesar Millan's training principles apply to life in general and to my teaching. A calm, assertive energy is likely to help me get anything I want in life, not just obedient pack members. When I teach, my staying in a calm, assertive state elicits a state of mind in my students that is conducive to learning. And, as Millan demonstrates in nearly every episode of The Dog Whisperer (I have 4 seasons on DVD!), when we want to create positive change, we must strive not to work against Mother Nature. Treating dogs as if they were humans makes them unbalanced; ignoring the way our bodies and voices are designed to work makes us unbalanced--tense, injury-prone, and frustrated.

Today I want to write about another of Millan's principles that has proven effective with my dogs and beyond. I extracted this principle from numerous episodes of the TV show in which Millan rehabilitates a dog who demonstrates inappropriate behavior--fear, barking, aggression, etc.--to some stimulus.

Millan's approach in such cases is to discover what provokes the unwanted response most strongly and to immediately confront that situation while guiding the dog to a different response. For example, he once worked with a dog who trembled uncontrollably every time her owner would turn on the stove timer. After draining excess energy through a bit of exercise, Millan brought the dog into the kitchen and turned on the timer. Through his calm, assertive energy combined with various ways of touching and otherwise guiding the dog, he taught her that the sound of the timer means "relax."

That's the principle, in a nutshell: teach the dog that the upsetting stimulus actually means "relax." I have seen it work on the show with skateboards, other dogs, cats, grooming tools, and many other potential triggers of bad behavior. Now I use it every day when walking my own pack. Freddy used to "go off" many times during any given walk--whenever we walked past bikers, roaring motorcycles, loud children, mentally disturbed homeless people, etc. Now I coach myself when approaching these kinds of stimuli to remain calm and assertive and I mentally state something like "aggressively barking pit bull means 'relax'."

What I've come to realize that Freddy is calmer now because I am calmer. Of course, he was all the time just responding to things that I found annoying or things that caused me to tense because I expected Freddy to bark at them.

Once I realized my own culpability, I began to apply the principle to my own tension-producing situations outside of the dogwalks. I remind myself when I notice myself beginning to become annoyed or frustrated or anxious that the stimulus means "relax":

Long line at grocery store means "relax."
Rude librarian means "relax."
Student arriving 18 minutes late means "relax."
Breaking bottle of olive oil (extra virgin, organic, costly) all over kitchen floor means "relax."

This mental mantra helps me to avoid getting caught up in an unproductive response pattern and choose more effective ways of dealing with the situation at hand. Does this process sound familiar to any of you Alexander students out there?

Cesar Millan's principle of reformulating triggers of tension into triggers of relaxation is a form of what Alexander called "inhibition." Inhibition means preventing a habitual (often unproductive) reaction so that something more beneficial can arise. Traditionally in Alexander work, inhibiting often involves a pause during which you can notice unhelpful tension creeping in and choose instead a more easeful response. Alexander advocated using these pauses to notice primarily your neck, because response patterns in our bodies tend to originate in the neck and propagate outwards from there.

Feel free to join me in experimenting with a combination of F.M. Alexander and Cesar Millan principles. When you notice yourself becoming frustrated (maybe at your next voice lesson), pause for a moment and tell yourself "singing a wrong note [or insert your favorite trigger here] means 'relax'." Then invite your neck to release any unnecessary tension that might have crept in before continuing with what you were doing.

See if that doesn't bring about a more productive state of mind and body! Works for me, every time. Thank you, Cesar. Thank you, F.M.

Am I strong enough? Whoo!

2010-04-06T08:40:00.000-04:00

Yesterday at my weekly voice lesson, I made the kind of misjudgment I hear all the time from my students and from health professionals.

My teacher, Donna, had asked me to sing an exercise containing an octave leap up to a note rather high in my range. When I sang it, the high note wobbled around crazily. It felt to me as though my vocal muscles were simply not strong enough to maintain the proper degree of tension to support that note. I expressed this opinion to Donna, and she disputed it, judging that the real problem was lack of coordination, not lack of strength.

Subsequent exercises, which brought about an improvement in my muscular coordination, bore out Donna's hypothesis. I was in just a few minutes able to sing notes even higher than the poorly coordinated high note I'd attempted earlier.

When my muscles are not well coordinated, the resulting conflict creates the illusion of weakness. My muscles aren't inherently weak, though; they just cannot operate effectively in the way I was trying to use them. When the proper coordination comes about, I am suddenly able to accomplish easily what previously felt impossible.

A similar situation happens frequently with people's posture. The muscles of their body struggle against a poor coordination, leaving them sore and tired. Like me, they misjudge the situation, figuring that if their muscles were strong enough, they would be able to sit and stand more erect. Even doctors are misled, and as a result, often prescribe physical therapy to strengthen the supposedly weak muscles contributing to their patients' poor posture.

In an Alexander lesson, I can in most cases bring about an improved coordination in the student's musculature in a few minutes, leaving them sitting or standing in a balanced state, enjoying an easy uprightness. I have actually never encountered anyone whose muscles were too weak to support them properly, given the right coordination.

When we act on our misjudgments, when we perform exercises to strengthen muscles we think are too weak, we stand to hurt ourselves in at least two ways: 1) by over-strengthening some muscles, we further throw off the balance of musculature that we need, and 2) we ignore the poor coordination that is actually at the root of our problems, meaning we will never solve them.

When our bodies (including our voices) are well coordinated, we can easily accomplish amazing feats with the strength we already possess. If your body is not serving you in the way you would like, consider that improvement will more likely come from learning more efficient coordination, not from strengthening.

How to bowl a perfect game. . .or sing a perfect tone

2010-04-01T20:37:00.000-04:00

Have you ever released a bowling ball down the lane towards the pins and "coached" it as it rolled, begging it to go a little farther to the left? All of us humans engage in such obviously pointless, semi-superstitious behavior from time to time, hoping in vain that, if we wish hard enough, we can alter the physics of everyday objects.

Despite our wacky behavior at the bowling alley, in reality we all realize that, once the ball leaves our hands, we have no more control over it.

(Don't we?)

In the same way, we have no more control over the quality of a sung tone once our vocal cords have begun to vibrate. After that point, all of our attempts at "placing" the tone or otherwise enhancing it fall into the category of superstition.

The only point at which we have a real chance of affecting the quality of our sound is at the moment of its inception. For this reason, our state of mind in the moment just before we start to sing is of utmost importance. This is the only time in which what we do, or more importantly, what we DON'T do, has a chance to benefit our tone.

The proper sequence is therefore: 1) think, 2) spontaneously release the tone. What you get depends on the conditions that were in place at the moment your vocal cords began to vibrate.

Incidentally, if you want to bowl a strike, you'd better make sure the conditions in place at the moment you release the ball are correct. After you let go of it, all you can do is watch it roll inexorably to where you aimed it.

The amazing new Ease-o-Matic Indicator!!!

2010-03-29T17:55:00.002-04:00

In Alexander lessons, one of the functions I perform for my students is to help them monitor their state of ease as they do various activities. With a delicate contact of my hands on their head/neck area, I can amplify their own sensations of ease vs. non-ease, making it easier for them to track how successfully they are preventing interference with their natural coordination.

Without a teacher's help, it's easy to get sucked into the intricacies of the activity you're pursuing, totally forgetting about your ease in the process. This is one of the main ways we all get into trouble in our daily lives. Ignoring our state of ease makes it very easy (inevitable, really) for a state of relative non-ease to establish itself. We end up scrunching ourselves and tensing ourselves in myriad ways, often never realizing this until it gets bad enough to cause us pain.

My students have frequently remarked that they would love it if I would follow them around all the time to help them monitor their ease. (They are usually daunted by my fee schedule for around-the-clock Alexander service. I have yet to have a taker for this intensive program, which would allow me to fund weekly bodywork courses and frequent biking tours through French wine country.)

But now, for the first time, I present my new invention, the Ease-o-Matic^® Indicator! (Drum roll, please.)

Ta-da! Here it is (available in two stylish models as shown to complement any color scheme.):

OK, so I didn't actually invent this. It's my Chihuahuas, Willy and Freddy. But let me explain how they help me to monitor my state of ease.

A state of ease, in Alexander parlance, is called "good use." This is short for "good use of the self," which includes all kinds of things like good posture, efficient use of muscles, appropriate energy expenditures for the activity at hand, and clear thinking.

After watching four seasons of "The Dog Whisperer" on DVD (anyone know when Season 5 becomes available?), I am very familiar with the "calm assertive" state that Cesar Millan advocates that all pack leaders embody when interacting with their dogs. This state seems to correlate highly with aspects of good use that come about through the Alexander Technique: clear thinking, physical ease, a tendency to respond effectively to stimuli rather than reacting out of habit or emotion.

When I embody calm assertiveness, my pack (Freddy and Willy) are more likely to respond with the desired state of "calm submissiveness" described by Cesar. When I become tense or worried or angry or frustrated or in any other sense not calm assertive (poor use of myself), the dogs respond by becoming instantly fearful or dominant or (especially in Freddy's case) loud and reactive to all kinds of stimuli apparently intolerable to Chihuahuas, like children, bikes, buses, skaters, joggers, other dogs, cats, trucks, people who look at him, wheelchairs. . .I think you get the idea.

The dogs are amazingly sensitive to even slight changes in my state. They know I have become tense often before I realize it myself, and the warning goes off. It might be an audible bark or the signal may come in some other form like pulling on the leash or losing focus on the walk.

I have been experimenting with tuning in to the state of ease in my neck whenever the dogs' signals "go off" in one of these ways. Interestingly, when I notice how my ease has receded and invite it back, the dogs' behavior shifts immediately back into a calm submissive state. It seems indicative of how far we humans have strayed from our natural instincts that our furry friends notice how our state changes before we ourselves do.

The Alexander Technique has increased my sensitivity to changes in my own state of being. In many activities, I am able to monitor these changes myself quite effectively. In other, more challenging activities (like walking two high-spirited toy breed dogs), I am more likely to allow my focus on the activity to overwhelm my self-monitoring. I am learning to overcome this tendency, with the assistance of my two furry teachers.

Want some help learning to monitor YOUR use/state of ease/calm-assertiveness? Walk a dog today. . .or go for some Alexander lessons.

The focus in learning

2010-03-28T09:07:00.001-04:00

Lately in my lessons, both as teacher and as student, I've been thinking about the relationship in learning between 1) fostering the particular skills under development and 2) fostering the overall state of coordination in the student. I've been wondering what the most beneficial ratio in focus on these two factors might be.

In most teaching, #1 gets virtually all of the attention. I'm recalling my childhood swimming lessons, in which I was taught how to kick my legs, how to move my arms, how to blow out the air under the water, and so on. Nobody ever suggested that all these functions were part of an overall pattern of whole-body coordination, or that it could be helpful to consider that coordination in learning to swim. In any case, I learned how to (barely) remain afloat while struggling mightily.

I also recall some unfortunate early voice lessons I took with marvelous singers who had no clue how to teach. I learned how to move my ribs and how to position my palate, tongue, throat, and even cheekbones, with not even a nod to the idea that somehow all these parts were subject to an overall coordination in my body, which could be well or poorly adjusted while I was singing. Of course, the more I tried to correctly align all the involved pieces of my anatomy, the more I interfered with my overall coordination. Since nobody was paying any attention in the learning process to this coordination, it escaped all of us—me and my teachers—that something radically detrimental was happening. Yes, I learned to sing, but only through a huge amount of straining.

Eventually, I was fortunate enough to come into contact with the Alexander Technique, a method for learning that does take the overall coordinative state of the body into account. In fact, it makes attention to this state the PRIMARY focus of all learning.
Since then, I have relearned how to swim and how to sing from teachers who are also Alexander teachers. Now I no longer struggle in the water or in my favorite songs, because I have learned to frequently check in with how the activity I'm undertaking is affecting my whole-body coordination, or, in Alexander's words, my primary control.

Since my Alexander training began, I have strived to uphold in all my teaching Alexander's principle of attending first and foremost to the primary control. Even so, I am coming to believe that I have underestimated the relative importance of this principle in the teaching process. In short, it seems to be much less crucial than I ever thought to teach someone how to do something (to sing or swim, for example) and much more crucial to teach someone how not to interfere with the primary control. This is not just healthier, it paradoxically seems to instill a higher level of skill in the students.

Two recent experiences, one in swimming and one in singing, have caused me to reconsider my teaching philosophy and to form the following hypothesis, which I plan to test throughout the coming months:

Hypothesis: that the less the teacher (me, in this case) concerns himself with the details of the activity and the more he focuses on the non-interference of his students with their primary control, the better the students learn the skill at hand.

My recent experiences, which led to the formulation of this hypothesis:

1. Swimming. During my recent course in Neural Manipulation in Boston, I stayed at a hotel with a pool. After nearly half a year of not swimming at all, it felt great to get back in the water and practice some drills and swim some laps. I started by considering the individual motions of all my parts and was pleased to notice that I seemed to be swimming quite well, despite my hiatus. Then, however, it occurred to me to put my focus on my primary control by paying attention nearly to the exclusion of all other factors to the state of ease of my neck. Surprisingly (perhaps this should not have come as such a surprise!), with this indirect approach, my body coordinated even better in the water. I found myself able to swim lap after lap with nearly no effort and with superb balance in the water. By focusing on my primary control, I was able to get out of my own way, letting my body discover the most efficient way to move.

2. Singing. One of my newest Alexander students came last week for her first lesson. Only after we'd worked together a bit did we discover with delight that we were both singers. It seemed to make sense to bring singing into the lesson at that point, so I used that activity to explore some Alexander principles. To our even greater delight, we observed her singing getting freer and freer and sounding better and better. (This was not a voice lesson; all we were working on was her noticing what she was doing with her neck muscles while singing.) She remarked that in two minutes of working in this way she had learned more about singing that she had during the whole time she was studying with her last voice teacher.

I am excited to explore the tweaking of my focus in teaching. I already consider the primary control in my voice teaching, but perhaps I haven't made it primary enough! F.M. Alexander wrote that if we make sure that we are not interfering with our primary control, the right thing will do itself. Cornelius Reid wrote that by choosing the correct exercise, a teacher could spontaneously stimulate a healthy vocal response in the student. When I consider these two principles together, they seem to add up to this truth: I don't have to tell my students how to sing.

This truth scares me a little! It has earth-shaking ramifications for singing, if not for all of human endeavor. I'll report back on how my experiments are progressing. . . .

Beyond Posture: The Alexander Technique for Singers (Part 4 of 4)

2010-03-25T05:35:00.000-04:00

(If you haven't read my intro to this article in my March 21 post, please check it out before reading this.)

Comfort with feeling wrong

Another unfamiliar experience that goes largely unacknowledged outside the practice of AT is the feeling of wrongness that often accompanies change, even when it's change for the better. This powerful, disconcerting effect makes altering our habits difficult because of our strong, very human aversion to being wrong. Unless you’ve had Alexander lessons to increase your comfort level with what Alexander himself called “unreliable sensory appreciation,” you will more likely choose the familiar, which feels right to you, over the new, which usually feels wrong at first. This goes for singing perhaps even more than for any other activity. Before I became aware that what feels wrong may in fact be exactly what I have been striving for, I would often (to the chagrin of my voice teacher) suddenly abandon singing right in the middle of a well-executed exercise because my brain had interpreted a strange new muscular coordination as incorrect.

My unreliable sensory appreciation remains intact after more than 15 years of AT study — new experiences still feel wrong to me — but I have learned to recognize this phenomenon and not let it rule my behavioral choices. I have actually grown more than just comfortable with the feeling of being wrong; now I even welcome it as a sign that things are changing. Also, it feels thrillingly rebellious to choose “wrong”! Even more important than this amusement, I am no longer enslaved to my vocal habits through the need to feel right.

Conclusion

We’ve expanded our view of the AT beyond posture, even beyond breathing, to include some mind-body skills perhaps previously unfamiliar to you. Now you can more fully appreciate the wide range of benefits the AT affords singers. I know of no other practice which hones the particular mind-body skills I’ve discussed, which is why I include AT in my 3-in-1 voice instruction program (along with voice lessons and Voice-Enhancing Bodywork).

I realize that the benefits I’ve called “the rewiring of your brain” don’t come across as vividly in words as they would if you were to experience them first-hand, but I hope that I have piqued your curiosity sufficiently to encourage you to seek out an Alexander teacher and begin a course of lessons. Perhaps, like me, you will feel as though you have discovered a previously hidden dimension to reality.

By the way, the Alexander Technique will definitely improve your posture and breathing. If those were its only benefits, that in itself would be enough reason for you to practice it. But if you’re interested in unleashing your full potential as a singer, stick with your Alexander lessons long enough to discover for yourself the transformative power of a rewired brain.

Beyond Posture: The Alexander Technique for Singers (Part 3 of 4)

2010-03-24T05:32:00.007-04:00

(If you haven't read my intro to this article in my March 21 post, please check it out before reading this.)

The ability to allow coordination to emerge reflexively

Singing, like any other skilled activity, works best when you can get out of your own way and allow your body to coordinate reflexively. Singing is accomplished almost entirely through the action of muscles which are not accessible via conscious control. When we ignore this reality — when we resort to manipulating muscles we can control instead of finding an indirect means of activating a reflexive response of our autonomic laryngeal muscles — we risk throwing off the delicate balance of the system and creating unwanted tension.

This challenging situation, calling for an indirect pedagogical approach, mirrors that of our postural system as addressed in Alexander lessons. Like singing, posture is accomplished by the reflexive interaction of a network of muscles, most of them outside our direct control. And, as with singing, many students initially try to improve their posture not by stimulating their natural muscular reflexes, but by contracting muscles they are able to control at will (the pull-your-shoulders-back-and-stick-out-your-chest approach), thereby throwing off their natural muscular balance.

In our “Just do it” world, in which we are continually urged to solve problems by trying harder, the Alexander Technique provides a rare opportunity to explore a non-doing, but paradoxically more productive option: learning how to indirectly stimulate your muscles into coordinated action. As you practice this unfamiliar option in your Alexander lessons as it relates to your posture, you will become more confident with allowing a reflexive response of all of your physiological movement patterns that operate through the action of involuntary muscles, such as your walking, your breathing, and, of course, your singing.

(to be continued)

Beyond Posture: The Alexander Technique for Singers (Part 2 of 4)

2010-03-23T05:29:00.010-04:00

(If you haven't read my intro to this article in my March 21 post, please check it out before reading this.)

Refinement of the kinesthetic sense

The muscular actions that make up vocal technique are subtle and minute. If you are not used to perceiving such fine movements, you might have trouble analyzing and tweaking what is going on in your larynx when you sing. AT lessons will prepare you for this kind of refined noticing by honing your kinesthetic sense, that often-unmentioned sixth sense which tells you where your body parts are in space and how they are moving in relation to one another. The AT trains you to perceive not only the movements of your body, but also the potential for movement, which involves a fine-scale muscular unlocking far more subtle than the relatively gross movements we make and observe in our normal daily activities.

AT lessons will also help to purge your neuromuscular system of extraneous “noise” in the form of excessive tension, so that you will more readily perceive the intricacies of laryngeal muscle response in your singing. You are more likely to accurately assess the state of muscular coordination in your larynx against a "quiet" neuromuscular background, just as you are more likely to appreciate the complexity of a Bach fugue in a quiet room with no extraneous noise.

(to be continued)

Beyond Posture: The Alexander Technique for Singers (Part 1 of 4)

2010-03-22T05:23:00.002-04:00

(If you haven't read my intro to this article in my March 21 post, please check it out before reading this.)

You know what? I have really good posture.

If you met me — or virtually any other Alexander Technique (AT) teacher — you would probably be impressed with the uprightness on display. Lots of educators have been similarly impressed with Alexander teachers’ carriage throughout the past century: as a result, entire AT programs in performing arts schools have been developed around concepts like “Posture and Alignment.”

I’ll admit to being pleased with my ability to assume a regal bearing at will. At the same time, I regret that this most visible effect of AT study has eclipsed, in both pedagogical programming and people's perceptions, what I think are actually its more important contributions to life and education. I fear that people, in their great admiration for perfect posture, overlook the more significant benefits to be gained from AT study. In other words, they may not be seeing the forest for the majestically upright trees.

Like singing, the Alexander Technique is a mind-body practice — with equal emphasis on “mind” and “body.” Its potential value is diminished when we over-focus on physical benefits like posture. To discover the real treasure of AT study, singers must look beyond posture (the arena in which Alexander instruction unfolds) to the less easily observed benefits that accrue with diligent practice.

Your AT instruction is likely to begin in the traditional way, with an exploration of postural issues: your relationship with gravity as you sit, stand, and walk. Even though I want you to eventually look beyond these issues in assessing the AT, let’s take a moment to acknowledge that there are benefits for singers even at this basic level: efficient posture leaves more energy for performing. But don’t let enthusiasm for improved posture blind you to the other, subtler changes going on.

As your lessons progress, you will notice how having more efficient posture frees up the functioning of the other systems of your body, like digestion and breathing. Freer breathing is another obvious advantage to you as a singer. . .but don’t stop looking for benefits yet! We still haven’t encountered the real treasure to be gained from AT study: the rewiring of your brain.

Now that I see that phrase on the page, I’m realizing that it’s fortunate that the desire for better posture brings singers to the AT. The promise of a “rewiring of your brain” might be a tough sell. The skills involved are not on most people’s wish lists for the simple reason that most people don’t even know these skills exist. In this article, I’m going to introduce you to three such skills, all of which arise out of AT study, and all of which I’m hoping you’ll recognize as crucial to your development as a singer:

Refinement of the kinesthetic sense
The ability to allow coordination to emerge reflexively
Comfort with feeling wrong

(to be continued)

Aborting my secret mission

2010-03-21T08:37:00.001-04:00

An enormous and almost universal misconception about the Alexander Technique has most of us AT teachers performing a "secret mission" as we go about our teaching. Let me finally set the record straight: our work is not principally about improving posture.

Let me repeat: THE ALEXANDER TECHNIQUE IS NOT PRINCIPALLY ABOUT IMPROVING POSTURE!

The misconception arises, I think, because we use postural awareness as the raw material for our explorations in the Technique. So the AT is about posture in the same way that sculpture is about marble. Not exactly false, but hardly the complete story.

I have written an article for Classical Singer magazine in which I explain some of the true benefits of the AT. I will post this article in sections on my blog over the next few days, but I wanted to explain first what inspired me to write it.

I teach the Alexander Technique because it is a powerful tool for self-exploration and for creating change—virtually any kind of change—in people's lives. It teaches people a whole new way of approaching life and a whole new way of thinking more productively. The Alexander Technique fosters health, better interpersonal communication, and the unleashing of creativity.

Can you see why I get frustrated when people call this astonishingly widely applicable resource "posture and alignment work"? My improved posture is great, but only the tip of my AT iceberg. (OK, that metaphor didn't work as well as I'd hoped.)

Anyhow, the secret mission of the AT teaching community is this: All over the world, people have come to us to have their posture improved. School administrators everywhere have hired us onto their performing arts faculties in order that we might "align" their students properly. (Don't you, after all, admire your favorite performers because of their exemplary alignment?) But as soon as nobody's paying attention, we surreptitiously begin our TRUE mission. We begin to teach you how to change your thinking in order to improve all aspects of your life.

I, for one, would like to out myself and publicly accept this role, which sounds to me much more imposing than "postural technician." The article you will see posted during the coming week is my first move in correcting the misconception so all of us teachers can more easily get on with our true work. . .out in the open.

An unexpected Alexander/Voice link

2010-03-18T08:18:00.001-04:00

I've been invited by the Training Director of the American Center for the Alexander Technique (ACAT—my AT alma mater) to come and give a class to the current trainees next week. I will be teaching the entire student body, which includes trainees in their first, second, and third year of the Teacher Certification Program. I'm going to be demonstrating how I use developmental movement patterns to help convey Alexander principles in my teaching.

Developmental movement patterns are those movements every infant progresses through while learning how to be upright and how to move in the world. A 20th-century biologist and anthropologist named Raymond Dart (who had admired Alexander's work) studied these movement patterns and designed a series of movements, now called the Dart Procedures, which anyone can use to explore how we are designed to move naturally. I've done a lot of classes and lessons with some AT teachers who worked closely with Dart and have since used movements based on the Dart Procedures to teach the Alexander Technique. Now my own AT teaching is heavily infused with Dart-based movements, which I find automatically and easily elicit an improved coordination in my students (and myself).

The Dart-based movements take your spine through its entire range of motion. (For the purposes of this discussion, we'll limit our attention to front/back movement, ignoring side bending and twisting to keep things simple for now.) Your spine can flex forward, as it will likely do if you drop your gaze to your upper chest; and it can extend backwards, as it will likely do if you raise your gaze to the ceiling above your head. The forward flexion takes you into what is called fetal or primary curve, because that's the shape your spine took in the womb. The backward extension is called secondary curve, because that shape occurred second, during birth and after.

The primary and secondary curves manifest opposing features. Primary curve is forward, more passive, and has a protective, retreating feel. Secondary curve is backward, more active, and has the sense of moving out into the world. We are rarely completely committed to one or the other. Every position or movement we perform combines the two curves in some ratio appropriate to the moment.

If over time we have lost our ease in going into primary and/or secondary curve, our posture and movement suffer. Our bodies have to make compromises, which creates conflict and tension. We can restore our ease of movement by practicing both curves and making sure we have available to us our entire range of movement.

The tricky part is that our postural reflexes work autonomically; that is, they are not under our conscious control. You cannot bring about, say, an 80% primary/20% secondary response through an act of will. It has to arise spontaneously in response to your environment, but can do so only if both curves are fully operational. As an Alexander teacher, I use the Dart-based movements 1) to restore full functionality to my students' primary and secondary curves, and 2) to spontaneously elicit proper responses from both. Eventually, my students are moving in a more natural, healthier way in all their activities.

Any of this pedagogical approach sounding familiar to those of you who study voice with me?

In singing, we have a voice composed of two registers with opposing qualities. (Chest voice is louder, more aggressive, and less flexible. Falsetto is quieter, softer-textured, and agile.) We rarely use these registers in isolation; every well-sung tone is composed of a registrational blend of chest and falsetto working together in coordination. This coordination is almost completely reflexive in nature, meaning we cannot directly bring it about. It must arise spontaneously as a response to the singing environment (pitch, loudness, vowel).

In my voice teaching, I use what you could call "Reid-based" movement patterns, i.e., exercises based on the principles of Cornelius Reid, to 1) restore full functionality to both registers, and 2) spontaneously elicit proper responses from both. Eventually, my students are singing in a more natural, healthier way.

I adore finding analogies between seemingly unrelated things, and this one seems to be just about perfect in its correlations. I'm hoping it will help people with a grasp of my teaching of either posture or voice to more fully understand the other. And I'm eager to see how my making this mental connection will affect how I teach both AT and voice.

Stay tuned for updates.

Can voice lessons save your life?

2010-03-17T08:46:00.002-04:00

Not all of my students identify as singers. I have a number of students who are seniors living in the co-op where I live. I make room in my schedule every week to see several of these neighbors for Alexander lessons or bodywork at a greatly reduced rate in order to create more of a sense of community in my life. Interestingly, these atypical students of mine have given me some of the most satisfying teaching experiences of my career. You might tend to think of older people as set in their ways, but I have found that most of the seniors I have worked with have been open to change and eager to try out new and unfamiliar things.

I'd like to introduce you to my student and upstairs neighbor Leona:

Leona

Leona is 87 years old and lives alone in an apartment on the 20th floor of my building with spectacular views over the river to New Jersey. She has had a very interesting life as a nurse and teacher of nursing in civilian and military settings (she has a doctorate in Nursing and was a lieutenant colonel in the Army). Like me, Leona has a musical background. She plays the piano and loves to sing.

The most inspiring thing about Leona is her continuing interest in learning. She is always reporting to me what she has learned during the week from various sources like reading on line, watching Dr. Oz on Oprah, or talking to healthcare professionals she is visiting. Leona has an impressive ability to turn information into useable techniques to improve her life. Her latest invention—I think she won't mind if I share this with you—reminds me of Alexander's principle of inhibition. When she catches herself in a negative thought process (often an "I can't" statement), she thinks to herself, "cancel, cancel," and rises above the limitations of that thought. She used this procedure several times during our lesson last Monday to enable her to move in ways she thought she couldn't.

A little over a year ago, I sang a few notes in one of Leona's lessons (I don't remember why), and she remarked sadly that she wished that she could still sing. She'd not only lost her singing voice, which she compared to a frog's, but was having a lot of trouble talking too. She was often able to make herself understood, especially on the phone, and was frustrated that people were misinterpreting her wishes or responding to her as though she were a doddering invalid. This was before the days of "cancel, cancel," but it occurred to me that there was nothing preventing us from doing a little voice work.

We did a mini voice lesson with Leona still lying on the table from her bodywork session. Leona was delighted to find that, with a little guidance from me, she could produce some bold sounds in her low range and even the beginnings of some higher notes too. Her eyes sparkled and she kept giggling over the new sounds she was making—in fact, we had to pause after practically every note for her to express her excitement. I knew then that we would be incorporating a little voice work into every session from then on. Little did I know, however, how important to Leona this would prove to be.

A few months ago, while reaching for something just beyond her grasp in a bookcase, Leona fell to the floor, fracturing her hip. True to form, she strove to overcome the injury with her own faculties, even attempting (and achieving) a couple of deep knee bends at her next session with me (before I could stop her!). But the injury wasn't healing and caused Leona increasing pain over the next couple of weeks. She ended up having to go into the hospital shortly before New Year's.

I won't go into all the ensuing details, but Leona has described to me a hellish series of transfers from one medical facility into another, taking her farther and farther from her home and the life she loved until she ended up in a nursing home in New Jersey. Leona, in her weakened condition, found herself battling insensitive and incompetent care, over-medication, and even enrollment against her will in a potentially risky experimental treatment program. She swore to me that the only thing that kept her from being overcome by all these negative forces was her voice that I had restored to her. She was at least able to make herself understood, even under great stress, which formerly had caused her voice to give out.

Long story short, this feisty 87-year-old used her voice to talk her way back home—against the advice of her doctors and the wishes of her (selfish) family—where she is once again flourishing and learning new things every day. (She's sure that remaining in a nursing home would have literally killed her.) Monday I tried out on Leona some of the Neural Manipulation protocols I'd just learned over the past weekend in Boston, and she was once again giggling with delight, saying how she "loved these new techniques."

I want to be like Leona when I'm 87, and hope that my voice teacher will still be helping me to find my voice then.

Coming home. . . .

2010-03-14T18:05:00.001-04:00

Well, I'm on the Bolt Bus ($10) back from Boston, feeling exhausted but eager to try out my new skills in the coming week on whoever of you is interested! It's pouring down rain, as it has been for the past 48 hours. (Even my hotel room was not impervious to the weather; I jumped out of bed this morning onto a soggy carpet. Ewwww.)

By the final day of this course, as is typical for these 3- to 4-day classes, I was feeling a bit over-sated with new knowledge, as well as tired of sitting in a chair for so long (not in my normal mode of living, thank goodness!) and breathing recycled hotel air. Luckily, I had enough time before my bus departed to swim a few laps in the hotel pool—a welcome bit of energetic movement before being restricted once again for 4 1/2 hours to a seat.

Now I'm sitting in that very seat, where, thanks to the miracle of in-bus wifi, I am writing this blog entry. (It was a little creepy when I walked back from the bathroom in the back (creepy also) to see a laptop or smartphone glowing at almost every seat. Have we become so addicted to our connectivity? (He asks while typing on his prized Apple while hurtling at 80 mph down the highway.))

I am planning to spend most of my trip back to NYC consolidating the notes I took over the past 3 very rich days of learning, but I wanted to share with you one inspiring fact that the instructor mentioned during her lecture. It has to do with one of the positive side-effects of the kind of bodywork I do, that I developed into Voice-Enhancing Bodywork. Specifically, it has to do with the power of this work to wake up your proprioception.

Your proprioceptive sense (or senses—I'll have to blog about this fascinating topic sometime) is what lets your body know 1) where it is in space and 2) if and how it is moving. When something in your body—a nerve, for example—is restricted from moving freely, your brain experiences a reduction in the amount of proprioceptive information it gets from any structures affected by that restricted nerve. Imagine the effect on your singing if your laryngeal muscles are among those affected structures. Or your diaphragm.

Singers have to be able to make very fine judgments about subtle movements of many of their parts. Anything like Voice-Enhancing Bodywork that improves the proprioception of all these parts will give the singer greater control over the voice.

I can attest, after my experience being worked on by my classmates these past 3 days, that it feels wonderful too! I feel expansive and open, and, most excitingly, a 20-year-old misalignment of my right leg undid itself and left me standing much more symmetrically. Thank you, lab partner Diane!

Greetings from Boston

2010-03-12T07:59:00.000-05:00

Hello, Readers. I am in Boston for the next three days for a course in Neural Manipulation, which will give me more techniques to incorporate into my Voice-Enhancing Bodywork.

Shall we start out with a photo showing the view from my hotel room?

From Blog posting pix

Let's just hope the course is more inspiring than the view.

I am actually very excited about this course, which will increase my knowledge about how to work directly with the nervous system, particularly the nerves and the brain. The techniques are similar to those I am already familiar with from other practices, such as Visceral Manipulation and Craniosacral Therapy—just the organs I will be working with is different. I've already been doing some Neural Manipulation already, which I've learned from a teacher in New York, and have discovered that working on the nerves, which serve all the other organs and muscles of the body, intensifies the effects of everything else I am doing. Also, working on the nerves often clears up problems in the other organs to which the nerves go: it's a great example of the interconnectedness of the body.

Anyone coming in for a session next week will have the opportunity to benefit from my newly acquired skills at their freshest. . .in other words, you can be a guinea pig!

Having a clear mental conception

2010-03-09T09:02:00.002-05:00

Let's perform a thought experiment. Imagine carrying out the following pair of instructions:

1) Emit a stream of air through your larynx while opening and closing your vocal cords 440 times per second, resonating the tone most strongly in the range of 800 to 1200 Hz.

2) Play middle C on a piano or pitchpipe. Now sing that note on the vowel [ah].

Obviously, nobody sings according to the procedure outlined in #1 above, although, if you could, it would produce the same result as #2. In reality, we sing by mentally conceiving the sound we want to produce, our bodies responding to the intention of our conscious minds by activating the right muscles at the right time.

This incredibly reliable and accurate mind-body phenomenon works as long as two conditions are met. You must establish and maintain a clear mental concept of the sounds you wish to produce throughout their duration and your muscles must be free to respond in the required manner. (The Alexander Technique helps you to refine both your thinking and your muscle response, which is why it's so beneficial for singers. And other people who need their brains and bodies for what they do.) If you are not yet singing to the best of your abilities, it is either because your mental conception is faulty or vague or inconsistent or because some mental or physical restriction is interfering with the ability of your muscles to respond. In either case, that is what we are working on in your voice lessons.

Do you see that this implies that you are not in lessons to learn how to sing? I don't know how to sing; at least, I have very little idea what is actually physically happening in my body or yours as we make sounds. But I do know that if you have a clear concept of the pitch, volume, vowel, and quality you wish to sing, your body will miraculously coordinate itself to produce your mentally conceived sound, within the limits imposed by the freedom in your muscles. On the other hand, if you try to do something to affect your sound in a particular way, you will more than likely just end up creating tension. We simply can't bring about the intricate coordination for singing by trying to do it.

Today I taught two students who discovered the power of their mind-body connection in singing. Sophie, who recently decided she wanted to explore singing, just had her second-ever lesson today. I had her sing an exercise, which she performed well. Then I wanted her to sing the same pattern at a louder volume (in order to bring in more chest voice participation). First, Sophie tried to "do" the increase in volume, through abdominal pushing. The sound didn't get much louder, but the singer got much tenser! I suggested she just wish for the tone to be louder without doing anything different: this time, she produced a beautiful loud tone with no additional apparent effort. She was able to alternate loud and soft singing at will, just by changing her intention. Her body was responding to her mental conception.

Dan is already a professional singer and an experienced Alexander student besides. In today's lesson, we were focusing on engaging a strong yet gentle, "non-grabby" kind of chest voice, even in notes sung in falsetto. At one point, I asked him to sing a descending arpeggio from high F to the octave below, all on a very bright [ă] vowel (as in "cat"). It started out great, but the quality changed on the lowest note to a more unfocused sound. Dan told me that he observed that he had changed something on that lowest note; in his words, the vowel "dropped back." I encouraged him to repeat the arpeggio, this time maintaining his intention to sing a bright [ă] on every note. With a clear, consistent mental conception, he maintained a consistent tone quality throughout the exercise. He didn't need to try to keep the vowel from dropping back; his mental conception brought about the right conditions automatically.

This mind-body connection is available in all activities, by the way, not just in singing. Most of the problems we have performing tasks of all kinds arise from not having a clear mental conception of what we wish our whole body to do or from factors that interfere with the free response of our muscles. These factors range widely, and include faulty ideas, wrong attitudes, aftereffects of injuries, and habits. An Alexander teacher can help you to discover and eliminate these factors, as well as to practice whole-body thinking.

Sing greener

2010-03-08T08:01:00.000-05:00

In an unspoiled natural ecosystem (surely there are some left in remoter parts of our planet) species coexist in a finely tuned balance. Change happens—species may migrate away, die out, evolve—but usually this happens slowly, giving the ecosystem time to adjust to the new conditions. You might say that a kind of inherent wisdom arises as part of the complexity of such a system, which allows it to absorb a certain amount of impact from changing conditions without significant damage.

A different kind of wisdom—one that arises from the intellectual power of a conscious brain—allows humans to harness aspects of an ecosystem for their own purposes. Our species has figured out to an unprecedented degree how to extract food, shelter, and energy from our environment.

Occasionally, our conscious wisdom conflicts with the inherent natural wisdom of ecosystems we inhabit, causing irreversible destruction, because our wisdom is not able to take into account the innumerable subtle interrelations in the system when effecting change. Our gross attempts at management—the introduction of new, incompatible species, the over-farming of resources, the recourse to toxic means of eradicating what we consider pests—destroy the natural balance and jeopardize every organism in the ecosystem, including ourselves.

Some people who have put their conscious wisdom to work in a different way are suggesting that it would benefit our planet and ourselves to honor the inherent wisdom of Nature when we interact with her.

A singer's body is another kind of natural system of incomprehensible complexity, in which a kind of inherent wisdom preserves balance. Our conscious brains will never be able to fully understand all the interactions in this system, but we can use our brainpower to help us avoid gross mismanagement of our resources.

Micromanaging Nature by trying to "do" the movements of singing consciously—trying to raise the soft palate, or open the throat, or take a deep breath, for example—is the vocal equivalent to spraying the forest with DDT. You might solve some problems, but at what eventual cost? Directly doing the movements we associate with good singing throws off the delicate balance of our bodies, usually creating unwanted tension somewhere.

What is the "green" alternative. . .the one that honors the inherent wisdom of Nature? It's the one in which we allow the mind-body connection to act as an interface between our intentions and the response of our bodies. We must learn to clearly conceptualize the sounds we wish to produce (this is the appropriate task of our conscious brains), and then trust our brains (the non-conscious parts, mostly) to best organize our bodies to achieve them. The wisdom of our systems figures out how to carry out our intentions while maintaining ease and balance throughout.

It sounds like magic, and when it happens in a voice lesson the results do seem magical, but that's only because the complexity of the system puts it beyond the ken of our conscious brains. We could paraphrase Arthur C. Clark's famous Third Law: Any sufficiently complex natural system is indistinguishable from magic.

Conscious control vs reflex response

2010-03-07T08:54:00.002-05:00

In working on a short article for submission to Classical Singer magazine, I've reached an impasse in my thinking. Before I can continue writing my article, I have to clarify for myself the relative roles of conscious action and reflex action in processes like singing.

It's clear that some muscles I can move at will; I can contract my biceps, for example, in "making a muscle." Other muscles, like my diaphragm, do not seem to be operable at will; I cannot move my diaphragm up and down, for example. (If you think you are doing just that, it's probably your ab muscles you're moving, but that's another blog posting....)

These categories are not black and white, however. When I pick up my coffee cup, my biceps contracts (along with a lot of other muscles) with no command coming from me to do so. Just my intention to bring some mildly caffeinated beverage to my lips is enough to invoke the necessary muscle contractions for raising the mug.

I can also indirectly affect the activation of my diaphragm, stopping its motion by deciding to hold my breath, or changing its rhythm by breathing faster or slower. In these altered forms of breathing, I assume that my diaphragm is moving differently, although I can't feel it directly. (There aren't any sensory nerves providing a feeling sense in my—or your—diaphragm.) In other words, I can't move my diaphragm in a particular way, but I can cause it to move in that way by changing my breathing intentions.

A little experiment I just did convinced me that it is preferable whenever possible to let reflex run the show. I twice picked up pillow that was lying beside me on the couch. The first time I just decided to pick it up and let my body do the necessary muscular contractions to achieve that. Easy! The second time, I tried identifying which muscles would need to contract and to contract them so as to lift the pillow. I immediately froze up this second time, not knowing which muscles to activate for this "simple" movement, or in which order. The pillow stayed where it was, while my arm and neck got really tense. Eventually, I was able to make the pillow move a short distance, jerkily, with a huge expenditure of mental and muscular effort.

Try it out for yourself before reading on. Pick up any handy object in the two ways I've described.

How did that go? I am going to assume that you were not much more successful that I was at lifting the object by directly commanding your muscles to contract. But you probably had no trouble at all lifting it by simply intending to do so.

It seems that the subconscious part of our brains is highly skilled at bringing about the appropriate muscular coordination for picking up objects. . .and, presumably, all other activities. Like singing. All I need to do is have a clear intention of what I want to accomplish—I wish to sing a medium-loud middle C on the vowel [ah], for example—and my subconscious brain will elicit the correct response from all the muscles involved in the activity. Thank goodness I don't have to consciously command the jaw-opening, palate-raising, vocal-cord-activating, and breath-expelling muscles (whichever ones those may be!) to do their jobs; I would likely make as much a mess of all that as I did with commanding my arm to raise the pillow.

Of course, I might be interfering in some way with the free response of one or more of the muscles needed to sing my [ah], in which case I have to figure out how to stop interfering. That's the subject of my article for Classical Singer, to which I will now return.

Thanks for helping me sort this out.

Taking part in your own learning process

2010-03-03T09:07:00.002-05:00

In the kind of healing work I do (including Voice-Enhancing Bodywork), one of my core challenges is discovering where in the client's body to concentrate my attention. Since the site where the client experiences symptoms such as pain is not always the location of the origin of the problem, I have to allow myself to be guided to the place where I can do the most good by signals from the client's body. Because of the continuity of tissues throughout the body, a restriction in any part can potentially affect any other part. For example, the sciatica (low back/leg pain) of a recent client turned out to have arisen as a compensatory response to neck trauma the client underwent during throat-cancer radiation therapy. Only when I addressed the neck problem did the low back situation begin to shift.

The continuity of body tissues also means that I can eventually feel through to a restriction in any part from any other part. In the case of the client with sciatica, I placed my hand on his symptomatic area (right side of low back) and felt a pull of tension up to his left upper chest. From there, I felt a pull up into the left side of his head just behind the ear. That was where the main restriction was, left over from the trauma of the radiation therapy, and that was where I had to begin my healing work to have the greatest effect on the low-back symptoms.

The kind of "homing-in" process I have described is effective, not to mention fascinating, but not so efficient in all cases. If I hadn't noticed the pulls that eventually led me up to the client's head where the problems were originating, I could have spend a lot of futile session time trying to get the low back to release. Luckily, there are techniques called "general listening" which allow me to discover in a matter of moments the most productive starting place before I even begin my treatment.

There is a similar technique available in Alexander and voice instruction for homing in on an effective starting place for each lesson, but it requires input from the student.

In fact, this technique IS the input of the student—you—which can come in virtually any form: a question, a demonstration of a problem you've been experiencing, a statement about how you've been using what we covered in your last lesson.

Of course, I can teach without such input, and do all the time. Over my years of teaching, I have developed a toolbox of ways to begin lessons "cold." Starting from, say, a simple movement (in an Alexander lesson) or a simple vocal exercise (in a voice lesson), randomly selected, we will gradually uncover something productive to work with, and can then home in on the core of the issue.

If you, however, come in with a "seed" idea, we can start the lesson a few levels closer to the core of an issue that is likely to have particular meaning for you. Your thinking, revealed through your words, provides clues leading to more productive starting places for our work together. It makes sense that whatever has been alive in your thinking lately will give us a quicker way in to where the juicy issues lie than a randomly selected idea, if for no other reason than that we will be working with something you are already interested in. (As opposed to what I am most interested in!)

I believe that I more easily access my best teaching when my students provide such a starting place. I can think of some very rich lessons that developed lately out of students' start-of-lesson input. Suzanne, a voice student who is also teaching singing, often comes in with questions about how to convey vocal principles to her students which shine light onto her own thinking process. David, an Alexander student, has been recording his lessons and transcribing key ideas onto paper, which he reviews throughout the week and reads to me at the beginning of the next lesson. Through this process, I can tune into what David has been finding interesting and help him to further develop his own process of thought and discovery. Since he has been doing this, his progress has deepened and sped up dramatically, and he is moving in a much freer and more dynamic way.

I think we all, as students, have an (often subconscious) insight into what we need. I began my last voice lesson by asking my teacher (the brilliant and delightful Donna Reid) for advice on demonstrating a bright falsetto sound to my students. The exploration that arose out of my question uncovered some deep misconceptions in my thinking about falsetto that allowed me to discard a futile, effort-based approach and take on a technique based more firmly in ease. This lesson developed into one of those watershed experiences in which many problems are overcome simultaneously. My highest and lowest notes have gained in ease and power and I have discovered how to access a richer-sounding speaking voice easily and consistently. I did not consciously realize that all of these benefits would arise out of my question regarding a chesty falsetto, but surely something in me knew that this particular question would lead me in a productive direction.

Something in you knows, too, what you need to explore. Share it with me at the start of your next lesson.

The advantage of self-discovery

2010-03-01T00:36:00.001-05:00

My student J. L., perhaps more than anyone else I've even known, is a master of meta-thinking. That is, he thinks very cleverly about his thinking. When he recognizes something in his thinking that is creating a conflict in his life, he figures out how to rewire his brain to more effectively process information. I am lucky that he shares a lot of his insights with me during his lessons. Lately, he apprised me of his system of "themes": he assigns himself daily, weekly, and longer-term themes to organize his thinking and shape his experience.

Inspired by J., I'm assigning myself for the remainder of 2010 the yearly theme of self-discovery. I mean by this term that I will be paying attention to how a certain kind of communication in teaching and other situations fosters a process of self-discovery without recourse to identifying for people what is right and wrong in their behavior.

For the past few weeks, I've been analyzing my lifetime of experiences of learning and my own teaching practices and attempting to get my feelings and ideas down on paper. This intellectual process started a few weeks ago after a disturbing exchange with a fellow Alexander colleague. This other teacher, whom I'll call G., and I were exchanging work at a recent meeting of an Alexander Technique organization we belong to. During our trade, I noticed that G. kept showing signs of nervousness and anxiety about how I was responding to the guidance of her (very skillful) hands.

When I began to think about this situation, I realized that I, too, and many other teachers shared G.'s trepidation when working with colleagues. What had instilled in all of us such unnecessary fear? Why didn't our confidence match our skill level? I am beginning to realize that much of our fear stems from the kind of feedback we had received in training as AT teachers and in our lives in general. In short, other people had told us when we were wrong.

It feels terrible when someone tells me they have noticed a shortcoming in my performance. This is true whether they flat-out tell me that I screwed up royally or whether they couch their observation in the gentlest, most compassionate phrases. There is just something in my make-up that causes me to freeze up, to go into a startle response whenever an outside entity recognizes my faults. I suspect that this trait is more or less universal.

On the other hand, when I notice for myself that I am reacting in an unproductive way, I get intrigued, not fearful. After all, it's my business to notice what is going on with my behavior. I am likely to welcome this awareness and to work with it in a useful way.

Some examples might help to clarify what I mean. In many Alexander lessons, I have been told by certain teachers that I stiffened my wrists when putting hands on them. Now, anytime I put my hands on these teachers (and, by extension, all teachers, or all people), I worry about stiffening my wrists. Ironically, this worry causes me to stiffen more! In contrast, when taking a recent lesson with a different teacher, I noticed in myself how I made my spine rigid when moving my arms. I was so delighted to make this observation that I giggled, and went on to "play around" with noticing how I did this unnecessary rigidifying in all kinds of situations. I've continued to have fun applying this observation in my teaching, at the gym, in my voice lessons, and everywhere else I can. Whenever I "catch" myself stiffening, I happily take a moment to unstiffen before continuing my activity with more freedom.

Two learning situations. From one, I developed the tendency to worry about stiffening my wrists. From the other, I developed a useful way of working to overcome my habit of rigidifying my spine.

The difference is simple: in one instance, the teacher pointed out (in the kindest way possible) that I had erred. In the other instance, the teacher set up an environment in which I could discover my own error. It seems absurd that I could respond so differently depending on how I became aware of something, but I am beginning to believe that this crucial difference bespeaks something inherent in the human condition.

In light of my 2010 theme of self-discovery, I am setting out to eliminate from my teaching the habit of identifying for my students when they are wrong. It then follows that I will also not be identifying when they are right, for if I continue to tell my students when I notice they are right, they would then be able to infer from my silence that I had detected a mistake!

In all honesty, I do not find the right/wrong paradigm to be a very interesting filter through which to observe my students (or myself). . .or very conducive to effecting change. I have noticed that the most profound and lasting change happens when I am able to set up conditions for students to notice things for themselves. Also, they seem to feel pride in making the same observations that would provoke embarrassment or anxiety if they came from me.

If you have been studying with me all along, you might notice a change in the way I will be approaching teaching now. You might notice me giving fewer indications of what I notice. . .and asking more questions about what you notice. I am shifting the responsibility for discovering what needs to change to you. My responsibility will be to create conditions to make your self-discoveries not only possible, but likely. This is not a straightforward challenge, and I am sure to slip frequently into the comfortable and easier habit of telling you when you are right and wrong. After all, that fear-inducing approach has been modeled for me—for all of us—in virtually every learning situation we've ever encountered.

I am looking forward to seeing how my theme of self-discovery helps me to grow as a teacher; I am also eager to see how this change in my approach affects you, my students.

Happy New Year!

Trusting your teacher

2010-02-28T08:12:00.001-05:00

I taught a lesson yesterday to an accomplished classical soprano with over six decades of singing experience. Despite her high level of expertise and her longtime familiarity with the subject (much longer than mine), this student is open to exploring new ideas and trusts me to guide her through unfamiliar territory, even when the going gets rough.

Yesterday, the going got very rough.

My student has throughout her singing life come to over-rely on her head voice, not really tapping into the throat-opening and strengthening properties of her chest voice. Since she had come to me with the express desire to increase her vocal stamina, I knew we had to wake up her largely dormant chest register. I proposed some exercises to elicit a strong chest register response, and soon had the student singing clear. strong, almost tenor-sounding low notes.

Since her laryngeal muscles are not used to being used in this dynamic new way, they responded with a strong tickling sensation, making the student cough and reach for her water glass. It got so uncomfortable that her eyes were watering and I could sense frustration building. (She'd come a long way to study with me, and now here she was, barely able to continue.)
Because we have a long history of working together, the student trusted me to know what was likely to help and continued through the discomfort. (And indeed, I knew that she could trust me in this case: the sounds I heard, despite the tickling, were free. Also, I had experienced such tickling myself when first working on strengthening my chest register, and have encountered it in many of my students. I take risks in my teaching, but only when they are firmly grounded in conscious reasoning and the principles of bel canto.)

Eventually, in a matter of minutes, the student was singing comfortably with a new coordination that happily combined her already-strong head voice with the newly awoken chest register. She was delighted to find that she could sing easily and with an even sound from low G (below middle C) up to soprano high B. (We'll go even higher once the new coordination solidifies a bit more.)

If you come to me for lessons, you might not have the length of association that this student and I enjoy—she is, after all, my mother, and we've been learning from each other for many years—but you can be assured that, whatever strange or possibly uncomfortable sensations you might experience in the lessons, they will ultimately give way to a freer, stronger vocal coordination. Like any committed voice teacher, I rely on my experience, my ear, and the principles by which I teach to guide me in guiding my students to vocal freedom.

Trust me on this one.

Stretching: the truth (part 1)

2010-02-26T07:33:00.000-05:00

Stretching can be as formalized and challenging as a yoga pose:

Or as simple and mindless as what you do to accompany your first yawn of the morning:

This morning, when I got out of bed, I went into my habitual yawn-and-stretch routine, but stopped midway and decided to analyze what I was really doing with myself. If I am going to be totally honest, what I did was to hold my breath, tense various parts of my spine until they were immobile, pull my head down hard onto the top vertebra of my spine, then let it all go. It was like a parody of bad postural choices: first too rigid, then too lax. Why does this feel so good?

Perhaps the satisfaction I get from my self-abusive stretch comes from just feeling anything in my body. Like when naughty children act out to get attention, even negative attention, which is better than no attention at all.

Or maybe this kind of stretching falls into the category of all-change-feels-good-at-first. Like that $50 lumbar support that felt like heaven for the 37 seconds that I tried it out in the store, but eventually did nothing to ease my back discomfort at the office.

In any case, when I compared my morning stretch to the wake-up routine of my chihuahuas, I noticed some crucial differences. Most importantly, the dogs don't hold their breath at any point in their stretching. Second, they move through an extended range of motion with their limbs and spine, but never stiffen them; the whole canine movement is very fluid. Third, the doggie version incorporates their whole bodies: you can see a gorgeous line from the tip of the jaw to the end of the tail. With this level of skill, it's no wonder that we've named two of the most common yoga poses (up dog and down dog) after our best friends. (Apologies to the cat people out there!)

If you have a dog—or a cat, I must admit, which is also an exemplar of healthy stretching—watch it stretch and emulate its technique. Or just keep in mind the three aforementioned elements that distinguish canine from typical human stretches: 1) let your breath flow throughout, 2) move through whatever range you can manage without stiffening, 3) let your whole body participate.

You can experiment with these dog-inspired directions throughout the day. Feel free to leave comments describing your experience. In my next posting I'll let you know about my explorations and give some guidance on how to stretch like an animal as part of your exercise regimen.

Another benefit of the Alexander Technique

2010-02-25T08:03:00.001-05:00

In re-reading my last posting, I realized that I had identified another benefit for studying the Alexander Technique—one that I have not seen expressed before or even thought about myself:

The Alexander Technique keeps me warmed up at all times.

The more I apply my Alexander thinking during the moderate activities of my daily life, the more readily I am able to embark on more demanding activities without special preparatory warm-up procedures. In this way, I never need dip below a certain baseline level of warmed-up-ness. If I don't lose my awareness or my state of dynamic coordination when I'm sitting on the couch or making dinner, I won't have to regain it before going on a run or moving furniture.

With Alexander thinking, my easy activities become the warm-up for my more challenging ones. I'm always ready for anything.

How efficient!

Why warm up?

2010-02-23T07:52:00.000-05:00

Do you warm up before singing? Before exercising?

Do you have a specific intention behind your warm-ups? If so, how well does your warm-up regimen fulfill these intentions?

Before the Alexander Technique transformed my thinking on just about every topic, I approached warming up with a mind-set quite different from my current one. Well, to be honest, I approached warming up with no mind-set to speak of. I warmed up "because they say you should." At the gym, I'd perform some desultory stretches based on what I could recall from P.E. classes (or the brilliant thinking [irony alert!] I was exposed to in Physical Training during my brief military career) before heading off to the weight room. Backstage before a show, I'd scream through some group warm-ups (usually led by a non-singer) while making last-minute costume adjustments. Later, when I was performing classical music, I "refined" this pre-show warm-up into pacing back and forth in the dressing room while singing arpeggios and whatever sounded good through the walls of the other soloists' dressing rooms. Normally, I'd continue singing and singing and singing as long as I could from the moment I arrived at the theater until it was time to go onstage. The more, the better. . .right?

Well, since then, the Alexander Technique has encouraged me to think for myself, to analyze my behaviors and beliefs—which turned out in the case of warm-ups to be based on, well, nothing, or misconceptions at best—and to approach every activity mindfully. I'm going to describe here my resulting personal philosophy of warming up, which I hope will give you some insights into discovering what works best for you.

Warming up activates a particular coordination in my body. Athletic activities, like lifting weights, running, or singing, demand a high-level coordination of the entire body. If I've been slumping over my computer all day, my whole-body coordination is unlikely to be primed for a high-demand activity, so I need to do something to bring about an improvement: to stimulate into action any muscles that have gone slack and to calm down any muscles that have become tense so that my whole system can work together efficiently. Because my Alexander experience helps me to bring a dynamic whole-body coordination to all my activities, even working on the computer, I usually arrive at the gym in a pretty well-tuned state these days. If I start my workout with light weights and lots of Alexander awareness, the additional demand placed on my system causes it to spring into an even more dynamic coordination. (This would not happen if my system weren't "primed" for such an activation by Alexander practice.)

Singing is a bit of a special case, since the particular coordination required of the laryngeal muscles is not one that occurs naturally or during any activity other than singing. If I have not sung (well) recently, I may need to engage in some sort of warm-up exercise to remind my singing muscles how I want them to respond. I'll talk about this more in another post in this series. (Singing is different from other activities requiring advanced skill, such as tap dancing or gymnastics, in which a high degree of refinement of action or an extended range of motion is called for, but not a different coordination. Readers, please let me know if you are aware of any other activities calling for a kind of muscular interaction that does not otherwise occur in the body. Maybe what dancers refer to as isolations would qualify.)

Warming up wakes up my awareness. Some activities, because of their complexity or potential for injury, require us to be more mindful of the way we use our bodies. So if all day long at work I've been ignoring the use of myself (as Alexander would have phrased it), I need to spend some time noticing how I'm employing my muscular efforts before embarking on more demanding pursuits. Paying more attention to my use throughout the day eliminates the need for the extra step of tuning in my awareness (and might help prevent throwing my back out while moving a chair or bending to pick up a dropped pencil). If I want to fine-tune my use and heighten my awareness that extra bit, I might apply some Alexander Technique thinking to my preparatory activities like walking to the gym, putting my clothes in my locker, and getting a drink from the water fountain. (This Alexander thinking can be as simple as noticing what effect said preparatory activities are having on my spinal freedom or my breathing.)

Warming up eases the transition between inactivity and activity. Our systems do not like abrupt changes to how dynamically we use them. For instance, you would probably be more ready to work out after jogging to the gym than after driving the same distance. Unfortunately, many modern-day tasks, powered by computer chips rather than muscles, are possible to accomplish with poorly coordinated bodies, so we allow ourselves to become physically disorganized. Then, when we need a more dynamic coordination, we have to work to bring it about. The more we can achieve a dynamic muscular coordination in all our activities, even the most sedentary of them (here's where the Alexander Technique comes in), the less we will have to employ special procedures to prepare for our more demanding activities. Think of a cheetah, who can spring into action to chase its prey at top speed after crouching—dynamically—in a tree for hours of patient waiting. If I've been less than cheetah-like in the dynamic employment of my whole body while, say, reading a book, before I hit the gym I might have to wake up my muscles, particularly at the extremes of their range of motion, with some movement sequences I've designed to accomplish just that. Or there is an Alexander procedure known as "constructive rest"—basically just lying on the floor + directed thinking—which stimulates proper muscle balance throughout the body. (Look for more about those movement sequences and constructive rest in future posts.)

Warming up to my topic

2010-02-22T06:38:00.000-05:00

Here in NYC, the temperatures have started creeping up a little, bringing a welcome end to the weeks-long cold snap during which the temperature rarely exceeded freezing and frequently dipped (with wind chills) into the teens. As Mother Nature warms up in preparation for spring, I thought it would be an appropriate time to discuss how we too can warm ourselves up. . .for exercise and for singing, that is.

In the upcoming series of blog posts, I will divulge my views on the subject of warming up—some of it unorthodox—which evolved over many years of personal experience in the gym and in the practice room.

Some of the questions I will explore here: Why warm up? When is it necessary? What can I do to warm up effectively? Is stretching helpful? What can I do to warm up for an audition or performance? How long should my warm-up last? Are there any warm-up practices best avoided?

I'd love to hear from my readers about the warm-up regimens you have come to rely on and welcome any questions you may have on the current topic. I invite you to post any of this as a comment to this posting.

Don't stop! Please, don't stop!

2010-02-19T07:23:00.000-05:00

I've noticed how almost all students have a tendency to interrupt their greatest successes: in the midst of a vocal exercise, they'll suddenly pull the plug on their singing, just as something new and wonderful was beginning to happen. (Much to the consternation of the teacher!)

Why do we all do this? (Yes, I do it too in my lessons.)

It seems that we humans are programmed with a great aversion to being wrong. Unfortunately, we are not always right about what is wrong. (And we're often wrong about what is right.)
Our brains get used to whatever experiences we habitually give them; these experiences will tend to be interpreted as right, correct, desirable—even when they are less than optimal.

Conversely, a new experience, even when it is superior to your habitual one, gets interpreted by your brain as wrong. It's as if a warning signal goes off—CAUTION, approaching unknown territory! I suppose that long ago in our evolutionary history, when we presumably had not yet amassed the collection of detrimental habits we modern people typically carry around, most usual experiences were to be welcomed, and unusual, potentially dangerous ones were best avoided at all costs.

Let me reassure you that in a voice lesson, you are highly unlikely to encounter a dangerous situation. You just might, however, if we set things up correctly in an exercise, encounter a brand new register coordination. And if that happens, you might have to remind your brain that, even though this new coordination feels foreign and WRONG, WRONG, WRONG, it might just be a step in the right vocal direction.

In other words, keep on singing, even if it feels like a horrible mistake to you. (I will let you know if ever you are so far off-course that you need to cut an exercise short.) This uncomfortable new experience might indeed be a blooper, in which case we'll change our approach and take another stab at it. But, if we are lucky, it might prove to be a serendipitous advance in your technique that we will want to nurture and solidify. (It's my responsibility as the teacher to set up exercises so that, as you progress in your lessons, you experience more advances and fewer bloopers.)

In closing, let's ponder the words of the wise if slightly sardonic F.M. Alexander: Everyone wants to be right but no one stops to consider if their idea of right is right.

FAQ: How many lessons will I need?

2010-02-18T07:52:00.001-05:00

In our culture, we love to buy into the fantasy of overnight transformation, and seem to trust the exaggerated promises more when they are explicitly quantified: "Lose 30 pounds in 30 days!" "Double your money in ONE DAY!" "Read these 10 steps to happiness!"

Google "in 10 easy lessons" and you will be inundated with over 30 million hits promising to turn you into an instantaneous expert in a bewildering array of fields: blues piano, Perl computer language, psychic prediction, calligraphy, the Bible, dog training, speed reading....

Knowing that they have been surrounded by this type of advertising for years, I am not surprised that many prospective students ask me when they're inquiring about voice (or Alexander) lessons how many lessons they will need. Also, I can certainly understand that people like to know how new commitments they take on are going to consume their finite resources of money and time and energy. But I am always stymied as to how to answer the how-many-lessons question, because I suspect that it is not answerable—and think it might be interesting to analyze why this is so.
Why I can't tell you how many lessons you'll need:

First, you are unique. In the history of the world, no other person has had your particular combination of strengths and challenges. In order to begin to formulate an answer to the how-many question, I'd need to have a lot of information about the structure of your vocal cords, your musicality, your intelligence, your cooperativeness, your drive, the legacy of your previous training, and many other aspects of your physical and mental/emotional make-up. Considering that, after more than four decades, I'm still discovering new things about myself in these areas, I am unlikely to be able to formulate a complete enough evaluation of your qualities to know how they affect the amount of training you will need.

Second, the amount of training you will need depends on your goals. Do you want to be able to simply carry a tune. . .or do you want to be able to carry a spear while performing as Brünnhilde at the Metropolitan Opera? Every lesson you take has the potential to bring you a little closer to your goals: two lessons will bring you about twice as close. . . .

The main reason I can't tell you how many lessons you'll need is that learning to sing is not a matter of learning a finite list of facts. (If it were, I'd be selling a pdf version of that list on my website!) Learning to sing, like learning any complex skill, involves a never-ending process of self-discovery. Gradually, you will learn how to better get out of your own way, to allow your body to produce the sounds you want. I wrote "never-ending" because you needn't ever stop getting better and better at singing. (And you may discover that you actually enjoy the learning process, which can be physically, intellectually, and emotionally very satisfying.) Like a runner who keeps training to shave an extra second off his race time, you can continue to take voice lessons your whole life, incrementally extending your range or your expressive power or your ease in singing. My own musical education began over 40 years ago, and I am not planning to stop taking voice lessons until I can no longer make my way to my teacher's studio.

OK, maybe a lifetime of lessons is a bit much to contemplate if you're just starting to think about learning to sing. Start with a single lesson, and see how you like it. If you decide to continue, I recommend committing to at least a couple of months of lessons to give yourself a fair chance of seeing some results. You can of course stop at any time. . .but I'll bet you won't want to!

How to "kick" a bad vocal habit

2010-02-16T13:42:00.002-05:00

I've blogged before about the importance for singers of maintaining a uniform vowel when moving from note to note. By not altering the shape of your internal resonance cavity (which determines the vowel sound), you avoid interfering with the delicate muscular adjustments to your registration which must happen with speed and precision in high-level singing. Any extraneous movements of the singing "environment" in and around your larynx makes it harder for the musculature of your vocal cords to respond with the requisite precision.

This issue is one that arises in nearly every lesson I teach and also in my own lessons with my teacher.

I was intrigued last week during an Alexander lesson with Mio Morales, a teacher I'm working with a lot these days, when I encountered the same principle in completely different circumstances. We were exploring the activity of walking, when Mio suggested that I let my legs be "way down there," i.e. far away from my head, and that I continue to let them be down there as I initiated a step.

Perhaps because I was primed by my recent emphasis on maintaining vowel uniformity, I noticed immediately when taking that first step that I was doing all kinds of subtle preparatory tensing in the muscles of my lower legs and feet just before and during the movement. When I "maintained a uniform leg" by inhibiting those extraneous tensions, I found that my legs moved with more ease. I felt lighter throughout my whole body and enjoyed a sense of gentleness pervading my movements.

Both of these situations—maintaining uniformity of vowel and of legs—exemplify what F.M. Alexander referred to as "leaving yourself alone." We can avoid complicating our movements from note to note and from here to the kitchen by inhibiting unnecessary preparatory tensing. In this way, we can make success easier and more likely for our muscles.

Want to know something really marvelous? At my next voice lesson after the Alexander lesson I just mentioned, I experimented with maintaining uniformity of legs as I initiated singing, and discovered that it helped me to maintain vowel uniformity too! I suppose that against a "cleaner" background of muscle activity in my body, ANY extraneous movement stands out more clearly. (Like how obvious a streak appears on the otherwise pristine window you've just cleaned.)

This just goes to show how your entire body is the environment for your voice and why it's so important to consider the whole Self in singing.

Another Valentine's Day Massacre?

2010-02-14T08:53:00.001-05:00

Throughout history, men have enjoyed a societal permission to celebrate their strength. Women, on the other hand, have long been encouraged not only to subjugate themselves in overt or subtle ways to the dominance of men, but also to compromise their already meagre remaining power through certain "fashionable" customs that you have to figure were invented by some guy.

Foot binding that literally crippled women's feet, corsets that restricted women's breathing and other bodily functions, burkas that effectively obliterate a woman's very identity—these culturally encouraged habits (irony intended) all interfere with women's ability to fully capitalize on their (non-sexualized) physicality.

Even after having our gender consciousness raised in recent decades, I fear that we really haven't come very far in granting women an equal claim to power, at least if what I observed in the current issue of Time Out New York represents currently held notions of masculine and feminine ideals. The main feature in this issue, a spread identifying around 60 of the "most stylish New Yorkers," includes photos of all the men and women the magazine considers exemplars of current style.

As an Alexander teacher, whose days are filled with helping people to recognize and change habits that interfere with their potential, I was horrified to note the consistent manner in which the women were portrayed in variously crippling postures. (The men, on the other hand, had adopted relatively more powerful stances.)

Of the 16 men whose legs are visible in their photos, all but one are shown in a supportive, wide-footed stance, with their weight more or less balanced between both legs. (The one exception had his feet so close together that they were touching, but he was still balanced between both legs.)

Of the 18 women whose legs we can see, 13 are shown either in an exaggeratedly pigeon-toed stance or with their feet crossed one over the other. Both of these stances interfere with the working of the hip, knee, and ankle joints and weaken one's ability to balance or to move quickly or powerfully. Engaged in habitually, these stances can create permanent imbalance throughout the body, resulting in pain and joint damage. Shall we at least take heart in those 4 photos in which the women's feet were wider apart and not pigeon-toed? Not really, because in all of them, the women had on crippling high heels in heights from ouch to insane. (If you're keeping track, you will realize that one photo is still unaccounted for: the one of the woman balancing on one four-inch high heel while kicking up her other leg coquettishly behind her.)

It would be interesting to know whether these men and women were art-directed into these poses, or if they chose them on their own. Either way, it's a depressing message that comes across when we take off our rose-colored fashion glasses. These women don't look "cute" or "hot" or "stylish"; they look and are deformed.

I would like women to make choices that give them more power in the world. Not the kind of "power" we have convinced ourselves that flexed calf muscles in killer heels grant, but real power that comes from unencumbered bodies moving freely and healthily. Why not start by not massacre-ing yourself with crippling fashions this Valentine's Day?

Things you'll never hear me say in a voice lesson: RAISE YOUR SOFT PALATE

2010-02-12T06:37:00.001-05:00

This is my first in a series of myth-busting posts, in which I hope to dispel some common misconceptions about singing.

When voice teachers advise singers to raise their soft palates, they are succumbing to an almost universal human confusion between simultaneity and causality. In other words, they are mistakenly assuming that if action A occurs during situation S, that A must have caused S. For example, a teacher may observe that when singing is well coordinated, the singer's soft palate is likely to be in an elevated position. So far, so good. But if that teacher goes on to assume that good coordination can be induced by raising the soft palate, and advises his students to do this, he is doing them a disservice. Let's examine why.

Although people tend not to think about it in such terms, singing is an activity that involves a precise and delicate coordination of every part of the body. Of course, some muscles, like those of the larynx and the diaphragm, are more directly involved than, say, the biceps. But every muscle in your body, including your biceps, is part of the environment in which your singing takes place, and thus, has a role in your overall coordination for this activity. Any note you sing, then, is the action not only of your "vocal" muscles, but of your entire, intricately coordinated body. To bring about this astoundingly complex coordination by consciously moving individual muscles is futile, but we all try to accomplish all sorts of things in this way.

Truly, any activity must be thought of in terms of whole-body coordination. Our muscles simply do not operate independently, but as part of a system. Teachers in all fields who do not understand this concept cause their students untold frustration and possibly injury. Ballet dancers and students of yoga and Pilates are often told to improve their form by drawing in the abdominal muscles. Weight lifters are encouraged to focus solely on the contraction of the muscles they are attempting to exercise. Many of us have been hounded to improve our posture by pulling back our shoulders. All of these recommendations are well-intentioned, but unsound. You simply can't address a whole-body coordination piecemeal, by moving this part here or that part there. . .at least not without creating unwanted tension somewhere in the system. (Think of how your back feels after 5 minutes of holding your shoulders in place!)

What we singing teachers are really after is the same thing wanted by the teachers of ballet, yoga, Pilates, exercise, posture, and everything else: an efficient, easeful, dynamic whole-body organization to support whatever movements are required in our particular specialty. It would be much easier to teach and to become proficient at any of these activities if we could bring about the needed coordination by consciously moving body parts A, B, and C into the correct alignment. But it doesn't work that way; we have to search for indirect ways of eliciting whole-body coordination. This is the central goal of the Alexander Technique, by the way.

So how on earth do you teach anything? Well, you have to first change your outlook on teaching and learning. Start by expanding your field of awareness (a concept familiar to Alexander teachers) to include the whole person performing the activity. Then, instead of focusing solely on the immediate goals to be attained (end-gaining, in Alexander language), you must keep your primary focus on the overall conditions in the body, what Alexander called the use of the Self. Also, remember that fine-tuning any activity involves not so much learning what to do, but learning how to stop doing whatever is interfering with your overall coordination. This all makes for a very different learning experience, and one that is likely to give the student more episodes of ease and success and fewer of frustration and stress.

In the voice lessons I teach, I set up exercises to spontaneously bring about a better whole-body coordination. (Just how I do this is a topic for a future post.) As conditions improve—in your throat, yes, but also throughout your entire body, or Self—your soft palate and every other part of you will gradually assume its optimal position for every note.

Since while performing you won't have to consciously direct your soft palate into position, not to mention choreographing tongue, lips, throat, jaw, diaphragm, and big toes, you will be able to focus on communicating your emotional and musical ideas. And that is what singing is all about.

Teaching like. . .a colony of ants?

2010-02-10T07:51:00.000-05:00

I've been reading Melanie Mitchell's book about systems theory, Complexity, in which she describes how complexity arises in various systems out of the interactions of many individually simple elements. For example, individually not-very-intelligent ants are able as a colony to very effectively find food and bring it back to the nest. Mitchell describes the process, evolved over eons, that makes this group intelligence possible:

[W]e saw. . .the way ant colonies forage for food: the shortest trails leading to the best food sources attain the strongest pheromone scent, and increasing numbers of ants follow these trails. However, at any given time, some ants are still following weaker, less plausible trails, and some ants are still foraging randomly, allowing for the possibility of new food sources to be found.

This is an example of needing to keep a balance between exploration and exploitation [of information gleaned]. When promising possibilities are identified, they should be exploited at a rate and intensity related to their estimated promise, which is being continually updated. But at all times exploration for new possibilities should continue. . . .

My teaching is guided by a similar process of exploration balanced with exploitation.
Through experience I have come to know what stimuli will generally invoke a particular type of vocal response in a student. But often, people don't respond the way one expects them to. In these cases, I have to be flexible enough to try something different; one of the "less plausible trails" may lead to what I am trying to achieve. Occasionally, even, when nothing logical seems to be working, a random change can shift things towards success. I'll change some aspect of how we've been working—the vowel, the volume, the pitch range, for example—as see what effect that has on the singer's output. (This may happen accidentally when a student misunderstands my instructions and sings something different than I had intended. Sometimes, the "mistake" produces better results than what I had anticipated!) If this change produces an improvement, I add it to my tool-box of promising possibilities. If it doesn't produce an improvement, I simply try something else.

Earlier this week, I was working with a tenor on his high range, where he is learning to coordinate his falsetto with a very free chest participation, resulting in easy, stable high notes. During this particular lesson, however, I noticed a breathy quality to the high notes, indicating a less-than-optimal chest register participation. Since chest register produces clarity in the sound, I suggested to the student that he aim for a clearer tone quality. Surprisingly, this suggestion brought an even more unfocused quality to his sound. I moved on to a slightly "less plausible trail," and requested a louder volume, which generally brings in more chest register. Still breathy. Hmmm. Momentarily stymied, I foraged in a random direction: "Sing the next exercise in the opposite of a clear quality." Bizarrely, that seemingly nonsensical instruction, the exact meaning of which neither of us was sure, resulted in an ideal register balance—and a free, clear tone.

I'll have to drag that morsel back to the nest and share it with the colony.

That's what I get for trying to be provocative!

2010-02-09T08:00:00.004-05:00

In my post from 2/7/10, I published a list of things that people do that may be damaging to their voices. I'll admit that I was aiming with some of the items on this list to get people riled up, in the hopes that they would come to the defense of their beliefs by commenting on my piece. (I'm not above such incendiary methods of upping traffic on my blog!)

Leave it to my long-time dear friend (and frequent duet partner) Toni Schiavone to call me on my audacity! Thanks, Toni, for forcing me to put my money where my mouth was and explain why I consider #4 and #7 on my list to be detrimental breathing fallacies. (I'll offer explanations of the other 8 list items in later postings.)

Over and over again in my teaching I see people interfering with their breathing by doing something conscious in an effort to enhance it. These efforts almost always backfire, either because 1) they ignore that the respiratory system works as a coordinated whole, not in parts that can be tweaked individually, or 2) they are based on anatomical misconceptions, or 3) they create new tensions while trying to improve the breathing. Two of the most prevalent, as well as the most harmful, breathing mistakes are belly breathing and breathing/supporting from the diaphragm.

In belly breathing, the singer attempts to bring air into what he or she thinks to be the lowest part of the lungs, causing the belly to expand. A brief consideration of your own body will show the fallacy behind this practice: With your fingers, find your lowest pair of ribs in the front. Your lungs lie completely above this level. Below these ribs lie your liver, stomach, small intestines and other digestive organs. There is no way to bring air into these abdominal organs--nor would you want to do so. A small amount of expansion does take place in the abdomen upon inhaling because of an increase of pressure in the abdominal cavity, but none of the expansion is due to an intake of air into this cavity. Trying to breathe into your guts is not only futile, but it also inhibits breath from coming into your actual lungs, which are located much higher than people generally believe (all the way up to just above your collarbones, in fact).

"Breathing from the diaphragm" usually involves a misunderstanding of where the diaphragm is and/or how it works. This muscular organ slices across your torso horizontally all around the bottom of the ribcage, dividing your torso into a chest cavity above and an abdominal cavity below. (It's like a floor for the lungs and a ceiling for the liver and stomach.) You cannot feel the diaphragm from the outside by touching any part of your body with your hands, nor can you feel the diaphragm moving, because there are no sensory nerves associated with this organ. (You can feel other parts of your body, principally your ribs, move in response to diaphragmatic movement.) What most people are feeling when they "support from the diaphragm" is actually a tensing of the abdominal muscles, which lie in vertical sheets from the bottom ribs in front all the way down to the pelvis.

Free, healthy breathing involves unrestricted swinging motions of your ribs: up and down like the handles of a bucket on the inhale and exhale, respectively. Tune into this gentle, easy movement as you sit breathing quietly. When you are able to discern the up-and-down motion of your ribs, try doing what you think of as "supporting from the diaphragm, " and see what effect this has on the freedom of your ribs. Most people in trying to breathe from the diaphragm will actually either push or tense or even pull in their ab muscles in the area of the solar plexus, thinking mistakenly that this rib-restricting tension will help their breathing.

It is quite possible that readers have different definitions of "belly breathing" and "diaphragm support" than the ones I've written about here, and are perhaps not creating interference in their respiratory systems. I am happy to continue this discussion with anyone who is interested or curious or confused.

Voice training: a twisty path

2010-02-08T13:50:00.001-05:00

Teaching voice challenges my creativity in a way that I find happily stimulating.

Because coordinating a voice involves not machinery, but a human being, a teacher needs to approach every lesson with an openness to surprises. I commonly encounter what I call "anomalies": voices that respond to an exercise in way that is different from, if not diametrically opposite, what I have previously heard or from what I expected. (After enough anomalies, you begin to learn NOT to expect any particular result!)

My own voice responded anomalously in various ways during the time I studied with Cornelius Reid.
For a long time, for example, he attempted to get my recalcitrant chest voice to stop shutting down in my high range by activating it with a combination of pitch, loudness, and vowel that typically evokes a strong chest register response: i.e. LOUD ah's. This approach brought about only minor improvements--very disappointing to both of us.

Mr. Reid, after decades of studying the bewildering variability of voices, figured that if something wasn't working in the lessons, you should just try doing the opposite and see what happens. In my case, we stopped banging away at the forte exercises and switched to a pianissimo ah, normally a loudness that tends to invoke more falsetto response than chest. Lo and behold, my anomalous arytenoids kicked in with an easy, stable chest register that I was able to take up into the highest notes of my range! Eventually, we grew a bigger, truly baritonal sound out of this incipient, quiet but clear register balance.

Thankfully, Mr. Reid demonstrated to me in my lessons and the many others I observed him teach a willingness to divert from the standard course. Now in my own teaching, I am not afraid to abandon the tried-and-true when I've tried it again in a different situation and found it to be unsuitable. Just yesterday, I was working with a bass-baritone who has very recently discovered how to maintain his internal resonance space throughout his range. Inspired by his progress, I decided to refine his technique even further by having him sing a clearer [ah] vowel, which normally brings about even better resonance and register response. To my surprise (oops-caught myself expecting!), the clearer [ah] actually threw off the improved register balance we'd achieved. I asked the singer to return to his previous [ah]--a little more like [uh]--and we got back on track. Eventually, we'll work on getting a clearer vowel along with a stable resonance and a correct register balance, but in that moment yesterday, it was not to be.

Sometimes I think about how much easier voice teaching would be if voices responded dependably and uniformly to the exercises that I use. Then I realize how dull that would make my work! It's much more interesting that every student's voice is like a puzzle to solve over time. With each student I explore how to uncover what is special about his or her voice and how to nurture and refine those qualities.

Since people differ so much from each other, and even from themselves in other moments, I have been able to come up with no standard way to teach singing. If you stop to think about all the things that can affect a voice--state of health, personality and mood, anatomical structural differences, ideas and attitudes, the technical demands of a particular piece of music, etc.--this should not be surprising.

10 great ways to ruin your voice

2010-02-07T18:15:00.001-05:00

Shouting over loud music in a bar/restaurant
Smoking/drugs/excessive drinking
"Placement"
Belly breathing
Pushing or any other kind of straining
Believing that singing is like sustained speaking
Doing anything "from the diaphragm"
Neglecting the development of either the chest register or the falsetto
Depressing your larynx through conscious effort or by mechanical means
Most group warm-ups (Better to warm up alone beforehand, then lip-synch through the group drills)

I'll eventually blog about all these detrimental practices.

Add your favorite don'ts—or refute mine—by commenting to this post.

The Alexander/voice link

2010-02-06T09:16:00.002-05:00

I'm lucky to have a voice teacher (Donna Reid) who, like me, is also an Alexander Teacher. In my lessons, Donna and I often explore ways to apply the Alexander Technique to the process of singing, and we are often dumbfounded at how much overlap exists between Alexander's principles and those of singing pedagogue Cornelius Reid. (If you're wondering about the shared surname, yes, Donna is the widow of Cornelius.)

One of the core principles of the Alexander Technique is INHIBITION. Inhibition means saying "no" to your habitual way of reacting so that you can allow something different—and probably better—to happen. The challenge of this simple concept, and the reason people come for Alexander lessons as opposed to just reading about the Technique, is that our habits are so familiar that they feel right to us. If habits feel right, then something different—even if it is better—is likely to feel wrong. (At least at first.) We are not very likely to choose what feels wrong over what feels right, so a teacher's assistance in making this uncomfortable but beneficial new choice can be crucial.

A comfortable habit that most of us singers cling to is altering our vowels in singing. We may not be aware of why we do this; we may not even be aware THAT we do it. When register coordination is faulty, we resort to distortions of our technique, like altering our vowels, in an effort to make the notes come out. (With a big emphasis on "effort"!)

If you want to stimulate a healthy response in your vocal coordination, you have to maintain a healthy environment for the sound. This includes maintaining a free, resonant, unadulterated vowel sound. When we consciously or unconsciously alter our vowels—one version of this is sometimes known as "covering"—we interfere with the delicate mechanical adjustments that our throat muscles are trying to bring about. Our own attempts at bringing about coordination are clumsy in comparison to what our muscles can accomplish when left alone.

Which brings us back to Alexander, who advocated "leaving yourself alone" in performing movements like getting out of a chair. Leaving yourself alone entails not interfering with a reflexive muscular response by doing what we think needs to be done: most activities involve far less effort than we habitually bring to them. In many Alexander lessons, one or another of my students, upon inhibiting a habitual way of getting out of a chair, has exclaimed with delight and surprise that standing up could be so easy.

In singing, we can experience this same kind of delightfully surprising ease by getting out of our own way. One relatively simple way of leaving yourself alone is to leave your vowels alone. Maintaining a consistent [ah], for example, as you move from one note to the octave above, will allow your gloriously talented throat musculature to accomplish for you the task of perfectly coordinating. (You can hear a sound clip of the difference here: the first time through, the singer goes from [ah] on the first note to [uh] on the second note. The second time, he maintains a consistent [ah] throughout.)

Ahuh by michaelhanko

Now isn't that more fun than micro-managing every note you sing?

P.S. I'm choosing to write about the Alexander Technique today in honor of ACAT, the American Center for the Alexander Technique, where I did my Alexander teacher training and where I now teach from time to time. Today the organization's annual membership meeting is being held in their space near Union Square. Anyone with an interest in the Alexander Technique can become a member of ACAT, not only teachers. Besides training teachers, ACAT provides introductory lecture/demos for the public and offers a rich assortment of Alexander classes and workshops. Check out their website for more information.

The perfect vocal exercise

2010-02-05T20:23:00.002-05:00

In a recent post, I defined what I mean by a register and described the qualities of both the falsetto register and the chest register.

One of the big challenges of singing, in fact, the main technical challenge, is to get these two registers functioning together well throughout your entire range. Most vocal faults can be traced to an over- or under-active register participation or to an awkward combination of the two, in which, instead of supporting each other, they conflict and produce tension.

It's possible that your registers are already well developed and healthy, but haven't figured out yet how to coordinate. In this case, we have to get creative in your lessons--we have to find out a way to "trick" them into coordinating better. Once your muscles have experienced an efficient coordination, which feels good, they are more likely to continue to respond efficiently in the future.

With his more than six decades of teaching experience, my mentor Cornelius Reid was able to come up with a whole battery of exercises that would effectively trick a singer's vocal cords into a better response. He knew how to set up conditions in an exercise that would make a successful coordination of the registers likely. One of his cleverest exercises--deceptive in its simplicity--is the octave leap from loud to soft with descending arpeggio.

Octave by michaelhanko

The genius of this exercise lies in its capacity for eliciting just the right degree of chest register participation in high notes. Too little, and the note goes into falsetto.

Toofalse by michaelhanko

Too much, and the note becomes forced.

Forced by michaelhanko

Here's how we use this exercise in your lessons: First, we establish the chest register by having you start on a lowish note taken at a loud dynamic level (forte). Then you move smoothly to a note one octave higher, taken softly (piano), before descending in a major arpeggio. When I hear how your vocal muscles respond to this exercise, I may tweak the set-up by altering pitch, volume, and/or vowel until we get the freest, most efficient response from your voice. When you can consistently succeed at this exercise, we will begin to train your vocal coordination to tolerate increased loudness on the upper pitch.

As always, it's crucial to maintain the integrity of your vowel during the whole exercise, so as not to introduce unnecessary complications. A common fault is to sing the first two notes as [ah]-[uh] (sung first in the following sound clip) instead of [ah]-[ah] (sung second).

Ahuh by michaelhanko

Your voice responds most freely when you perform the opening octave of this exercise spontaneously, with rhythmic élan.

Singing: It ain't natural!

2010-02-04T00:49:00.004-05:00

You often hear singers talk of singing naturally, as though singing were an inherent bodily function like vision or walking or blood circulation.

The Alexander Technique community, too, suffers from the widely held belief that good singing is natural, and thus can be elicited in anyone if we can just get him or her free enough. I have heard this implied even by Alexander teachers who are also singers.

The muscles we use for singing evolved as parts of our swallowing and breathing mechanisms. They open the throat to facilitate the passage of food and air and close the throat to prevent things from going down the wrong tubes. It is a marvelous serendipity that humans have figured out how to co-opt these muscles for producing the glorious sounds of singing. In order to properly coordinate the "vocal" muscles (e.g. cricothyroids and arytenoids) for high-level singing, they have to be coerced into interacting in highly unnatural ways that they would never experience in performing their original functions. In simplified terms, muscles groups that normally alternate their action--either these or those contracting at any given time--must learn to contract simultaneously and brace against each other's pull.

To achieve this unnatural but agreeable coordination is perhaps one of the most difficult human pursuits. Cornelius Reid used to assert that only a few singers in the whole world in any era manage to coordinate their "vocal" muscles at the highest level of proficiency. (He meant few enough to count on the fingers of your two hands.)

Faced with the challenge of eliciting such an unlikely coordination, it makes sense for all singers to employ the Alexander Technique to make sure that we aren't creating unnecessary tensions that would make good singing even less likely. But, contrary to widespread opinion, simply freeing yourself of tension won't coordinate your vocal registers. An Alexander lesson in itself will not turn you into a master singer, any more than it will have you dancing like Baryshnikov. (Unless you are already a Baryshnikov. Or a Björling. Or a Beyoncé.) You need voice lessons too, and preferably from someone who understands how to elicit that elusive and unnatural response from the muscles of your larynx.

Sizing up the Competition - The Genius of Miranda

2010-02-03T09:47:00.005-05:00

Sometimes I view instructional videos from various voice teachers to see how their philosophies and teaching methods compare with mine. I have so far encountered no other teacher whose video showed an approach more congruent with mine than the one you are about to see in this posting. You may wish to take notes in order to benefit maximally from what this teacher--who humbly introduces herself only as "Miranda"--has been gracious enough to share with the whole world community of singers:

You can click on the "Read more" link for my complete analysis of the work of this pedagogical genius.

Did that not take your breath away? (Perhaps you should pause and perform Miranda's opening breathing exercise before reading on.)

What I admire: The teacher's self-presentation--make-up, video production standards, poise--exemplifies the professional. She provides clearly explained, useful exercises for students to practice until they can save up enough money for a 3-hour private lesson of their own. She debunks the harmful fallacy of inducing vibrato by shaking the neck and provides several healthier alternatives.

What I might have done differently: While I applaud Miranda's amazing ability to sing in both "high voice" and "low voice," I prefer to use the more traditional terms "head voice" and "chest voice." Though it must be a constant challenge for a singer like Miranda of such bountiful gifts, I personally would strive not to intimidate my students by emphasizing my own skill to such a degree during a lesson.

Bottom line: If you have the financial resources to afford Miranda's lessons (once you have improved to the expensive level, I mean), by all means, get in touch with her. If you are not quite so well off, you can continue to visit this blog (for free!), where I will do my best to interpret and make available her pedagogical gems. Of course, you can also check out her vast collection of instructional videos on Youtube, in which you will benefit not only from her knowledge, but also from the opportunity to see--and more importantly, hear--her walking her talk. (Singing her thing? Chanting her rant? Trilling her skill?)

I sign off, humbled in the presence of greatness.

The Registers - Descriptions and Sound Clips

2010-01-31T21:35:00.231-05:00

In my way of looking at the voice, influenced by the work of Cornelius Reid, a register is the sound quality produced by the action of one of the two opposing groups of vocal muscles in the larynx. The cricothyroid muscles et al. generate the falsetto register, while the cricoarytenoid muscles et al. generate the chest register. (Some theorists posit the existence of more than two registers, but since here we are defining a register as being produced by a particular group of muscles, and since there are only two such groups in the larynx, only two registers can be said to exist. Other so-called registers are in reality sounds produced by differently coordinated interactions between the falsetto and chest registers.)

In their pure forms, the falsetto and chest registers encompass only a minimal range of notes each and exhibit unsubtle vocal qualities of limited use in legitimate singing. When you learn to combine them efficiently however, their complementary qualities enhance and support each other, making available to you sounds in a wider range of at least two octaves, loud or soft on any pitch, and with a large palette of tonal colors.

In order to get the two registers working together well, it is often first necessary to separate them out and independently refine the action of each. We do this by taking advantage of certain combinations of pitch, loudness, and vowel to elicit a particular register or registrational mixture. This posting will demonstrate and describe the characteristics of the falsetto, the chest register, and the integrated working of them both together.

The falsetto:

The “pure” falsetto, with no participation from the chest register, is a breathy sound that ranges in volume from very soft at its lowest pitches around the A below middle C to a bit louder at its highest pitches an octave higher. (Breathy, because without the action of the chest register muscles, the vocal cords do not approximate (=touch) completely. A falsetto that is more “singy,” i.e. with tonal clarity, or one that extends higher than the A above middle C, requires some participation from the chest register.) The pitch range of the pure falsetto is identical for men and women. In combined registrations, the falsetto determines the tautness of the vocal cords and thus the pitch and contributes beneficial qualities such as warmth of tone and flexibility. Some types of throat constriction can be “blasted” open using this useful, if unaesthetic sound.

We can best elicit a pure falsetto using the vowel [oo] anywhere in the appropriate octave, although it’s often easier to avoid bringing in the chest register if we choose a pitch high enough to make chest register participation unlikely. I often start at around the E above middle C to get the pure falsetto established before taking it lower.

Here’s a clip of a baritone singing single tones in pure falsetto from F above middle C to the A below. Notice how the volume decreases as he descends, in accordance with the characteristics of this register.

Purefalsetto by michaelhanko

Here are the same notes in a mixed falsetto. The increased clarity and volume come from the participation of the chest register, although the falsetto is still quite dominant.

Clearfalsetto by michaelhanko

If you attempt to take the falsetto lower than its natural range, your voice will either diminish into soundlessness or take on some chest register to continue lower. In the following sound clip, listen as the singer descends on an arpeggio on the vowel [oh] from the F above middle C to the octave below. When he reaches the bottom note, outside the range of falsetto, you will hear his falsetto “break over” into a mixed registration involving some chest voice.

Falsetochest by michaelhanko

The chest register:

When uncoordinated, i.e., unaccompanied by any falsetto participation, the chest register is a crude, somewhat aggressive sound that ranges from the lowest notes one can sing up to around the E above middle C. It’s loud throughout this range, getting even louder and harsher as it ascends. As is the case for the falsetto, the range of this register is the same for men and women, although, since men sing about an octave lower than women, most of their range lies within the confines of the chest register, while only the lowest notes of women’s voices do. The action of the chest register is what maintains the openness of the throat, which of course is desirable even for the highest soprano pitches. In combined registrations, the chest register permits excursion into the lower tonal ranges and contributes power, clarity, and focus to the tone. It is easy to misuse this register, however; most forms of throat constriction are the result of an over-aggressive or otherwise poorly coordinated chest register.

We can easily elicit the chest register by singing loudly on a lowish note on the vowel [ah]. (Men have a wide range of options here; women are limited to the lowest 5th or so of their range.)

In the next clip you can hear the unmistakable differences between the falsetto and the chest register. The baritone sings twice a descending arpeggio from the D above middle C to the D below, first in falsetto (nearly inaudible by the bottom note) and then again in chest voice.

Chest by michaelhanko

If the singer attempts to take the chest voice too high, the tone will become louder and more and more spread until the muscles can no longer endure the excessive strain this imposes on them, breaking into a falsetto at this point. In the following sound clip, you can hear the dramatic change in quality when this break occurs. This is the famous break which all singers, particularly men, must find a way to bridge so as to avoid the comic, yodel-like effect of abrupt changes from one register into another and back.

Break by michaelhanko

In this next sound clip, the singer repeats the same sequence of notes, but allows his registers to coordinate. As they work together, they smooth out the transitions from a coordinated chest register into a coordinated falsetto, also known as head voice, and back again.

Smoothbreak by michaelhanko

Voice lessons provide a pathway for register development. In an untrained or incorrectly trained voice, the registers may each be poorly developed and they will not be able to cooperate efficiently with each other. During lessons like mine, the falsetto and chest registers will be trained in two ways: 1) independently, to strengthen them and correct any faults present, and 2) in coordinated combination with each other, to refine their ability to work together.

Well-coordinated registers make singing feel easy and give you increased range and agility, as well as the ability to sing on any pitch at any volume and with a whole range of tonal colors.

The Magic Button Delusion

2010-01-31T09:26:00.003-05:00

Pushing a button to accomplish a task is deeply satisfying. When riding an elevator as children, my sisters and I would vie for the privilege of pushing the button which would magically light up and take us to our desired floor. Even as an adult, when pushing the buttons on displays at certain types of museum I enjoy a frisson completely out of proportion to the usually ho-hum sequence of events unleashed. (Usually, a lighting change or a robotic mechanical movement.) I think buttons give me a gratifying sense of being in control: look at the power I wield in my finger!

I've mentioned only some rather mundane examples of events activated at the push of a button, but every day modern technology puts operations of greater and greater complexity under the control of our pointer fingers. There is a button on my electric piano which calls forth from the instrument the playing of a piece far beyond my own pianistic skills. My partner has a collection of sewing machines of various vintage; some of the more recent ones will accomplish quite sophisticated, computer-guided stitchery at the push of one of their buttons. There is even an infamous button on a certain red phone that will call forth the nuclear annihilation of our planet should it ever be pressed by a U.S. President. And who knows what impressive feats may eventually be accomplished at the push of a (virtual) button on my iPhone? (Maybe I should download the iAvertNuclearDisaster app from Apple.)

We humans love the concept that we can solve problems at the push of a button. We love this concept so much that we try to apply it even when there is no magic button to push. . .we just act AS IF there were such a button. We bring a great deal of vexation upon ourselves by applying this delusion to the operation of our bodies.

Your body, composed of billions of interconnected cells, functions in every action as an integrated unit of unimaginable complexity. Whether you are throwing a baseball, singing "The Man that Got Away," or reading a blog, all the various parts of you have to coordinate, precisely balancing this tension against that one, all the while digesting food, pumping blood, fending off disease, and performing myriad other functions.

Even if we simplify this situation by taking into account only the activity of muscles, we are left with an astounding complexity to consider. Every muscle of your body has a role in every action you perform, whether that role is to contract by a certain amount, to release contraction by a certain amount, or to maintain a certain degree of tension as other muscles change. If we had to coordinate this intricacy through conscious thought, our brains would soon implode. Luckily, our systems take care of much of this muscular activity reflexively, without our needing to get involved. In fact, when we try to get involved, we normally mess things up, like the proverbial centipede who can't take a step when he stops to think about which foot moves next.

As both Alexander teacher and voice teacher, I am constantly confronted with "centipede" students who have been taught (elsewhere) to think about and move certain body parts in isolation, without consideration for the complexity of the system or for the delicate balance that must prevail among all the parts of that system. These students have been misled into believing that success comes through the pushing of a magic button: just move this part here and all will be well.

The magic button delusion takes many forms. For now I will limit my discussion to how it can interfere with the freedom of three different functions. In posture, which involves a sophisticated counter-tension of muscles throughout the body, an often-recommended magic button is to pull back the shoulders, which eventually tires out the back muscles and makes them ache. In breathing, you hear the misguided advice of pushing the "diaphragm button" in various ways—usually advocating the poking out of the stomach area, or sometimes pulling in—which ends up only restricting diaphragmatic movement. Singing teachers in particular seem to invoke a large number of magic buttons for the action of making vocal sounds. Some common ones, which I will blog about in detail at another time, are raising the soft palate, opening the throat, lowering the larynx, and holding out the ribs. Pushing any of these magic buttons, by ignoring the delicate interaction of a entire system of muscles, risks throwing off the balance of the vocal muscles and generating constricting laryngeal tensions.

What I am looking for in each of my students is a free, unobstructed response of the whole self, as a unit. The system of the whole self is far too complex to be managed through direct control of each part. Therefore, to push a magic button—to move, raise, lower, hold, or otherwise interfere with any individual element of the system—will not lead to freedom or to the most accomplished use of your body, but rather to unwanted tension and frustration. You must learn to give up desiring the direct control of your coordination and start ALLOWING your body's natural, virtuoso reflexive control to take over. This happens not by pushing a magic button (read, doing any particular action), but by stopping those actions that are getting in the way of your coordination.

This non-doing approach to singing is what we will practice in your voice lessons. Alexander lessons will help you to consolidate your skill in non-doing by applying it to everything you do.

Save your button-pushing for your microwave popcorn.

Sizing up the Competition - Celebrity Edition

2010-01-30T08:53:00.004-05:00

You'll probably recognize the student in this video; she's one of the truly great entertainers. (And watch to the end for a hilarious impression of her by her young godson--priceless!) Click on "Read more" for my commentary on the teaching.

What I admire: The teacher creates a welcoming atmosphere for the student and fosters a sense of joy in singing. She is not intimidated by her student's eminence.

What I might have done differently: If one of my students arrived at her lesson in an obvious state of over-stimulation, I would suggest a few minutes of Voice-Enhancing Bodywork to bring her energy to a level at which productive work is more likely. During the lesson, I would strive to emulate the kind of ease in my own body which I want to bring about for my student. When my students sing, I refrain from singing loudly along with them so that I can more effectively listen to what is going on with their vocal coordination.

Bottom line: I wouldn't pay for the vocal pedagogy on display here. But I suppose Liza can easily afford her fees. And maybe this teacher's approach helps Liza to cultivate the breathless yet brassy, over-the-top, quasi-hysterical persona so beloved by her fans. . .but at what cost to her equilibrium? (Did I just use "Liza" and "equilibrium" in the same sentence?)

Finding a voice teacher - a checklist to use in your search

2010-01-29T17:20:00.001-05:00

As a singer, I understand that finding the right voice teacher can be a difficult process. A teacher is someone you are entrusting your voice to and someone you may be working with for a long time. You want to find a teacher whose approach meshes with your needs as a student. You want to find someone you can trust to give you accurate feedback about how you are singing.

In hopes of making this difficult search a little easier, I have compiled the following checklist which you may find useful in evaluating me and other prospective voice teachers (or your current teacher).
I hope that my website has stirred your interest in the Art & Science of Singing enough to include me in your search for a voice teacher. Why not schedule a no-pressure, no-obligation sample lesson—and bring along a copy of the checklist to help you make a decision that feels right to you.

Voice Teacher Checklist

You can ask yourself the following questions about any voice teacher to help you determine whether that teacher is right for you:

   1. Do I feel a positive rapport with this teacher? Do our personalities harmonize?
   2. Does this teacher create a supportive environment during lessons? Do the teacher’s comments help me to feel good about myself? Am I having fun as well as learning?
   3. Do I get the sense that this teacher thoroughly knows the subject of teaching voice?
   4. Is this teacher able to meet me at my current stage of development—and take me to the next level and beyond?
   5. Is this teacher interested in nurturing my own individual sound, or in making me conform to his or her personal ideal?
   6. Is my singing consistently improving during the course of my lessons? Is my range always increasing—in both directions? Am I increasingly able to sing loudly and softly in all parts of my range? Am I developing more vocal agility?
   7. Is this teacher’s approach helping my singing to become more and more effortless? Do I feel energized or exhausted after singing?
   8. Does this teacher express ideas in words that I can easily understand and put into practice? When I have questions, is the teacher able to give satisfying answers?
   9. Are this teacher’s services within my budget, including any travel costs?
  10. Is my overall feeling that this teacher would be a good choice for me?

Don't jostle your larynx!

2010-01-29T17:01:00.001-05:00

Ever try writing (the old-fashioned way, with a pen or pencil) on a moving train? If so, you know how extraneous movement interferes with fine motor coordination. You might end up with a page of barely decipherable chicken-scratching.

Like the muscles in our hands that allow us to write clearly in a stationary environment, our vocal muscles—the tiny muscles that move and stretch our vocal cords in various subtle ways in singing—require a stable environment in order to respond precisely and delicately. A turbulent environment throws them off, adding unwanted random "noise" to our sound, like the unwanted random jittering our pen makes on the paper when the train rattles along the tracks.

So how do you provide your vocal muscles with the stable environment they need to accomplish their delicate task well? You maintain stability by not unnecessarily altering the shape of your internal resonance space when singing. Does that sound complicated? It's not, really: the configuration of your resonance space is largely determined by the vowel you sing. If you maintain a consistent vowel, you stabilize the environment in which your vocal muscles are working.

For example, if you are singing a two-note interval on [ah], you must make sure not to change the [ah] when moving to the second pitch. Often, we alter our vowels so automatically, that we are not even able to perceive the change. It was months after my mentor Cornelius Reid first identified my habit of singing [ah-ah-ah-UH] as I went up the scale before I was able to note the difference myself. I remember thinking (incorrectly, as it turned out) that he must have been imagining things; it sure sounded like [ah-ah-ah-ah] to me!

The effect of modifying our vowels is amplified for larger intervals. You can try it for yourself by singing [ah] on a lowish note followed by the same note an octave higher. If you change the vowel (for example, to [uh] or [oo] as in book or [a] as in cat), you will jostle the vocal muscles unnecessarily, interfering with their ability to respond with precision and ease. If you maintain a consistent [ah], your musculature, as if by magic, will have the freedom to create just the right conditions for the second note.

It may take some time before this process works efficiently. A lot depends on the current state of coordination in your vocal musculature and your ability to hear accurately what sounds you are producing. Until things are working at their peak, it is very helpful to have a teacher's ear to analyze what is going on.

One of my primary goals in voice teaching is to lead my students to an ability to accurately discern the quality of their vowels so they eventually are able to maintain a stable resonance environment in their singing.

How I'm honing my teaching skills

2010-01-29T16:59:00.002-05:00

I consider it part of my responsibilities as a teacher to continue in my own learning process. But don't feel sorry for me; there is nothing I enjoy more than learning new skills or refining old ones! As I review my continuing education schedule for 2010, it seems I find myself in a particularly rich educational environment this year.

First off, I have my own weekly voice lessons with my superb teacher, Donna Reid, during which we not only work on my vocal technique, but also compare teaching notes. Then, as always, I am studying Alexander Technique with a variety of teachers. Currently, my main Alexander mentors are Mio Morales, under whose guidance I am coming to understand more and more about ease, and Marie Stroud, whose expertise in using developmental movement patterns in teaching has transformed the way I teach the AT. (One of these days I'll have to blog about that topic.)

In the world of bodywork, I am excited about three upcoming courses. In March, I'll be taking my first course in Neural Manipulation, learning more about how to affect the health of the entire body by working directly on the nerves. (I promise not to work your last one!) In September, I'll be continuing in my craniosacral education with the second-level course in Somato-Emotional Release, which explores the connection between our emotions and how they manifest in our tissues. And in November, I'll be taking the next level of Visceral Manipulation, which covers the organs of the thorax--basically all the body parts most intimately connected with singing!

I am looking forward to sharing with my students all the new skills and knowledge I'll be learning!

The myth of method

2010-01-29T16:57:00.001-05:00

Probably the most Frequently Asked Question I get from prospective voice students is “What method do you teach?” Sometimes when they hear my reply—that I don’t teach by ANY method at all—I get the impression that they are skeptical or disappointed. But here are some thoughts on why I believe that no teaching method may actually be the best teaching method.

I’m going to define a “method” as a step-by-step system of learning to sing, maybe including a sequence of exercises designed to advance your technique. Such an approach assumes that all voices are basically similar and that every singer’s technique can be improved by applying the same “one-size-fits-all” scheme. Sadly, though, one size ends up fitting nobody very well. Singing is simply not that simple.

My mentor Cornelius Reid used to comment that he had probably as many teaching methods as he had students. He was not exaggerating. He had hit on the truth that no two voices are the same; in fact no singer’s voice is the same from lesson to lesson (we hope!). Because of significant differences in the physical make-up of the vocal cords and other organs, in temperament and attitude, in state of health, in level of training, in many factors, a teacher must at every lesson analyze and respond to what is actually going on in that student’s technique in that moment.

A method would not provide me a wide enough range of teaching options to meet these diverse conditions. Often, faced with a student’s unique situation, I must at a lesson create a brand new exercise to address a vocal problem. That same exercise might come in handy for another student at another time, but could be detrimental for a singer with different technical issues. Every one of your lessons with me, therefore, will be custom-designed to help YOU advance to the next level of proficiency.

Even though in my approach to teaching you will experience a perpetual state of experimentation and novelty, this does not mean that I am operating randomly. I may not use a method, but my teaching is guided by adherence to PRINCIPLES. Most of these principles were discovered hundreds of years ago during what was known as the first Golden Age of Singing, when bel canto (beautiful singing) was the goal. You will become familiar with these principles—which mainly involve registers, resonance, and vowels—during your lessons with me.

My goal in teaching you (which was also the goal of the original bel canto teachers for their students) is to eliminate whatever is interfering with the reflex action of your vocal registers so that your singing can become truly free. It would be simpler, but probably not nearly as interesting or satisfying, if I knew of a definitive path—a method—that would lead to this goal. The more complex truth requires us to partner in a fascinating process that has a lot in common with scientific research, in which, guided by principle, our vocal experiments bring you closer and closer to your ideal voice.

Don't try this at home! Why it's not possible to recreate your voice lessons on your own

2010-01-29T16:55:00.000-05:00

The way we work together in your voice lessons is basically this:

I give you an exercise to sing. You sing it, as spontaneously as possible, doing your best not to interfere with the reflex response of your voice. I listen, evaluate the results, and carefully choose a next exercise to exploit any successes while correcting any problems.

In this process, we both have firmly differentiated roles, requiring dissimilar mindsets.
I need to be in an analytical mode, since I have to judge what is going right and wrong in your vocal coordination based on the sensory information coming to my ears and eyes.

In order to sing with the freedom required in these exercises, you need to be as free as possible from judgment of the results of your singing. Self-judgment stifles your spontaneity, making it more likely that you will gravitate towards the familiar, rather than the new and potentially better. Only when you are not concerned about the result can you properly focus on the process you are undertaking to produce it. (This is similar to that sought-after Zen state of being in the moment, focusing on means rather than ends.)

The upshot is that my way of vocally working with you requires one of us to be a judge and one of us to abstain from judgement. If you tried to replicate this process on your own between lessons, you would have to simultaneously judge and abstain from judgement, clearly an impossibility!

There are more productive uses of your practice time than to try in vain to be your own voice teacher. I suggested some in another post yesterday. If you want more ideas for self-study, feel free to ask me in your lessons.

How to recognize correct singing

2010-01-29T16:53:00.002-05:00

Correct singing is effortless. It leaves your whole body feeling energized and raises your spirits.

Should you record your lessons? Tips on practicing

2010-01-29T16:51:00.000-05:00

Whether or not you benefit from recording your lessons depends on how you plan to use the recordings. I'll first describe what not to do with them and why, then I'll give some suggestions for making your time between lessons productive.

I don't recommend singing along with the recording or repeating the exercises on your own. In fact, I don't recommend any technical practicing at all between your lessons. (I myself practiced exercises at home for a long time, against the advice of my teacher Cornelius Reid, and noticed that I made much better progress after I stopped!)

Not practice exercises? Does that sound shocking? (But maybe just a bit liberating as well?) Let’s look into why this advice is actually sound.

First, as hard as it may be to believe in this era of working-hard-to-achieve-your-goals, you don’t need to hammer away at a new coordination for your body to assimilate it. In singing, we are working with micro-adjustments of very small muscles. (We are not like weightlifters at the gym, engaged in building up muscle bulk.) Vocal change, even when it seems huge, comes in tiny increments. After each change, your body needs a chance to rest and to integrate the new coordination. This requires time more than multiple reps.

Second, until you are at a quite advanced stage of your training, you will not be able to sing as well unsupervised as you do in your lessons. You learn best by repeating successes and minimizing incorrect patterns. “Practice makes permanent,” as Mr. Reid used to say. You will move forward in your technique faster when your proportion of correct singing is higher. A little correct singing in your lessons advances you further than lots of less-than-ideal repetitions in the practice room. If you don’t practice, you won’t have a chance to sing incorrectly!

A third reason not to try to repeat exercises from your lessons at home is that this kind of mindless repetition is probably useless and maybe even potentially detrimental. In your lessons, I respond to what I am hearing in your voice at each moment. Because your singing differs from day to day, the exercises I propose will be different too, depending on what is going right and wrong in your vocal coordination at the time. Today’s exercises might be completely inappropriate tomorrow. At some point in your training, you will become attuned to your own voice in the way that I am in your lessons. At that point, you will be able to design your own practice sessions at home. Until then, it is better not to risk reinforcing an inappropriate vocal coordination by doing exercises on your own.

So what should you do between lessons. . .and what should you do with those lesson recordings? Remember that much of vocal training involves developing your ear and strengthening the connection between your mental conception of a tone and your body’s reflexive response to that thought. Listen to your lesson recordings as objectively as possible, noticing the changes in sound and paying attention to what thought processes brought about these changes. See if you are able to detect in your recorded voice the qualities you hear me mention. Let the recordings be a stimulus for thinking, rather than doing.

If you want to practice something, explore vowel sounds. You can speak them or sing them, noticing what you do to form them, seeing if you can do less to form them, finding their nuances and colors, changing quickly or slowly from one to another. Otherwise, study your music. Memorize it, speak the lyrics, analyze it structurally at whatever level you are able. Sing phrases of it in the shower or around your home, and notice what is changing in your technique. A few minutes a day of carefree vocalizing will do no harm. Let it be fun.

A new focus

2010-01-29T16:46:00.001-05:00

If you haven't visited my website in awhile, you are probably going to notice that I've made a lot of changes: a newly organized navigation menu on the right of the screen, new pages added, a new title for this blog, even a new URL for my new homepage dedicated to singing instruction:

ArtandScienceofSinging.com

The Art & Science of Singing is my name for a 3-in-1 approach to training singers I've developed. This unique (as far as I know) combination of voice lessons, Alexander Technique, and Voice-Enhancing Bodywork brings together the three services I have been offering all along. I've been noticing for months how my voice students were benefitting from including elements of Alexander Technique and bodywork in their lessons; their learning has been both deeper and faster using the combination. Now I've made it "official" by formulating various 3-in-1 programs of vocal study, which you can read about on one of my new webpages.

In order to build interest in my new 3-in-1 approach, I will for the next few months be focusing on informing singers about the Art & Science of Singing. This does not mean that I will be closing my doors to non-singers! I will still be offering standard Alexander lessons and Tablework for the general public.

This new shift in focus has really fired my enthusiasm lately. I feel happy to have found a way to combine my passion for singing with my 3 professional passions into a "product" that I think will be highly beneficial to my clients. The variety and challenge of switching among 3 related but highly different modes of working throughout each day of teaching will keep me engaged and intellectually stimulated. I already love my work, but this new direction seems likely to bring me even greater satisfaction and joy.

May it also bring satisfaction and joy—and a free voice—to many singers!

First Posting

2010-01-29T16:43:00.000-05:00

Today I'm switching my website-hosted blog to blogspot.com. The first several postings are transfers I've cut and pasted. Starting tomorrow, I'll be adding new material directly to this new blog.