Beware the "method"!

My teacher Cornelius Reid used to warn budding teachers, "There are as many singing methods as there are singers."

He meant, I believe, that 1) people come with a unique blend of problems, skill levels, misconceptions, attitudes, and enrgy levels; and 2) everyone has an individual style of learning. Disregarding this truth is one of the core problems with our system of school education. If you don't believe me, ask yourself and a few friends if your educational needs got met to your satisfaction in high school. Did you feel adequately nurtured, challenged, appreciated for your unique gifts?

Thought so.

That is why I have taken Cornelius at his word and worked hard to derive a custom method for each of my students that addresses their goals, talents, and challenges precisely.

If you know of a teacher who applies a one-size-fits-all approach to teaching her students, pray that the method either miraculously suits the one person for whom it might be the perfect solution. . .or is so far off the mark that students are able to perceive its ineffectiveness when applied to them.

Pity the poor student for whom the method is almost right. That singer might never learn how close he came to great technique without actually reaching it.

I beg you to excuse the dire tone of this posting, which I'm going to attribute to this blasted flu, which has caused me for the first time in my life, ironically, to lose my voice. I just hate to see learners of anything unnecessarily limiting their growth by buying into the Myth of Method.

And that is no April Fool!

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

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.

How to elicit students' vowel awareness

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? 

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

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.

How do I open my throat?

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.

The 5 stupidest things I ever heard from voice teachers

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?

The focus in learning

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.

An unexpected Alexander/Voice link

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.

Voice training: a twisty path

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.

The Alexander/voice link

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.

The perfect vocal exercise

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.

Singing: It ain't natural!

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 Registers - Descriptions and Sound Clips

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.

Don't jostle your larynx!

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.

The myth of method

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.

Should you record your lessons? Tips on practicing

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!)