Under Construction

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?

Feelings...nothing more than feelings

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.

Hello 12, Hello 13, Hello Voice Lessons?

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:

The Danielle Principle

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.

Aren't lessons supposed to make me BETTER?

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.

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

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:

1. Sing this arpeggio on [oh]: low B-flat - octave higher B-flat - (descending to ) F - D - B-flat
2. Same arpeggio, starting on [oh] and changing to [ee] for the second and following notes.
3. Ascending B-flat arpeggio, starting on [oh] and changing to [ee] on the top and final note.
4. Sing the phrase of the song on the vowels only: [oh] - [oh] - [ay] - [a] - [oo] - [ee]
5. 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]
6. 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!

What I learned from my parents

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:

Taking part in your own learning process

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.

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

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.)

FAQ: How many lessons will I need?

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.

How to "kick" a bad vocal habit

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.

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 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.

The Magic Button Delusion

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!

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

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).

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

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.

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!)