Voice and Opera Training

From time to time, a female singer will come to me with suffering from  a  kind of mid-voice anorexia:  the  lower notes are   strong, but there is no sound in the mid-range. Usually this type of singer has been trained to separate the registers, and to vocalize in a heavy chest voice   as a means of “strengthening” the “vocal muscles”. They proceed from there to an empty middle range and an overly light, breathy high voice.   For the mid-voice to be healthy, the low cannot be forced. If you produce the low notes with a heavy chest adjustment and do not allow the vocal cords to make a smooth series of lighter adjustments as you  ascend the scale, you are in for a bumpy flight!   This heaviness in the low range may feel strong to the singer; but it takes its toll on the middle register. Encouraging the singer to find a lighter chest adjustment in the low can aid the transition on the way up. The insight that a feeling of light chest adjus...

On August 21 st   2011 at the age of 59 I went back to school.     I began a two-year distance degree in psychology for musicians at the University of Sheffield in England. Of course, I had all kinds of anxiety about the program. On the plane on the way to Sheffield, I remember thinking “Is this the dumbest thing I have ever done?” This whole venture was prompted by an increasing sense of failure in mid-life. You know it’s bad, when you get a twinge of remorse every time you see a certain poster on the subway (“It’s not too late to do what you were born to do!”). When I was at school in my 20’s, a Master’s degree was not that common for performing musicians. I was more focused on trying to get work as a singer than on getting more degrees. I did register for a Master’s degree from a small American Conservatory back in 1981, funded by the Canada Council.  The experience was not a happy one. I had already spent 10 years as a post-secondary student (BA, Performance...

  I am sure that most of us are familiar with the adage of the Italian school, “sing like you speak”.  We also know from experience that while in some respects this is completely true, in other respects it is not. It would be equally correct to say, “to sing well, you must have a flexible vocal position that will allow for modification of the vowels when acoustically necessary.” There is no single correct vocal position that will accommodate every note in the singer’s range. While the first two formants of the singer’s voice determine what vowel is produced (and in this way are intimately related to correct speech), formants 3, 4 (the singer’s formant, which does not appear in speech, and allows the voice to be heard over the orchestra) and 5 determine vocal quality and individual timbre.   Without correct balancing between the fundamental pitch and the shape of the resonance cavities, beautiful singing is impossible.  Both vowel modific...

A tale of two tenors   I have two tenors who have come to me recently for lessons. They share a similar problem: they have no approach to the passaggio area, blasting their way up to the top. This means that neither have high notes.   The first tenor sings as a baritone; the second finesses everything above a “g” in a light head tone. Tenor 1 works as hard as he can to keep his larynx down, to no avail; inevitably, it goes higher as he ascends the scale. Tenor two “puts it forward” as a method: of course, his larynx is up around his eyeballs.   Is there any middle ground between trying to force the larynx down (don’t even try it, it never works) and just letting it the larynx do what it wants, which is to lift as you ascend the scale? Mercifully, there is a natural function which releases the throat; it is called yawning. Unfortunately, no one ever taught us how to yawn and sing clearly at the same time.    If we examine the feeling of a yawn very carefully...

There are times when, with all the good will in the world, a motivated and hard-working student  just seems to get worse instead of better. What is going on? In my experience, most singers fall into certain types, when it comes to practice. There are those who treat voice lessons like a kind of massage therapy; they arrive for the lesson, work hard, and then don’t think about technique again until the next lesson. This type of student will seem not to progress much from one lesson to the next. They won’t actually get much worse; but any progress you made at the last lesson has to be relearned, again and again.   “OK”, you might say, “if only I had a serious student who really practiced between lessons.” Be careful what you wish for. Among the most challenging students to teach are those who work hard and get worse between lessons. When this happens, perhaps the first thing you should ask yourself as a teacher, is whether the student is being overly zealous in carrying out...

Recently, a singer came to me so bruised from her previous vocal experiences, that she virtually has post-traumatic stress disorder.   Alice (not her real name) was in such a state over her voice, that she was unable to produce a sound without paranoia. The effect of constant worry about sound is that you can’t sing. The first thing I tried to do with this student was to emphasize that there was nothing wrong with her voice; in my opinion, she had to learn how to let it out, rather than judging the sound before she produced it. If you believe your sound is intrinsically bad, and has to be “fixed” before it can be acceptable, you are stuck. No amount of fixing is going to produce a voice that is free, balanced and flexible. The problem is, first and foremost, in your thinking.   Far better to see your voice as a potentiality that needs to be released. Once you get your mind off “sound”, you can begin to do the things that allow the sound to be produced in a healthy, balanced wa...

Many of the things we are told as children stay with us our entire lives, whether or not they are true. Were you told you can't sing? Do you still believe it? Do you wish you  could  sing? Joel Katz believes you can learn to sing as an adult. He helps adults explore their musical possibilities. "It is a conviction of mine that development in later life has a lot to do with revisiting situations from early life that left us incomplete or unsatisfied," Katz writes in his blog:  Voice and Opera Training Katz teaches voice in Toronto and has an impressive list of accomplishments. I'm even more impressed that he takes the time to encourage those of us who are not great singers. You can learn more about Katz on his website   From About.com a New York Times Company

As a voice teacher, primarily of adults, I meet a lot of people who have been told at some point (usually early on) that they cannot sing, have no talent, etc. This type of person has made a decision to confront early life experience of a negative kind to find out what is actually possible. We know from many studies that how you understand failure in music is a powerful predictor of whether you stay with it or give it up. Research has shown that those students who attribute failure to lack of ability tend to give up; those that attribute it to lack of effort stay with it. It would be interesting to know how many of those students who gave up music come back to it as adult learners.   It is a conviction of mine that development in later life has a lot to do with revisiting situations from early life that left us incomplete or unsatisfied. For example, working out at the gym leaves me with a particular sense of accomplishment; the gym was the scene of much trauma and humiliation as a...

Yesterday I watched the film "Young at Heart". I found it almost unbearably moving. These choristers, with an average age of 80, live to sing, quite literally: singing may actually keeping them alive. Recent research tells us that the onset of Alzheimer's can be delayed with mental activity, especially through learning new skills.   There is something deeply touching about seeing this chorus convey the lyrics to rock-and-roll songs with such joy, such sincerity, such lack of artifice. Watching them perform to a jail-house audience who were enthralled, enthusiastic and at times, deeply moved, was really something.   I wept a lot watching this film. I was so often reminded of my father, who had a deep and abiding love for music. He was listening to violin music on the walkman I bought him until the day before he died. For him, his research and his lab (he was a scientist) kept him fighting against lung cancer. He was absolutely determined to beat it so that he could go on w...

Singing is hard to teach and confusing to learn. I think a lot of this has to do with our need as singers to balance opposing elements. After all, we are trying to use highly contracted vocal cords within an expanded throat; a contraction within an expansion. I have often found myself in a lesson, wondering at how such contradictory advice can come out of my own mouth. “Up and over” I say, only to follow up a moment later with, “No, you’re lifting!”  Related to this is “lift the palate…. But don’t go up!” This clearly needs a bit more unpacking to make sense. I think it comes down to imaginative work as opposed to physical work. Physically lifting the palate is less effective than feeling your palate is high: best of all may be to “see” the palate high as a kind of visualization of inner space. You want the singer to imagine that the voice is lifted and the palate is high, but not to physically lift anything to do it. Cognitively speaking, muscularly lifting the palate would i...

One of the best movies I have seen recently is the animated feature, Inside Out. Actually, it brought me to tears more than once. The authors have created a cartoon that is based on modern cognitive psychology, in particular, modern theories of personality, memory formation and retrieval, cognitive development and emotional function.  I was particularly touched to see how, in the control room of the mind of an 11 year old girl, musical memory has a privileged route to consciousness. No matter who you are, where you are, or what you are doing, a musical thought can find its way into your mind, imbued with all the emotional significance that has accrued to it through your experience.   I was touched to think what a delight and what a privilege it is to study music as a psychological phenomenon, and to attempt to add to our understanding of its’ unique function in human mental and emotional life. Oh, and by the way, birds do it too! http://esciencecommons.blogspot.ca/2012/12/bird...

I have never been a great one for taking music exams. I never enrolled in the Kiwanis Festivals (although I have adjudicated it in later life), and I took only one set of RCM exams. As an undergraduate, I had to deal with a feeling of constantly being judged and graded for my performance ability, and I think it increased my nervousness and lack of confidence. My real progress as a singer was largely outside of school, in lessons with master teachers and through my own constantly self-evaluative practice. Performing itself, compared to exams or auditions, was relative freedom.   My response to discouraging assessment has usually been to turn away from sources of external validation.  For example, I entered a competition when I was in my early 20’s, where I advanced to the semi-finals, but did not win. I was given a detailed adjudication to read. It went into my files. Twenty years later, I had to overcome my own feelings of shame at not having succeeded in order to re...

In the summer of 2011, when I turned 59, I began a master’s degree. I had been thinking of it off and on for more than 15 years. In 1994, when I got back to Toronto from the Phantom of the Opera tour, I considered getting a master’s in performance under Lois Marshall, an artist whom I adored. Something held me back. Perhaps it was a fear of studying under my own professional colleagues, perhaps it was a fear of the state of my transcripts: at any rate, I never filled out the forms. By 2001, I was thinking again thinking of post graduate study. I had in the intervening years turned from performing to teaching, having had some success coaching advanced singers in Europe. This time, I thought of a master’s in education. I got as far as downloading the application and writing away for my transcripts. When my transcripts arrived, I tried to convert the letter grades into the standard 4 point system. I was overcome with shame. Confronting that trail of successes, failures and incompletes...