In my voice studio, I ask potential new students a series of intake questions so I can understand the reason for their desire to study singing. Nearly to a person, they will invariably state that they are having issues with ‘breathing’ or ‘breath support.’ It’s a completely reasonable problem in an inquiring student.

It’s also, most of the time, the wr…

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Festina lente.1

Developing a singing voice just takes time, friends. Sorry to burst your bubble so soon.

And speaking of bubbles…soprano Beverly Sills wisely said:

There are no shortcuts to anyplace worth going.

After a lifetime of teaching, even the great voice teacher Manuel Garcia II realized that the speed of training of pr…

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Pierfrancesco Tosi didn’t have a word for the thyroarytenoid. Giambattista Mancini never heard of formant tuning. And yet Edmund Myer (writing at the turn of the last century about the singers who trained under that old Italian system) put it about as plainly as it can be put1:

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Two of my favorite tools in the studio are, at first, two of the least popular among my young students. The first exercise is a bright, blaring [æ] vowel, the “twangy” vowel, mouth open wide, which is deployed specifically to assist thinning out the chest register so it can travel up past the break without dragging t…

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The greatest singers rarely sound interchangeable and their voices remain unmistakably their own.

In many ways, we have become remarkably good at educating singers how to resemble other singers, regardless of the style of music they sing. There’s an irony here that is difficult to miss: In our pursuit of authenticity, we often manufacture imitation.

Histo…

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This past weekend was the Fourth of July in the United States, and so I’ve been thinking a bit about the idea of vocal freedom, of course. (Everything is about the voice,…

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Singers rarely only acquire vocal technique. They also acquire an artistic persona, which can manifest in vocal affectations and strategies that, at first blush, might seem impressive.

These behaviors can sound like progress, since they approximate what might be considered “cultivated” singing. But they could also be the f…

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One of the more persistent assumptions in contemporary vocal culture is that effective practice should nearly always approximate performance conditions. Students often feel that if they are not singing with substantial intensity, they are somehow avoiding the “real work” of development. The result can be a studio cultur…

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There is a phenomenon in modern classical singing for some time which I have begun referring to as Omnivowel™. The term is admittedly playful, but the phenomenon it attempts to describe is not. It refers to a progressive loss of vowel differentiation across the singing range where distinct vowels gradually converge toward a generalized covered and disto…

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What would happen if America sang together again?

A few weeks ago, my student Petr told me about a Danish tradition called morgensang (morning song). In Denmark, particularly within the folk high school tradition, people gather at the beginning of the day and sing together. Danish citizens share a song before the day begins. The tradition is tied to the …

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A recurring problem in the modern voice world is falsification of timbre. I do not merely mean stylistic coloration, nor the natural adjustments singers make in response to repertoire, language, or expressive need. I mean something far more pervasive: the deliberate manipulation of the vocal tract in order to manufacture…

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One recurrent theme that surfaces again and again in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writings on singing is the centrality of the vowel, and the role a properly coordinated laryngeal musculature plays in governing breath economy. Alongside this emphasis, one finds a striking paucity of detailed instruction on methods …

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Peter T. Harrison’s observation above cuts to the heart of a persistent difficulty in vocal pedagogy: the tendency to divide what is, in reality, indivisible. We speak readily of the “physical,” the “mental,” and the “emotional” dimensions of singing, as though they were discrete domains capable of independent cultivation. Yet the act of singing resists…

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“…when singing, on one occasion, with Giovanni Battista Rubini in Matrimonio Segreto, he held the great tenor’s hand in his own during a passage of the famous duet and looked him full in the face—yet could not detect the act of breathing in the least degree…a triumph of consummate art.”

— Frederic Lablache, recalling …

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There’s a paradox at the heart of what we do as voice teachers. We ask students to sing (often revealing something deeply personal) and then we respond with a critique. Not to hurt them (hopefully!), but to help them grow. Gerald Klickstein reminds us in his book The Musician’s Way1, there is simply no path to improvement…

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This week I’ve been talking with students about the idea of Dumbo’s magic feather.

Released in 1941 by Walt Disney Productions, Dumbo tells the story of a young circus elephant with oversized ears that make him a target for ridicule. From the beginning, he’s treated as a joke and separated from his mother (in a tearjer…

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Not well in the sense of being technically correct, or stylistically appropriate, or even impressive. But well in the older sense of the word: clear, proportionate, and genuinely moving.

When you revisit the earliest recordings of great singers, something rather striking emerges. Much of what they chose to reco…

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What would happen if we took away every “trick” in the voice studio?

I’ve been thinking about that today, probably because the internet has become a kind of late-night infomercial for vocal pedagogy. Scroll long enough and you’ll see it. “The one weird trick to unlock your mix.” “The exercise that will “fix” your break in thirt…

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