I was casually perusing the countless cable channels on the television recently (a genetic trait of male Homo sapiens) and stumbled upon one of those ubiquitous infomercials.
We have all seen one: A half-hour program that promises to make you a millionaire without leaving the comforts of your home and requires only 30 minutes a week of your spare time! All you have to do is buy a book (it comes with a free videotape), or attend an expensive seminar at an exotic resort.
I listened briefly and was raising my remote to click onwards when the program got my attention. The subject was golf, a game at which I would love to excel but can’t find the time to pursue. The hosts of the show weren’t selling a new, bigger driver or the latest design in golf-ball dimpling. They were selling a technique, a way to hit the ball “as straight as you can point.”
Now, if you have never tried to hit a golf ball straight, you may think it sounds easy. Believe me, if it were easy to hit golf balls “as straight as you can point,” manufacturers wouldn’t sell them 24 to a box! Allow me to pass on some of the specific things the spokesman said. See if they don’t resonate with you as they did with me. I listened to the entire program—but not because of what I thought it might do for my handicap.
The spokesman was an engaging fellow—a plus in any kind of selling. He was from Dallas, and spoke with a familiar Texas twang that made me feel right at home (having been raised near there). He was a golf pro: an accomplished player who operates a golf course, teaches the fine points of the game to those who will pay for his services, and runs the pro shop, where you can purchase the best equipment money can buy. (As with most hobbies, golf can be a very expensive way to get some exercise.)
“Tex,” I’ll call him, reported that over the course of his years as a pro he had met hundreds of people who had spent thousands of dollars on golf lessons and still couldn’t hit the ball predictably. Of course, he went on to say that with just a few short sessions with him and his techniques, golfers could experience a dramatic improvement in their game.
I know you’re probably wondering where all this is going, but allow me to “play through” for just a moment. The rules of the governing organization of golf in the United States say that to be a licensed golf pro, you must work under the guidance of a licensed golf pro as an assistant for four to five years, and take a series of required courses. Tex said he was surprised that none of the courses he had to take had anything to do with teaching golf, but were concerned primarily with merchandising, so that the pro shop would be profitable.
Tex then made a fascinating point: Golf equipment has improved tremendously over the last 20 years—but golf scores have not. This was surprising to me. Modern clubs are designed by engineers and made of the same hi-tech alloys that have taken us into space. Golf balls are designed to take advantage of complex aerodynamic principles. They literally fly through the air. Every aspect of golf has been studied and described in complete scientific terms. The PGA has a book that quantifies all the scientific details: optimum club-head velocity, ball trajectory, the biomechanical aspects of the golfer’s wrists, arms, shoulders and torso, and the ergonomics of the golf-club grip.
Modern science has done its best—and yet, golf scores have not significantly improved. None of the high-tech innovations help. Not a bit.
Tex went on to describe his technique. He proposed that golfers train their bodies with several “building block” exercises—smaller, isolated parts of a complex golf gesture. By practicing these few exercises, golfers build their skills from the simple to the difficult. Isn’t that the way most learning takes place? You train the easier skills, then put them all together and allow the body to act reflexively when you step up to the tee.
I must tell you that my tape has not yet arrived, so I can’t tell you exactly what Tex teaches. But his message and concerns spoke very clearly to me, because they apply to what I do as a voice teacher.
Do you hear what I heard in all of this? Think of it in terms of what we do. Do singers today sing better than they did 20 years ago? Better than 50 or 100 years ago?
Do we understand the science of singing better than we did 50 years ago? Indeed we do. Has it really helped any of us be better singers or teachers? An honest answer would have to be “no.” The science of singing has supplied us with a useful vocabulary with which we can better communicate with the other professionals involved in singing these days, the M.D.s, the speech pathologists and voice scientists. A common scientific language has helped us to communicate with each other, and voice science has provided us with a good understanding of the voice and how it functions. But it hasn’t really helped us be better voice teachers, has it?
I know some of you are thinking: “Now, wait a minute! Isn’t this guy a voice scientist?”
Yes, I trained as a voice scientist. I have spent a great deal of my academic life studying the science of the singing voice. Why? Because I find it fascinating! But in all honesty, scientific investigation—my own or anyone else’s—hasn’t taught me a single new thing about teaching voice.
Seeing the golf infomercial was timely for me. I had just returned from one of the greatest experiences of my professional life—the opportunity to spend almost a month sitting at the feet of one of the master voice teachers of our time. Every day of that time, I sat quietly and watched Mr. Cornelius Reid of New York engage in his life-long work of building voices, using methods and exercises based upon concepts he has gleaned from centuries-old writings by all-but-forgotten voice teachers. I also took lessons from Mr. Reid two or three times a week—and I was amazed to find my own instrument begin to behave in ways that I have always known it should, but could never manage.
It was all rather simple: two registers, loud and soft, rhythm and musicality, and pure vowels. Four simple elements.
Two opposing muscle systems reside within the larynx, and each one defines the fundamental nature of a register. (Modern science confirms this ancient theory.) Strengthen a muscle system and you build a register. Almost all voices are deficient in one of the two registers, and when this is so, the voice cannot function correctly. So, you target the weak register and strengthen it. As you strengthen your weak register, you balance your dominant register appropriately—and the voice reaches its full potential. The hallmark of success is that over time all evidence of the registers disappears!
“Loud” encourages the chest voice to speak. The chest register is the source of power, brightness, and fullness of tone. “Soft” engages the falsetto, the source of ease and flexibility. The [a] is the vowel of the chest; the [u] is the vowel of the falsetto. Through appropriate exercises, we can create an environment where the weak will be made strong, and the strong will be brought into balance. Nature follows that lead and the result is very predictable.
The beauty of all this is its simplicity, when compared to much of the pedagogy in the world today. It stands like a haiku next to a Byron sonnet.
The result is a free voice that can sing high and low, fast and slow, legato and staccato, a voice that can swell and diminish evenly and perform a beautiful trill, a voice that will endure and reach its prime in the fourth and fifth decade of life, when too many voices are in their decline
We have convinced ourselves that we have control over that which is too complicated for us to put in order with our conscience minds. How do we jump over a stream? If the muscles are strong enough, the body simply knows how to do it. The details of the act are too complicated for us to dictate. If we had to plan and execute the act, we would surely get wet! Singing is the same. If the voice is strong and free, it will sing as beautifully as the measure of gift is capable.
If, on the other hand, the voice has been trained only to imitate sounds that are not innate, it will fail—like trying to jump over the stream clad in armor. Whatever success the voice may find in the strength of youth will not last into maturity.
It sounds so simple. Why don’t we understand it?
To go back to the golf analogy—you’ve been very patient with it if you’re still reading—we expect golf students to learn to play golf by playing golf. We send them out on the course and tell them that if they swing at the ball often enough and hard enough, they will learn how to be good golfers. This doesn’t work for me on the golf course, and the same principles didn’t work in the studio when I was a young student of singing.
We all want whatever will make our students successful. Our motives are true. We want to do well at our life’s work. So why do we so often find ourselves ineffective in making significant positive changes in our students?
Now don’t be offended by this question! If we’re honest, we must admit that we really don’t help enough of the people we teach. In our defense, I must ask: When were we taught to build a voice? As a student, I never learned anything about building a voice, only how to manipulate one. They are not the same thing. All of us can coach an aria, explain the subtleties of foreign-language diction, and develop the artist to a certain extent—but we need to be able to effect a positive change in a voice, so that the instrument comes to be something that it wasn’t in the beginning.
Isn’t it disturbing when we see so many “flash-in-the-pan” wunderkinds make a daring splash in their twenties then vanish just a few years down the road? Why does this happen? Because the way they sing sounds good, but it isn’t good for them. Talented youngsters have good ears and can mimic us, or any other model we put in front of them—but is it right for them? Scores of ruined or unfulfilled young voices would suggest it is not.
Voice teaching is one of the few professions I know where one can practice the profession without having read even one of the better-known and celebrated books that make up the written legacy of our field. Can you be a mathematician without close study of the entire body of knowledge that came before you? Wouldn’t that lead to utter chaos and ineffective, non-productive work?
We have to look to the literature left by voice teachers who have gone before us, who learned how to do it well after years of experience, and then wrote about it. Is it possible to learn to teach from a book? I think it is, if it is the right book. Can you learn to teach voice by reading Lilli Lehmann’s How to Sing? No. Here is a memoir of a fabulous artist who describes in vivid detail her own sensations of singing, but making any sense of it is beyond me. Our library shelves include many such books, books that may be interesting, but are of little real help.
Ah! But wonderful sources are available that can help us get on track. Pier Francesco Tosi’s Observations of the Florid Song and Giambattista Mancini’s Practical Reflections on the Art of Singing are two great places to start. At first, you may find the lack of detail frustrating. Specific exercises are rare, but the principles are stated clearly, and therein lies their greatest worth.
These early writers lay the foundation for the work of Mr. Reid. He didn’t invent the two-register theory, but he certainly has made it available and useful to me as a singer and a teacher. Of course, every voice teacher should know of the many other valuable resources, including the writings of the Lampertis [Francesco and Giovanni Battista], Garcia II, Julius Stockhausen, and of course, Cornelius Reid.
Voice teachers today are putting a lot of energy into learning the principles of acoustic analysis, studying the anatomy and physiology of the vocal mechanism, and buying equipment to establish voice laboratories. This is all well and good, and leads to a truly enlightening and fascinating study—but in and of itself, this pursuit will not help us be better voice teachers or singers.
I have found that the best use of scientific truth about the vocal mechanism of the human body is that it helps us recognize pedagogical truth when we see it. It helps “separate the wheat from the chaff” in our vast written legacy. Voice science confirms the best of pedagogy that has been practiced in the last 300 years. We must look to our past to assure the future of beauty in our art.
To summarize this bit of rambling, let me say that I believe all of us can benefit from examining our methods of teaching in the light of Tex and Cornelius Reid. Mr. Reid told me that he has been teaching for more than 60 years and that only in the last few of those years has he really begun to figure it out. He and Tex have a lot in common in the way they approach their work. They are smart enough to know that the mind and body of the student are much better at figuring it all out than either of them could ever be. They have discovered that focusing on the end result during the training process is useless when it comes to learning how to play golf or learning how to sing.
For most of us, driving a ball 300 yards will never happen if we begin by trying to hit the ball 300 yards. For most of us, singing as well as Joan Sutherland will never happen if we try to sound like her.
Successful learning of any kind progresses from the simple to the more difficult. Physical skills, especially, are ruled by this order. We need to have a better understanding of the basic component skills that make up the act of singing. We need to teach our students to practice these things, and then we need to learn how to set up the appropriate musical environments that will bring those building-block skills together to produce the free-singing voice. No one I know has a clearer idea of this than Cornelius Reid—well, maybe Tex the golf pro.
This article appeared in Australian Voice, the journal of the Australian National Association of Teachers of Singing, and is reprinted by permission of the author.
