When you have been doing anything for a long time, you develop a list of sayings, some borrowed and some original. Here are a few:

Never, ever feel like you are giving 100%; always keep something in reserve.

The voice is shaped like a lily; pointy on the bottom, ringy and ungy in the middle, and bloomy over the top.

There will always be someone with a bigger voice.

Legato singing is loitering while sliding.

The English language is made up of sausages; consonant-vowel-consonant, consonant-vowel-consonant. Just like the best sausage links are the ones that are tied together, so is the best legato singing.

Belting as people think they understand it is a unicorn; it doesn’t exist that way.

You have got to work on your technique like you work on your repertoire. I could throw this score out the window and hit the soprano on the head who knows the role, in the right language, with the right cuts, with the correct translation. The difference will be how compelling the singing is.

Music is the language of emotion.

More next time…

I am a full-time private music teacher; this is all I do, and it is a joyful job – one about which I am passionate. Changing the world through music, one singer at a time. Ahh…from the sublime to the practical…

Barrett Music Studio is also a business. I need to maintain a student load in order to be able to eat, sleep under a roof, and raise my children. Like all businesses, I advertise. I use a few different means of advertising to attract students: word of mouth, internet search analytics, some referral services. These are successful to varying degrees.

The form of advertising with the best record of retention is that of word of mouth. In these cases, a student who has been working with me recognizes a need in a friend or colleague and senses that our personalities will click. These referrals come with their own FAQ’s page – the personal testimonial of the student. They can offer personal insight into process, personality, positivity, and progress, things that are difficult to quantify when doing an internet search or using a referral service.

That being said, a majority of my students come to me through referral services. I have met some incredible people who took a chance with their choice and for the vast majority of them it has been a rewarding journey of discovery and progress. I’ve been so blessed with these students; my life has been deepened for getting to know and work with them.

For a few prospects it doesn’t work out and that’s all right. You cannot be all things to all people, as the saying goes. Part of it also is managing expectations. I am a vocal technician first, and a vocal coach second. As I remind my students, “Job One is beautiful sound. My job is to give you the tools to achieve that.”

Because of that mission, lessons with new students always start with exercises to give them the tools to start building and expanding their voices. As I teach them the exercise, I relate what its purpose is and how to use the exercise to achieve their goals. It is technical work and demands concentration and discipline. For the students that come in with the idea that my job is simply to teach them new songs and play along while they sing, I’m afraid the lessons will not be what they are expecting.

Choices. Looking for a voice teacher is already a highly personal pursuit as I have written about here:
https://barrettmusicstudio.blog/2019/08/09/courage/

In the information age there are so many choices it can be paralyzing. How can you tell which of those teachers are for real? Which ones are actually able to give you what you want? Who will work for you? My advice: take them for a test drive. There is no substitute for the impressions and experience of that in-person interaction.

More tomorrow…

The human body is an amazing thing. We have these things in our bodies called proprioreceptors, found primarily in the muscles, tendons, and joints, that responds to stimuli produced within the body. They receive or perceive certain states of activity of the different body structures. Think of them like GPS signals within the body.

Throughout our body internally, these proprioreceptors transmit information to the nervous system about location, state of contraction, relaxation, stretch or muscular recoil of muscles and limbs. These sensory organs enable us to conduct ourselves through space accurately and efficiently avoiding impact and trauma to the body. They are a vital part of our successful evolution.

Try an experiment: close your eyes and take stock about where your different body parts are. Assuming that you are relaxing, you can still reach out and perceive the sensory returns from your limbs and torso about their state of being and relative position to the body and your environment. When you pay conscious attention to the input from the proprioreceptors, you can develop a very clear idea with regard to effort, relaxation, and proximity of your body to itself and surroundings. Your brain is always processing this information behind the scenes, allowing us to breath, maintain heartbeat, blink, swallow, all involuntarily to maintain the health and viability of the body. Imagine how helpless we would be if we had to think about every heartbeat.

Now here’s the thing: we have almost no proprioreceptors in the larynx. You can sense when your vocal folds are adducted or abducted – closed or opened – but you cannot sense if you are stretching them or thickening them, or both, actions that are as definitive to vocalization as walls and roofs are to structures. We can sense certain levels of pain and discomfort on and to the vocal folds, but don’t have the same tactile sensation that we have with most other external skin structures, and thank goodness – we would tickle ourselves to death when we sang or spoke!

This state of being of the human body is the major hurdle to overcome when it comes to vocal training. We find correct means of phonation through trial and error primarily by means of indirect feedback. Was that note comfortable or uncomfortable? Did it sound free or pressed? Was it on pitch? Did the sound have spin? Was the sound flexible? As singers, we have to rely on our ears – an inexact source of information about ourselves – and the ears of our trusted mentors to help us train the complex coordinations that comprise singing.

Vocal training through lessons can be a lengthy process precisely because we have to learn what the sensation of correct and free sound is through indirect feedback. All because we lack feeling!

More tomorrow…

There are two hard and fast rules in my studio.

Rule #1: If it hurts, it’s wrong.

Rule #2: If I say something you don’t understand, say so! It’s my job to speak your language, not your job to speak mine.

More tomorrow!

Copyright © 2019 by Andrew Barrett, DMA

Our identity is bound up in so many aspects of our persona: that face that looks back at us in the mirror; the way we wear our hair; how our voice sounds; and so much more. Growing facial hair – or not, wearing makeup, coloring our hair, cutting our hair, growing it out, these are all actions that we can take that are temporal to lesser and greater degrees. But we had our ears before we had mirrors, and our own voice is something that we know excruciatingly well.

We recognize voices from the beginning. As babies develop in the womb, they hear the voices of those around them. After birth they respond to their mother’s voice long before they recognize the face because of its familiarity. We detect social cues, emotional shifts, subtexts, from the tone, syntax, pitch, and color of peoples voices. We can detect illness in a person’s voice, whether we know them or not. When a child experiences hurt or heartbreak, nothing is more real or more comforting than the voice of their mother.

Our voices are as much a part of us as our thought processes. When one recognizes that they have run out of knowledge or instinct to continue to grow vocally, and think about taking voice lessons, it can be both liberating and terrifying. When one realizes that their voice is not performing as it should, that something is simply not right, there is a sense of loss and desperation to get back an essential part of themselves.

For those reasons and so many more, taking those steps into a voice teacher’s studio for the first time is a display of courage, for it is allowing someone else access to a vulnerable part of you. All criticisms and observations about the voice pierce the sense of self quite differently than they do about hairstyle or facial hair or the like; those things are temporal and can be changed or will change without our intervention. It is far easier to talk about those visual elements in the third person. Seeking and accepting attempts to alter vocal production are a deeply personal activity as they ply into the depths of self-identity at the direction of someone else.

Walking into that first voice lesson demonstrates courage on a fundamental level. You are courageous. Never forget that. I won’t. See you at your lesson!

More tomorrow…

Copyright © 2019 by Andrew Barrett, DMA

In the previous post I recounted the story of how my first voice teacher built her technique and career by imitating a recording. Indeed, imitation is one of the tools in the voice teacher’s toolbox, relying on our innate ability to initiate rather complicated coordinations. As previously mentioned, mimicry is a double-edged sword, particularly when we go to the vast trove of recorded music.

While live performances are by their nature, temporal, recordings immortalize a moment in time. Further, through the wonders of software and digital technology, sound and recording engineers are able to enhance and alter that immortalized performance moment in unforeseen ways; herein lies the danger. As consumers of music we are drawn to those recordings that resonate strongly with us, riding the emotional wave that comes with it, imprinting the sound we hear and trying to recreate it, whether or not we are equipped for it.

There is a ubiquity of our communal imprint of some songs and standards. For example, if you imagine the opening phrase of “New York, New York,” I can all but guarantee that it is Frank Sinatra that is playing in your head. To attempt to perform that song today brings with it a requirement to pay homage to that icon’s version as it is synonymous with the identity of that song. In so doing, we limit ourselves to our mind’s attempt to imitate the phrasing, color, and emotional trajectory of that immortalized few moments; it can become an unattainable standard by which we define success.

The danger of this path of imitation is at least twofold. The first is the physical attempts to recreate a sound for which we may not ultimately be equipped. By directing the various parts of our instrument to recreate the sonic standard we create coordinations that may not be healthy, but are nonetheless mentally and emotional equated with that successful sound memory. It becomes difficult to undo that coordination, rooted as it is in other aspects of memory. The second is the limitation to our artistic expression. Through the act of imitation, essentially we are recreating a moment, not creating a moment.

Make the interpretation your own so that the coordinations are your own, bound up in your own emotional trajectory, not limited by another’s.

More tomorrow…

We live in an extraordinary time for music for many reasons, not the least of which is the existence of the vast body of recordings that have been made. We are constantly being inundated with music at every turn, and why not? Music makes everything better for the simple reason that it elicits an emotional response. That emotional response is a primary driver for learning music, singing along with the radio, going to see La Boheme for the umpteenth time. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve listened to Hamilton, always ready to ride along with its brilliant emotional, dramatic, and musical trajectories.

Nearly every piece of music that has been composed has also been recorded. With the creation of streaming services, one does not even have to buy the recordings anymore. The advent of Apple Music, Spotify, etc., enables us to listen to countless renderings of any given song or aria. We understandably gravitate towards our favorite versions, and when we sing along, imitate what we hear. This is a double-edged sword.

Consciously and subconsciously, we internalize those sounds we hear, creating metrics of how we measure our own capabilities and progress. Recordings of renowned artists are also terrific teaching tools. My very first voice teacher, the late Glenda Maurice, arrived at college singing Country Music standards – Your Cheatin’ Heart was her go to performance piece. Her family hoped to measure her progress by how well she could sing selections from South Pacific, as their metric of success was Broadway. Paraphrasing Glenda’s story, her first college voice teacher after their first lesson gave Glenda a recording of Kirsten Flagstad, saying, “listen to this: this is what you should sound like.” Within six months Glenda went from Williams to Wagner, becoming an International Metropolitan Opera Competition Winner. She never looked back.

It was the imprint of sound that gave Ms. Maurice – I never called her Glenda! Gasp! – the metric for which to strive. It should be recognized, however, that she was the freak of nature, that “one in a million” blessed with that type of ear-mind-body connection whereby she could accurately and correctly imitate those sounds. For most of us mere mortals straight-up imitation can cause unending frustration as we don’t know precisely how to make those sounds and end up engaging in all manner of physical contortions to find some approximation of our self-imposed metric.

More on this tomorrow…

I’m just going to say it: singing is as much an athletic pursuit as any sport.

It needed to be said.

Very often there is a disconnect, particularly for students who possess musical aptitude, that because they can already sing – match pitch, read music, and memorize lyrics – their practice responsibilities are met simply by memorizing their assigned songs. Doing vocalizes and exercises is not very gratifying at all. Frequently, students will do their perfunctory scales, and then jump right in to singing the songs they like.

When a budding athlete joins a sports team, an essential part of the commitment is going to practice several days a week for hours at a time. At these practices the athlete participates in drills to hone specific skills related to the sport. Think of batting cages, golf ranges, basketball hoops on garages, and the like. At the beginning of the sport season all of the team players participate in the drills, not just the newbies. For those athletes serious about their sport, training continues throughout the year, not just during the season.

When I listen to a voice and get to know and understand its capabilities and limitations, I go to my toolbox of vocalizes. I put together a regimen of exercises designed to target the weaknesses of the student in order to expand their capabilities. Some exercises generate an almost immediate payoff, while others take time and commitment. Exercises designed to address registration issues – chest voice, mixed voice, head voice, and the pursuit of a unified voice – take the most time and commitment. The exercises should actually make up a significant portion of the singer’s practice time. This is why the student is taking lessons; to address their weaknesses.

Go. Practice. Work on your technique. Shoot those baskets. Swing in the batting cages. Drive on the golf range. Work on your technique. Practice.

The worrisome outcome for male voices during and after the voice change is that they will walk away from singing.

When a young man’s voice drops, he is faced with an “upside down.” Heretofore, being the owner of a high voice he would have found himself singing the melodic line or counterpoint in treble clef. During the change itself, as the high notes begin to disappear and the speaking voice starts to lower, he is no longer able to sing the leading line; even the alto line can be challenging. Sensation and performance can vary from one day to the next.

The big drop is marked by an arrival at a speaking pitch for most male voices around A3. This is when the “blank spots” manifest themselves, and the identity crisis hits overdrive. The range of the freshly mutated male’s voice requires him to learn how to read music in a different clef in addition to all of the new sensory inputs and motor coordinations. Previous coordinations don’t always elicit the expected responses, and pitch matching could become problematic, even if the singer was competent prior to the change. These are all amplified by the continued non-linear development of the laryngeal structures, yielding outcomes that don’t please the singer’s own ears. When other athletic endeavors of the adolescent male become better with practice, but singing endeavors yield inconsistent results – through no fault of their own – the temptation to walk away from singing becomes great.

So what can be done to keep these young men engaged during this critical time? Lots, fortunately, and here in Minnesota, the Land of 10,000 Choirs, youth choir directors are sensitive to these issues and have made great strides in retention.

More tomorrow!