The singing teacher rants...again.
9:07 a.m.
The whole business in yesterday�s post really got me to thinking about this whole teaching of singing profession that I�m in. I suppose other teachers of musical instruments come up with similar attitudes from students, and I know this isn�t the first (or the last) time for me to address this issue. A famous singer once said that a singing teacher was like a hair dresser, i.e. just there to make you feel good about yourself, while a good coach was indispensable. This may be true when a singer has reached the point where his/her technique is perfected, but it is definitely not true when it comes to young singers. They can�t hear themselves properly, for one thing, and everything they do hear is either a) wonderful, or b) horrible. Tape record these kids and they won�t believe that they are listening to themselves.
Do dance teachers go through the same amount of crap that we do? Somehow I don�t think so. When you teach in a classroom situation, such as a dance studio, even if you are going around and giving individual help to needy students, the dynamic is very different from one-on-one instruction. It�s not personal. I feel as though this need to be constantly stroking my students� egos takes away from doing my actual job, which is teaching them how to sing better.
For example: Yesterday, while taking this new student through the vocal warmups that I make everyone do (they are the same exercises I do daily, given to me by a former singing teacher), I noticed that she was consistently flat on her high G, the space on top of the staff. So I asked her if she was aware of it. She was not. Her former teacher had never pointed it out to her either. So I decided we should talk about placement, or at least I should find out what she knew of placement. She had been instructed repeatedly to put the sound forward, in her masque, which means the bones of the face, and this she does; hence she has a very bright, almost strident sound, and she�s flat on her high G. I tried to introduce the idea of using the whole head for resonance, and utilizing especially what I have started calling the �sweet spot� (just imagine the middle of a tennis racket), somewhere centrally located in the cranium where the resonance can be focused and then sent out into the world, ensuring good pitch. I kid you not, it works every time, and if you hear a really good singer who sings perfectly in tune all the time and you listen really carefully, you will hear that she focuses the sound in that very same place just behind and above the ears. Well, I can, anyway. But she didn�t want to hear about the �sweet spot�. She thinks that this masque technique works well for her and it�s going to be very difficult for me to get her to change.
I gave her a breath-support exercise which I give everyone, a really rather challenging thing which I call the �car turning over on a cold, frosty morning� exercise, consisting of pulsing out triplets and quadruplets while phonating on a neutral chest sound, utilizing the epigastrium to make the diaphragm push air out of the lungs rhythmically. It�s hard. I tell my students that I don�t expect them to get it right away, but that someday they will, and they�ll never have another problem singing HandeI runs again. Her first objection was that she can�t make that kind of phonation (which sounds sort of like if you were pretending to be a zombie). So I tried to get her to do it on a more “singing� tone. Then she had a really hard time trying to figure out which muscle she was supposed to be tensing and relaxing, even though I had just spent five minutes talking about it extensively. The only way she could do it was through relating it to another exercise her former teacher had given her, singing up and down an octave with rather Bachian rhythms: an eighth followed by two sixteenth-note groupings. But, the point I�m making here is that she doesn�t understand the need for my exercise when the one her former teacher gave her is adequate, in her view.
I�m not an egomaniac. I do not teach singing because it makes me feel important. I do it because I love to see the faces of young people light up when they realize they can execute a certain passage that seemed impossible when they started. I hear a person sing and I just know what he/she has to do to fix certain problems. This is not knowledge I have gained from books; it is stuff I have picked up on the job. I know exactly what to tell a student, what he should be doing breathwise, vowel-wise, with his embouchure and placement. The problem lies in the attitudes I come up against, especially in those students who have been praised and have built up inappropriate self-images. I do not see myself as an ego stroker, or as a hair dresser for that matter. I am not being paid a very nice hourly wage by the university to make these students feel good about themselves. I am supposed to be teaching them how to sing, or how to sing better. Now if only they would get off their high horses and let me do my job!
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