Life-long learning II: A Master's at 59

This summer, when I turned 59, I began a Master’s Degree.

I had first thought of it more than 15 years ago: in 1994, when I got back to Toronto from the Phantom of the Opera tour, I looked at 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 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 was too much for me. I never even finished computing my grade point average.

As a more or less ‘gifted’ child, I had graduated from college at the age of 19, and left behind me an academic record rife with inconsistency. For every “A” in literature or music, there was a “C” in quantum mechanics, or a B- in biology. I took far more courses than I needed, in every conceivable field, but I often didn’t finish them.

In 2010, after the opera workshop I taught at a prominent Toronto music school was canceled, I thought once again of going back to school. Somehow, I knew that I could not face approaching 60 without beginning something. Because I didn’t want to leave home to study, I looked for a plausible distance master’s. I found a program that looked really interesting; the Master’s in Psychology for Performers at the University of Sheffield in England. Working with singers does bring you to the heart of psychological issues, and I thought this two year program might be just right for me.

Once again I began the hell of applying. To my amazement, when I finally confronted the shame of my messy transcript, I had just over a 3.0 average for my BA and a 3.4 for the first year of a graduate diploma I did in 1981. I filled out a ream of forms, and sent them in. I was accepted to the program.

I began the degree with a residency in Sheffield in August, and I loved it. At first I was overcome with anxiety. I thought I had been out of school for too long to succeed academically, that the subject would be horribly dry and I would die of boredom, that poor eyesight would not allow me read the assigned reading. I was all wrong. The teachers have been wonderful, the assignments interesting, the readings fascinating. Whether this degree leads to me getting a good university teaching post or not hardly seems to matter. I feel welcomed into an entirely new community of scholars, and I feel like I belong there.

To any of you out there who also feel like it’s too late to start, I say “Go ahead. Start your Master’s at age 59. Maybe you’ll even have a PhD by the time you retire!”

Life-long learning

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 child. As an adult, I can reclaim that experience and cast it in a new mold.

Financial and time constraints will always play a part in ongoing adult learning. For an adult to invest time and money in studying music means prioritization. Music must be given a higher priority for time and resources than the other things in one’s life. For myself, ongoing development has been an important part of my identity. I was one of those musicians who couldn’t get it all from teachers. By the age of 26, I had decided that whatever further progress I would make as a singer was going to come from my own efforts. That began a life-long struggle to acquire vocal competence.

If you want to keep singing past the age of 45, you have to learn to accommodate the changes that life brings you. Essentially, I believe that all singers who continue into later life have to be engaged in a practice of on-going learning. I read recently an excellent article on Tony Bennet, still singing in his 80’s. He has a set of warm-up exercises from his teacher, and a carefully worked-out regime that allows him to keep performing. He too, is engaged in on-going life-long learning.

High note problems: fixing the “quick fix”

Once in a while, I will see a tenor in mid-career, who comes to me with a high note crisis. This kind of singer has enjoyed considerable success with a dangerous technique; he has learned to sing the high notes with a stentorian sound and tremendous compression. His method is to depress the larynx as he approaches the top, and to support like crazy.

Most of us, I think, are in agreement that to sing well, the larynx has to be comfortably low. “Releasing” or “loosening” the throat is a cornerstone of technique for many teachers. Pressing on the larynx can be an addictive approach for several reasons.

1. It really feels like “doing” something. Unlike more imaginative approaches, it gives you something that you can physically do as you approach the upper register.
2. It may work really well for a while. The memory of this success will keep you at it long after the approach ceases to function effectively.
3. It has an appealing simplicity. "Push down, sing high".

Eventually, the cords no longer want to approximate with the voice box under all that pressure. The medial compression which serves to keep the cords together no longer seems to function. At this point the singer is cracking virtually everything over an A flat in performance.

The solution is to substitute an imaginative approach for a physical one. That means the singer has to have great trust in the teacher. Doing it right always feels like much less than forcing did; and it is hard to believe that an imaginative picture of the loose throat and the progressively higher palate will help at all.

There is a famous story from one of the meditative traditions (I forget which one) of the monk who had a profound experience of illumination, and then spent the rest of his life trying to recapture the experience, to no avail.

Experiences cannot be recaptured. When an approach fails you, even if it worked in the past, let go of of it. Have the courage to approach things in a different way.

In singing, we keep going back to basic principles; good breathing, good support, a feeling of forward clarity and lightness in the voice, a loose throat, a healthy onset and an imaginative picture of the vocal space, that allows room for development as you go higher. Rounding or vowel modification can be a helpful way to make the transition to the upper register, provided you don’t get stuck.

In my experience, interfering with the larynx always leads to trouble. The quick fix will get you there sooner; but it will lead to collapse over the long haul.

When students leave

I don’t know about you, but every time a student leaves me to go to another teacher, I feel both anger and loss. If I really look at myself, I think there is also a fear in me that I haven’t given enough, and a sense of personal inadequacy.

I heard a lovely expression once, derived, I think, from zen buddhism. “Teaching” it says “is impersonally guiding those with affinity”. I don’t think this precludes compassion; a compassionate response is the reason the Buddha taught in the first place.

If we guide others impersonally, but compassionately, we give them our best, but are able to let go when they decide to move on. The saying also demonstrates that teaching is not possible without affinity. I think I am a good voice teacher; but I know that my process of seeking out answers through explicit understanding is not for everyone.

There are singers who are better off, in my opinion, just singing, rather than thinking about singing. It is my personal feeling that those singers may also need, at some point in the future, to understand how they go about singing, if they want to preserve the voice, and progress in their art.

This type of singer is probably better off working with someone who will just let them sing. Sooner or later, if they start with me, they will leave. My job is to guide them impersonally, but compassionately, to the best of my ability, and in my own fashion; then, when necessary, let them go without rancor. “Senza rancor” said the lady in the opera, and I agree with her.

The way I teach is conditioned by my own particular history, how I got into trouble as a singer, and how I got myself out of it, wht my natural talents were, and what I had to learn. Whatever your teaching style, there will be students out there who have a real affinity for it.

To a certain extent, I will adjust the content of my teaching to suit the particular needs of the student; but I know that on the most basic level, my personal approach to teaching comes from a belief in the cultivation of awareness. When I hear from a student “I sing better when I don’t think about it”, then I know that the clock is ticking.

Let the conscious mind understand, guide, and then get out of the way. That, to me, is the path to freedom.

What to do when your breathing feels stuck

When I was a young singer, my teacher, whom I adored, was a stickler for correct breathing. He called it “breathing from the back” and I could never get the hang of it.

Eventually, he said to me “You’re smart, you know what to do… go do it!” That was the end of my formal training. I spent the next few years struggling with my breathing, while working professionally. Somehow, I managed to get through performances.

I remember a particularily horrible radio broadcast of Vivaldi’s Gloria with a noted Canadian chamber choir. My breathing felt like lead. I gasped with every breath. I struggled to force it into the back: All to no avail.

Much later, I realized that to get the breath subtle, balanced, and in the right place, neither too high nor too low, you had to work imaginatively. It was also very helpful to realize that a balanced breath has an abdonimal component, and that this involves using the transverse and oblique abdominal muscles.

The breath will feel different to the singer, depending on body posture. If you breathe sitting in a chair, hunched over with your elbows on your knees, you will feel the abdominal component clearly. If you breathe in a standing posture, with a healthy feeling of classical presentation (not slouched), you may imagine the breath starting in the back, around the level of the floating ribs, and moving to the front along the edge of the rib cage.

The key to getting the correct physical response in breathing is to work imaginatively. You can give the appearance of correct breathing by forcing muscles to behave, but this kind of breathing is never comfortable.

Once the inhalation is balanced, you still have to master the release of the breath at the end of the phrase, or you will feel stuck as the music continues. This is especially true in bel canto repertoire, where the composers seem not to give you time to recover between phrases.

The same muscles that we use to take the air are the ones we use to support the voice; this is the “lotta vocale” or “vocal contest” between the inspiratory and expiratory muscles that is basic to the support/appoggio mechanism. You have to release the inspiratory muscles sat the end of the phrase so they can do their job in the inhalation.

Instead of taking air at the end of the phrase, release the residual air. This should allow the diaphragm to rebound and initiate an inhalation quite naturally. Practice this by deliberately taking more time to release the breath after every phrase, even it means adding beats to the music. Once you get the hang of it, you can eliminate the rhythmic distortions.

Singing on the gesture of inhalation

I love the Italians, So often, those little nuggets of advice which we have heard from our teachers (“sing on the breath”, sing “on the gesture of inhalation”, “appoggio”, “with the words forward, on the lips”) are derived from the Italian vocal tradition. To me, these aphorisms bridge the gap between the science of singing and how it feels to actually do it correctly.

I first encountered “singing on the gesture of inhalation” in the wonderful little book, “Hints on Singing”, a description of lessons with Francesco Lamperti. Let’s unpack the term:

1. Beginning the tone with a feeling of inhaling, or “drinking in” allows us a smooth transition between inhalation and exhalation/phonation.
2. It is an efficient way to set up the action of the inspiratory muscles against the expiratory muscles which is the hallmark of appoggio.
3. It releases the larynx, lifts the palate and expands the pharynx, in a dynamic fashion.
4. It reverses the contraction of the windpipe which generally accompanies phonation.
5. It “places” the voice. Singing “on” (not “in” or “under”) the feel of inhalation means that we feel the voice “over” the resonance cavities of the throat.
6. It teaches us the feeling of the correct onset. All we have to do, then, to have a perfectly balanced onset, is to take care that there is no breathiness in the sound.

Ultimately, it is the imagination that makes the sound; muscles are directed by brain at the speed of thought.

Singing Italian music: come si parla

I recently received a recording of a piece I am interested in doing at my school, Garica’s I Cinesi. It is one of a series of one act operas written by Manuel Garica to be performed in salons, and is for voices and piano. The works are all gratefully written for the voice, and are a bit like early Rossini in style. The modulations are individual and surprisingly original. The vocal writing demands an assured coloratura technique.

The recording I have is of a college opera department, and they sing, for the most part, pretty well. The Italian is curious, to say the least. All of the vowels are correctly pronounced, and the double consonants are all there; but to my ears it still sounds like terrible Italian. The actual cadence or phrasing of the Italian language is simply not there.

Most young singers have no idea that they are expected to impose the shape of the language on the notes. This may be why so much collegiate Italian is so bad. In Italian music, for example, whenever a composer sets a word with an unstressed ending, a decrescendo, or “phrasing off” (often an appogiatura) is expected., even if what is on the page are two equal notes on the same pitch.

On the more global level, every phrase of the music corresponds to the natural pronunciation of the text; this requires carrying the stress patterns of the language over to the written out notes themselves. In classical repertoire, very little of the performance dynamics are actually written into the music. To a young singer, it may requires a certain courage to add so much to the written score. It is an expected part of the performer’s job.

In Mozart, for instance, once you begin to sing the music with the cadence of the language, you begin to perform in the Mozart style. Mozart usually writes his high notes on unstressed syllables, except at the climax of the piece. This means that most Mozart high notes are should be sung piano; it is the same phrasing you can hear when any good violinist plays a Mozart Concerto.