Teaching Voice: The Most Difficult Thing to Teach There Is

I have had a lot of voice lessons. I have given voice lessons. These two activities encompass the realm of the student and teacher in a field of study which is so elusive that it makes fools of people with the best of intentions.

Teaching voice and singing are both very difficult things to master. Anyone who tells you any different is lying to you.

The instrument of the voice is internal, invisible and uniquely different from person to person. Of all the singers you can think of, do any two of them really sound remotely alike? No, of course not.

Yet people compare singers to each other as if they could have anything to do about it. Tenors are especially bad about this. Tenors compare the well known tenors of all time with each other and make judgement about them. Pavarotti had this but Domingo had that, yet Carerras was more this way and Krause couldn’t compare to any of those. Then you get into the realm of Corelli, Del Monaco, Gigli and ultimately Caruso.

Everyone thinks the voice makes a person a great singer but it isn’t. There are a lot of great voices on the earth. Beautiful and big voices abound like sand on the beach. While it is true that the natural timbre of the voice is special and plays a huge role in the way a voice sounds, it isn’t what makes a singer special.

The most important part of singing is what you do with the rest of your body while you are singing. The most important and all elusive part of singing is how you use the air. Some call it support and some call it breathing. The study of the singing is more about how you use the air than it is about anything else.

So, when people ask me how old should a person be before they can take voice lessons I say, start as soon as you can because it isn’t about learning how to sing with the voice, it is all about learning how to use the air, support and breathing.

I have known quite a few singers who played wind instruments to a high level before they started to sing, and it is this ability to support that you should learn when studying the flute, clarinet, oboe, trumpet, trombone or horn and so on which I think has helped them more than they realize become a good singer, because they know where the support comes from.

For a voice teacher to teach support as the first area of study with singers is rare. Everyone gets hung up on the result when the most important factor is in the doing of it.

Yes, it is important to place the voice correctly and to understand the registers, but those things are a lot easier to teach than support is. Support isn’t sexy because you can’t place a value on it. Few teachers have an ear for the support side of the equation when it comes to singing and regardless of how a teacher teaches the ”above the neck” part of singing, it is the teachers who can teach the below the neck part which will produce the best singers.

Since I began singing I don’t know how many times I asked teachers, accompanists, conductors and other singers how to get that elegant Italianate line that Pavarotti was such a master at and nobody really knew the answer to it. I have only been to touch on it a couple of times with a couple of teachers, but the key to it seems to be one single thing, the way you support the voice and it has to do with using very little air, in fact, no air or better said a supported air cushion.

Aria, is the word used to describe a solo by a singer in opera. Air. There it is. It is a display of how you use air so that the audience is swept away in the effortless elegance of a beautiful line of singing, which is achieved only with great effort in the realm of breath support. The effort of singing is in the support, not in the voice. Really, the voice has to be free so it can function properly, if you are singing with your voice, you are manipulating the instrument in such a way as to restrict it’s performance. To have a voice that is unencumbered is to allow the voice to be what it is, as natural and as beautiful as it can be.

A painter has a brush, a singer has a voice, but like the painter with the brush, it isn’t the brush doing the painting, but everything that is behind what is holding the brush. The muscles, the posture the attitude and sensitivity with which a painter paints, this all has little to do with the brush, but has everything to do with the painting.

The voice is the same way. Like the brush, the voice is what it is, and with a singer you only have one brush, so that means the only thing you really can control and change are those things which guide the brush and hold it so it can ‘paint’ with grace and ease. So learning how to sing is really about learning how to hold the voice without holding it. If that makes sense at all.

This is what makes teaching singing so elusive and learning to sing so challenging, because most people spend all of their time on the wrong thing. It is all about the breath.

There is a youtube video with an audio taken from Corelli as he is in his final days of life, you can hear the respirator working in the back ground as he talks and what he says in these final words of his life is this, ”Singing is a breathing game. Those singers who sang with great ease did so because they knew how to support the voice properly.”

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