Confessions of a singing teacher
by Kate Slaney.
ExploreYourVoice.com
When I started out teaching in a music school
some 15 years ago I was secretly more afraid of my students than they
were of me. Not that I ever set out to instill fear, but the thought of
having something as personal as one's own voice judged from on high, or
so it seems, is enough to put most people off
singing lessons.
I'd been in bands and singing all types of popular music since I was 17.
I'd even studied music and voice at university, but nothing could have
prepared me for this job. It was one on one class room teaching.
I was given 16 students of all ages with the orders to carry on where my
predecessor had left off. He had been a rather charming personality by
all accounts, however his 'method of teaching' as it turned out was to
sing, play the piano and tell jokes. He even took requests.
I learned from my students that he'd never even heard most of them sing!
They would either sing weakly along with him with his voice dominating,
(much like people sing to CD’s), or not get to sing at all.
None of the students had ever been to singing lessons before and either,
thought this was the sort of thing you should expect or, felt relieved
because they didn’t have to face what they sounded like - as most
beginners do to a point.
My first student who I encouraged to sing was an eleven-year-old boy. He
had a promising voice and, despite our progress throughout the lesson, I
was no match for his usual Wednesday night entertainment. He pulled no
punches . He gave it to me straight. He said I just wasn't very funny
and seemed to wonder how long I'd last in the business.
The rest of my students, many who had been there for over a year,
couldn’t believe how bad they sounded after all their 'training'. They
looked at me accusingly. They certainly sounded better when their last
teacher was singing.
What was I to do?
I had learned to sing like a lot of
professionals. I was self- taught. As a child I was obsessed with my
favorite singers and tried to emulate them. This led me to taking up the
guitar, writing songs, and playing to anyone who would listen. Luckily I
was encouraged by my family and various teachers at school. However, my
singing at age 14 was light, breathy and prone, quite unpredictably, to
shooting embarrassingly off key if I got overly nervous performing for
others. This was a horrifying mystery. I had no idea that you could
control your pitch, amongst other things, by controlling your breathing.
I wanted a strong singing voice more than anything else and I simply
never gave up trying.
I was also lucky that the singers I tried to
emulate were folk and jazz singers. Their singing styles encouraged me
to sing forward onto my lips and develop my head voice rather than rip
my throat out trying to hit the high notes. I learned to project my
voice off my vocal chords. With out knowing it, when I later sang
heavier styles, Rock or R&B the technique I'd picked up followed
naturally and kept me from sore throats and damaging my vocal chords.
This was just as well because I'd had bad luck with the few singing
teachers I'd encountered. The first teacher I had a few lessons with as
a child frightened me to death.
"Sing up!",she bellowed over the piano.
She was right of course I should have sung up!
But she had no way of connecting with me. She seemed to be trying to get
me to shout. I was completely confused. Shouting wasn’t singing to me
and, in any case, a child like any adult for that matter has to be
encouraged. They have to be told what they are doing right-and to have
it explained, how the voice works and what exactly it is they’re doing
wrong.
Above all singing to me had always been
enjoyable; there had to be a way of teaching without destroying the
musical experience.
The next step I took was to hit the books. I found many different
teaching methods, either fraudulently claiming to make you a star and
/or numbing you of any ambition through endless repetition of scales and
strange or poorly explained exercises.
It was becoming pretty clear, if I was going to survive as a teacher
there was one thing I had to be certain of.
Could anyone be taught to sing? From what I'd heard so far there was not
a strong, tuneful voice among my tribe.
Like people picking up any wind instrument for the first time they were
breathy, weak and could not sing in key for long, if at all. Conversely
some were strong voiced but with a shrill or strange tone that left me
with little to do in the first lesson but practice my composure.
The question that bugged me the most was this
persistent argument that some people were naturally 'tone deaf' implying
that somehow they could never learn to sing. So I set about to find the
source of this argument. Incredibly I found nothing save for one study
done in the 1930's claiming that 10 percent of the population were tone
deaf.
Yeah right (!) the 1930's produced many 'studies' apparently 'proving'
among other things the 'inferior intelligence' of blacks, women, Jews
and the Irish.
Call me a 'liberal', but I decided to ignore
this 'intelligence'. Especially since at a casual glance I noticed that
I was living in a world where singing was a huge and integral part of
practically every culture and religion known to the world. Millions of
people had learned to sing as they had learned to speak and had grown up
without hang - ups about it.
So I was convinced. A singing teacher who couldn’t teach raw beginners
to at least sing in key was doing those students an injustice. I wasn't
going to make stupid promises to them, they'd have to work, and so would
I.
As I prepared for the following week's classes, I still had one of the
most unspeakable renditions of "Wind Beneath My Wings" swimming in my
head.
It seemed I was out to prove the impossible.
