Monday, October 12, 2015

The Right Kind of Knowledge

Most people mistakenly believe that singing is a daunting technical and complicated task that only highly trained and educated persons can master. Nothing could be further from the truth, and the first thing that I do with new students in my singing school is to break them from that mythology.

For example, a middle-aged man from the town of Clare had always been interested in singing, and he set an appointment for me to give an assessment of his voice at the Bel Canto House School of Singing. When he sat down with me in my studio I asked him what he was expecting for me as a singing teacher to do at the first meeting. He answered matter-of-factly: "Well, I expect you’ve got a magnifying glass of some kind here in your office so that you can have a look down my throat there, and that will let us know whether or not I can sing!"

Of course, I didn’t look down the fellow’s throat at all! I asked him to sing a little bit of what was in his heart and we used that as the foundation of our work together. The human voice is a mystery and you will best be able to USE your voice when you embrace the mysteriousness of it, rather than trying to cut it up into little pieces that can be explained away.

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