Vocal Boutique… What Do We Mean By That?

“We offer 'Cadillac' quality of voice/vocal coaching and voice repair. Our services are classy, timely, high-end & simply unprecedented.”

What exactly do we mean by the above statement?

The Royans Professional Vocal School, aka, The Royans School for the Musical Performing Arts, was founded on February the 15th, 1984.

Originally, it was designed to be a local music and vocal school. But in 1987, after the partner of the school passed away, the school took a different turn. Since I have always been specializing and highly educated in voice, I decided to turn The Royans School for the Musical Performing Arts into a professional vocal school; and thus discontinued offering any lessons pertaining to musical instruments.

So now, my institution became a ‘vocal boutique’ specializing in voice and voice only.

Those years, people were able to appreciate the quality and were able to make the differentiation between the “Walmart” or “Honest Ed’s” (Discounted department stores, which have carried everything and anything for the highly discounted prices) and highly specialized boutiques of whichever kind. Those who appreciate quality, and of course, nevertheless, could afford to go to a specialized store (boutique of whichever sort) did so and felt quite dignified purchasing much higher quality stuff; and respectively took pride that they were able to pay for it accordingly.

Then the next phase kicked in where  the people still understood the difference between the department store and the high-quality merchandise boutique. But at that time, they somehow presumed that they could buy a “Cadillac” for the price of a bicycle, or at best, for the price of a cheap Hyundai vehicle.

We started feeling it when people began to bargain with us and thus, by definition, dismissing the highly professional quality of our services; and therefore, respectively, they started bringing down our professional fees which we, in fact, have been charging for all of the previous years without any problems. I verbalized that experience by saying that I feel that I have been forced to sell “Cadillacs” from…a junkyard! To say the least, that’s what my potential clients were making me feel!

Little that I knew…! Now, we came to a time of the financial recession, “digital pollution” and complete & total illiteracy and, the least to say, ignorance due to the “excess of information” via the internet. Nowadays, people do not even have a differentiation between a bicycle, a Hyundai and a Mercedes or Cadillac - It looks and feels like that it is all the same to them…

How sad is that?

Sad indeed!

We, however, always had been a high-end quality services vocal boutique and are very proud of that.The Toronto Star, in 1999, published an article about myself titled “Not as Easy as it Sounds”. It mentioned that my method and technique is not for the faint of heart (to put it mildly). I also added that it is not for the people with a below-average IQ… Go figure!

Given the above, it is clear that it is not for people who blindly trust the internet and get drowned in the right and (a lot of the times) wrong information. Those are the ones who presume that the Scooter and the Mercedes come from the same family, so to speak…

To those kind of people, I think that even I would not be able to help…

However, I am hoping that the world in general will smarten-up and sooner rather then later, for their sake and for everybody else’s sake; as otherwise, we might begin to experience reverse-evolution - From the human, to the monkey (no offence to the monkey) and, perhaps, even below…?

I certainly hope that it would not come to that, as if it does, for me, it will be a sign that the world has not only gone crazy exponentially, but it is also, evidently, approaching its VERY END!

To conclude, I always say: “ The smart person will understand my philosophy, the not-so-very smart will have their own view and, no doubt, will enjoy the consequences”.

The latter, my reader, is your riddle…