A Voice Apart

The vocalrevolution is here , I said it finally to myself and to the world at large in 1994. I have been teaching voice since 1985 and teaching it my own way, in spite of an extensive 12 year education in the music field.  While I have been studying in the Music Teachers College in Russia , Leningrad, I was offered to do rather strange things to supposedly develop my voice. After those vocal escapades, (I called them "vocabatics without a safety net"), my throat would hurt and my voice would sound raspy and low. It made me really worried and I begun to think about it night and day. I also started rebelling during the private vocal lessons and during the choir practice, to the point that I got kicked out of the choir and almost got kicked out of the college. I was prohibited to sing in my last semester before obtaining the Bachelors Degree of Music Education and specialising in Voice and Choir Conducting. Go figure! I, however, graduated with the flying colors

Teaching now for over 40 years , I could right away sense if the child, or now adult, has ever been taking any activities which require mind/body coordination, like for example: Ballet, Gymnastics, Figure Skating and, of course, participating in some of the other recreational or professionally oriented events and sports. Those who did not do it I their childhood, could not literally “walk and chew the gum at the same time”, so to speak. Some of them could not walk a straight line, let alone on their tippy toes with their arms up, as per the requirements of Vocal Science Method and Technique . Some of them simply do not possess any motor skills. Their brain is not trained to give a command to their bodies, which in case of the voice training and voice powering, it requires a great deal to visualise how the physical sound travels, and then connect the sound to the upper back muscles, upper diaphragm and lower abdomen, to achieve the total voice performance , speaking, or fu

Let’s examine what has happened to the world lately? What has happened is that nobody speaks, especially on the phone. Everybody is texting and e-mailing and practically nobody  communicates otherwise.  Not necessarily any of those people have a voice problem; and that’s why they are afraid to speak. But, all of them, however, independently, have a problem in common; they simply do not know how to communicate anymore, ( voice problem or not). Some of them, primarily young people, who were born in this technological craze, evidently, had never been taught either how to hand write, nor how to read actual books, (not the internet mishmash), and let along speak, as even passing school tests, they had to respond in writing; choosing one answer out of 3 or 5 choices (multiple choice method). How scary is that? Some of them cannot even sign their own name, unless electronically! In my world, those, (the above described people), are often inquiring about either  singing or sp

Very often, I get the phone calls, (especially from the US), from the husbands or wives of the vocally effected individuals. They inquire about the Non-Surgical Voice Repair on behalf of their loved one and I, in a lot of times, am hearing and even suspecting that there is something wrong with their own voices. Since some people are not able to coherently express themselves outright at the beginning of the phone conversation, I presume that they inquire about themselves! Of course, if I hear severe voice damage, I know that I am talking to the right person. It is quite peculiar that the spouse, with no voice problem per say, sounds like he/she has one!  It seems, like when I travel to the UK, I also pick up a British accent. Also, when I receive the American clients from Buffalo New York or Texas, my Russian and Canadian accent gets mixed in with their American accent.  It seems to be when one of the spouses has a voice problem and has obvious difficulty speaking, the oth

Everybody knows there is a rock style and there is an alternative rock style. But not everybody knows that there is an alternative… to music? How so you may ask? The fact is that the music, like everything else in life, has its own standards. Many years ago, I wrote an article which was called “First, Third and a half and Fifth and a quarter, to our shame, became our music standards".  I was talking about the triad which usually consists of the first, third and fifth steps from whichever musical key you want to start counting. I believe it is self-explanatory now and describes it perfectly. However, world renowned judges, primarily performers themselves, at times make strange decisions with respects to who is going to make it through the blind auditions and move on under their supervision, and who is not. To my surprise, there were a couple of vocalists who were dead-on musically and pitch wise, but for some reason, did not get chosen. And there were definite