A Voice Apart

When I reached Canada in 1980 and almost right from the start began teaching voice (speaking and singing), I noticed that, in general, nobody per say paid attention to the way they were speaking/singing or, for that matter, even conducting a proper posture while trying to deliver a message. Some of them, while speaking, were literally falling backwards, arching their upper back to the wall behind them, rather than to me standing right in front of them. Needless to say that by doing that, they were throwing their speech backwards and the voice would be falling to the back of their vocal cords, which is quite deadly for the vocal health . Nevertheless, the words were coming out slurred and un-pronounced; thus, their enunciation was quite poor. A lot of them were complaining of dry and/or full of mucous throats. Some of them were complaining of the actual pain and discomfort in their vocal boxes. Today, 33 years later, the problems still persist. The difference is that I am not s

Who is the Biggest Loser you may wonder…? LET’S FIND OUT! "Evidently, when it is concerning the human anatomy, there are no “cutting corners”.   A few years ago, sometime in November, my friend and I went to Niagara Falls to watch a Christmas skating show known as “Christmas On Ice”. We’ve been there all previous years and really loved that show, but I have to say, that last year’s show was the worst out of all. There were only about 10% of the original cast participants in the show (skating, dancing and singing). We were wondering then why there were young and inexperienced skaters desperately trying to resemble something remotely reminiscent of the original show? In all three categories, the performers were very amateur and clearly inexperienced. They were hardly rehearsed, the pace of the show was very fast, very loud and very chaotic. I have to say that it was also very poorly directed. In the most recent show that we watched, my friend and I were very pleased to see (for the