Wisdom from Hedley
Hedley (that's HEDLEY!) Lamarr (Blazing Saddles) is on to something when he cries, "now go do that voodoo that you do so well!" And it's not just that he can make a clever Cole Porter reference.
Each of us has some special magic, some thing that's unique to us, a gift which is ours to give. And discovering what that gift is and how to manage it is one our major tasks in life.
I'm going to start from an opera perspective, but this will extend out to a wider range of vocal styles.
For a singer finding that gift translates first into understanding the concept of Fach. Fach is the German term used to classify (classifying things, that's so German) singing actors into particular types of roles. The term applies primarily to voice type but also includes physicality. We can further complicate this with a French term, physique du rôle, meaning looking the part. Leaving aside all the triggering issues around this concept that demand our respect and attention let us consider how this used to work. Valentin Adamberger, the tenor who played the role of Belmonte in Mozart's Entführung aus dem Serail, was considered a "young lover" type. He looked and sounded like what a young lover was expected to sound like in the late 18th century. Roles such as Samson and Otello demanded heavier voices and often thicker physiques to go with them. Throughout the history of opera, by the way, there have always been singers of ample size, singers who stood perfectly still and sang, singers with svelte bodies, and singers who supposedly introduced acting to opera (and somehow this canard seems to apply mostly to women). Before Callas. Mary Garden, Claudia Muzio, Geraldine Farrar, and so on, all the way back to Giuditta Pasta and before.
All this is to say that each singer has a task, to discover how their voice and body align and start the process of figuring out what to sing using that information. But that is only the start. The real work is done by factoring in self image and aspiration.
I love recordings. But there is a way in which they have ruined singing, both by making the impossible possible and by creating goals that cannot reasonably be attained. Before recordings the only information a singer got about what a role or an aria or a song should sound like was on a page or in memory from a performance. This gave more latitude in terms of Fach: if you could sing it you could sing it. As opposed to modern standards of measuring up to a century's worth of recorded evidence. And that recorded evidence goes right into the vulnerable and impressionable souls of singers at the start of their journeys. It is hard to work towards being one's authentic self when the desire to sound like some idol interferes.
Thus the overarching rule of voice training should be: do not let who you want to be get in the way of who you are. Again: DO NOT LET WHO YOU WANT TO BE GET IN THE WAY OF WHO YOU ARE! Returning to Hedley, figure out which voodoo is yours to do.
This is much harder than it looks. So many messages get in the way. Messages about measuring up to the wants of others and messages about acceptance and success. Choir directors want blend. Conductors, directors, and casting agents all have demands. It is truly difficult to maintain authentic identity when all the feedback comes attached to the projections of other people, many of whom have toxic baggage of their own. They are putting their past wounds about body shape and voice size, weight, and color on you. In my men's group we have a concept called the shield--put it up to deflect projections but let it down to allow in that which resonates.
Another issue is the pressure many singers feel to be versatile. (Obligatory Sondheim quote: "the curse of versatility!"). We expect opera singers to master at least 4 languages and be able to perform anything in their vocal category from Monteverdi to Glass. It used to be that singers sang in their native languages and repertories. Very few singers get that kind of privilege any more but they seem so prize-worthy when they do it! This applies to choral singers as well. The Brahms Requiem makes demands rather different from those posed by the Bach b minor Mass and while learning how to make those differences certainty develops musicianship it can even out the level of actual achievement. There is virtue in learning how to do both well. There is magic is learning how to do one style fabulously. In this case the good can be the enemy of the excellent.
All the time I see singers who are dissatisfied with themselves because they want to be more things or different things than they are. I raise my hand. I know these feelings and recognize them when I see them. I wish grad recitals could be programmed as self-explorations rather than surveys. I wish audition preparation was based on showing one's authentic self rather than trying to second guess what the panel wants because the singer needs a job! And that reality, the need for a gig, whether purely for money or for recognition or validation, is the poison that makes developing an authentic self such an exercise in mountain climbing.
Two examples of this toxicity come immediately to mind.
On the first day of class at the conservatory the opera director strode into a room full of young singers, hurled a copy of Musical America (the listing of all the managed singers available for work) to the floor, and declaimed, in his emphatic voice, that the book was a listing of mostly unemployed singers but here he would teach us the skills to get work. He then proceeded to teach us all the skills that most of those unemployed singers had probably learned at other schools and eventually sent us all out into the world to get or not get work however it turned out. I get it. I was at a trade school and employment is the objective. But finding employment that matches the inner soul of each singer would have a longer trajectory. Harder to do. Especially with youth.
Youth.
At a school where I used to teach there was a young woman with a high, light, clear voice and the looks and personality to match. Everything about her fairly screamed ingénue. So what did she want to sing? Only the fiercest belt number she could find! And she struggled to force her voice into the format required for a full theater belt. Belting is a technique and can be taught but some voices are more suitable for it than others and the process of transforming her into what she wanted to be would have destroyed the gift she possessed. I tried to steer her towards what I felt was her "voodoo" but she was having none of it and dropped me as her teacher, switching to the other teacher. I guess she felt she would get more support for her aspiration there. But a year later, after she sang in a master class for a visiting Broadway star, she encountered me in the lobby of the music building and said, rather sheepishly, that she guessed I had been right and she was really a high soprano because the visiting star had told her that this was her gift and she should prize and develop it. Nice to have my instinct validated. Less nice to be considered of no account until someone with more street cred backed me up.
This is why cabaret singing is an essential tool for the process of learning how to be a singer, and notice that I didn't write "how to sing." How to be a singer is the real issue, a larger project that includes how to sing. Putting together a cabaret show requires figuring out what story is yours to tell, finding the songs that tell that story, learning how to sing them and put them over, and then testing all that in front of an audience. This process can be applied to a classical music recital, and will result in programming that varies pretty far from the usual way a recital is assembled. And it will isolate and identify the ways in which authentic self differs from ambition and aspiration. Alas it won't make any money. But it may, it is my hope, help you find your right place in the universe, the spot where you feel alive and connected, where time seems to stand still—a prism between the universe and your audience.