“I have been a teacher for as long as I have been a student: learning is a complex activity and one of the most powerful ways to deepen your understanding of complex knowledge, concepts, and skills then to successfully transfer them to another individual through thoughtful guidance and instruction. In the discipline of singing—an elaborate physical skill—the student/teacher relationship is one of collaboration: mutual exploration of how we use our bodies to make sound, and cultivation of the artistic imagination that conceives those sounds. The studying of singing is a life-long pursuit and one of the purest expressions of joy in the human experience.

In my own vocal journey, I have served as music theory and aural skills tutor; a French, German, Italian diction and language tutor; a Teaching Artist with Alaska Theater of Youth; as well as a private voice teacher for singers of all genres and styles, and other professional voice users for almost a decade.

My philosophy of teaching is based on a kinesthetic approach to the voice: developing a physical sense of what your body is doing while you’re singing. Singing is an action, and once you know in your body what that action is, you can craft a method of singing that is efficient, unencumbered only by the limits of your imagination. 

The endeavor towards ease and beauty in the voice is simple, but demands patience, time, and effort. Practice is an important part of this discipline, but it should never be grueling or tedious: practice is borne of curiosity and exploration. Like as in yoga, the most imperative part of a single practice session is not to achieve perfection of a certain sound, note, or song, but the act of the exercises themselves. It is only over long periods of habitually recurring practice sessions that we can bring about positive change in our techniques. It would be better for vocal development to practice even just 10mins 7 days a week, than for 70mins once a week. It is also important to remember that, unlike a piano or a violin, the voice is made up of flesh and blood and there is only so much sound you can healthily make in one day. When you first begin vocal study it is helpful to keep a practice journal to track your vocal exercise and practice regimen.

In this vein, the most important guiding principle in my pedagogy is the amorality of the voice: there are no good or bad sounds, there are only the sounds we know how to make, and sounds we don’t know how to make yet. Like a game of Marco Polo, sometimes you must search around blindly in search of a sound you’re not quite sure of yet, but it is better to squawk, crack, and screech in an attempt to find the sound you’re looking for than to be afraid of making an ugly or ‘undesirable’ sound. Vocal study is about drawing a circle around all the sounds you can make, so you can pick and choose which ones you would like to use.

In lessons I work with students to develop very specific skills functions, and you should always feel comfortable to ask questions about what the end goal or point of an exercise is:

Exercises in body and alignment focus on flexibility and supplely of the muscles both involved in singing, or surrounding the different parts of the vocal mechanism. Exercises in breath develop strength and power in singing: the muscles of respiration are the largest and strongest muscles in the vocal mechanism, and subsequently the muscular action of the breath makes up almost the entirety of the physical effort of singing. 

Exercises in phonation have to do with how the vocal folds adduct, or come together in the larynx. The sound itself is not made by the larynx, but rather by the muscles of respiration that flow through the folds while they are adducted, creating vibration. The most commonly used term for good phonation balanced with efficient breath technique is called support. I rarely use this term in teaching, unless the student has a strong kinesthetic sense of how breath function should interplay with vocal fold function. One of my pet peeves in my own vocal journey, especially in the beginning, is how much teachers and students alike use support as a buzzword. While it is technically accurate that most singing mistakes are due to a lack of support, telling a student that they are lacking support does nothing to help them correct the issue.

Exercises in registration deal with how we navigate the breadth of our voice, typically focusing on the passaggio—italian for passage—which is where cracks generally occur. Registrational work will specialize based on style and genre. We typically work to smooth out the connections between registers—to create the illusion that all parts of the voice are one and the same—but sometimes cracks/audible register shifts are appropriate.

Exercises in resonance are about how we shape all the spaces the source sound travels through before leaving the mouth, and traveling to the ears of the audience. The shapes of the throat and mouth transform the basic buzzing of the vocal folds into the complex vocal sounds of speech and song. Similar to registration, these vary based on what kinds of sounds are stylistically appropriate.

Exercises in articulation help cultivate efficient vowel and consonant formation. Independent movement of the tongue and jaw is imperative to proper function of the vocal mechanism.

Exercises in expression are about how we use the entirety of the vocal mechanism to convey meaning. Exploration of vocal colors and style to communicate simple and complex emotions and ideas through sound.

The ideal student for me is simply someone who comes to a lesson with joy, excitement, and focus; someone for whom singing and music is a part of their lives, or they wish for them to be. Let’s work together to have fun, and do something special.

Best,

Jeremy