There is no greater responsibility than nurturing, training and developing the voice of a young singer. The rapport between teacher and pupil is comparable to that of an analyst and his patient, a priest and a believer, an athlete and his coach or a guide leading a traveller through a dense jungle. This quest must be taken on with humility, for no teacher creates a student. All that we can hope to do is help the young singer to understand and, above all, feel in his/her own body what will enable him/her to realize all of his/her musical and vocal intentions through a functional vocal technique.
Teaching basic technique is the most important part of training a singer. Although I have modified it through years of study with other teachers and experience on the stage, Richard Miller's method as outlined in his The Structure of Singing remains an intelligent, coherant "cook book" for the voice teacher. Like a good holistic general practitioner with a patient, the voice teacher works not only towards curing the ailment at
hand (using vocalises and specific technical work as a doctor uses medicine, physical therapy and the like), but also strives to develop good habits to ensure that the patient is less likely to be ill in the future. Ours is a physical art and our training is as similar to that of a gymnast as it is to that of a violinist.
Vocal technique is not only taught by using exercises and isolating specific technical areas (breathe management, agility, the passaggio, etc.) for detailed work. Its application to the demands of the repertoire is essential. Coaching should involve both technical and musical work, for one of the most difficult tasks for a musician is that of balancing the demands of good vocalism with those of expression. Only masters such as Chaliapin, Berberian and Fischer Diskau have managed to fully unite technique and interpretation, putting their voice at the service of the music, rather than the opposite.
Singers should work on all of the repertoire which is appropriate for their instruments, from medieval music to world premieres via bel canto. Just as pianists learn to play Scarlatti, Bach, Mozart, Chopin, Debussy and (increasingly) Stockhausen, so singers should be able to sing monodies, "airs de cour", cantatas, vocal solos written after 1950 and baroque and contemporary opera arias, as well as the "mélodies", "Lieder" and arias of Mozart, Rossini, Verdi and Wagner which are the supporting columns of the vocal literature. Only by exploring a complete repertoire can a singer become an accomplished musician and discover where he/she is most useful for the professional world.
It is senseless for singers to only perform with piano accompaniment. Their voices and ears are trained in a special way by singing vocal solos, madrigals, chamber music with instruments and pieces with orchestra.
We are fortunate to have access to the tools of technology. I record every lesson on cd, so that the student can have an idea what he/she really sounds like, rather than being misled by the inner ear, as well as be able to go over the lesson again and again, and have an objective way to measure his/her progress (does he/she sound better now than a year earlier?). Video recorders help to correct errors more naturally than the scolding of yesteryear. It is better to see for oneself that the right shoulder is too high than have a teacher constantly nag you to "lower your shoulder." Zooms permit the student to see what happens to the tongue, for example, during an actual performance, rather than only while keeping the vocal tract under surveillance while singing in front of a mirror. Finally, computer programs enable us to analyze and follow the development of the vibrato rate, resonance balance, etc. in an objective way, rather than simply relying on the opinion of a voice teacher.
