Dear List:
First, a brief reintroduction. I have been a list participant and lurker on and off for many years. I am an engineer in my 40s - a former motor control theorist in the area of human movement, and have many years of choral singing experience and private vocal study. My singing teachers have all been mostly classically oriented, included a member of Chanticleer and several bona-fide opera singers. I myself have a very light voice and no desire to sing opera, and had a year-long stint in a miked jazz vocal ensemble. I'm not especially talented as a vocalist, but I like to think that every now and then I have something useful to say about my own struggles trying to improve my singing.
I would add that it would be helpful as well as polite if new posters would briefly introduce themselves to the list.
Nick Scholl has recently made several postings concerning the writings of Cornelius Reid. I have some opinions about these writings which I would briefly share - I am trying hard to be fair in my statements.
While I believe that there is probably a good deal of useful information in Reid's writings, I also believe there is the opportunity to either come away with the wrong ideas, or to mis-interpret Reid.
Reid does not usefully distinguish between what are casual analogies and physical reality. There may be a neural basis perhaps for the idea of "two registers" as a kind of hard-wired, "out-of-the box" set of motor strategies. I have young children, and they naturally employ one of two types of vocal coordination strategies which arguably could be called chest and falsetto.
However, as I have argued, the whole terminology of register "mixing", for example, is a fiction. Muscles can be coordinated, and different motor strategies employed, but nothing is getting "mixed" except perhaps our perception of the end result. The idea of "falsetto" as a mechanism to be "joined" with "chest voice" is another fiction. Imagine "mixing" backhand and forehand in tennis - you are either doing one or the other - they don't mix.
Nick Scholl parrots Reid's pedagogy, writing:
"Essentially, you will need to separate, isolate, and build independently your student's two registers...When both registers a strong and clear on their own [this could take months or years], then they can be joined to balance each other in a integrated sound..."
In response, Randy Buescher wrote, "Every student I've had come through my studio that was trained that way has not been able to bridge the two registers together. From my experience this pedagogy encourages permanent register separation and offers little benefit."
I must express enthusiastic support for Randy's view - not as a teacher, but as a student who attempted to develop his voice from extensive falsetto practice.
That said, I do believe that:
falsetto is useful as a way to get a feel for a light easy production
the kind of falsetto I produce involved a high larynx position and was inherently a strained production
excessive practice of falsetto can be bad - blowing a lot of air over the vocal folds in a relaxed state can lead to bowing of the folds
On a related but somewhat different topic, I am becoming interested in SLS after watching some of the videos of masterclasses (with Seth Riggs and with Dave Stroud - two separate 3 hour videos) at the Dave Stroud site and am in the process of contacting a local SLS teacher. At one point in the Riggs masterclass, Riggs (a baritone, and apparently in his early 70s), sings somewhat in imitation of a counter-tenor, and it was quite interesting for me to hear his light yet connected production up to the G a fifth above the tenor high C. Exactly whether his production above a certain point is "falsetto" or not seems debatable to me, but there were no glitches or switches, especially going up from the chest voice.
The SLS approach, as I observed, contrasts markedly with how I interpreted Reid - there is an emphasis right from the start on vocalizing over a fairly wide range and without any vocal discontinuity into a different production. Of course there is a need to develop a light production with the vocal folds lengthened and less vibrating mass, but here is a pedagogy that does so without resorting to switches and glitches and which emphasizes continuity.
In contrast, the falsetto pedagogy as identified by Scholl, and as I attempted to practice it, involved making a "switch" to a falsetto register and trying to "strengthen" the falsetto until it could "join" the lower register. I very strongly believe such a pedagogy to be incorrect.
Cheers,
Michael Gordon
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