I thought you Listers out there might be somewhat interested to hear about my impressions of Seth's most recent master class here in SF. I went there with a lot of anticipation, as my teacher's technique is also what she dubs "speech based", although she has no affiliation with Seth and his technique. (And just as an aside, it really is phenomenal how powerful, beautiful, and effortless speech based singing is. The trick is finding the correct and applicable speech.) She and I went together, interested in his approach, hoping to find new ways of thinking about similiar concepts, or better yet, hoping to be scandalized with something controversial that we could perhaps experiment with and find out something exciting! The truth is, his technique as displayed at this master class is actually very traditional and rather conservative and very safe and healthy for the voice, not even remotely fitting the "bad boy" reputation he presents. He basically emphasized vowel modification for the entire 4 hour length of the seminar (which is definitely extremely valuable and useful, however, only a means to the end of true bel canto, speech level singing). All of his examples were with a rather light balance and the emphasis in the seminar tended to be on the tenor and coloratura voices. For training tenors in light mechanism production (which I don't do, but Deborah does) there were some valuable exercises. He also focused very pointedly through out the seminar on making money, and didn't mention a single time anything related to artistic fulfillment or joy, but rather, as a pop singer, developing your style and going and making money from it. He discouraged classical aspirations entirely. When I asked him about technical issues related to heavy mechanism, full throttle operatic production for large scale voices, he did not address my question.
In the end, from what was presented there that one day, it was all in all very innocuous, and not even remotely controversial. TinaO
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