Dear Randy and Vocalisters:
You wrote:
>A lot of musical theater programs have huge problems when it comes to the
>voice faculty, in that the same people who teach in the voice major program
>(and live in the opera ghetto musically and pedagogically) are teaching the
>musical theater people. This leads to tremendous confusion on behalf of the
>students not knowing how to sing musical theater.
>
>A tremendous example of this in Illinois is Miliken University. I had a
>student who went there, connected out of chest wonderfully, and the teacher
>there proceeded to eradicate her chest voice and build the voice on a top
>down production. The silliest thing this teacher said was, "That's how
>Streisand learned to sing." This is of course a huge falsehood.
>
>I'd be very cautious about the teacher you get in such programs, make sure
>they are familiar with an approach like speech level singing, or something
>else that stresses a connection out of chest and pure sounding, unaffected
>vowels.
COMMENT: All that you say above I could also say of music theatre
programs in which the voice teachers are not trained in classical
singing techniques but only in singing styles and production results
required by the American musical theatre. It is not uncommon for
music theatre voice teachers to have little or no basic vocal
technique approaches but only a concern with the end product
regardless of how that is to be achieved. In fact, I would go so far
as to say that in my experience it is rare to find someone who is an
expert in music theatre who has even a mild idea of how the voice
should be taught technique.
That being said, I do not suggest that music theatre singing is
harmful to the voice but only that it requires as careful a study of
technique as classical singing with the exception that in music
theatre singing the voice is amplified and in classical singing it is
not. This places greater demands on the classical singing technique
and usually requires a longer period of study to achieve the results
required of classical singing.
One can rather easily discover classical singers who have ruined
their voices by attempting to achieve results for which their voices
are not yet ready. One can also easily discover music theater
singers who have ruined their voices because they have proceeded
without any proper voice study or with incorrect voice study. In
fact, the latter category is more common because it is possible for
an actor of skill with minimal vocal training to achieve a degree of
success that would not be possible for an equivalent singer in opera.
The degree of success that is so achieved encourages more and more
difficult engagements and finally the lack of singing technique
causes vocal failure for the music theatre singer/actor in this kind
of situation.
Because the voice is a more fragile instrument than the body as a
whole and because both the voice and the body are equally important
instruments for the music theatre singer/actor, it would be my advice
that any preparation for a career in music theatre follow much the
same pattern of preparation as does the classical singer/actor:
learn to sing well as your first early priority and learn acting
simultaneously. But if you must, temporarily, give up one for the
other, give up the acting and stay with the voice study.
To my knowledge, this is not the pattern that is followed in most
music theatre schools.
--
Lloyd W. Hanson
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