My Voice Instructor Creed

So time in the early to mid 90's, I wrote a creed.  Even then, it felt radical, pushing back against how I had been educated in music.  Don't get me wrong. I had had many wonderful teachers who stretched me and gave me tools that I still use today, Many of my experiences were life changing in positive ways.  But those positive experiences existed within a system that could often be more damaging.  When everyone talks about how the program for first year must majors is primarily about getting you to change your major to something else, something is broken. This can't be healthy.  But I took those drops of positive in the sea of despair and let them form what I believed about music education.

Every few years, I stumble upon that Creed as I'm looking for something else.  And of course, I never put it in a place where I can easily access it when needed.  It's here somewhere in my house, but I couldn't find it this morning.  And that's OK, because I needed to rewrite it and update it anyway.

The way we teach singing and the ways in which we interact with our students have changed over the years, and that is a good thing.  But some days, I still feel like what I want to give my students through lessons and my primary goals in teaching are different from those of my colleagues.  That's OK.  And in the context of planning for my relaunch of my business in a different state, I think it's important to re-articulate these goals and beliefs, crafting new statements that reflect my own learning and growth over the last 25 years of teaching.

This is why I teach singers.  This is what I believe I am here to do.

Creed

I believe that voice lessons are about more than learning how to sing beautifully.

I believe that from a technical standpoint, our primary goal as voice teachers is to help students find freedom, ease, and a healthy way of producing sound. If they sound great and look great, but it feels tense, painful, or even just physically uncomfortable to them, we haven’t found their right way yet.

I believe that singing is an art form, and as such asks us to look deeper, to invest time and energy in bringing our very best to meet this art.

I also believe that singing can and should be done by everyone, and that we can’t shut the door on people who don’t have the time, energy, or desire to invest themselves in the art form. The 2am lullaby is every bit as valid and as powerful and as needed as Verdi’s “Ave Maria” from Otello.

I believe that voice lessons are about empowering students to take positive steps in their own lives, to take responsibility for their own growth.

I believe that voice lessons are about self-discovery, soul work, healing, and confidence building.  

 

I believe that voice lessons are about learning to express your deepest feelings. Through music, thoughts and emotions that seem too big or too tender or too deep can find their way into the world. Music facilitates expression in ways that words alone cannot.

I believe that singing is all about communication, and voice lessons teach us ways to be effective communicators.

I believe that voice lessons are about learning to understand those not like us, or people who have had different experiences than our own. We do this by trying to understand the lives of those who wrote the music and also by working to understand the characters we are portraying.

I believe that voice lessons are about learning to connect to others in deep ways. To the poet/lyricist. To the composer. To our listeners (audience, congregation, friends).

I believe that connection lies at the heart of all good communication.