.If you believe, as I do, that the exclusive key to building a singing voice is the patient practice, over many years, of exercises that encourage, completely without force, the two, and only two, vocal registers to coordinate in the production of a single pitch, you may wish to read further. On the other hand, if you think that a voice can be built through efforts to affect resonance, breath support, positioning of the larynx, uvula, jaw, lips, mouth, etc., images of pitches coming from various locations in and out of one's body, a covered voice quality, vowel modification, or any of a hundred other approaches to singing, you should STOP READING NOW.
Years ago while a baritone in the Studio of the Deutsche Oper Berlin, a colleague of mine loaned me Cornelius Reid's book, The Free Voice. By the time I finished that book my understanding of the voice had been totally transformed and with it my life. That book has proven to be the major turning point in my life.
At the time I had an agent who had begun to send me to audition for smaller German Opera houses. Drunk on the joy of this vocal epiphany, I wrote asking him to stop sending me to houses in need of a baritone because I expected before long to be able to audition as a tenor. I never heard from him again, nor he from me.
Carefully following Reid's suggestions I immediately set about separating my vocal registers so that I might individually develop them and thereby balance their strengths. That meant lots of work on my falsetto which had lain dormant since my voice almost imperceptibly changed in junior high school. Before long it became clear that the hasty remark to my erstwhile agent had been overly optimistic. I decided to come back to the US to continue my study with the help of the GI Bill. On the way I arranged for an audition in New York City with the master himself, Cornelius Reid.
He allowed me to observe the lesson of a very talented bass the hour before my audition was to be. I was favorably impressed by the quality of his voice but I was surprised at the amount of force Reid had him use as he approached the top. That same approach was encouraged in the scales he led me through in probing my voice when my turn to sing came. He must have liked what he heard for he agreed to take me as a student and said he could arrange for me to get my lessons through a school which would honor my GI benefits. I must have said something like, "Great, I'll get back to you." I couldn't have had the courage to say what I was really thinking, "Just who wrote this book of yours?"
In those two hours there was no mention of registers, falsetto, mesa di voce, register balancing or coordination. It was just more of the same old open up and push it out, i.e. force the chest voice as high as possible. Needless to say I didn't stay in New York to study with Reid. I wrote a few letters -- years before the Internet and Vocalist -- trying to find a teacher who actually taught what Reid had written about. I had no luck.
I decided to return to my Alma Mater, Louisiana State University, and work on a Master of Music degree. I kept working to strengthen my falsetto so it would grow to match that of my grossly overdeveloped chest voice. Eventually things began to go wrong. The beauty of voice, until then almost universally admired, began to fade. The voice became unsteady and a subtle bleat appeared. After a while I started feeling a slight pain on the left side of my larynx.
I was denied admittance to the DMA program at LSU and opted to work on a Ph.D. in musicology to keep the GI Bill coming while I worked my way out of my vocal difficulties. After finishing all but my dissertation I began working with computers and gradually gave up singing altogether. I did well with computers and advanced at a rapid pace.
Ten years ago I decided that I had been happier as a struggling singer than I was as a successful Unix Operating System programmer, so I started singing again. I found that I still held to the ideals which Reid espoused in The Free Voice, but this time I was older and perhaps wiser. I realized that "developing" the falsetto had wrecked my voice -- forcing the voice to perform exclusively in either register is, after all, forcing, so I discarded that part of Reid's method. I decided to sing two octave scales at a consistent, easy volume using the purest "ah" sound I could produce, allowing the voice to break into and back out of falsetto whenever it pleased. This time I would follow the leading of my voice instead of trying to bring it under my intellectual control. For that purpose I chose to sing away from a piano to remain unaware of exactly where the breaks were occurring.
It's been ten years and almost every day of that time I have spent 30 or 40 minutes doing the same set of exercises. The progress has been incredibly slow, but, in ample recompense, incredibly consistent. Over those years the voice has rebuilt itself one millimeter each day. In this long process my attitude toward developing the voice has seen many changes. When I started I thought that in a few months I would learn how to sing. After a couple of years of learning I decided that I was really a musical instrument maker and that I was building my voice. It was only a few months ago that my latest insight into the mysteries of vocal development revealed itself. I now believe that a voice is not something that you learn to use or something that you build with directed effort. For me it has become a more organic process. I now believe that I am growing my voice the way one grows a rose bush or a oak tree.
In this time many changes have taken place. Out of my mouth have come sounds most likely heard in barnyards, but the registers have in the process come closer and closer together. In all this time I have refrained from singing since I would most certainly revert to exclusive use of my chest voice, as the new voice had not finished building. In spite of that I have found myself deeply satisfied and encouraged with each day's millimeter of progress.
Not long ago I learned that the creation of a virtual community was one of the potential benefits of the Internet. I don't know anyone who is doing what I am doing, but the world is big and I believe there are others on this same path. I would like to meet them. Not because I want to learn anything from them for I am happy with my progress; my own voice has led me here. Not because I have a desire to give advice to anyone for I believe one must find his own way in voice and in life. But just because I believe it would be a comfort to converse with someone who understands what I've been talking about.
If you have hung in there and read to this point, you may be one of those.
If so, you may contact .