GK: A second turning point came a little later on when I was into my
professional career (I performed professionally for about 12 years
and then turned exclusively to teaching) in my late 20s. I
experienced a vocal collapse.
This is not at all uncommon in singers who have an inadequate
technique. Some get over it, others do not. By the time I got over
mine I had become so fascinated by the mechanics of the singing
voice that I found it a lot more interesting and rewarding to teach
than to perform.
To return to the “collapse”—it happened just at a time when my
career might have taken off from post-student small-time jobs to
bigger venues and contracts. I started to experience voice loss
whenever a concert was coming up, so I was advised to do some
bodywork.
Surprisingly, singers know very little about their instrument as a
rule, and there is not a tradition in classical singing training, at
least, of “voice-body” work. There was and is an interest in the
Alexander approach but it tended to be used as an “add-on” for
singing training, rather than being embedded in the everyday singing
lesson. Nowadays we have singing teachers who are also trained
Alexander practitioners: but they weren’t around 30 years ago, to my
knowledge.
The bodywork was great and I have maintained an interest in such
approaches ever since, but—to be honest—it did not really solve my
own problem. It went some way to helping me to find a state of
physical equilibrium and mental balance. But because there was
nothing in my training, nor in the body work, that enabled me to
gain awareness of my vocal muscles, I was still left in the dark
about “how the voice works” and I still experienced the same vocal
difficulties.
It is at this point that many singing teachers resort to “the
psychological”—meaning I can’t fix it, “they” can’t fix it, so it
must be in your head! This is something that still makes me very
angry when I come across it in the stories of my own clients. Yes,
sometimes there are psychological issues underlying vocal problems
and voice loss; but since these problems are very often somatised in
the vocal muscles, we can use techniques to help us address those
muscular patterns and regain control over our voice, even in
psychologically stressful situations.
So that is two steps on the journey. Another influence that happened
almost together with the second part of the journey was meeting and
working with Andrew Wade at the East 15 Acting School.
Andrew was the voice teacher there and I taught singing. We were
both very open with each other about our individual approaches and
often used to sit in on each others’ classes and even ran joint
sessions. I loved learning how an actor approaches their text—it
made such sense to me—and I have always felt that, especially in the
concert repertoire for classical singers, this approach can help
singers enormously in interpreting the poetic texts of so many
wonderful songs.
I also liked that Andrew had a process. Singing teachers tend to be
gurus and often don’t like to reveal their process. Andrew’s
teaching wasn’t like that and it influenced me in my approach. I
started writing down exercises, making my own teaching more
systematic—if you are teaching in a group setting you have to do
that anyway—and it solidified my practice. When I came to write
Singing and the Actor all those written records of exercise routines
were enormously helpful because they had been tried and tested both
in group and one-to-one settings.
Meeting and subsequently working with Jo Estill was the next step.
As you probably know, Jo’s approach was to “de-emphasise” breathing
and she steadfastly refused to discuss breath in the 1990s. Since
then, I have noticed that the Estill organization has—perhaps
literally—taken a leaf out of my book and now include the “Accent
Method” approach to breathing in their training courses.
What Jo brought to the singing profession from her research was a
willingness to talk about the vocal mechanism and to use this
positively as a training tool. In this she may have been influenced
by the work of phoneticians like Laver and Catford who taught that
discrete settings of the vocal tract were controllable. This really
was new stuff for singing teachers in the UK in the 1990s and it
influenced me greatly. In particular, it helped me to understand
that when I got stressed about my own singing, this manifested as
laryngeal constriction. And suddenly there was the possibility of
“answers.”
