https://rouvasacademyofsinging.com.au/blog/the-biggest-music-tours-of-2019-heres-to-looking-forward-to-looking-back-by-the-singing-teacher/ They say rock’n’roll is a young person’s game, but clearly the major acts coming our way next year didn’t get the memo. There are so many golden oldies touring in 2019 that in years to come, we’ll probably look back at this as the golden age of nostalgia.

Pop princess Kylie Minogue is planning to go all out with celebrations for her 50th birthday

Phil Collins will get the ball rolling in January with a tour in which he professes to be Not Dead Yet (fans in the UK were so unsure how long that promise would hold they allegedly snapped up the tickets for five London dates in 15 seconds). In April, those old smoothies Air Supply will be mellowing out audiences with the help of an orchestra. BYO air supply.

The godfather of punk, 71-year-old Iggy Pop, will be writhing his still-lithe (but indisputably lined) form across our stages in April as part of Bluesfest, with sideshow gigs in Sydney and Melbourne. It’ll be a fun house for sure.

Just to prove nostalgia isn’t solely the preserve of the over-65s, in March the Happy Mondays will be performing their 1990 album Pills ’n’ Thrills and Bellyaches in its entirety (or at least the bits Shaun Ryder can still remember the words to). Grab your baggy pants and bucket hat and step on, ravers.

Here are a few more of what we suspect will be the most interesting tours of the first half of the year ahead.

The Eagles
There’ll be no Glenn Frey on this March tour (he died in January 2016), but his son Deacon joins the line-up, alongside Don Henley, Joe Walsh and Timothy B. Schmit from the classic line-up of the band that checked out long ago, but never really left. Vince Gill completes the main ensemble and there’s also a horn and string section to flesh out that mellow West Coast sound. A perch in the Eagles’ nest will set you back anything from a low of $199 to a high of $399.

Kylie Minogue
Our Kylie’s latest Vegas-style extravaganza is named not for the most famous pair of hot pants in music, but rather for her age: inconceivable as it seems, Charlene is now 50 (until May at least). Her music career alone is now 31, and while her debut single I Should Be So Lucky doesn’t make the cut, the set list on this career-spanning, genre-hopping spectacular – divided into six change-of-costume-defined acts, plus encore – reportedly covers pretty much everything else the fans might hope for, all the way from The Loco-Motion at one end to Golden at the other, via Confide in Me, Spinning Around, Can’t Get You Out of my Head and a whole lot more. Sydney, Melbourne, Mt Cotton in Queensland, Perth, Adelaide and the Hunter Valley in March.

The Monkees
It’s not the full Prefab Four – Peter Tork is not in great health, and Davy Jones is long dead – but this is the Monkees line-up fans thought they’d never see, with Micky Dolenz joined onstage by Mike Nesmith for the first time in Australia since 1968. In fact, it’s the first time Nez has played in Australia since 1977, when he toured at the height of his Rio fame. If you’re really a Believer, you’ll have to fork out $599 for the full VIP package in June.

Red Hot Chili Peppers
Five years after they were last here as part of The Big Day Out, and 12 years since they last headlined a tour of Australia, Melbourne-born bass legend Flea and his bandmates – including co-founder and singer Anthony Kiedis, long-time drummer Chad Smith, and relative new boy Josh Klinghoffer on guitar (he’s been with the band since 2007) – play a series of stadium and winery gigs, including a first visit to Tasmania. Promising plenty of funk for young and old, it kicks off in Hobart on February 17 and rolls through 10 shows in six states before finishing up in Perth on March 5.

Lily Allen
Given her tabloid life and confessional lyrics, it was probably inevitable that Lily Allen would turn to the memoir, even if, at 33, she’s a touch on the young side for such things. Then again, she’s been on the public radar since becoming one of the first artists to emerge via social media in late 2005 (on My Space – remember that?) so why not. She’s unlikely to be reading excerpts from My Thoughts Exactly on her No Shame tour in February, but it promises to be an intimate affair all the same – just the diminutive singer (and her stack heels) and two synth players, and a catalogue that trawls the wreckage of a failed marriage while all the while keeping “one foot in the rave” (her words, but we like them).

Ozzy Osbourne
The former Black Sabbath frontman has been touring for 50 years but this jaunt around the world – which started in 2017 and isn’t slated to end until 2020 – will be his last. Or so he says. “The thing about music is it’s got no age limit,” he told this paper in October. “If you’re good, you’re good and if you’re having fun, have fun.” Osbourne is one of the biggest names at Download, the heavy rock/metal festival that has its second Melbourne outing, and its first in Sydney, in March. Also on the line-up are Judas Priest, Alice in Chains, Slayer and Rise Against. Rock on, headbangers.

Lauryn Hill
It’s billed as the 20th anniversary tour of her solo debut The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, and fans of the ex-Fugees singer can probably expect her to play the album in full when she tours in February. But given it’s her only studio album to date, when could they not expect the same? Hill regularly divides audiences by remixing her songs (hey, just because she’s playing the album, don’t go expecting it to sound like the album, OK?) and turning up late, but she still delivers a hell of a show. Just make sure the babysitter doesn’t have to be home by 10.

Nick Cave
Typically, a Cave visit home each summer comes complete with a Bad Seeds tour. This year, it’s the singer-songwriter-screenwriter-sometime-actor solo at a piano, armed with that extensive catalogue of songs and a willingness to take questions from the audience and a promise to answer them with as much good humour, grace and honesty as he can muster. It started in May in New York, when Cave took to the stage for the first of four such dates with the confession that “I have absolutely no idea what I’m really doing here”. By the time he opens the Australian leg in his childhood hometown of Wangaratta on January 3, he’ll presumably have it figured out.

John Mayer
The blues-folk-rock singer-guitarist is perhaps as well known for his string of celebrity ex-girlfriends – Taylor Swift, Jennifer Aniston, Kim Kardashian and Renee Zellweger among them – as he is for his music. You can see him in the semi-intimate surrounds of the mid-sized stadiums in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane in March from a mere $132 (as of time of writing – the tickets are dynamically priced), but to get seriously up close and personal you might want to lob for the $509 Premium package. No word on whether that includes him asking for your number, though.

Read full article here: https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/music/the-biggest-music-tours-of-2019-here-s-to-looking-forward-to-looking-back-20181228-p50ond.html

For more information contact us at Rouvas (0404) 044 823

https://rouvasacademyofsinging.com.au/

The post The biggest music tours of 2019: Here’s to looking forward to looking back by The Singing Teacher appeared first on Singing Teacher.

Radio X has the perfect playlist for 2019 with Great X-Pectations. As each New Year dawns, we hand pick a choice selection of the bands, artists and singer-songwriters that we think you’ll be hearing more of over the next twelve months.

In previous years, Radio X has tipped The 1975, Royal Blood, Pale Waves, Catfish And The Bottlemen, CHVRCHES, Blossoms, Wolf Alice and more.

Find out more about the best new music for 2019, plus listen to our pick of the acts right here…

1. Another Sky
London-based progressive pop quartet fronted by versatile singer Catrin Vincent, who released their debut EP, Forget Yourself, in January 2018. They head out on a huge UK tour in February 2019. Watch a beautiful, exclusive live version of their song Tree right here.

Official website: www.underneathanothersky.com

2. Anteros
Taking their name from the Greek god of requited love, this London quartet is fronted by Laura Hayden, boast influences from Blondie to Brandon Flowers, and describe their sound as “disco with a side of rock”. Debut album When We Land arrives in March 2019 – take a listen to the opening track, Call Your Mother here.

Official website: www.anterosofficial.com
3. APRE
APRE. Picture: Polydor Records

Charlie Brown and Jules Konieczny met at a chess club in Ealing, West London and their collaboration started out as a side project for two busy musicians, before they decided to focus on APRE. Touting themselves as intelligent, alternative pop, the duo’s latest single Backstreet was released in December 2018 and they have live dates lined up for 2019, including London’s Omeara on 3 April. Watch them perform an exclusive live version of Without Your Love alfresco, especially for Radio X.

Official Facebook: www.facebook.com/apreband

 
4. Jade Bird
Raised in South Wales, 21-year-old Jade Bird recorded her first EP, Something American, in Woodstock, New York State and was signed to Glassnote, home to Mumford And Sons. With a voice that recalls Patti Smith and Alanis Morrisette and a sound that mixes Americana and indie pop, Jade’s excellent singles Uh Huh and Love Has All Been Done Before have received daytime airplay on Radio X. She will be heading out on tour with Hozier in March 2019. See Jade perform live at Radio X’s Great X-Pectations gig here.

Official website: www.jade-bird.com
5. Áine Cahill
Hailing from County Cavan, Ireland, Aine Cahill counts Lana Del Rey, Marina And The Diamonds and classic jazz as influences. She released her debut EP, Paper Crown, independently in 2014. Now signed to Warners, 2018 saw Aine play The Great Escape and Neighbourhood Festivals – you can watch the video for latest single Water Into Wine here.

Official website: www.ainecahill.com
6. Cassia
Exuberant indie pop with a touch of Vampire Weekend and Foals, 2018 saw this Macclesfield trio get shortlisted for Best Live Act at the AIM Awards, before selling out the O2 Ritz in Manchester and The Garage in London. 2019 will see them release their debut album, but until then, watch the video to recent single, Loosen Up here.
7. Chappaqua Wrestling
Charlie Woods and Jake Mac have been writing songs together since the age of 14, this Brighton-born, Manchester-based duo name diverse influences such as The Beach Boys and Teenage Fanclub, and claim their music is “sweet-Americana with an electronic swooning twist”. They have an appearance at The Great Escape lined up for 2019 and you can hear their latest single Plant Trees here.

Official Facebook: www.facebook.com/chappaquawrestling
8. Easy Life
Easy Life. Picture: Island Records

Beautifully honest lyrics and laid-back beats are the speciality of this Leicester collective, fronted by Murray, whose freewheeling vocals recall Jamie T. Formed in late 2017, the band have toured heavily across the past year, with their debut single Pockets becoming a huge favourite with crowds up and down the country – as you can see from this exclusive glimpse from their show at Think Tank Underground in Newcastle last November!
9. Sam Fender
Born in North Shields, Tyneside, Fender came to the attention of Ben Howard’s manager in 2013 and signed to major label Polydor in the summer of 2018. Sam’s debut single was Play God in March 2017, which was streamed over a million times on Spotify. This was followed by the moving Dead Boys and its accompanying EP at the end of the year and the announcement that the singer-songwriter had won the BRITs Critics’ Choice Award. 2019 will see Sam play Manchester’s Gorilla on 25 February, Electric Brixton on 28 February and Neighbourhood Weekender in Warrington on 26 May.

Official website: www.samfender.com
10. Fuzzy Sun
Stockport five-piece who dabble in psychedelica-tinged glossy indie pop. 2019 is looking very nice – June sees them perform on the bill at Blossom’s massive Edgeley Park homecoming show and in July they’re playing Manchester’s Castlefield Bowl with The Wombats. Take a listen to their latest track, Heavy, featuring a video shot on their most recent tour.

Official website: www.fuzzysunband.com
11. Indoor Pets
Formerly known as Get Inuit, the name change doesn’t appear to have had any effect on the trajectory of this Kent-based quartet who perform – as they call it – “dirty pop”. Their debut album, Be Content, comes out on 8 March 2019 via Wichita Records – take a listen to their latest, Being Strange, here.

Official website: www.indoorpets.club
12. The Mysterines
The Wirral-based garage rock trio of Lia Metcalfe (lead guitar) George Favager (bass) and Chrissy Moore (drums) formed in 2016 and gained an influential fan in the form of The Coral’s James Skelly, who produced their debut single Hormone. The band have supported Miles Kane on his tour earlier this year and they will be special guests of the Psychedelic Porn Crumpets in February 2019. Hear their single Hormone here.

Official Instagram: www.instagram.com/themysterines
13. Sea Girls
Having gained a reputation for their frantic live performances and epic guitar rock sound, Sea Girls have been plying their trade throughout 2018 and released their latest single All I Want To Hear You Say in September. They head out on a major headline tour at the end of February 2019 – but you can get a taste of their amazing live show with this exclusive clip, showcasing the band’s appearances with appearances at Truck, Citadel, All Points East and Leeds festivals across the summer.

Official website: www.seagirls.net
14. The Snuts
West Lothian’s The Snuts have been creating a buzz throughout 2018, capping off the year with a run of sold out dates. They issued their Manhattan Project single in September and have already lined up shows at SXSW and Mad Cool festival for 2019. Take a look at them in action at Edinburgh’s La Belle Angele in October.

Official website: www.thesnuts.co.uk
15. Sophie And The Giants
Fronted by the distinctive voice of Sophie Scott, this Sheffield-based guitar-pop four-piece met at music college in Spring 2017 and released their debut EP, Adolescence, in October. Tom Grennan was so impressed by the band, he had them as support on his European tour last Autumn. The band have just announced their frist headline UK tour, which includes a show at Camden Assembly on 28 March.

Official website: www.sophieandthegiants.com
16. Sports Team
Harlsden’s Sports Team released their debut EP Winter Nets in January 2018 and have since been building up a word-of-mouth buzz across the year, supporting The Magic Gang, Hinds and Rat Boy. Their recent single, Margate, was recorded with Courtney Barnett and they have a stack of live dates lined up for 2019, including a show at London’s Electric Ballroom on 22 March. You can see how they’ve been getting on via this boisterous tour diary here…

Official Facebook: www.facebook.com/sportsteamband
17. Ten Tonnes
Known to his mum as Ethan Barnett, this 21-year-old from Hertford comes from a musical family and has been mentored by Hugo White of The Maccabees. He released his debut EP Lucy independently, but was quickly snapped up by major Warner Bros. Having toured with Stereophonics and Tom Grennan in 2018, he’s set to release his debut album in April. Get a taste of the track Better Than Me – along with a peek into Ethan’s massive year – via this exclusive clip.

Official website: tentonnes.com
18. Whenyoung
Chiming guitar pop trio from Limerick, Ireland, whose latest EP Given Up dropped in November. Aoife Power (vocals/ bass), Niall Burns (guitar), Andrew Flood (drums) have released singles such as Heaven On Earth and a cover of the Cranberries classic Dreams, and supported The Vaccines and Blossoms acroos the year. They’ve just dropped an incredible new track called Never Let Go and play Manchester’s Deaf Institute on 10 February and Electrowerkz in London on 13 February.

Official Facebook: www.facebook.com/whenyoungband
19. Yonaka
Brighton four-piece Yonaka create dark, distorted, beats-heavy guitar rock, fronted by the charismatic Theresa Jarvis. 2018 saw them tour with Bring Me The Horizon, with their latest EP Creature being released in November – the title track quickly found a place on the Radio X playlist.

Official website: weareyonaka.com
20. Zuzu
This Liverpool singer is also a producer, director, actor and comic book illustrator – and her anthemic songwriting got her a support slot on Courteeners’ recent UK tour.

Official website: www.thisiszuzuofficial.com

Read full article here: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/10/arts/music/artists-to-watch-2019.html

For more information contact us at Rouvas (0404) 044 823

https://rouvasacademyofsinging.com.au/

The post The Singing Teacher: The Best New Music, Artists And Bands For 2019 appeared first on Singing Teacher.

Our pop music critics are keeping an eye on Billie Eilish, Nakhane and Nicola Cruz this year.CreditCreditFrom left: Roger Kisby for The New York Times; Tarryn Hatchett; Hanna Quevedo

Jade Bird – “Love Has All Been Done Before”

When she’s gently strumming an acoustic guitar and singing about love in her reedy, tremulous mezzo-soprano, the 21-year-old Jade Bird might seem to fit a soothing, long-established singer-songwriter mold on “Love Has All Been Done Before.” But that’s only until she gets riled. Then her rock band kicks in, her voice gets rough and her words turn pointed and pitiless. And when full fury takes over, she starts spitting lines at rap speed. She’s no pushover. Her debut album is due April 19. JON PARELES

Blueface

This Los Angeles rapper has a quixotic, charismatic flow, spilling words past the end of lines with a pinched, tart voice that recalls the earliest Los Angeles gangster rap. On the recent mixtape “Famous Cryp,” he’s vibrant but protean, still figuring out the boundaries of his skill. But songs like “DM,” “Bleed It” and “Thotiana” are terse, bawdy and infectious. JON CARAMANICA

Nicola Cruz

Nicola Cruz is an electronic musician, producer and D.J. from Ecuador who has already made a reputation on the international club circuit. Instead of putting electronic sounds in the foreground, he builds tracks from loops and improvisations that are likely to come from ancient instruments, particularly Andean ones like wood flutes, percussion and small guitars — though he might also try a sitar. The artificial pieces he constructs sound oddly natural. His second album, “Siku” — named after an Andean panpipe — comes out Jan. 25. PARELES

Billie Eilish – “you should see me in a crown”

Billie Eilish’s debut album is likely to appear this year, and while she’s only 17, she is no unknown. Since her initial SoundCloud postings in 2015, her online releases have drawn hundreds of millions of Spotify streams and have made her a tour headliner. The songs she writes with her brother and producer, Finneas O’Connell, are usually hushed ballads that glance back at Lana Del Rey and Lorde. Her voice is whispery and sweetly tearful with a steely undercurrent, and it stakes out a particular persona: passionate and vulnerable but also vindictive and treacherous. Onstage, she gets thousands of voices singing along. PARELES

Lauren Jenkins

In current country, Fleetwood Mac and the Eagles loom as large as Hank Williams and Loretta Lynn once did. Lauren Jenkins writes and sings about disappointment, disillusion, drinking and holding on despite it all with a Stevie Nicks rasp in her voice. Her debut album, “No Saint,” is set for March 15, and it surrounds her most bitter tidings with gleaming guitars and bright harmonies. PARELES

LeeBrian

LeeBrian, a young Puerto Rican rapper, is the first artist signed to the label of Sky, the producer responsible for hits by J Balvin (and others). LeeBrian is a nimble, flexible vocalist — sometimes agitated, sometimes preternaturally relaxed, and often toggling between both, like on the whimsical “Goku Sin El Ki.” CARAMANICA

Lil Tjay

Lil Tjay is an exuberant, sweet-voiced singer-rapper from the Bronx with an easy instinct for melody. What helps him stand out from the current overstuffed class of artists with similar aesthetic approaches is his comfort moving between both light and dark subject matter, as on the hit “Brothers” and “Long Time.” CARAMANICA

Heather Morgan
Over the past few years, this Texas native has found success in Nashville as a songwriter for Brett Eldredge among others. But listening to her recent debut album, the soothing and lovely “Borrowed Heart” — some of which was written with Lori McKenna — that work for others sounds superfluous. She’s got a sturdy, rich voice, and a way of bending a song toward sadness, where she sounds right at home. CARAMANICA
The South African songwriter Nakhane Touré is also a novelist and actor whose works deal with a fraught upbringing: He broke away from conservative Christian “conversion therapy” to prize his identity as a gay man. The songs on his album “You Will Not Die” — released in Europe last year and due Feb. 22 in the United States — delve into both trauma and redemption. They ponder faith, pleasure, exile and belonging; they traverse hymns, neo-soul, South African pop and electronic dance music, and Nakhane’s voice crests in a vibrant, androgynous falsetto. Tenacity carries him toward joy. PARELES

YBN Cordae
Of all the members of the YBN hip-hop collective, none shows more promise than YBN Cordae, a North Carolina rapper who specializes in thoughtful, emotionally eloquent and lyrically complex music. On songs like “Kung Fu,” he’s impressively dexterous, and of all the rappers who’ve taken swipes at J. Cole recently, only he handed any blows. CARAMANICA

Read full article here: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/10/arts/music/artists-to-watch-2019.html

For more information contact us at Rouvas (0404) 044 823

https://rouvasacademyofsinging.com.au/

The post 10 Artists to Watch in 2019 by The Singing Teacher appeared first on Singing Teacher.

This week’s debut earned 9.2 million viewers in the US to easily sweep its timeslot and make it the network’s highest-rating reality TV premiere since The X Factor launched in 2011.

A singing contest with a twist, the show features 12 mysterious celebrities – including Grammy winners, Broadway stars, and Hollywood Walk of Famers – performing radio hits while disguised in wacky animal costumes.

A judging panel, featuring celebrities Robin Thicke, Nicole Scherzinger, Jenny McCarthy and Ken Jeong, are tasked with picking the best and worst performers and revealing their secret identities.

Perhaps more significantly for local networks, the show has quickly captured that oft-elusive water-cooler buzz, as TV critics fawn over the bizarre concept and viewers speculate over the personalities hidden beneath the nutty costumes.

A review in Vanity Fair described the series as “the show we deserve in 2019”.

“In a broadcast landscape rife with reality-competition shows that recycle the same format over and over again, The Masked Singer feels less like a straightforward take on the genre – and more like a corner of Weird Twitter brought to life by some unholy Hollywood ritual,” the publication wrote.

Other reviews have seen the show labelled “the weirdest and most wonderful show on television”, and “the craziest reality show of our time”.

The series is based on a hit South Korean format, King of Mask Singer, that debuted in 2015, and is produced in the US by Endemol Shine, whose local arm is responsible for shows including Married at First Sight, Australian Ninja Warrior, Australian Survivor and All Together Now.

Read full article here: https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/tv-and-radio/show-we-deserve-in-2019-bizarre-singing-show-becomes-us-tv-s-biggest-reality-hit-20190104-p50pl4.html

For more information contact us at Rouvas (0404) 044 823

https://rouvasacademyofsinging.com.au/

The post Bizarre singing show becomes US TV’s biggest reality hit! Is this the singing show we deserve in 2019? appeared first on Singing Teacher.

Justin Timberlake has postponed another show on his “Man of the Woods” tour as his struggle with bruised vocal cords continues. The latest date to be postponed is tonight’s show at the Oracle Arena in Oakland, although as with the other bumped concerts, promoter Live Nation immediately announced a rescheduled date, this one on March 15 at the same venue.

The postponements began when the singer bumped his Oct. 24 date at Madison Square Garden in New York, saying on social media:

“Hey guys, I’m sorry to announce I have to postpone the show at MSG tonight on doctor’s orders. My vocal cords are severely bruised. I’m gonna make this up to you and the new show will be on my birthday, January 31. More info to come. Again, I’m so sorry to do this, but excited to see you soon. Love, J”

He’d successfully sung his way through a gig at the venue two nights earlier, doing his usual two-hour, 26-song set. Ironically, Monday’s show was a make-up gig itself, following the postponement of a March concert scheduled for Madison Square Garden that Timberlake had put off due to a Nor’Easter.

But a series of postponements have followed, in Buffalo, N.Y.; Tacoma, Wash.; Los Angeles; Phoenix; Las Vegas; Fresno, Calif.; and Portland, OR, along with Oakland.

At press time no announcement had been made on the status of the next date, scheduled for Saturday in Omaha, although a rep for the singer said a statement is expected later today. Timberlake has a total of eight concerts scheduled before the end of the year, with the tour slated to kick off again on Jan. 4 in Washington, DC.

Read full article here:  https://variety.com/2018/music/news/justin-timberlake-postpones-another-concert-vocal-problems-1203080830/

For more information contact us at Rouvas (0404) 044 823

https://rouvasacademyofsinging.com.au/

The post Vocal Classes: Another Concert by Justin Timberlake Postponed Due to Vocal Problems appeared first on Singing Teacher.

Nancy Wilson performing in 1964 at the Hollywood Palace in Los Angeles. A forerunner of the modern female empowerment singer, she could infuse even the saddest song with a sense of strength.  Credit: https://downbeat.com

Nancy Wilson, whose skilled and flexible approach to singing provided a key bridge between the sophisticated jazz-pop vocalists of the 1950s and the powerhouse pop-soul singers of the 1960s and ’70s, died Dec 13, 2018 at her home in Pioneertown, Calif. She was 81.

Her death was confirmed by her manager, Devra Hall Levy, who said Ms. Wilson had been ill for some time; she gave no other details.

In a long and celebrated career, Ms. Wilson performed American standards, jazz ballads, Broadway show tunes, R&B torch songs and middle-of-the-road pop pieces, all delivered with a heightened sense of a song’s narrative.

“I have a gift for telling stories, making them seem larger than life,” she told The Los Angeles Times in 1993. “I love the vignette, the plays within the song.”

Some of Ms. Wilson’s best-known recordings told tales of heartbreak, with attitude. A forerunner of the modern female empowerment singer, with the brassy inflections and biting inflections to fuel it, Ms. Wilson could infuse even the saddest song with a sense of strength.

“Face It Girl,” an epic soul blowout, became one of Ms. Wilson’s biggest chart scores, making the Top 30 of Billboard’s pop chart and Top 15 on its R&B list.

Her biggest hit came in 1964, when “(You Don’t Know) How Glad I Am” (Jimmy Williams and Larry Harrison), a rapturous R&B ballad delivered with panache, reached No. 11 on Billboard’s pop chart.

Three years later she became one of the few African-Americans of her day to host a TV program, the Emmy-winning “Nancy Wilson Show,” on NBC.

A hardworking and highly efficient singer, Ms. Wilson released more than 70 albums in a five-decade recording career. She won three Grammy Awards, one for best rhythm and blues recording for the 1964 album “How Glad I Am,” and two for best jazz vocal album, in 2005 and 2007. In 2004, she was honored as a Jazz Master by the National Endowment for the Arts.

Nancy Sue Wilson was born on Feb. 20, 1937, in Chillicothe, Ohio, the first of six children of Olden Wilson, a supervisor at an iron foundry, and Lillian (Ryan) Wilson, a maid. Her father introduced her to records by mainly male artists, like Nat King Cole, Billy Eckstine and Jimmy Scott, when he sang with Lionel Hampton’s Big Band. “Much of my phrasing is so similar to Jimmy Scott’s,” Ms. Wilson told the The Los Angeles Times.

At 15, while she was still a student at West High School in Columbus, Ohio, Ms. Wilson entered a talent contest held by the local television station WTVN; it led to regular appearances twice a week on its show “Skyline Melodies.” Until her graduation, she sang at nightclubs, sometimes with Sir Raleigh Randolph and His Sultans of Swing, an 18-piece band.

Ms. Wilson arrived in New York in 1959 with three goals: to be signed by the influential jazz manager John Levy, who worked with the saxophonist Cannonball Adderley and the British pianist George Shearing; to be signed by Capitol Records, the home of singers like Nat King Cole and Peggy Lee; and to record her first album with the producer David Cavanaugh, who worked with those singers.

Within five months she fulfilled all three goals, even while holding down a day job as a secretary at the New York Institute of Technology. A high-profile gig at the Blue Morocco club led to the contract with Mr. Levy, who got her the label deal, which connected her with Mr. Cavanaugh to produce her debut album in 1960, “Like in Love,” with splashy arrangements by Billy May.

Live performances, particularly in intimate nightclubs, where audiences could see her gestures, became a hallmark. “Audiences want to see a song as well as hear it,” Ms. Wilson told Jazz Wax. “Part of what I do is in my body language, my hands, my arms. You miss a lot by just hearing my voice.”

At the same time, Ms. Wilson worked tirelessly in the studio, releasing three albums in a single year during her prime. She also made many guest appearances on television, singing on variety shows like “The Ed Sullivan Show” and “The Tonight Show,” and acting in hit series (“I Spy” and “Room 222”).

She used her prominence to break down racial stereotypes. “That’s what I loved about doing ‘The Carol Burnett Show,’ ” she said. “I didn’t have to play ‘black characters.’ I could just do comedy, which I loved.”

Ms. Wilson’s music moved with the times. She cut songs written by the Beatles and Stevie Wonder on her 1966 album “A Touch of Today,” and later incorporated disco and R&B styles before moving back to jazz on her later albums, culminating in “Turned to Blue” in 2006.

Ms. Wilson’s marriage in 1960 to the drummer Kenny Dennis ended in divorce a decade later. In 1973, she married Wiley Burton, a Presbyterian minister, and remained with him until his death in 2008.

She is survived by her three children, Kacy Dennis, Sheryl Burton and Samantha Burton; two sisters, Karen Davis and Brenda Vann; and five grandchildren.

Ms. Wilson remained proud of her holistic approach to music, preferring to call herself a “song stylist” rather than a follower of any genre. “I don’t put labels on it, I just sing,” she told The Los Angeles Times. “It’s all in the ear of the listener. Let them decide.”

Read full article here:  https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/14/obituaries/nancy-wilson-dead-jazz-singer.html

For more information contact us at Rouvas (0404) 044 823

https://rouvasacademyofsinging.com.au/

The post Vocal Coaching: Singer Who Bridged Jazz and Pop, Nancy Wilson, Is Dead at 81 appeared first on Singing Teacher.

Vocal juggernaut. Social activist. Artistic collaborator. Diva.

As Aretha Franklin is laid to rest, the Queen of Soul will deservedly be remembered in an array of tributes reflecting the immense legacy of her life and music.

Her voice is ingrained in the canon of American music, and she’s had a number of staggering accomplishments. But to me, one period of her career stands out as the most significant: the years after she left the world of gospel music.

Her jump to mainstream music meant a move into a segment of the industry that was dominated by men who had very specific assumptions about how a woman should sing – and what she should sing about.

Franklin’s ability to assert control over her career was a watershed moment for female artists seeking to find and maintain their own artistic voice.

Columbia tries to mold a starlet

Aretha Franklin began her career in Detroit singing gospel under the tutelage of her father, C.L. Franklin. As a teenage mother of two in the mid-1950s, sticking with gospel would have been a sensible path for the young singer.

During the 1950s, a number of gospel singers began successfully transitioning into secular music, including notables such as Sam Cooke and Willie Mae Thornton. The ambitious Franklin followed suit and left Detroit for New York City.

In 1960, Aretha Franklin signed a contract with Columbia Records after being pursued by John Hammond, a talent executive who, earlier in his career, had signed Billie Holiday.

At Columbia, Franklin recorded her first non-gospel album, “Aretha: With the Ray Bryant Combo,” which was released in February 1961. Reviews were mixed. It wasn’t so much the quality of the record as it was the hodgepodge nature of its tracks.

The album opens with “Won’t Be Long,” a song written by John Leslie McFarland, who penned a number of hits for 1950s rockers like Bill Haley and Elvis Presley.

The track is a streamlined piece of R&B with a tinge of rock ‘n’ roll thrown in for good measure. Franklin’s role on the song – and the album – is entirely as a vocalist. The keyboard playing and song arrangements – two of Franklin’s particular strengths – were left to her male backing ensemble and production crew.

As much as the song rocks, it plays into the same male fantasy of girls pining away for boys who have run off.

“I get so lonesome since the man has been gone,” she sings, echoing a tired trope. Despite the message, it’s Franklin’s voice – jubilant and strong – that takes over. By the end, the meaning no longer matters. What’s left is Franklin, who clearly doesn’t seem all that bothered about the idea of her man staying or leaving.

After “Won’t Be Long,” things get truly odd. The energy of the opening fizzles as Franklin’s cover of “Over the Rainbow” begins. The juxtaposition of these two songs epitomizes the confusing nature of her first album. It’s almost as if the executives at Columbia couldn’t decide which silo of “feminine popular singer” Franklin should occupy, so they tried a bit of everything.

The rest of the album sustains the same random vibe; Franklin covers standards from Gershwin to Meredith Wilson, with an overdose of McFarland tunes in between.

The album didn’t generate much traction, and her career at Columbia can only be described as frustrating, with her artistic impulses continually suppressed by a company that seemingly wanted to mold a starlet rather than an artist.

Setting Franklin free

Franklin became exasperated with a label that didn’t understand or support the music she was trying to create. By 1966, after nine albums, Columbia and Aretha Franklin parted ways.

Enter Jerry Wexler, the R&B pioneer and Atlantic Records executive who’d been closely following Franklin’s career. Now free of Columbia, Franklin signed with Atlantic Records, which was known as one of the best R&B labels in America.

Wexler’s strategy with Franklin was simple. Rather than attempting to adhere to older standards – as Columbia’s producers were prone to do – Wexler would simply stay out of Franklin’s way, giving her a freedom that led to her creating some of the most exciting and forward-thinking soul music of the era.

A key moment came when Wexler arranged a recording session at the legendary FAME studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama.

That session produced the song “I Never Loved a Man the Way I Loved You,” which was recorded live at the studio. Thematically, “I Never Loved a Man” isn’t all that different from the Columbia release of “Won’t Be Long” – it essentially plays into same male fantasy trope.

But the music is clearly about Franklin.

Utilizing musicians from Muscle Shoals and Memphis’ Stax Records, the song contains a grit and energy that isn’t on the Columbia recordings. With punctuating horns and bluesy guitar fills, the band expertly supports Franklin without overstepping.

While “I Never Loved a Man” may have been the first song released and the title of the album, it was the album’s opening track that truly launched Franklin’s star.

Drop the needle on the album, and you’ll hear horns and a spunky guitar riff. As Franklin sets in to the opening lyric – “What you want, baby I got it” – her piano can be heard hitting like a second drum kit, adding a percussive boom to the entire song.

According to Wexler, the idea to cover “Respect” and the arrangement were Franklin’s. Upon hearing the song that many now herald as a feminist anthem – rather than a song about a relationship – Otis Redding, who wrote the tune, infamously told Jerry Wexler, “That little gal done took my song.”

The rest is history.

Read The Article Here: https://theconversation.com/how-aretha-franklin-found-her-voice-101708

The post Singing Teachers – How did Aretha Franklin found her voice? appeared first on Singing Teacher.

Ali Tennant, who works on The Voice, says unless singers take care of their voices, the damage can be irreparable.

It’s after the likes of Justin Young from The Vaccines and Nathan Sykes from The Wanted damaged their vocal cords singing.

“Most pop stars start off with problems with their voices because they are thrust into the limelight,” said Ali Tennant.

“Or they are working the live circuit and they haven’t had vocal lessons before and they get opportunities they have to take.

“They have problems because they don’t know how to breathe and they can do irreparable damage.”

Nathan Sykes’ voice is back to full strength now but for a while he didn’t know if he’d ever return to The Wanted.

He said: “It was strange, the surgeon sitting me down and saying, ‘You have got to contemplate never singing again. Try and stay positive but if it does go wrong prepare to be devastated’.”

Collapsed lung

His bandmate Jay McGuiness believes it was down to working too much.

“I think it was a case of when our song went big in America we had just come off a huge promo tour and doing loads of gigs, then we had to travel a lot,” he said.

“I don’t think our record labels saw eye to eye on our scheduling, so I think we were just worked pretty hard.”

“I’ve had sore throats and a collapsed lung,” the frontman said. “I’ve had the doctor say, ‘You’ll never sing again.’ It’s terrifying.”
Janet Wilson, an ear, throat and nose consultant in Newcastle, says they see a lot of singers working in pubs and clubs who haven’t had much training.
“That is a recipe for disaster for the voice particularly as they become more successful,” she said.

“If we sing at the wrong pitch and really stretch the front end of that vocal cord, then that can cause problems.”

Tours only get bigger as artists become more successful.

Combining that with the amount of interviews singers have to do and there is often little time to rest their voice.

Vocal coach Ali Tennant says there are ways artists can protect their voice with exercises and being disciplined.

“A lot of young artists nowadays don’t have any [discipline] because of the nature of how they come to be,” he explained.
“Whether they came off The X Factor or The Voice, they don’t have the time to learn.

“They audition and then they’re on a concert tour.”

Read The Article Here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/23188122/touring-and-poor-technique-damaging-singers-voices

The post Vocal Coaching: Touring and poor technique can lead to damaged singers voices appeared first on Singing Teacher.

More and more singers are cancelling big shows and turning to surgery to fix their damaged vocal cords. But is the problem actually down to the way they sing?

“I don’t even know how to start this,” Adele wrote in an online letter to fans on 30 June. The previous night, she had played the second show of a sold-out, four-night residency at Wembley Stadium. These dates, in front of audiences of 98,000, were supposed to be the triumphant conclusion of her record-setting, 123-date world tour. But on stage, something had just felt wrong.

“I’ve struggled vocally both nights,” she wrote. “I had to push a lot harder than I normally do. I felt like I constantly had to clear my throat.” After the second show, Adele went to see her doctor, who told her she had damaged her vocal cords and had no option but to cancel her remaining shows. The most powerful young voice in the music business had fallen silent. “To say I’m heart broken would be a complete understatement,” she wrote.

Though only 29, Adele had been here before. Six years earlier, she had suffered a haemorrhage to her vocal cords after singing live on a French radio program. In order to repair the injury, she underwent an incredibly delicate, high-risk medical intervention: vocal cord microsurgery. In this operation, the surgeon wields miniature scalpels and forceps attached to foot-long poles that are guided down the throat to excise whatever damaged tissue is robbing the vocal cords of their elasticity, and depriving the voice of its natural timbre, range and clarity.

Adele’s surgeon, Dr Steven Zeitels, was after a nasty polyp that had formed under her epithelium, the thin outer layer of the vocal cord. Zeitels carefully snipped the layer with a scalpel, and then, with forceps, pulled back the tissue like a flap, exposing the polyp below. With a second set of forceps he pulled out the gooey, infected mass, and zapped the remaining haemorrhaged surface with a laser to stop the bleeding and prevent scarring.

The margin for error in such surgeries is measured in fractions of a millimetre. You can’t let the instruments touch any healthy tissue. Dig too deep, Zeitels knew, and he would risk damaging the superficial lamina propria, the soft, pliable underlayer of Adele’s vocal cords. If he pierced that, he told me, there would be no way to preserve the power and suppleness of her voice.

On 12 February 2012, three months after her surgery, Adele swept up six awards at the Grammys, including album of the year and song of the year. In her acceptance speech for best pop solo performance, she thanked Zeitels for restoring her voice. To most observers, it was a cheering comeback story, but for a handful of medical specialists it was a watershed moment. For years, vocal cord microsurgery had been considered risky. (In 1997, an unsuccessful surgical procedure left Julie Andrews’ already damaged voice beyond repair.) More than the physical risk, though, singers feared the damage to their careers that could follow if word got out. In the world of showbusiness, it was safer to be seen as a singer with a healthy young voice than as a one-time great with surgically repaired cords.

Now, Adele had suddenly swept away the stigma. In the years since, Zeitels’ business has boomed, along with those of many of his peers. They have no shortage of patients: there is an epidemic of serious vocal cord injuries in the performing arts. In addition to his work on Adele, Zeitels, who directs the Massachusetts General Hospital Center for Laryngeal Surgery and Voice Rehabilitation, has repaired the cords of more than 700 performing artists, including Sam Smith, Lionel Richie, Bono and Cher. Michael Bublé, Keith Urban, Meghan Trainor and Celine Dion have also had to quit touring to get their cords surgically repaired. In a mark of how attitudes to surgery have changed, both Smith and Bublé broke the news of their surgeries to their fans via Instagram.
Advertisement

There is no precise data on the number of performers who have gone under the knife over the years. But several surgeons told me they estimate that vocal cord surgery has been performed on thousands of pop, rock and classical singers, as well as on theatre and stage musical stars. Cancelled shows reverberate across social media and hit a struggling music industry hard. When Adele pulled out of her remaining two Wembley shows this summer, nearly 200,000 tickets had to be refunded. It’s unclear if she will ever tour again.

After Adele’s 2011 surgery, Zeitels became something of a celebrity. Occasionally, a reporter asked him if Adele was cured for good. He made no assurances, but told Channel 4’s Jon Snow that her surgically repaired voice “sounds smoother now than before”.

While the media was celebrating this miracle surgery, one woman in the music industry raised a dissenting voice. According to Lisa Paglin, a former opera singer turned voice coach, Zeitels had simply found a temporary fix; in the not too distant future, Adele would once again be forced off the stage and back into the operating theatre. It was a prediction that Paglin and Marianna Brilla, her coaching partner, were willing to stake their reputations on. The rash of vocal injuries silencing our most promising young talents, they argued, is too big a problem to be solved by microsurgery.

“How many surgeries would Dr Zeitels consider performing on Adele? Or on anyone? After surgery, unless a singer makes major changes, ‘return to performing’ means a return to the vocal abuse that put her/him on the operating table in the first place,” Paglin wrote, in the small trade publication Intermezzo. “Concerts – injury – surgery – rest – concerts – injury – surgery. Is this the life of a professional singer?”

When Adele cancelled the final nights of her recent tour, Brilla and Paglin felt saddened but vindicated. For more than a decade, they have been pushing for a revolution in the way that almost every modern performer has been taught to use their voice. After years of painstaking research in musical archives, early scientific journals and the classroom, Brilla and Paglin say they can deliver what medical science has failed to: a permanent fix for vocal burnout.

Their solution requires the revival of an all-but-vanished singing method that is not just beautiful to the ear, but also easy on the throat. Some of their ageing and beleaguered clients described it to me as a kind of fountain of youth. But their cure is not without controversy. It is based on a provocative theory that has been gaining ground among a small cadre of international talents: that we have all been singing completely wrong – even Adele.

Singing is a rough business. Every vocal performance involves hundreds of thousands of micro-collisions in the throat. The vocal cords – also known as vocal folds – are a pair of thin, reed-like, muscular strips located inside the larynx, or voice box, in the throat. They are shaped like a wishbone, and contain the densest concentration of nerve tissue in the body.
Advertisement

When we are silent, the cords remain apart to facilitate breathing. When we sing or speak, air is pushed up from the lungs, and the edges of the cords come together in a rapid chopping motion. The air causes the cords to vibrate, creating sound. The greater the vibration, the higher the pitch. By the time a soprano hits those lush high notes, her vocal cords are thwacking together 1,000 times per second, transforming a burst of air from her lungs into music powerful enough to shatter glass.

Beautiful singing requires lithe cords, but all that slapping together can wear down their fine, spongy surface and lead to tiny contusions. Over years of heavy use, nodules, polyps or cysts form on the vocal folds, distorting the sound they create. For a singer, the first sign of trouble is often the wobble. His pitch fluctuates on and off key because his ragged cords have lost their natural vibrato – their ability to resonate properly. Then there’s the “hole”, a point on the scale where a singer’s vibrating vocal cords fail to produce the proper tone. Try as he might, those notes will exit his mouth flat or, worse, as a barely audible gasp.

It was once unheard-of for a singer to perform with a faulty voice, but the opera world has recently been shaken by a trio of incidents in which the stars Rolando Villazón, Aleksandrs Antonenko and Roberto Alagna walked off stage mid-performance, unable to go on. Some opera singers complain of year-round cold symptoms, and legal steroid injections and other drugs are often used to get a struggling singer through a performance. But singing through the wear and tear can cause the lesions to burst and bleed, creating voice-ruining scars, which is what happened to Adele in 2011.

Voice specialists liken the physical toll on singers and stage performers to what athletes endure. Surgery to the professional singer’s vocal cords is what ligament reconstruction has become to the football player’s knee. Dusty theatres, stuffy airplane cabins, erratic eating and sleeping patterns, the stress of living off stingy contracts – all affect the vocal cords. Add to it the occupational hazard, at least in opera and classical music, of taking on roles that require you to sing above your natural range, and the cords become extremely susceptible to injury.

In 1986, the conductor, vocal coach and New York Times music critic Will Crutchfield lamented that vocal burnout was cutting short careers and diminishing the power of opera, “as audiences, by necessity, accustom themselves to hearing voices in poor condition”. Back then, Crutchfield saw that singers peaked in their 30s and then began to decline. But Adele, Trainor and Smith all underwent career-saving surgery in their 20s. Vocal burnout is afflicting amateurs, too. One veteran teacher in Italy told me that female students in their early 20s who want to sing like Adele or a young Whitney Houston are the ones who come down with vocal nodules. Another music teacher told me she recently had to instruct one of her 10-year-old students to stop singing and get his damaged cords checked by a specialist.
Advertisement

The rise in vocal injuries is linked to a change in what we consider good singing. Across all genres, it has become normal to believe that louder is better. (One reason that Adele is such a big star is because her voice is so big.) As a result, singers are pushing their cords like never before, which leads to vocal breakdown.

New waves of medical research into the causes of dysphonia, or the inability to properly produce voice, bear this out. In the west, vocal abuse is surprisingly common in all professions that rely on the voice , from schoolteachers to opera singers. Awareness of the problem is growing, but as Adele’s case demonstrated, and separate studies conclude, surgery is not necessarily a lasting fix.

Brilla and Paglin have been saying this for years. “You cannot solve the problem by simply relieving the symptom,” Brilla said. “It’s a motor problem. The singer has to understand it’s the way you’re running your engine” – the techniques they’re using to sing. “If you don’t fix the engine, it’s going to happen again.”

Teatro La Nuova Fenice, a 19th-century opera house built in the neoclassical style, sits at the top of the small hill town of Osimo in central Italy, just inland of the Adriatic Sea. In the grand lobby of the building is a marble plaque commemorating the night in 1927 when the Italian tenor Beniamino Gigli, one of the greatest talents of his era, performed here. Gigli packed concert halls across Europe and the Americas in a career that spanned five decades.

Gigli is an icon of the purer, more natural singing style that characterised a period when vocal injuries were almost unheard of, say Brilla and Paglin. They have a small teaching studio in a cul-de-sac below La Nuova Fenice. Brilla, a dramatic soprano with a fearless air, first became obsessed with the fragility of the human voice more than 50 years ago, as a teenage opera singer growing up in Pennsylvania coal country. A doctor there diagnosed her with a problem common among young singers with big voices: her vocal cords weren’t coming together properly. She had a hole. Over the next few decades, she cycled through nearly 30 teachers, including legends such as Antonio Tonini and Ellen Faull, trying to learn to sing in a style like Gigli’s – at once powerful, clear and sustainable over the course of many years.

Brilla met Paglin, a lyric soprano who appears small next to Brilla, while studying voice at Indiana University’s school of music. The two bonded over their love for Italian opera and their frustration with the way singing was taught, even by their legendary teacher Margaret Harshaw. Feeling that the giants of music instruction didn’t have the key to vocal longevity, Brilla and Paglin determined that they would be the ones to unlock the secret.

In 1977, Brilla won a prestigious Fulbright scholarship to travel to Italy to search for a way to sing beautifully without risking injury. There, she heard glimpses of perfect arias from older, mostly Italian opera singers who learned their craft in the early 20th century. These singers seemed to effortlessly produce clear, powerful musical tones, and so many of them were still performing with vigour well into their 60s, 70s and 80s. To Brilla, they held a clue to the vocal longevity lost to singers today.
Advertisement

Paglin soon joined her in Rome, where they started spending hours each day at the national sound archive, La Discoteca di Stato, listening to early recordings. They also scoured libraries for texts that discussed how operatic and classical singing techniques had changed over the centuries. When they weren’t researching, they were performing; big talents in their own right, they performed in many of the major opera houses and music halls of Italy and Austria. This put them in the presence of more masters, whom they peppered with questions. They also tracked down other ageing opera stars, teachers and conductors.

Their research pointed Brilla and Paglin to a surprising conclusion: that responsibility for the modern decline of the voice lay at the feet of Verdi, Wagner and Puccini. These three composers were the pop music sensations of their day. Music scholars credit them with being the first to challenge their singers to push their voices to new limits, in order to capture the emotional ups and downs their characters were feeling. Think of the teenage Japanese bride in Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, her heart breaking, desperately watching the seas for a sign her love will return, or the thunderous battle cries of the Valkyries in Wagner’s Ring cycle. If you’re going to kill off the main character of your show, you need genuine rage and pathos on stage.

But Brilla and Paglin heard something different – that the emotionally charged, full-throated, operatic singing style Verdi and Wagner made popular in the late 19th century – and that Puccini amped up even further in the early 20th century – had subsequently infiltrated all singing genres and public performances. With each passing decade, the style grew more extreme. To illustrate the point, when I visited the duo earlier this summer, Paglin pulled from their sprawling research library a file containing a series of images. The first was a photograph, taken in 1920, of the legendary Italian tenor Enrico Caruso mid-aria. Caruso seems to be enjoying himself, even as the camera flashes; it’s as if he’s talking to a friend, not baying at the audience. “This is natural singing,” Paglin said.

As she flipped from image to image, we travelled towards the present, a decade at a time. The photographs of the more contemporary singers – including the tenor Rolando Villazón, who has suffered multiple vocal injuries – looked like horror-movie stills: their mouths were wide open, eyes bulging, neck veins popping, as if they were screaming. There was none of Caruso’s easy calm.

Caruso and Gigli produced legendarily big sounds, but with an effort that today’s performers might deride as somewhat wimpy. Compare Caruso’s 1916 recording of O Sole Mio with Villazón’s 2010 rendition. Caruso’s is powerful, but not so powerful that the lyrics crash into one another and become indecipherable; and even at the height of the aria, he doesn’t drown out the strings. That Brilla and Paglin had identified this contrast wasn’t enough. They wanted to reverse-engineer exactly how Caruso and his contemporaries sang.

n 1983, Brilla convinced Maria Carbone, a retired Italian operatic soprano, to work with them. Carbone was nearing 80, but still had a powerful voice. While Carbone sang, Brilla would clasp Carbone’s abdomen to feel what was happening inside her body. Carbone started with an aria from Tosca. As her voice rose, hitting higher and higher notes, Brilla’s eyes widened. “I could feel this tick, tick. Tick, tick,” she recalled. It was the natural up-down release of her diaphragm. “Nothing else was happening.” Carbone’s ribcage wasn’t ballooning out as she sang, and there were no deep gulps of air, as is common with today’s big-voiced singers. More amazing still, the movement of Carbone’s abdomen while singing was just as quiet and rhythmic as when she spoke. “It was a discovery of what the perfect singer’s posture should be,” Paglin said.

Brilla added: “Whereas all the teachers in my life had been telling me to open, open, open” – to exaggerate her breathing and lunge into every high note to produce the biggest sound – Carbone “was demonstrating the opposite”. The root of the problem, they realised, is in classrooms. “Too many students graduate from conservatories who don’t know how to sing, and it’s leading to injury,” Brilla said. “We’ve got to stop this. It’s ass-backwards!”

It is not just singers whose careers are threatened by deteriorating vocal cords. In 1989, the Italian actor Maddalena Crippa momentarily lost her voice during a live performance of Shakespeare’s bloodiest work, Titus Andronicus. Crippa was playing Tamora, the vanquished queen of the Goths. After Tamora’s son is murdered before her eyes, Crippa said she “unleashed these uncontrollable cries”. But, for a moment, her next line wouldn’t come out. It was the first time in her acting career that Crippa’s vocal cords had failed her. “The suffering I felt was indescribable,” she told me.

That suffering continued for more than a decade. Crippa’s voice was no longer reliably crisp and sonorous, and a burning pain lingered in her throat. After visiting vocal coaches and throat specialists, she got the prognosis that all performers dread: nodules on her cords. Cortisone injections and voice exercises worked well enough to get her back on stage, but her confidence was shaken. “You mean you still don’t know how to use your voice?” she remembered thinking. “It’s demoralising.” Then, in 2002, at the suggestion of a fellow actor, Crippa visited Brilla and Paglin’s Osimo studio.

Unlike medical doctors, Brilla and Paglin don’t own a laryngoscope that allows them to peer into the throat. If someone comes to them with injuries, they treat the problem by ear. They sing a soft note and ask the student to match it precisely. They can hear in the response where the pitch is off-key, and where the damage is located on the cord. (When I spoke with Adele’s surgeon, Steven Zeitels, he demonstrated something similar, singing a scale to isolate where his own cord is damaged – a perturbation, as it’s called, the result of years of long hours in the classroom.)
Advertisement

The moment Crippa said hello, Brilla and Paglin knew there was something very wrong with her voice. She exuded tension, as if bracing for confrontation, and took big, gulping breaths before speaking. Brilla and Paglin often see this problem with singers; their vocal cords are so used to having great quantities of air shoved at them that the cords won’t respond without that force. “Once you start pushing, you’re condemned to push for the rest of your life,” Paglin told me. “Unless you learn a new way of doing it.”

In their studio, Brilla and Paglin instructed Crippa to lie on her back and produce a series of high notes, which Paglin demonstrated for me. It sounded like a faint squeaking, as if she was gently releasing air from the neck of a balloon. When Crippa was told to reproduce what Paglin called a “floating high C”, she protested, saying she couldn’t get that far up the scale. Finally, she gave it a try, producing a barely audible piff, followed by a more sustained tone. Hearing herself, Crippa broke down and cried. “They were tears of joy,” Crippa told me. “They touched a nerve deep inside me. I mean, this is my voice. My voice.”

Brilla and Paglin say they can restore most vocal cord problems naturally, via exercises that “massage out” the defect over time. They aim to stimulate the cords precisely where they aren’t coming together properly, and to break students out of the bad habits that cause problems in the first place: taking big gulps of air, tensing the throat and jaw muscles, forcing the mouth to open to exaggerated proportions, and the urge to scream out the high notes.

There are limits to what Brilla and Paglin claim to be able to do for an ailing artist. Paglin told me of a time when she was watching a singer perform on stage, and could tell there was something very wrong. She got a message to the singer that he urgently needed to see a doctor. He did, and was diagnosed with a form of throat cancer.

But their track record with other difficult cases has earned them a small international following. The veteran Italian stage actor Moni Ovadia was one of their earliest big-name success stories. Throughout his mid-40s, he performed up to 250 shows a year, in Europe and the US, but by 48 he was ready to quit showbusiness. His voice had become flat and raspy, and he found it physically painful to perform. He credits Paglin and Brilla with restoring his voice and his career. “They saved my life,” he told me. Today, at 71, he is a bull on stage, and can perform non-stop for up to three hours.

In May, at Brilla and Paglin’s studio in Osimo, I watched an aspiring dramatic soprano named Emanuela Albanesi rehearse the high-energy duet Mi Volete Fiera?, from Gaetano Donizetti’s comic opera Don Pasquale. There are few, if any, widely accepted standards for teaching singing, and many teachers complain that too many of their peers get jobs because of how they sound, not what they know. Paglin and Brilla mine the internet for teaching videos that concern them, such as one in which a soprano chides a student to open her mouth wider and wider as she sings an aria, in order to achieve more volume; not until the student plugs her fist into her mouth is the teacher satisfied.
Advertisement

Albanesi, however, sang with an ease that belied the strength of her highest notes. As she came to the final “grazie!”, I was expecting a thunderous, take-the-roof-off moment, but she never lost the disarming grin with which she performed. I thought of that photo of Enrico Caruso singing with such relaxed ease. I whispered to Brilla that it was the first time I had ever been able to make out each and every lyric in a such an intense operatic number. “I’m telling you,” she said. “We’ve cracked it.”

The question remains: could Brilla and Paglin’s approach permanently cure an artist like Adele by teaching her to sing in a more natural way? Steven Zeitels is dismissive of such an approach, and quick to defend Adele and his other clients against the contention that bad technique is causing their vocal problems. “People used to think if you needed an operation it meant you don’t know how to sing. The people I see – they know how to sing!”

Zeitels believes that medical specialists such as himself are becoming increasingly important to the arts, which he compared to other demanding physical pursuits. Any athletic endeavour will eventually take a toll if done for long enough, he said. “What’s terrific is we’re getting better and better at bringing people back.”

Specially trained vocal therapists have also restored performers to health through voice training, but medical experts advise taking this route only for minor vocal injuries, such as small nodules. Otherwise, they strongly suggest surgery. This attitude rankles Brilla and Paglin, who have cured artists such as the internationally renowned jazz singer Maria Pia De Vito, who suffered from a vocal cord cyst. In her case, surgery was never advised. But it often is, even in these benign cases. “What irony,” Paglin said. “There is an industry built around singers who harm themselves while singing, and there is another one built around fixing them up.”

Another renowned throat surgeon, Dr Robert T Sataloff, who has performed voice-corrective surgery on several Grammy Award winners, including Patti LuPone, bristles at the notion that surgery is not a sensible way to keep singers healthy. Combined with proper education on the dangers of improper singing technique, he believes it can keep people on stage for longer. “Is it perfect? No. And it probably never will be,” he told me. Like Zeitels, Sataloff drew a sporting analogy. Injury is inevitable – “and that’s when they end up in my office”.

Some conservatory teachers in Italy dismiss Brilla and Paglin’s natural-singing approach as heretical, and their disciples as a sect. Over time, the duo have made a number of enemies. An invitation in 2011 to teach a series of master classes at Rome’s Conservatorio di Musica Santa Cecilia, one of Italy’s top conservatories, met with near universal opposition among the faculty. The classes were popular with the students, but many teachers didn’t want them on campus. Edda Silvestri, the former director of Santa Cecilia, told me she didn’t recall any overt hostility towards the duo, but she did remember the rift Brilla and Paglin created between faculty and students. “Unfortunately, this is common when you try to introduce any new approach to a conservatory. They are conservative places,” Silvestri said. Elizabeth Aubry, the vice president of Italy’s most influential organisation of singing teachers, the Associazione Insegnanti di Canto Italiana, finds Brilla and Paglin’s critiques “ terrible”. She said the main objective of her organisation and its counterparts in the UK and US is to teach teachers precisely not to do damage.

For his part, Zeitels is working on a futuristic fix to dysphonia. Anyone who relies particularly heavily on their voice – schoolteachers, talkshow hosts, sales reps, preachers, lawyers, frazzled parents – is vulnerable to chronic raspiness, or to going hoarse. One of Zeitels’ patented innovations is to apply a biomaterial – a gel implant – in the tissue of damaged vocal cords to restore pliability. He sees it as a potentially huge breakthrough. “It will be just as important what you put into a vocal cord as what you remove,” he told a journalist in 2015.

But some of Brilla and Paglin’s students are thriving without such intervention, including Maddalena Crippa, who at 59 years old is in the midst of a remarkable second act. Her voice has been injury-free since she started working with Brilla and Paglin 15 years ago, and last May she wrapped up a critically acclaimed tour of L’Allegra Vedova, a one-woman-show based on a 1905 operetta. For 75 minutes each night, she sang and acted two roles, the husky-voiced Danilo and the high-pitched Anna, who at one point sing a virtuosic duet. Critics were impressed, with one raving that Crippa is still “a brilliant singer”.

Adele, however, is one of those rare figures in the arts. Her unique voice, and her story, are so big that many people believe that what she does (or doesn’t do) to correct her latest injury will determine future approaches to protecting the voice.

On 1 July, when news broke of Adele’s cancellations, Paglin sent me a Whatsapp message. She was frustrated by the press coverage. Recalling that Adele’s original surgery in 2011 had proved to be a huge PR victory for vocal-cord microsurgery, she worried that the message from Adele’s latest setback would be that, not to worry, a second or third surgery will get the star back on stage. “What makes matters worse is that the ‘mechanics’ are still convinced that all there is to it is to keep operating, while the singers themselves still talk about air travel, drafts, allergies and ‘stress’. #elephantintheroom could be a good hashtag,” she wrote, referring to what is wrong, as she sees it, with how people are taught to sing in the first place.

A few hours later, she sent me another note. She felt bad for Adele, and wanted to help. “We know how to fix Adele’s problems (sans surgery), and for good. If only we could talk with her.”

The post Why do stars like Adele keep losing their voice? appeared first on Singing Teacher.

http://rouvasacademyofsinging.com.au/blog/can-anyone-learn-to-sing-for-most-of-us-the-answer-is-yes/ Do you have a pair of vocal folds that can produce sound? Can you tell the difference between a higher note and a lower note? Good news! You and about 98.5% of the population absolutely can be taught how to sing.

And the rest? Well, according to a recent Canadian study, about 1.5% of the population suffer from a condition called “congenital amusia”. They have real difficulty discriminating between different pitches, tone, and sometimes rhythm.

So if you were to play a well-known melody – say, the tune to “Happy Birthday” – and you played a few wrong notes, most people would identify the errors straight away. However, someone with congenital amusia might not notice anything wrong at all. You can see examples of that in this video, from about the 3.20 mark:

Natural talent aside, most of us can be taught to sing

Several years ago I had a request for private vocal lessons from a woman who just wanted to sing one song for her husband’s birthday in six months time.

What I noticed was that she was unable to accurately pitch match. She came to lessons each week and maintained her practice with incredible diligence. What she lacked in natural ability, she made up for in heart and work ethic. Within six months, she was not only matching pitch, but she was singing one and a half octave patterns slowly through her entire range (for example, from low C to A in the next octave up).

More importantly if she sang a note incorrectly, she could discern and correct it herself. She performed the song for her family and it was a happy outcome for all involved.

Her experience shows that hard work pays off, but that’s not the only factor. Work by German researchers found that that it is not just how much you practice that counts, but rather how quickly you identify and correct your error. This is what makes an OK singer into an expert performer. That said, without deliberate practice even the most talented singer will reach a plateau and get stuck.

How singing works

Understanding exactly how singing works is a surprisingly complex field of research. There is a rather significant leap from singing in the shower or being part of a community choir (although both are a great place start) to pursuing singing professionally.

Singing practice and training involves generating a sense of vocal freedom – this is what you’re seeing when you watch someone sing movingly, beautifully but seemingly without effort. For most singers, years of practice go into developing that kind of freedom.

As singing voice teacher Jeannette Lovetri writes:

It takes about 10 years to be a master singer. Ten years of study, investigation, involvement, experience, experiment, exploration, and development, and in some way, that’s when you start really being an artist.

We are all born with the key ingredients of a singing voice. The early gurgling and bubbling sounds we make as babies contain some of the key components of singing – a variety of pitches, dynamics, rhythms and phrases. But some of us may have a genetic advantage that can be enhanced by training.

A University of Melbourne study called Let’s Hear Twins Sing aims to discover what factors influence singing ability and to what extent genes play a role in pitch accuracy.

Physical skill and control

The act of singing looks simple but actually involves highly skilled control and coordination of muscles – and these muscles need to be both flexible and strong. True control comes from training.

A person needs to be able to control the air pressure in their lungs and use their abdominal muscles to push air through the trachea, where it meets the vocal folds, which start to vibrate. In a really good singer, vocal health, posture and alignment, breath management are matched with imagination, self-expression and creativity.

A really good contemporary professional pop singer isn’t just born that way. They also need an inquiring mind, dedication to understanding the physiology of the vocal instrument, the discipline and daily practice of warm-ups and a variety of exercises, a deep understanding of music harmony, ability to notate and transcribe music, some degree of improvisation and stagecraft skills.

Film stars learn to sing all the time for a role (usually surrounded by a team of vocal teachers and months of daily practice). The results aren’t always perfect, but that’s not necessarily what is important. Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, for example, has a small, breathy voice but it suits her role and enhances her character.

So if you’ve never sung professionally but want to try singing, I encourage you to give it a go! Chances are that you can be taught to sing – and even if you can’t, there are health benefits to trying.

Singing increases breathing control and lung capacity, it can improve heart health, and release the happy hormone oxytocin, elevate your mood and reduce pain, and may even increase your immunity. Even practising a new behaviour, like singing, can be good for the brain.

So enjoy singing. Find a singing teacher who loves singing and teaching, performs regularly and incorporates their knowledge of anatomy and physiology into their vocal teaching. Once you start, you’ll likely realise that singing can bring benefits for life.

The post Can anyone learn to sing? For most of us, the answer is yes appeared first on Singing Teacher.