These little numbers are the first arbiters of everything aural. What they hear is what you’ve got if you listen to yourself.
I want to let everyone know that the size of brain you may be carrying around has nothing to do with those ears doing the work they should do. I have worked with some really mentally challenged individuals while I was still traveling from Opera House to Opera House. Each of these mental midgets had no problem singing gloriously. They were also able to adjust the sound of their voices according to what they heard. I guess this success of the mentally deficient might be one reason why the Vocal Universe is so full of denigration of these little sensory organs called the ears. However, I am baffled by “teachers” telling students to distrust their ears. It makes me want to cry.
Garcia is quoted by his last student as advising that students should listen to their voices. The word ear is missing from this quote, but my question is this: How big a brain do you need to understand that Garcia’s advice is about the use of the ears?
The ears are not the exclusive organs of vibration perception because they cannot pick up a lot of sensations that the nerves in our skin and muscles easily detect. These other organs can give us information that adds depth to the data that the ears perceive. A look at the technology designed to deliver vibrations that the ears miss can give you a general idea of what I’m talking about. Garcia wants us to pay attention to the ears and not the sensations we feel elsewhere. This includes the internal feelings of vibrations that may or may not get our attention as we sing. The information we get from our ears is primary. The information we get directly from the structure of the throat is maybe #4 or #5, the vibratory information we get from the surrounding structures of our chest #7 or #8. What we feel in our gluteus maximus has no number on my list. So let’s stay focused on the important parts of the human anatomy that participate in producing our vocal result.
The ears themselves are incapable of judgment. That’s why the brain was created, and why Garcia tells us to use it.
The reason we go to a teacher in the first place is to have the teacher’s ears hear our voices so that the teacher can use his/her brain to communicate to us how to improve our product. The sad state of affairs that I lament in “Factory Made” is that the pedagogues, intent on convincing students to voluntarily pretend to be deaf, are having success. To make a voice student pretend that the only ears in the studio belong to the teacher is to make the student take a lesson in which the student is a passive participant. I can understand why a weary Factory Worker might want to keep the assembly line running smoothly.
A student telling a teacher about the student’s own opinion vis-à-vis the quality of his or her singing can be really annoying not to mention how it can slow things down. My problem with this desire for efficiency is a result of my value system. The student on that assembly line is more important to me than the teacher. The student is more important than the entire Factory.
I believe that all teachers’ ears need to be treated with cynicism and verified by the voice student’s own ears and judgment. These little numbers come in matched pairs and are not accessories. They are an integral part of the gift that every successful artist enjoys and are as necessary as the larynx. The student cannot exercise his or her responsibility to take care of the instrument that God gave him/her without using those ears and they are the first and most important part of the singer’s defenses.
Interpretation is also impossible without the participation of the ears. What Garcia advises the artist to do in order to bring life to his/her performance also includes the use of the ears and the brain. This brings to mind two quotes that caught my notice when I read a recent pedagogical publication.
On page 2 Madam Sell writes:
“Hoole suggests that interpretation as a subject cannot be taught.”
She then includes the following quote that she paraphrases later in her text on page 155:
“but it can be cultivated in all but a small minority. Anyone whose desire is to learn a musical instrument must, by the fact that they are interested, suggest at least some basic interpretational senses on which to build.”
Ivor Hoole, “Once more with feeling”, MUSIC TEACHER, September, 12-15, 1995. P. 12
On page 153 we find:
“In the final analysis interpretation cannot be taught.”
James C. McKinney, The Diagnosis and Correction of Vocal Faults, Nashville: Genevox Music Group 1994, p. 29
The fatigued Factory Worker/Teacher might take solace from the above advice. I do not know madam Sell’s situation, but can imagine her manning a station on the Factory Floor at the assembly line passing rather quickly under the sign: “For Singers Only”. Maybe the singer should hang his brain on the same hook intended for his ears at the Factory door. Can you imagine what fun Lucy and Ethel would have had if those chocolates were given the power to talk.