When I was running around the World being a tenor, I learned many interesting things. One thing I had to wait to find out until I quit letting the airlines drag me around, is that the human ability to imitate the Kazoo has become a pedagogical teaching tool.
My latest blog “Ears” was about the lack of faith teachers have in the standard student’s ability to use their ears. One of the most tragic examples of the “don’t listen to yourself” school showed up very recently. A young man contacted me through the “Please Write” page on this website and asked me for advice. He responded to my request for recordings of his voice with some songs and a lesson with his current teacher.
One of my female students used to send me recordings of her voice lessons from the school where she went to further her education. In her recordings, I discovered the Kazoo teaching technique. The student is instructed to make a pitched sound with the vocal chords while buzzing the lips of the mouth. That I had reservations about the efficacy of this instruction is a howling understatement, but when the student came back from that school, I discovered that she could sing higher into her head voice before an hysterical clenching of the vocal chords would eventually shut down her sound. I explained to her that the trick of the buzz had helped her to sing a little higher. My fear that she could lose her ability to sing in Chest Voice was happily unwarranted and so I was a bit mollified. I wasn’t in love with the buzz, but “No harm no foul.”
As I found time to listen to the recordings from the young tenor who contacted me, I finally finished all the songs and started to audition the lesson he sent me. Another school, another teacher, another student, another buzz. Almost a continent away from the school where my female student was being told to do scales while buzzing her lips, a male student sends me a recording of a teacher instructing him to buzz his lips too. So what? Using the “Chest Voice” while Buzzing the lips is impossible. The quantity of airflow required to make the lips of the mouth buzz cannot get past “Complete Glottal Closure”. The function at the larynx will have to be a very weak “Falsetto” or “Head” voice so that enough air gets past the vocal chords for making those lips buzz. Now a soprano or a mezzo soprano may find buzzing the lips to be a good way to stop unintentional “Belting” or relaxing tightness in the upper register, but for a boy this Buzziness can be a real problem.
I wrote back to this young man asking:
“Can you sing in Chest Voice/Complete Glottal Closure?”
“If you can, please let me hear it.”
I’m still waiting for an answer from him.
This falsetto singing where chest voice is appropriate is not unique to this particular student. I was puzzled some time ago by the same kind of singing in a set of You Tube videos. The links for these videos had come from a friend who wanted me to hear a new “Rossini Voice” on the rise in the business. The singer I heard in those videos was better organized than the vocal student I am still hoping to hear from, but his manner of phonation was the same. No chest voice to be heard anywhere.
A few tenors I encountered in the old days used this falsetto affectation from the upper middle part of their voices all the way up to the highest notes they would sing. There was even a bass baritone that found it useful. But these guys would sing in chest voice in the lower portion of their voices. In the world of singing I used to live in, chest voice was still going strong.
With that Kazoo teaching technique buzzing in my ears, I now realize that Chest Voice is under attack. With this blog I sound the alarm.
It is one thing to lament the lack of Chest Voice in a soprano. She can still sing a lot of music with success. The tenor lacking Chest Voice is another matter altogether. In my understanding of the Art and Craft of singing he is actually missing his voice. Chest Voice IS the tenor voice, the baritone voice and the bass voice. Now, let’s apply the Kazoo method to a student and suggest that the resulting feeling in the throat is just the best ever and should be kept universally operative. Let’s also say that the singer should pay no attention to the sound that results from keeping that feeling going even while not buzzing those lips. If the student follows our advice, we will have picked the pocket of that student, and the Chest Voice will be only a distant memory. If this happens to a male student, a foul will most certainly occur.
In my world of operative ears the above reality would just be another “Say what!!!!?” weird effort to invent some “new” method. In this new world invented for students that measures feelings as good and listening impossible, “The Buzz” seems to be Chest Voice poison.