Singing, Teaching, and the Larger Questions

Over the past twenty years, I’ve been collecting ideas about singing and teaching—not just about how to sing, but about how singing and teaching interleave with science, philosophy, society, and the way we understand ourselves. Most of my students have heard me say, “Have I given you the [blank] talk yet?” This blog is my attempt to bring those talks into a more formal presentation.

My path here hasn’t been a straight line. I didn’t grow up as a successful young singer; in fact, I was denied entry to college as a voice performance major. I didn’t have an early, polished success story. What I did have was a house full of diverse music and vocal role models, and a mind that was constantly curious. As a child, I built things, took them apart, and built them again. My greatest academic strengths were in physics, math, and

geometry. That impulse—to construct, dismantle, and find how things work—is still with me today, whether I’m in my shed with wood or in the studio with singers.

That background shapes how I think about teaching. I see technique not as a single system to be mastered, but as one expression of much larger questions: How do our minds process experience? What does it mean to act freely? How do chaos and order coexist in the singing mechanism? And how can ideas from science and philosophy help us look at the act of singing with fresh eyes?

This is not a blog of instruction. I won’t be offering tips for a better high note or a guide to supraglottic vibration—you can find that somewhere else, or just come and have a lesson. Instead, I want to use this space to integrate and to challenge: to gather my love of music, philosophy, and science and set them alongside one another. Some posts will circle around technique, others around Buddhism, free will, interoception, chaos theory, theatrical

A bench I created and designed from scratch.

expression, or ideas I haven’t yet imagined. My hope is not that you take them as lessons, but that you give them space to bounce around your thoughts and perhaps intertwine with your own conceptions of singing, teaching, and learning. If you are a libertarian free will incompatibilist, like me, then you believe that’s not your choice :). But that is for another blog.

If you love singing, or teaching, or simply enjoy reconsidering old questions in new light, I invite you to read along and share your thoughts.