An aspiring singing professional has to navigate a sea of singing experts and make decisions about how to interact with them. Beyond determining whether someone is a singing expert, they must determine what type of singing expert they’re working with.
That’s hard. As previously mentioned on this site, a person generally (and a beginner especially) doesn’t know what they don’t know. Expecting a beginner to accurately judge the capabilities of a self-proclaimed expert is unrealistic. But there might be a few things that the beginner can do to help him/herself.
Clash of the Singing Experts
Further, there’s a second layer of challenge, and that’s the occasional clash between types of singing experts. The singer can receive a bit of advice from one expert that is contradicted the next day by a different expert. One can see this tension between experts in a quote such as this from Michael Sylvester:
What matters more and more are academic honors and degrees… As research in vocal science—a very important subject—has ramped up in the past 30 years or so, there has been an academically driven switch in the fine points of vocal technique…To my mind, this has led to timid, careful, uneventful and measured singing…You learn how hard it is to be on a stage, a real professional stage, and deliver night after night. You hone your craft and then you learn a completely different and equally hard thing: How to hear a voice and diagnose its problems and then how to fix those problems and how to carefully and cautiously week after week train a young voice in a technique that will serve the student for a lifetime…Many of our finest singers have been awful teachers…They are lousy teachers, I think, because…they mostly were born with a heightened skill at singing and were trained very expertly how to use their own voice.
There’s a lot to unwrap in a quote like that. He’s presenting several ideas: first, credentials do not make an expert, at least not by themselves. Second, the influence of science on voice teaching hasn’t necessarily been a good thing all of the time, or even most of the time. Third, it’s important to learn how to actually produce on a professional stage on a regular basis. However, and fourth, being a professional singer is not – by itself – what makes a good voice teacher. Whew.
I’m not as pessimistic on the state of voice teaching overall, but I’ve sometimes heard similar concerns in private conversations I’ve had with other teachers. Clearly, there’s some sense that singing expertise doesn’t necessarily translate across fields: one can be an honored academic or terrific singer and still not be a great or even good teacher. Likewise, there’s a recognition that scientific influence in the voice studio or directly on singers doesn’t translate automatically to improved singing.
Defining Singing Expertise
So what is the poor learning singer to do? And what could experts do to help?
We should try to more clearly define what it means to be an expert in the singing world. It is also valuable to be aware of the different types of singing experts, and when we think of any singing expert, we should determine where exactly their and our expertise lies. In this way, we can more clearly evaluate the kind of work we do and the kind of work we see from other experts.
I will be writing a series of posts, which will be stretched out over a few weeks. In the next post, I’ll disentangle what it means to be an expert primarily using the outline of expertise (the so-called “Periodic Table of Expertise”) created by Harry Collins.
Although his outline is one view on the nature of expertise, I find that it translates well to the world of singing. Personally, though I find his outline convincing, I must acknowledge that I’m not a sociologist. I am enthusiastic about the ideas because they form a more interesting web of expertise than I’d previously considered, and it has made me more thoughtful about how I will interact with other professionals, aspiring or otherwise.
At the very least, I hope it inspires you to consider what you consider expertise, how it’s gained, and how to spot it.
Next section: Singing Experts II: What Makes an Expert?
