Open Letter to Demanding Students.

Today I had to send an honest reply to a new student who, after a first lesson, wrote me a quite demanding and naive email, in which he asked me to give him simple, precise and concise instructions before our next lesson as he wouldn't want to spend time doing what we did in the first lesson. I want to share my reply here in the hope that some people understand what really takes to sing or to teach singing, as they have no clue. "Dear X, I can see you are very focused and rearing to progress! I really appreciate your frustration, but what you are asking is quite a complex task. In fact, learning how to cover the vowel may well be called the secret to Belcanto, basically the very essence of it, and if it was just a matter of explaining the mechanics of it and instructing the singer on what physiological manouvers he has to implement ("raise your soft palate but without tensing", "keep the tongue out of the way" etc..) learning to master the Art of Singing would be considerably easier and quicker than it actually works out to be. In a short answer, I can't tell you anything you could not guess and do by yourself. I could quite simply say: relax the abdominals, inhale organically, relax your throat, open your mouth, drop your jaw, think of a warmer sound and sing. But you I suspect you thought of these things already, didn't you? An honest and more efficient approach in the long run consists of having you to sing and giving you immediate feedback, showing what you are doing wrong, explaining you why it is the case, and suggest an alternative with a calibrated auditory example that illustrates the desirable sound you should aim for. By understanding the change at the auditory level, you are then able to conceive a different sound and your body will deliver what your ear and brain heard. It's frustrating and it takes time, but that's the only possible route. I can assure you that I take lessons from coaches at the Royal Opera House, for 150 pounds an hour, and they don't seem to explain things any better. What we would like the student do, we can't share it by giving written instructions. If that was the case, one could learn how to sing by reading a textbook on singing. Instead, we organise our teaching by dividing something that it's a sum of different processes into parts to focus on each of them at a time. Posture, phonation (onset, legato, offset), articulation, breathing, support, vowel modification, these are all dealt to separately. It takes time and patience... Unfortunately, when trying to convey concepts relating to the singing voice, the vocabulary we use is sometimes vague and other times, when trying to be specific and using scientific terminology to describe the anatomy and the physiology of the voice, we still can't understand each other.. This is because we don't share the same sensations, we can't agree on what we mean, on what it is that we trying to describe, to what degree we should move something, and how this coordinates with other physiological events happening at laryngeal, pharyngeal, thoracic and abdominal level, all happening at the same time in singing. Let me know if this is of help to you and if you want to embark in this journey with me, I would be happy to help you make the most of your voice and enjoy your singing to the best of my abilities. Kind Regards, Yuri"