Are there any GOOD examples of vocal pedagogy?

If you know anything about New School Singing, then you know that it rejects most of the core principles of mainstream classical singing pedagogy. NSS doesn’t even think it’s a good idea to call your voice an instrument. It doesn’t believe in opening the throat to maximize resonance space, it doesn’t think relaxing is going to help you get more skilled, and it doesn’t think it’s always a good idea to stretch out the vocal folds and sing on the “thin edge”. That’s a whole lot of rejection, and it has led some to ask “are you FOR anything other than yourself?”. That’s a fair question, and here is a fair answer: I endorse Complete Vocal Technique, without hesitation. Sure, they are much stronger when it comes to rock and heavy metal singing than classical. But the right philosophy is there and classical pedagogy would be much improved if it adopted it.

CVT is the only vocal pedagogy I have come across that I can endorse. It is a self-correcting system grounded in REAL research and CURRENT scientific findings. By comparison, classical singing pedagogy is still more or less in the stone age. Our idea of applying science is something like Bozeman’s “Acoustic Vocal Pedagogy”, which is more or less the same mainstream pedagogy that developed around the New York scene of the early to mid 20th century. It is presented in a format that is adjacent to some limited (and sometimes demonstrably false) explanations of vocal acoustics, but this acoustic theory has no practical effect on what is actually prescribed to students. It is also a rather outdated theory which omits the two most consequential discoveries in vocal acoustics: perturbation theory, and nonlinear source-filter interaction.

The Complete Vocal Institute, on the other hand, not only embraces these scientific findings to inform CVT, they also actively participate in real, peer-reviewed science in order to test their theories and develop new ones. Their stated belief, which is shared by NSS, is that “all singers can accomplish all sounds.”. Mainstream classical theory, by contrast, continues to invest in the idea that a paid consultant is needed to uncover or discover the inherent “natural voice”, while simultaneously taking years to force it to perform according to the instructor’s preference, or worse, their misguided but sincere attempts to classify singers according to “type”.

Instead of being trained to look for clues about a singer’s type, and instead of being trained in the intricacies of a classification system eerily reminiscent of racist theories from the turn of the previous century, a CVT teacher is trained to ask the one question I have never heard in over two decades of professional coaching based on classical pedagogy: what sounds do YOU want to make? They are also trained to recognize and label the different types of sounds a singer can make, so that those are more than just empty words. Classical pedagogy stands to benefit greatly if it can manage to humble itself, take a rest for a while, and listen to what CVT has to say.