Recently I was asked what I meant when I said that the three fundamental categories of skill in singing are position, motion, and attitude. It’s easy to understand what these categories are: position and motion are everything a singer does that you could literally draw or photograph. Attitudes are everything a singer does that can’t be drawn or photographed. Simple enough! But it’s not so obvious why we need them in the first place. How do these three categories work together? How are they used to organize vocal techniques?

Imagine you want to collect and maintain a herd of goats. Sneaky-ass, mischievous, freedom-loving goats. You have two jobs really. Collect the goats, and then keep them somewhere. All the other jobs you can think of, like feeding the goats, for instance, are either part of catching goats, or part of keeping goats.

Attitudes are a lot like those goats. When you perform a song or an aria, or anything really, you don’t calculate positions and motions because you don’t have time. You just sing it. Hopefully, to your audience. Just like goats are the point of finding and keeping goats, these subjective attitudes are the real value that you acquire when you train and develop your singing skills. You may not be able to describe them to another person, but you know how to repeat them consistently, and you absolutely depend on these attitudes to get you through a performance. They are words and phrases in the secret language you speak only with yourself. Attitudes may be imaginary, but they power everything we do.

If attitudes are the whole point, why do New School Singing materials keep harping on about position and motion? It’s because those goats – those attitudes – are freedom-loving goats! You found them in the mountains after a long and hard pilgrimage. You went places normal people don’t go, and you acquired these awesome beasts after a long and arduous cosmic hunt. You need is a way to keep them, if you want to share them with others.

Position and motion are objective. They are solid and they are real. You can draw them, and you can describe them precisely. They can be transmitted as information from one person to another, and both will wind up with exactly the same idea, as long as the information was accurate. All the sounds a singer can make are really just coordinated positions and motions. That makes position and motion really great candidates as building materials for the fence you will install to keep your goats.

Singing consistently well at a professional level is basically that. The job you’ll be focused on at first is finding that first goat. But if you don’t have a fence waiting in the first place, you’ll go look for more goats and you come back, and you still have only one goat. You’ll be essentially going around a loop that always winds up at the beginning again. That’s why New School Singing starts with position and motion. It might seem tedious, but so is going around in circles without accomplishing anything you set out to do.

After a while, the job of singing turns into 90% just chasing after escaped goats, and maintaining your fences. There really isn’t such a thing as a less challenging version of being the best singer you can be. It’s a whole lot of the same jobs, over and over. The more goats you have, the more escapees you have to deal with. It is perpetual work just to keep things from breaking down, and if you slack off you lose a bunch of goats. But it isn’t boring! There’s never really a goal that’s reached, other than temporarily having a badass herd of goats. Singing performances are either goat cheese or goat meat, depending on how sustainably you sing.

So what if your teacher isn’t giving you position, motion, and attitude? Why not think of it this way: Are they giving you any useful position, motion, or attitude? You can work with that! If you find one person to help you with each of those, you might have something there. Just don’t buy into their attempts to make them your only teacher, and you can turn the situation to your advantage. YOU are building a herd of goats, and a pen to keep them in. YOU are milking the goats and deciding what kind of cheese to make. Whether you tell them you’re working with other teachers or not is up to you. The important thing is that you obtain and then organize all this information into attitudes that work for you, and that you know how to maintain them, and what to do when one of them escapes to the mountains.

Happy herding!

copyright 2022 Philippe Castagner

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