This story begins at the end

It has been some years since my last voice lesson. My relationship with that teacher, David L Jones, began to unravel the day I asked him a written technical question via private messaging. In person, I was easily swayed by his incredibly agreeable charm, and in retrospect I see that I often forced myself to ignore my doubts, and to supress my own reason so that I could arrive at the conclusions he suggested. This interaction was different. The words were there on the screen for me to read and re-read, and quite all of a sudden I could not deny that David L. Jones was attempting to deceive me. I revered this man as my Vocal Lord and Saviour, but I could not deny what was on the screen in front of me: he was trying to bullshit me with word salads, name dropping, and almost certainly by inventing self-aggrandizing stories. Lest I be accused of exaggeration or character assassination, here is the question I asked, and his single-reply answer on May 24, 2016:

Philippe Castagner: I just read today’s post and I have a question I didn’t want to ask out loud. As far as I can tell, the impulse generated by the larynx is the same for ee and ah. It’s the shape of the vocal tract that turns that impulse into a vowel, as Sundberg demonstrates with a duck call and a tube. Do you have any literature or references? The manuals I’m looking at for doctors don’t mention this at all. I feel like this is a pretty big one. (If the chords open wider for ah, would this not increase the time needed to close again, and thus change the pitch?) The myoelastic theory of phonation DOES say that chords are blown wider apart during more intense phonation. But in that case the time needed to close again is shortened because the extra air is driving a stronger Bernoulli effect.

David L. Jones: The cords do not vibrate as close on the ‘a’ vowel as the closed vowels. This was proven with the fiber optic camera in the research of Dr. Barbara Mathis. Yes the shape of the pharynx has a lot to do with the cord function. Most singers did not have the same pharyngeal stretch on the ‘a’ vowel as the ‘o’ for example. This is why the Lehmann exercise works at stabilizing this vowel. As my teacher Evelyn Reynolds says, “We so not sing pure vowels, we sing combinations of vowels that give the illusion of the pure vowel!” This is vocal acoustic of course. I find voice science is great, but things need to be simplified when working with singers. Otherwise they get too much in their head and not enough in their body. I remember I taught a voice scientist in the North of Holland about 1988. He wanted a lesson with me so I gave him one. It was before internet of course. He had a giant wobble in his voice an it disappeared after one hour of the Lindquest work. About 2 weeks after returning to New York I received a letter from him in the mail. I remember he said, “You have ruined my life! My wobble is gone and I have not scientific data to tell me why or explain why!” He actually found the entire experience humorous. We later spoke on the phone and laughed about the fact. He was then off to study ancient Chinese singing. So for me the most important point is if someone benefits from an image or concept. Best. David

Come again?


When I questioned him about the non-sequitur, his attitude changed quite suddenly. I was still completely confused about how the vocal folds vibrate under different conditions, and why, but instead of telling me the truth (those three magic words: “I don’t know”), Jones doubled down on the same tactics. What I needed was to know what i was doing, but Jones just kept feeding me non-citations. Since he was out of ideas for making me go away, he checked in with my emotional state before coming back with another deception.

David L. Jones: Ok, so what do you want or need from me right now? D

Philippe Castagner: I want you to consider what I’m saying carefully, and give me a shot at contributing something useful.

David L. Jones: I can only tell you that what I have worked with for decades works. That is really all I care about. If you are more interested in voice science, I am sure there are many forums for this kind of subject. Best. David

Philippe Castagner: I can’t say I’m not disappointed. I feel this is inconsistent with values I learned from you, which I treasure deeply. My interest in understanding the model is entirely practical. Knowing why helps one decide what [to do] next.

I decided to drop it, but a few days later I got another message from Jones.

David L Jones: Philippe, I just had a long phone conversation with Dr. Barbara Mathis regarding her research. It has been a long time since I spoke to her and we had a wonderful conversation. She taught herself to sing with the fiber optic camera in the office of Dr. Van Lawrence, then laryngologist for the Houston Grand Opera. I asked her the question about the ‘a’ vowel in relation to the closed sounds. She said, and I quote, “The vocal folds were still together vibrating, but further apart than on the ‘i’ vowel or ‘e’ vowel.” This reflects exactly how Lindquest spoke about the ‘a’ vowel. The change in the resonator position can have a great deal to do with the extent of study of the singer. Those who are trained longer can stabilize the change between closed and open vowels and lessen the dramatic shift. So I hope this answers your question. Dr. Mathis’ dissertation is available at Lamar University, however I do not know if she covered this subject in detail. The Lindquest training was the basis of her vocalization and the exercises were the ones she learned from him directly during her study in Santa Barbara, CA. Best. David

Again the same pattern. More name dropping, more signaling that there were some very smart people with degrees somewhere giving him this “information”. Never any citations, and when he did refer to a publication, he also indicated he had never read it (else how could he be unsure of what was discussed in the paper?). When I checked his reference, Dr. Barbara Mathis, I discovered she had no history of research whatsoever. She simply wasn’t a voice researcher or a scientist. She was a retired voice teacher at a University, and not by any stretch of the imagination the primary source he was making her out to be. I did find her as an author on Jones’s website, and again the pattern of self-reference emerged.

I have serious doubts Jones phoned her in the first place, since the story he told fits the pattern of bad liars so plainly. Bad liars often believe, correctly, that adding specific details to a story helps make them sound more credible. But bad liars make very poor attempts at actually integrating those details into the story in an organic way. They are simply tacked on, and aren’t actually relevant to the narrative. If you remove them, you still have the same story, and your ability to follow it is unaffected. I attempted to contact Dr. Mathis, but got no response. While researching the Swedish-Italian school, I discovered she died just two years after this exchange. Jones’s behavior raises another red flag: none of his external references can be checked. The only exception I found to this rule was in the case of Leif Lundberg, who was cited in Jones’s book as a historical source, and subsequently disavowed the entire thing on my YouTube channel.

Waking up is hard to do

When I had processed those messages, I couldn’t deny what had just happened, and I also couldn’t deny that I must have been extremely easy to manipulate. But we all fall for scams here and there. Common manipulation techniques like word salad have common labels because people use them often – and that is a pretty sure sign that something works. Manipulators have a Trump card that they will always play: time is on their side. No matter how well-educated, how strong, or how smart you are, at some point in your life you will be vulnerable. Manipulators don’t exploit your lack of intelligence, they exploit your vulnerability. Therefore, they do not need to be stronger, smarter, or better-educated than you. They only need to be able to spot a vulnerable person, and to apply those time-tested skills at the correct moment. Whether or not you fall victim to one is largely a matter of luck and timing.

But when I go back and re-read articles written by my former teacher, I still can’t help but be a little embarrassed. The deceptions in those articles are obvious. It seems to me now that one would have to be intellectually disabled to fall for any of this. A follow-up question or two is all you need to figure out Jones is signaling some sort of knowledge or experience, but never seems to be able to actually explain anything. For example, in one article on dramatic voices, he writes “obviously the principles are similar in training lyric voices, but the specifics are different and require understanding how to coordinate the body more diligently. Body connection, understanding of registration, use of less air pressure than is often instinctive to the singer, and teaching an understanding of a proper vocal protection make up only a few critically important concepts that form the basis of healthy vocalization for the dramatic singer.”

What exactly is a body connection and what is not? If we dig through all the articles, we never actually find a definition. If we look for objective and universal definitions of what is meant by “registration”, again we can’t find anything. If we attempt to confirm the idea that a loud, clear, and ringing voice is achieved by using “less pressure than is instinctive”, it is impossible, but we do come across the fact that this type of singing requires very high subglottal pressure. If we try to find a definition for “a proper vocal protection”, or any sort of objective definition or description of injuries likely sustained by those who sing without proper vocal protection, again we find nothing but references that loop back around to themselves. In this body of work, all roads lead back to Jones citing himself discussing some sort of research that is never actually revealed, which can never be tested.

Readers who want to believe, like me, believe there must be some primary source material, some original research. It is almost unthinkable to imagine someone consciously pretending to have undertaken some sort of real research, some sort of documentation, and some sort of real investment in the process of asking questions, making predictions, and testing them to see if they hold. There is, in fact, no record of Jones doing any of those things in singing, but he nonetheless encourages this belief by frequently using the word “research”, without citing any research, and encouraging his supporters to do the same. One need not be embarrassed about falling for this at all, unless one has spent as much time learning how to spot manipulations as David L. Jones has spent crafting them. He is a professional, and you are not even aware you are playing a game together, because you came to work. His marketing targets singers in crisis, raising the odds that when you walk in that door, you are vulnerable.

The Last Word

This brings us to the reason I am writing this, and, ironically, to what I want to tell you: in singing, the last word is a sound. What do I mean by that? When I look back at my experience falling for an obviously fake master of singing, I no longer feel so ashamed. It doesn’t mean I’m not intelligent, or that I can’t trust myself. What it means is that I’m just like everyone else, and that if I want to avoid falling victim to con artists, I need to prepare myself better, and I need help to make my world better. I believe the same applies to you. Here’s how I suggest we, as individuals and as a community of singers, start defending our interests in this big messy business we call singing: from now on, let the last word always be a sound. Let our motto be “show me!”. When the last word is words, we are vulnerable to teachers who would abuse our trust and who lie as easily as they breathe. It’s not necessary.

The “Swedish-Italian School” myth is the biggest scandal in vocal pedagogy, basically… ever. Except this kind of scandal is compounded by an even greater one: thousands of his colleagues privately admit the whole thing is an obvious scam, but none of them are willing to say so publicly. They have an unwritten consensus to protect their highest law: that the last word is words. If consumers start losing faith in the power of words alone, the business of voice teaching will get very rough, very fast for a lot of very comfortable people. They will not be able to compete for jobs and respect, at least in this lifetime, because they squandered their good years learning the grift instead of learning the craft.

The vast majority of Jones’s cohort have no interest whatsoever in a teaching voice if it involves any actual singing. They will even encourage students not to listen to their sound as they sing, which is logical if you have no confidence in achieving good results in the first place. The more the student is aware of their sound, the worse it is for teachers like Jones. Singing competently, for them, is very nearly a sign that a person can’t possibly know how to do it. After all, they can’t sing competently, but they are great teachers of singing, and they have the words to prove it. But singing competently, to a reasonable consumer, ought to be the first but not only requirement they look for in a voice teacher (so let’s please dispense with the anecdotes about the great singer who couldn’t teach – that’s not how logical dependencies work!). Demonstration, in singing, ought to be thought of as cretin repellant: spread it all over the studios, and they will gradually find other places to go.

I don’t believe singling out David L. Jones, by itself, is a worthwhile pursuit. I’m human like you, so I do feel the thrill of “gotcha!”. But it has long since passed, and I’m left with the irritation that I documented his lies in public, and his entire cohort barely gave a collective shrug. There are ten more waiting to take his place, and each of those has ten more waiting to take their place. We can never punish enough of them to make a lick of difference. But there is an opportunity for you to learn from my mistakes. It is an opportunity for us all to remember that we came to singing lessons looking for a sound, not for a super-dooper valid explanation of why we can’t make it right now or … er … ever, but we, uh, because, research … yeah, fiber optics. It’s a chance to remember, the last word is always the sound.

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