THE VOICE

SINGING

In order to sing well, one needs to take lessons.   Now many start by going online and taking the free singing lessons offered.    After that, they will decide to take voice lessons and even though there are good ones such as offered by Singing Success or Singorama, if one is serious, one will look for a voice teacher.   

The thing is by going for  voice teacher, they are showing to those around them or the world in general that they do intend to use the talent that God has given them and in my opinion, it would be rather wasteful to put over $50 in lessons  a month (taking the cheapest rate) and the only singing one does is in the choir, at church in the congregation, or to themselves in their home.    I am not talking about just getting paid for your singing.    I am talking about recitals, solos where at least an audience hears your voice.   

Now preparing to sing for a recital or a concert is not easy.   One has to practice and get the phrases right, and not only that, to show the emotion in the song and get the right tone.   I have several operas and classical pieces and when I go to Youtube and hear Maria Callas or another famous singer, I wonder how did she do it.   I want to be able to sing like them and have the voice that would thrill the audience, but do not want just sing into the mirror.      

It also is not right for someone to say, "Well you are brave to stand in front of the audience."    To a singer that means that they really cannot sing so they are brave enough to make a fool of themselves in front of an audience and that the audience is clapping out of sympathy. 

    

Besides not really wanting to, the reasons why one cannot sing a solo at a recital or a concert should be because a singer's inability to do so and that should be because of her feeling she is not ready at that time,  her own physical health prevents her from doing so, or she has other commitments, a funeral in the family, being somewhere else at the time.   As for physical health, if it is such that her mobility is decreased at the time - a fall, etc. if she cannot get on the stage for that solo performance, why expect her to sing in the choir?  

So what does this mean?    It means it is up to the performer or her voice teacher to decide if she is going to sing.     It is not up to the potential accompanists to determine whether the singer is going to sing or not.    And if everyone she asks says no, or makes an excuse, pretty soon the singer will not bother asking the next time.   The worse would be if they assumed the singer had a cold, was depressed over a loved one, or her voice had gone out so she could not sing and that would not be true.    There might not be a next time.    I remember when my husband was alive if he would be home alive because he worked at a railroad and there were cases of men being crushed between cars, etc.    He died after he retired and it was by a terminal illness by the way.   

   

There is also time.  What if the "once you reach your seventies, you can no longer sing," is true?" Now many will say why did you not start sooner, but we do know people who gave up their dreams to raise a family, my mother being one of them and she unfortunately died of cancer, so there was no chance of her doing what she wanted.   I really did not know if that was true, but I did get the feeling that she had tried and failed because it was not in what she was good at.    She was a very unhappy woman when she died.   And when I first started to look at voice lessons, it seemed that there was an assumption that the singer wanted to be professional or a talented amateur, i.e. if she just wanted to sing in front of the mirror or in her own place, she would not have bothered signing up for lessons.   That is why there may have been if "you are in your seventies, forget it," and of course many youngsters think that was a typographical error and they meant seventeen.    

 Many companies do allow the manager to make cds for their congregation and also for the performers, ;but if they want to sell them outside that area - i.e. for instance suppose there is a Christmas Concert at The Heavenly Church in Bready, Alberta (made that up.) in order for them to sell them to anyplace outside of the Bready area, they have to pay copyright rules.    That means if the Cd appeared at the Holy Christian Bookstore, they did pay the copyright fees for each and every song on the CD.    So be careful    The fines for not paying the fees are extremely high and in many cases have to do with the potential customers or the audience.