A great coach once said to me “to be a student of singing, you must be a student of the HISTORY of singing”.
My first reaction wasn’t necessarily positive
At first hearing of this, I was initially dismissive to some extent – why does it matter what people 20, 50, 100+ years ago were doing? What does that even mean and why is the history of singing relevant to me and my voice? But pause for a second, and think more like a scientist, and you’ll begin to understand.
Engineers, physicists, biologists, or whatever serious discipline you care to name, do NOT ignore the past. Quite the opposite. Their present is spent deep in understanding every step taken in the past, in order to guide and shape their future. They take the past, and build on it. Practitioners of such subjects don’t make up everything from first principles on their first day. They build on the advancements garnered and knowledge hard-won by those who went before them. And those practitioners built on those who went before them, and so on and so forth.
This is the very definition of development and progress.
We all stand on the shoulders of those who went before us.
Or at least, we should be standing on the shoulders of those who went before us, rather than trying to reinvent the wheel.
To me, this idea of standing on the shoulders of giants conjures to mind the image of a giant human pyramid. We only get to ascend so high because of the developmental height earned by the hard work of those who paved the road before us.
This concept is not just limited to the realms of hard science. This still holds true when it comes to learning an instrument like guitar, piano, violin, or even a relatively young instrument like the drum kit (which is barely 100 years old). The greater the history of the instrument, the greater the exploration of successful and unsuccessful avenues that has been undertaken and completed. The avenues of progress are clear, and the cul-de-sacs have been identified. This means that if we choose to pay attention to the past, the higher up the human pyramid we are capable of starting.
To be clear, this is not about preserving tradition, this is the very nature of true progress and development.
Ask yourself: what about the singers today
In contrast, what we have today is singers not choosing to start from a great height by studying those who have gone before. Instead, most are choosing to start at the bottom of the human pyramid and “figure it out for themselves”.
It’s not about preserving tradition: it’s about progress
Where this attitude has come from, who could say – there’s certainly a lot of individualism and post-modernism floating around in the 21st century. So when we fall victim to the premise that “there’s no right or wrong“, this is undermining literally centuries of work that others have put in before us. By advocating “find your own truth“, we sweep aside the development that generations before us have built for us. This leads to people not just abandoning the knowledge of years gone by, they are choosing to ignore it completely. What ends up happening most of the time is that they end up wandering down dead-ends that were long ago identified as such.
This to me is a massive waste of time, talent and energy. What could be accomplished if we sat up and paid attention to those who had figured things out before us?
“Learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t live long enough to make them all yourself”.
Eleanor Roosevelt
We don’t have enough time in our own individual lives to replicate every mistake and eliminate every cul-de-sac. As such, why would we ignore the maps of learning generated by the past? The ancestors of our discipline in singing weren’t complete idiots, and instead had figured out quite a lot before we arrived in the scene.
The best way to get better is to start where they left off
This is what it means to be a student of the history of singing. One does not have to go devote their life to this subject to learn why this matters. It’s not about church choral singing or singing classical music, instead we’re talking about universal understanding of solid vocal function and development. Whether you dig someone’s style or genre is a separate issue. We’ve got to the build the vocal instrument right first, then style from there.
Please: Don’t try and DIY your own voice.
Don’t just “yell your way to a note” or “push harder“, or stick tonnes of riffs everywhere to disguise or dance around the issues in your voices. We’ve got to look to the past to understand how we’re going to get to the future, and not just take a superficial look at what singers are putting out. If you want to get better, the answers are very much available to you.
Learn More: Related Articles
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