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Combined page (2026-10-21). Original draft first; 4 variant drafts appended below under “Variant:” headings — Why the World Needs More Regulation in Voice Teaching; The Unfiltered, Unlicensed Truth of Voice Teaching; Voice Pedagogy's Wild West; Voice Training Madness: The Tragicomedy of Musical Incompetence. Edit down to one post before setting Ready to Publish.
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Reconciled single copy — Cluster 16 canonical.
When I was in college I expected that my glorious conducting technique and adorable dimples would propel me to the podium of a great orchestra chorus by twenty-six. At twenty-six I was teaching high school–aged ski racers to sing Harnick and Bock and amateur community choristers to sing Mozart. Something had gone wrong.
The path I followed taught me a great many things, but a few years ago I realized it was time for a change. Now I am happily ensconced in the voice pedagogy master's degree program at Shenandoah University discovering the great many things I should have learned prior to starting, or at least earlier in my teaching career. I came to (or perhaps better stated, succumbed to) the realization that I needed more training on my own.
This raises the question: Would I, and the thousands of singers I have worked with over the years, have been better served if I had done this sooner? That is the topic I would like to explore in this article.
I spent nearly twenty years working as a professional musician, the bulk of my time with teen and adult amateur singers. For years I proudly stated that I taught "singers ages eight to eighty-eight every week." Over the years I acquired experience with, anecdotal evidence about, and stories related to voice technique, rehearsal strategy, and the limitless capacity of singers to advance their craft. Yet, I also knew that I needed help — to surround myself with people who could fill in the knowledge gaps of which I was aware, and to point out the blind spots I had not uncovered. My current studies are illuminating these gaps more and more clearly every day — a very humbling process indeed. So I wonder: how many other voice teachers are in the same spot as I was?
I was a successful high school musician from a small Vermont town, and I was able to use that legacy and my Eastman education to secure good teaching positions very quickly. The "local boy makes good" story can be powerful; I used it to maximum extent.
My first professional engagement was with a community chorus. I stepped up to the podium (figuratively — there was no podium) of the Mad River Chorale in the fall of 1996. I got the job because I was the only person who applied. I was twenty-two conducting an ensemble whose singers' average age was over fifty. And although I had studied both choral and orchestral conducting at Eastman, this was the first time I had my own group. I had no idea what I was in store for.
I asked the choir to take out their perennial holiday favorite, Sing We Now of Christmas, and we rocketed through. I thought they sounded pretty good; I made a couple of adjustments and we moved on. I next asked them to take out the Puccini Gloria, the centerpiece of our holiday concert. I had sung it the previous semester under the baton of Donald Neuen at Eastman, and Don sent me his score, which I meticulously studied. I prepared my conducting gestures in the mirror, I remembered all of Don's areas of focus from our rehearsals, I even pinpointed a couple of key concepts I would drill — I was ready. I gave the MRC singers their pitches and off we went, for about six measures, and then the wheels came off the bus. The accompanist couldn't play the part, the singers couldn't hit the notes, and the singers were not using any manner of refined voice production. MRC was a non-auditioned community chorus in a ski resort town (pop. 3,000) — what did I expect, the Eastman Chorale? No, but I at least expected the choir at the high school where I student-taught the previous spring.
I was completely unprepared to do this job. I never fully grasped the fact that I had always piggybacked on the work of others: other teachers and conductors had taught their choirs how to read music, sing in tune, and sing with good tone; other teachers had trained their singers about rehearsal decorum, to bring pencils and so forth; other managers had set up the room, made seating charts, and handled the logistics. I just got up, ran the singers through the piece, told a joke or two, dropped in a witty musical gem, and voila — things were great. I had taken the years of work done before me for granted and assumed I had known what I was doing through osmosis. By the same logic, I would be able to assume that I knew how to be a professional chef because I had eaten in a lot of restaurants and thrown a few successful dinner parties. This is simply not the way the world works.
Though humbled, my hubris was largely still intact, and shortly thereafter I was hired to music direct Anything Goes at a community theater in the same town. Musical theater, I thought, how hard can that be? I can conduct Mozart and Dvořák. I was humbled again. Nevertheless I did a good enough job to be asked by a local private school (a private ski-racing academy with about a hundred students) to do their musical. Here I was faced with young singers who for the most part had never sung in a chorus, and the limitations of my experience became strikingly clear. I had a lot to learn.
My choice was to treat this circumstance as a laboratory. I was the subject and the scientist, with a simple question to answer: how do I train these singers?
I certainly could (and have) framed this as a noble experiment, but let's face it — it was not fair of me to use my singers as test subjects, at least to the degree that I did. I should have stepped back and sought more specific training.
A public school teacher must receive a license from the state Board of Education; we all know this. But there is no requirement of any kind for a private voice teacher. Interestingly, the State of Vermont requires licensure for a great many professions: