Stay in your lane (sourced on Snappa, August 3, 2023)
One of the gifts of aging is that we start to see more clearly all the ways in which we are hindered from being our fullest self. Among the most pernicious of society’s constraints is the admonition to “stay in our lane”, which is really shorthand for “don’t be complex/nuanced/multi-faceted/complete”. I think I have probably intuitively resisted this since “five-ever” (as my witty twenty-something, super-hip daughter would say), but when it came to singing, I have often complied too.
When I was an athlete in school with a budding passion for vocal music (shout-out to David Low, my amazing high school music teacher), I was told (fortunately not by him!) that I had to decide to do one or the other (I didn’t. I sometimes lost my voice screaming at games. Oops.). When I began my singing career, each time I added a role from a different genre or era (hello, Handel! hello, Strauss!), folks wanted to pigeon hole me as just doing that one thing. When I began teaching (never mind when I had children!), rumours began to circulate that I was giving up singing (I didn’t). And then when I followed an instinct to branch out into a more popular, cabaret-influenced song repertoire and created my ensemble L’accordéoniste, people intimated that perhaps I was not going to sing classically anymore (I did).
The fact is, I have always had very diverse tastes in music. I love singer-songwriters (Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, Tracy Chapman, Sarah McLaughlin), as much as I love some of the classic rockers (the Beatles and Stones, Elvis, Elton John–do people even call them rockers??), jazz (everything from Ella, Louis, Sarah Vaughan and their ilk, to Ornette Colman, Charles Mingus and the Art Ensemble of Chicago), original country (Hank Williams, Patsy Cline, Tammy Wynette), R & B (Marvin Gaye, Earth, Wind & Fire, Gladys Knight), crooners like Tony Bennett, Frank Sinatra & Bobby Darin, to more recent vocalists like Amy Winehouse, Adele, Lizzo and others too numerous to mention. I also love music theatre (more golden age and “Fiddler on the Roof” era, but I’m learning!). And I love opera too. But for so long, I was told that singing any of those other things was dangerous for my voice, that those styles were not conducive to good singing, and that classical voice was the gold standard. The conventional wisdom was: “if you can sing classically, you can sing anything”. But we now know this to be patently false.
Here’s the thing: at the recent CCM (Contemporary Commercial Music) Vocal Pedagogy Institute in Winchester, VA, I learned so many incredible techniques and methods to sing well. In any style. In every style. And that each style has its own characteristics and nuances. I learned that we can cross-train the voice, just the same way we can cross-train in sports. In fact, doing so increases flexibility, versatility, stamina and strength. Not only that, it means that singers can truly find their “signature style”, and find it, healthily, across genres. As I began applying these things, I rekindled a love for singing that is broader and richer than it has been for decades. And I am no longer gonna stay in my lane. And I’m not going to tell my students to do it either.