A few years back I went to a seminar which introduced 2 currently very famous schools of singing in popular music. They built their reputation on a scientific approach, the importance of knowing what a voice is doing, when it is producing different sounds.
In the beginning there was a short introduction of important „voice explorers“ before these methods: Garcia, Husler and Reid.
Reid was mentioned positively, but his work couldn’t answer all the questions that would come up in popular singing. Their idea is, that we could know exactly, which ‘button’ to push, simply because we saw in an MRI what is going on during a certain sound and this would give us the freedom to use our voice in any way we want.
As a student of Cornelius Reid and a firm believer in a process of voice building, I have to say it yet again: Reid’s biggest achievement doesn’t lie in any scientific knowledge he was digging up at the time about how the voice functions. It is his knowledge of how to approach a voice! So whatever I can take from this seminar as a voice teacher – and there were a couple of interesting nuggets – would be useless to me, if I didn’t have Reid’s background of what the voice needs to develop. And when it is developed, most of the topics, that were discussed don’t have to be discussed anymore, since the root of the problems is gone. To call Reid an ancestor to these methods is just outrageous to me, since it takes away everything he stands for. I could go on and on but that is a story for another day.
I am quoting this wonderful statement, even though I can’t remember right now, who said it, but the main message stands:
„The moment we started seeing the voice, we stopped hearing it.”
Let us be aware of this danger and honor the complexity of the human design!!
Monika Kopp 