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 having a scientific approach and the importance of knowing what a voice is visibly doing, when it is producing different sounds.
In the beginning there was a short introduction of important pioneers before these methods: Garcia, Husler and Reid.
Reid was mentioned positively, though his teaching 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 you can observe in an MRI what is going on during a certain sound and this would give us the freedom to sing anything we want.
As a student of Cornelius Reid and a firm believer in voice building as a process, I have to say it yet again: Reid’s biggest achievement doesn’t lie in any scientific knowledge he was digging up about how the voice functions. It was his understanding 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 principles of what a voice needs to develop. And when it has been properly developed, most of the topics, that were discussed, are rendered irrelevant. To call Reid an ancestor to these methods is outrageous to me, since it takes away everything he stands for.
This beautiful statement sums it up perfectly and even though I can’t remember its origin, the 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 