What would you consider to be the main focus of your career, or your “specialty”?
“I’ve got multiple careers, but the main focus has always been performance, because I was a performer who came to academia after 20 years of performing professionally. So performance first, then voice science. It changed my life, and it’s given me complete longevity just understanding how the voice works and realising that I am a vocal athlete, that this voice is muscular. Once I can coordinate from alignment, to breath, to resonance, to whatever, I’ve got to get all of that in some sort of order that supports each other to make a good sound. So those are the two really important things to me.
A singer needs to be able to sing well, in any style. Style is not the problem, it’s technique, it’s knowing how to manage your voice, and each individual is different. So we have to, as teachers, make a plan for each voice. But then it’s about being able to sell that onstage. Because, you know, unless you want to sing to yourself, you’re probably gonna want to sing in public at some stage, even if it’s just someone’s wedding or birthday. But certainly for people who want to be artists who want to perform at the university (I teach performing artists) we’ve got to get the voice operating so that they’ve got longevity and stability in their vocal production. But on top of that, they’ve got to be able to perform. So performance would be the third thing.”
How did you discover your calling for your speciality? How did it start?
“I was a singer first. So at a very young age, 16, I got my first fully professional job on TV. So it was already straight into the big public arena, and it was weekly, and it was a contemporary voice. So it was singing whatever the director said we have to sing. And in those days they send your tape through the mail giving you the original cover of the song. We’re talking 1960’s here. So that’s how old I am. But then on Wednesday, it would be the actual backing track with a live band playing the backing track. And on Friday, I’d be at the station with one run through singing with the band live to air. So I learned very quickly how to be a professional. And that’s- do the homework, make sure it’s all working, get there, be able to put it on stage, and perform. So that’s how it all started. And then from there, it just went to live performance, and I was like performing my life. The studio work I’ve done has been producing other people, not myself. I don’t like studio work, because there’s no audience and I really like an audience.
I never planned to be a teacher, but I got offered the job as a teacher at a performance school for children, from four or five years to eighteen years old. And I just loved it, I just love being in a classroom, having groups of kids and then having individuals and watching their progress. Especially with kids, you get to see the joy in music, you get to see the absolute honesty in voice production. They don’t care what they sound like. I just loved it and that quickly became parallel to my performance. And then of course these days it’s taken over from performance. And once I got into upper level tertiary education, university level education, you audition people so I actually got to work with people that I wanted to work with. That was a real bonus. My work these days outside of the con is working with professionals film, to video etc.”
What do you love the most about your work?
“I love the fact that whatever you put in to teaching (and I think this is teaching across the board) with music- the passion that you share with the students, the knowledge base, talking about learning from them, but basically seeing the light come on in their eyes, the joy of being able to sing something they couldn’t sing before, if it’s knowledge they’ve never had before that they’ve never thought about, and then seeing them develop as artists- it’s as big a buzz for me as it was for me actually standing on stage myself.”
In your opinion, what qualities do you feel make an “excellent” Vocal Pedagogue?
“You’ve got to want to be working with people and for them, and alongside them, not to them. So that’s one thing. These days, I really think all teachers need to understand the voice, artistically of course, but from a voice science perspective. The information is there, the knowledge that we’ve gained through Voice Science is just so illuminating, and exciting because they’re constantly learning more and more. These days with neuroscience, oh, my gosh! I always knew that I was working with a brain driven instrument. I mean, this (the voice) is something you can’t see, touch or feel, you’ve got to think it into place. And you’ve got to have a stored memory of sound, audiology is so important. The fact that we’re working with this sort of ethereal instrument, that’s more about imagination than anything, what voice science does is sets us up to actually understand the instrument we’re playing. And when you teach our students to do something, you fully understand what it is you’re asking them to do. It’s not the student’s job to know that it’s the teacher’s job. So I think, of course, we need artistry, and of course the bottom line is getting people on stage that can tell stories and sing well. But we can help them on their journey if we fully understand the instrument that we’re manipulating.”
Can you speak to the importance of having mentors? How have mentors influenced your life/career? Can you tell us about some of your mentors?
“Yes, I think it’s incredibly important. My original mentor was my dad, who just from the time I can remember, told me what a great singer I was. Who would take every opportunity to stand me on the table to sing for the family, or for friends. So if there was a group of people, I’d be told to sing for them and not in any harsh way, but basically, “Irene will sing for you because she’s such a good singer”. So he was my mentor, he (Dad) actually came to all of my gigs until I started doing band work. But all, you know, the TV work, the cabaret, the concert work, Dad was there. He’d carry my bag in and leave me in the dressing room, and then he’d go sit in the front row. So he was definitely my original mentor.
But along the way, it’s actually been musicians, it’s been really top musicians. The people I work with are always older than me, but these days they’re not. I was like their kid sister, and they cared and they guided me in those days. There was no such thing as a singing teacher. I was told don’t go to classical teacher, because they’ll change your sound. Because I sing contralto and did the big diva belty thing before belting was out through the stratosphere, before it was above C5. And so they would just guide me to repertoire that they thought suited me but they’d also say, “you know, Irene, you’ve got to tell a story there”. They didn’t know the background, but they just knew that it had to be honest. And so Viv Middleton was a major influence to me. He was a piano player who really brought my jazz singing on just through gigging and saying to me, “oh, you should sing this song… Why don’t you tell the story a little bit differently here? It doesn’t always have to be big, you know.” So, that was amazing.
In terms of my academic work, I’ve had a couple of wonderful mentors who, again, told me I’m a terrific teacher and have said, “Irene you need to read these articles,” “You need to do that master’s”, “You need to do that doctorate”.
And my husband, of course, I’ll be married 55 years to the same man. We still like each other, which is amazing. But he said to me years ago when I first started to work in academia and I was complaining about, you know, not really being taken too seriously (because it was jazz, which was a bit frivolous in those days, as opposed to traditional classical). And he said to me if you want to join the club, pay the dues. And that was doing the study, doing the rest, understanding not just what I did, but how I did it.”
Building Blocks – Questions about ten key areas of voice
When it comes to breathing, what are the most influential tips, insights or research findings that you would like to share with our audience?
“We can’t live without it. Bottom line, we are creatures that need to breathe. We breathe from birth, so I don’t teach anyone to breathe. What I do is teach them how to manage their breath, I certainly teach them that they don’t have to worry about the breath in, they just have to allow that to happen. Too many singers worry about dragging the breath in. What we have to teach our singers to do is certainly to allow the breath in, but then to manage the breath out according to what you know differently for different styles. Do I think it’s important? Vitally. We’re primarily playing wind instruments. So unless the breath flow is even and supported, and as we get the other big issue of support, all the other things that we do are not really particularly going to be easy for anyone. So I do work firstly on alignment, because if the instrument is not set up correctly, you know, you can play a fiddle upside down, but it’s not particularly efficient. I can play a guitar behind my back if I want to, but it’s not particularly efficient either. So why is singing any different? Let’s teach people to put air through their larynx, get the vocal folds into vibration. That’s breath. So breath is important.”
When it comes to the larynx, what are the most influential tips, insights or research findings that you would like to share with our audience?
“Leave it alone. Too much focus on the larynx just makes singers get frenetic about small details. I like to keep things simple. There’s very few sensory nerve endings in the larynx. So telling someone to push, pull and lift something in the larynx is not particularly helpful. Because what they’ll do is they’ll use extrinsic muscles to do that. So I tend to not talk about the larynx much. I tell students it’s a sound maker, the air has to move through the larynx. And if the vocal folds close, any sort of closure, you’re going to get some sort of sound on the way out. So I tend to literally leave the larynx alone. I don’t teach larynx position or anything like that. If the breath is set up correctly, if the support is good, the larynx will sit on the air, and that’s what you need it to do.”
When it comes to the vocal folds, what are the most influential tips, insights or research findings that you would like to share with our audience?
“Just send enough air through and I mean enough air, you’ve got to get air to flow evenly through the vocal folds to set them into motion, but then to keep them in motion efficiently. If you don’t keep the air flowing efficiently (and of course that brings in support, keeping the lower abdominal muscles engaged and remembering that we’re a cylinder of muscle not just a one sided figure, so it’s not just the belly) but basically if you don’t do that then what happens is other muscles jump in to assist so we end up with lots of laryngeal tension, tension in the neck. You know, all sorts of head adjustments. We don’t need any of that if we just set the air moving. Let the vocal folds move with the air, so I’m a great believer in aerodynamic myoelastic rather than myoelastic aerodynamic. Get the air flowing first and let the muscles get their energy from the airflow.”
When it comes to acoustics/resonance, what are the most influential tips, insights or research findings that you would like to share with our audience?
“So this is somewhere I do work. I work a lot in this area, because I don’t really talk to students about their laryngeal activity, I talk to them a lot about their vocal tract activity. So literally, above the larynx, and out through the mouth, so that the pharyngeal area is incredibly important to shaping sound, but all tone and quality, all of those things. So resonance for me is a good starting place. Getting people to make a bright, continuously ringing sound, that can be quiet or that can be loud. I don’t use the word soft, because the minute you say soft to contemporary singers, they’ll want to be breathy. I don’t teach breathiness. Breathiness is an effect. Breathy onset is an effect. For a contemporary singer, it’s not something we should train. It will come with emotion. And so it should, as will glottal stroke and glottal attack. But basically, just getting the resonance in a place that is useful. In other words, speaking quietly, but being heard. Calling out loudly, but without too much pressure on the folds. So by resonance, I would say “sing on the rooms of your glasses”. So let’s keep the resonance here. Never talk about the nose, because they’ll try and force the sound forward. But if you say keep the sound- all I’m basically saying is keep the sound forward and elevated and not on the larynx, leave the larynx alone.”
When it comes to registration, what are the most influential tips, insights or research findings that you would like to share with our audience?
“Registration is another one that’s so controversial. Registration is registration, but it’s different aspects for different styles. And because I teach so many different styles- the only style that I don’t teach is opera, that’s not- I don’t know the repertoire or the culture of it- but everything from legit music theater through to heavy metal. I think it is idiosyncratic to each individual voice. And if we can find the tessitura of a voice, the natural tessitura, and not something they’ve copied. Students want to copy all the time, they want to sound like, you know, a 30 year old woman, or a 50 year old man, when literally when they’re 12. So you’ve got to find their comfort register. So usually where they have a healthy speaking voice, and then working to get registration balanced. I have to say, I stopped saying chest and head many many years ago, because it’s got nothing to do with registration, it’s got everything to do with resonance. They were fantastic terms when we didn’t have voice science. But literally, you don’t change registration up in your head and you don’t change it down your chest. It’s done at the level of the larynx. So the bottom line is I talked to people about their speaking register, and their upper register where they might think is singing. I work both of those registers. And then I bring the “head voice” in the old terms, but I bring them the upper register down, and the lower register up to blend rather than, again, I don’t talk about mix, because then people are trying to do something they’re trying to mix it up or whatever. I go now let’s get these two sounds because it’s tonality, it’s the vocal folds working differently. Our students don’t want to know about that, they want to know that they can hear a distinct change. Okay, so I go okay, let’s try and bring those sounds together. So with contemporary singers lightening off that to engage with authority or engagement, the mass on the vocal folds and with the upper register, lightning down so allowing the CT to be less dominant as you come down and finding some balance in the middle. This has been talked about for years and will always be talked about. But whether you call it balancing the passaggio or whether you call it transition, or finding an easy transition, or mending the breaks (which I hate, by the way, because once you break something, you can put it back together the same way). Other than that, I just think it’s a slow process. That’s the hardest thing, because most people will have one of those registers, if you want to call it that, because it shouldn’t be two registers, it should be one continuous register. But that takes time, effort and practice on part of the student. No teacher can fix registration if the student doesn’t do the work.”
When it comes to vocal health, what are the most influential tips, insights or research findings that you would like to share with our audience?
“Don’t smoke. We know through science generally, it’s bad for you. It clogs up your lungs, can do all sorts of weird things to your vocal folds and including causing all sorts of pathologies. So don’t smoke. Be moderate in drinking. When I first started singing people would say “have a sherry it’ll make your voice better”. No, it will make the back of your throat feel a bit stickier. But you can easily do that with honey. So drinking in moderation. Don’t drink just before you sing and don’t drink on stage. Basically, wait till you’ve gone through your gig and then have a drink with friends. That’s wonderful. That’s social. So not over drinking, no smoking, and looking at your diet. Being a gigging musician all my life, at one o’clock in the morning, you’d be hungry. And so what do you grab? Fast food. I got into the habit of bringing sandwiches or bringing something so that when I was hungry, I could eat food that I’d made that I knew was nutritious. That takes energy and time, but I had four kids, so I had to do it for them, so why not for me. So basically, just look after your general health. Be active, you can’t be a couch potato for four days a week, and then get up and get crazy. Well you can, you just won’t last and I was in it for the long haul.”
When it comes to style, what are the most influential tips, insights or research findings that you would like to share with our audience?
“Do your homework- teacher and student- if you want to sing in a particular style, especially with a myriad of styles that are out there today just in the contemporary realm, let alone going into music theatre which also has all the contemporary styles and should be a genre of its own. Because of the classical influence from the early pre 60’s, musicals into classical basically style is exactly what it says. It’s a style, it’s a way of doing something. It can be in fashion, you know 80’s style from 1920s style, it’s an obvious differentiation that the general public knows they know they’re recognising. So, with style, just know all the different elements that make that style. With singing, the sounds, the tone qualities, the emphasis on consonants or vowels, the legato line or all the rhythmic line, what is it that’s creating that particular style? My main thing with singers is don’t say you sing across styles, if you sing repertoire that’s from a certain style, you’ve got to be able to sing it as well. You’ve got to be able to make the sound of that style. So style needs listening, it needs aural study. It needs you to listen a lot and pick up all the nuances, all the subtleties that the general public recognise as that style. Rock in the rock world sounds very different to music theatre rock. People who know that style really well, they don’t know what it is, but they recognise the difference. If, like me, you’re a jazz singer, and you’re going to do pop, you’ve got to let go of a lot of the style elements using Jazz and find the ones that are in pop. And the other thing that’s difficult with contemporary styles is that these days, up until about the 80s, multiple artists would cover a song. These days, it’s primarily one singer, one song. If you’re Taylor Swift, you sing that song and everybody wants to sing like Taylor Swift. If you’re, if you’re Beyonce, everybody wants to sing it like Beyonce. Of course, not all voices are created equal. Therefore, I’m not going to sound like Beyonce, okay? Unless I do all sorts of manipulation to get that sound into that shape.”
When it comes to posture, what are the most influential tips, insights or research findings that you would like to share with our audience?
“Find the individual’s alignment. I’m a great believer in Alexander technique for that, and the aim is basically not to make someone conform to a particular alignment. But find or notice what their spinal shape is. These days, of course, we’re working with kids a lot, and young adults who are on computers and on phones all the time. So they’re all getting a little bit of a scoliosis in their neck. I work with all my singers to try and straighten that away. How do I do that? Not by making it an unnatural movement, but basically using the wall using the floor to find some sort of relaxation of the muscles in the neck. So alignment is basically standing in an active position, not, for instance, on the back on the heels, because that’s a stuck position. Dancers don’t dance on their heels, for obvious reasons. Even Michael Jackson doing the Moon dance, is actually doing it on the balls of the feet, but is walking backwards. Our bodies are not designed to lean back or to be back permanently. We can move back there, but we’ve got to move forward again. So I work with all my singers walking and singing. I ask them to walk, and to show me how they move. And then when we stop, we stop in a mid stride so that the body is still propelling forward. Because I always say to them, if you lean back, you’re pulling the sound away from your audience. If you really want to engage someone in conversation, you will lean towards them. So I’m not saying go off the centre, but find their centre. Most people these days, young people, I’m finding, actually bend backwards, especially from the pelvis, they’ll lean the top of their body back. And it’s a lot to do with I think trying to correct the forward movement that they’re using around computers etc. It’s important to find everybody’s sense of centre. Most people know of the old exercise of hanging from the ceiling by your head. I don’t use that one because that’s a bit old fashioned now, but basically, I explain to them that if this spine could pop out through your skull, it would be dead centre of your skull, if it went that far. So let’s find some dynamic poise, I’m a great believer in Barbara Conable body mapping. I did a week long intensive with her in America and it just changed my whole life about the way I worked my body. That dynamic poise, that’s her word, but basically having free movement of the head, and allowing the head to be constantly balanced, no matter what position your bodies are in. Certain styles want you to be off balance. Music theatre, for instance, if you’re a character, you’re going to have to go into a character pose, but the head needs to stay free. And if the head and neck are free, you can basically do what you like, especially as a singer.
Barbara Conable was the person who designed body mapping as a topic. It’d been mentioned before, but she turned it into an art form. It was originally for musicians because her husband was a cellist. And they were both Alexander people, and he kept getting RSI. So she worked with that. And then she realised how important it could be to singers. Body mapping is literally organising your body to be its most efficient balance. So everything’s balancing on the other, and then you’re free to make sound.”
When it comes to teaching methods or communicating complex ideas about singing, what are the most influential tips, insights or research findings that you would like to share with our audience?
“I make people aware of methods, but I don’t teach any methods. I believe that teachers have to be more eclectic than teaching one thing. I think we have to be aware of what individuals can come up with in terms of teaching singing. I’m a great believer in taking what I want from those methods. And then telling my students, where I’ve taken from, i.e. thats from Barbara Conable, that’s from Mary Saunders Barton, I’ve picked all these things up from traveling overseas, and going to conferences and I would put myself into situations like speech pathology conferences and things where I didn’t truly understand like an acoustics conference with Sundberg. I remember the first one I did 30 years ago, and it was like a foreign language. But going and studying and making sure I understood what that was. Because if you do that, you can pick the things out that are right for that student, rather than teaching them a whole lot of stuff that is not right for them, or they don’t need to know. So I’m aware, and I mentioned all the big methodologists, you know, the ones who’ve had very successful global impact. But I don’t adhere to any of them, I’ll pick out what I think might be useful to students, and the rest are different intuition and personal experience of voices and singing. The complex things I think about in pure voice science, and then I break it down into the language of the student. So I’ll often ask the student to tell me, if I explained something to them, to tell me in your own words what I’ve just said. You say that back to me but in your words, tell me what you understood. That way I can find out what they’re taking on board and what they’re missing, because then my language is not matching their language. So I think that is a teacher’s duty to understand a student’s learning mode. In other words, understand their comprehension, how they comprehend something, and if you can turn the students language into your language, but have the right concept, have the right scientific basis for what you’re saying, then you can give it to the student without blinding them with academic language.”
Final Thoughts (Words of Wisdom, Books, Resources)?
“If you want to be a singer, sing, sing, and sing some more. You’re not going to learn to sing by looking at a book, you’re not going to learn to sing by doing what a teacher tells you to do, you’re going to learn to sing by listening to many, many singers. That means listening. So to sing, you’ve got to listen. Be someone who listens to music and listens outside of your preference, your aesthetic preference. You know, if you’re like me, if you love jazz, you don’t just listen to jazz singers. You listen to pop singers, you listen to classical singers, you listen to voices. And it’s amazing, at university level, if they don’t do that, you notice that they might come in and go out with basically the same sound. But if you can get them to listen across a broad range, all of a sudden they start bringing in aspects of everything they’re listening to. So I think that that’s really important.
Books on singing, I really like the books that are based in voice science, that’s just fact, they’re not spinning. Even if they’ve got a method it is based, in fact, scientific fact. I recommend Janice Chapman’s Singing and teaching singing. That sounds strange, because I’m primarily a contemporary teacher, and she’s a classical teacher. But all of the exercises, and they’re brilliant ones in that book, are based on three or four hundred years of classical teaching that can be adapted. So I’m a great adapter of classical work because they’ve had time to work out what they’re doing. So Singing and Teaching Singing by Janice Chapman and Ron Morris. Ron Morris actually teaches with me here now. He’s brought the speech pathology aspect to a science based aspect to the original book. I really like The Vocal Athlete‘ by Wendy LeBorgne and Marci Rosenberg. Because I like the title if nothing else, but I like a lot of what’s in that book! I like Anne Peckam’s books because they’re simple books and not great big tomes. And you’ve got exercises that you can pick and choose from. You don’t have to do them all and there’s no set order, you just do what you need. But also there are aural examples, you can listen to somebody else doing that. So I really like Anne’s books from a practical point of view. The Voice Science books: The Diagnosis and Correction of Vocal Faults by James McKinney. It’s an old book and it’s been reprinted, but there’s just good common sense stuff in there. And for new teachers, it’s a really good book to go to.
I like Bodymind and Voice by Thurman and Welsh. As it’s not been reprinted, there’s nothing wrong in that book, it’s just that science has gone past it in some ways, but there’s good practical aspects. The index will send you to certain topics, you don’t have to read it chapter by chapter. I liked those books. They’re the ones that you don’t end up reading all of, but you get what you need. And it sparks you on to something else.
I like the modern books, the compilations, “So you want to sing CCM”, “So you want to sing gospel”, out of NATS. I like those because they give a whole range, it’s not one person, it’s a whole range of people talking about what they’ve done through their teaching careers. Similar to this project. So if you find one thing that works for you, you might not find anything in the next person’s, but you’ll find something that gives you an opportunity to work across a range of amazing knowledge that’s been set. Then of course, the basic science books from Ken Bozeman; Practical Vocal Acoustics. I mentioned Johan Sundberg earlier; The Science of the Singing Voice. I get really nerdy and really interested in acoustics. I love those books, but if that’s not your bag, you don’t have to go there. Teachers who haven’t had the opportunity to study that, don’t have to feel that they should. These other books are more basic, they give you basic insight. And of course I love the medical stuff, Robert Sataloff and Ingo Titze. Christina Shewell is a speech pathologist and she wrote a book called Voice Work. It’s really good, insightful voice science based, but you don’t have to get into the voice science part if you don’t want to, but it’s based on speech pathology.
Teaching Kids To Sing by Kenneth Phillips is a good one if you teach a lot of young children. It’s a book that’s a bit outdated now in terms that it’s not been reprinted. But it’s got good, basic, practical, approaches to teaching children that still work really well. I could go on, I’ve gotten so much from reading, but I’m not someone who likes to read a book from beginning to end. I like to use them as resources. So I like to look at the indexing.”
List of Publications by Irene Bartlett
