About Pop Singing Lessons And The Difficulties To Define Vocal Styles
For over 20 years I have been giving pop singing lesson in London, in Europe and the United States.
During that period of time defining popular vocal styles has become harder and harder.
Like most musicians and singers, I've grown up alongside players who seemed to be speaking the same language as me, and we seemed to have a workable shorthand vocabulary.
We just seemed to have our own musical and vocal language.
As a young singer I was aware that we often used descriptions that gave us a kind of common ground to work from.
These descriptions aren't quite as useful in England, where a valley sound or a Motown feel doesn't have the same currency.
There are, of course, distinctions that have to be made by large companies who sell recordings, but these often seem as unhelpful as the academic music studies I've looked through.
The best they can do is create large general categories and then hope that their staff and their customers have enough local knowledge to find that Lyle Lovett CD.
The Beginning Of Popular Music And Pop Vocalising As We Define It In popular music, at the very beginning of the recording industry, the first strong, detectable popular genres were Blues and Jazz.
As Jazz branched out into many distinct subcategories, from the big swing bands to Bebop, and through to more progressive forms, Blues remained more or less a shading that infiltrated nearly every style of popular music.
Folk music on the other hand has a long and wonderful history, and Country music quickly found its own distinctions and began to influence other forms of popular vocalising once recordings were widely available.
The Fifties And The Beginning Of Rock music With the beginnings of Rock or Rockabilly music and Rock'n'Roll vocalising in the early 1950s, elements of Jazz, Blues and Country were all detectable.
My interest in these histories usually centre only on how such things influenced the stylistic choices made by singers working and recording at the time.
In the late part of this century when one thinks of vocalists, there are still large categorical distinctions - but of course, these distinctions are only marginally helpful.
We may have a general notion of what Country singers sound like (which grows a bit more confused when we listen to KD Lang or Shania Twain), or of what Jazz singers sound like.
Although, up until the massive success of Norah Jones, many people would have been able to think of only few contemporary Jazz singers (since Jazz fusion styles have so successfully blurred this category) or what of Folk singers sound like (although applying the label to someone as unique as Damien Rice can be pretty confusing as well).
But in the end it is often just as easy to let the recording companies sort it out for us.
During that period of time defining popular vocal styles has become harder and harder.
Like most musicians and singers, I've grown up alongside players who seemed to be speaking the same language as me, and we seemed to have a workable shorthand vocabulary.
We just seemed to have our own musical and vocal language.
As a young singer I was aware that we often used descriptions that gave us a kind of common ground to work from.
These descriptions aren't quite as useful in England, where a valley sound or a Motown feel doesn't have the same currency.
There are, of course, distinctions that have to be made by large companies who sell recordings, but these often seem as unhelpful as the academic music studies I've looked through.
The best they can do is create large general categories and then hope that their staff and their customers have enough local knowledge to find that Lyle Lovett CD.
The Beginning Of Popular Music And Pop Vocalising As We Define It In popular music, at the very beginning of the recording industry, the first strong, detectable popular genres were Blues and Jazz.
As Jazz branched out into many distinct subcategories, from the big swing bands to Bebop, and through to more progressive forms, Blues remained more or less a shading that infiltrated nearly every style of popular music.
Folk music on the other hand has a long and wonderful history, and Country music quickly found its own distinctions and began to influence other forms of popular vocalising once recordings were widely available.
The Fifties And The Beginning Of Rock music With the beginnings of Rock or Rockabilly music and Rock'n'Roll vocalising in the early 1950s, elements of Jazz, Blues and Country were all detectable.
My interest in these histories usually centre only on how such things influenced the stylistic choices made by singers working and recording at the time.
In the late part of this century when one thinks of vocalists, there are still large categorical distinctions - but of course, these distinctions are only marginally helpful.
We may have a general notion of what Country singers sound like (which grows a bit more confused when we listen to KD Lang or Shania Twain), or of what Jazz singers sound like.
Although, up until the massive success of Norah Jones, many people would have been able to think of only few contemporary Jazz singers (since Jazz fusion styles have so successfully blurred this category) or what of Folk singers sound like (although applying the label to someone as unique as Damien Rice can be pretty confusing as well).
But in the end it is often just as easy to let the recording companies sort it out for us.
Source...