Hello, Robert:
I have enjoyed your columns over the years, being a fellow teacher to both classical and pop singers, and I have intended to introduce myself to you long before this. Your last two columns in the NATS Journal gave me the incentive to take the time to say “hello.” I am one of the founders of the musical theater division at the Circle in the Square Theatre School in NYC, where I have been teaching singing technique, repertoire development and song interpretation since 1980.

At the same time I have also maintained a busy private studio in the Lincoln Center area, where I have been working with classical and Broadway performers as well as pop singers of every description. (I have attached a short bio.) Because I wanted to raise my daughters outside of the metropolitan area, twenty years ago we moved to the Burlington, Vermont area, where I also have a very busy private studio. With the beginning of this school year, I am starting my 20th year of flying between my two very full lives—Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday in NY, and then Friday through Monday in Vermont. It sounds crazy, but I have been able to have a career working with professionals and professionals-in-training in NY, and my family and I have enjoyed all that living in Vermont has to offer.

As a 30 year NATS member, I have appreciated the way the organization has grown. I think one of the organization’s biggest accomplishments has been the way it has embraced the revolution in technology that has affected research in all areas related to the voice. Although there has been resistance, the result has been increasingly sophisticated Journal articles and a better informed membership. When the Journal expanded to include your column on popular singing, however, my reaction was to be, at the same time, amused, pleased and a little concerned. As a singing teacher who’s father (Vern Reed) was classically trained at The Eastman School of Music and went on to have a significant career as the tenor in the Buffalo Bills barbershop quartet (The Music Man (Broadway and the movie), major radio and TV credits, thousands of concerts), I grew up learning to love all kinds of vocal music and styles of singing. I also learned to appreciate the aesthetics of each style and to have a profound sense of what aspects of the human experience each best expressed. When NATS began to show an interest in theatrical and pop singing styles and techniques, I was glad that the kind of singing that most Americans enjoy was finally going to be supported by the teaching profession, but I was concerned that theatrical and pop singers and their teachers would be considered the unsophisticated “country cousins” and not be given the full attention and respect of a world class professional organization that they deserve.

I am afraid that my concerns were well founded, and a revisit of your columns over the years bears that out. I have privately cheered you on as you have labored to bring some dignity to the world of pop singing and to address the needs and problems of teachers who work with pop singers, but after many years, you are still battling an institutionalized prejudice against belting and the aesthetics of theatrical and pop singing. Columns about uninformed judges, NATS sponsored workshops on belting where the clinician doesn’t teach belting at all, teachers and coaches who encourage students to sing Broadway songs in a classical style, and colleagues who accuse theatrical and pop singing teachers of ruining voices because of the very nature of belting, are a testament to what I think is quixotic undertaking. Every summer at the Circle in the Square Theatre School summer intensive I am faced with classes of young theatrical singers from colleges and universities from all over the country who have been warned with a religious fervor by their well intentioned but misinformed singing teachers not to belt. If a theatrical singer can’t belt, their prospects for participating in musical theater are severely limited. Despite its best intentions, I don’t believe that NATS will ever be able to give Broadway and popular singing—the way it is currently institutionalized-- the full support it deserves as an American art form. For that reason, I would like to propose that a separate wing be created under the NATS umbrella for the support and encouragement of popular singing.

A quick look at other professional organizations may provide a blueprint for a revised relationship between the pop and classical singing worlds within NATS. In the world of ice skating there are figure skaters, ice dancers, short and long track speed skaters and hockey players. They all wear skates and skate on the same rink, but they have their separate associations. It is not reasonable to think the figure skaters would want to be judged by a hockey referee. The competitive riding world includes hunter/jumpers, the dressage events, barrel racing, harness racing, thoroughbred racing. It is hard to picture the dressage crowd and the barrel racers agreeing on the aesthetics of horseback riding. They are two different ways of relating to the horse. The medical profession also provides some insight. They have an umbrella organization (AMA) under which information is shared throughout the profession as a whole, but each specialty has its own separate association. This is a paradigm that I think would be a great benefit to the singing profession in general and NATS in particular.