What is Technique and how do we learn it?

[ronws]

Good post, Owen. And don't worry. Or, maybe you should worry. You can find yourself feeling ignorant in middle age just as easily, if not more easily than when you were a younger teenager. In fact, as I recall, it was easier to imagine knowing everything at your age and I knew some guys that felt they knew everything and I certainly knew a lot when I was 18. And so life, itself, spent the next 30 to 40 years proving, often harshly, that we don't know as much as we thought we knew.

You, Owen, are something of a rarity. Being a young man of your age and willing to ask questions and actually listen to the answers.

[ronws]

And actually, I don't think the amount of ignorance changes. I think we become more aware of it as we grow older. There is so much unknown in life. And as life goes on and we learn more things, it also reveals how much else there is to know.

And sometimes, in these discussions, I am reminded of ongoing research in Quantum Mechanics. QM is like basic physics but even more basic, which sounds like an oxymoron. For even more fanciful theories such as big bang, superstring come along and even have popular sway for some time. And the search is on for the smallest indivisble particle but each new level of particle discovered only leads to more layers and then to wave theory in which particles are not discrete and finite objects but perturbations in a continuous wave function.

And you are probably ready to ask me, what does this have to do with singing? And my reply would be, "exactly."

And that's why I like to keep things simple, elaborating details only as necessary. In the same breadth, with regards to never-ending pursuits of terminology and perspectives in singing, pick one, stick with it for a year. You will get some improvement in one direction or another. And better able to assess what you need next. Like the student who does well in school and first goes to UCLA. After there, he then realizes a program better suited for him at Cal Tech or MIT. Or an aerospace engineer who goes to, of all places, University of Texas at Arlington, with its own nationally rated wind tunnel for testing mock-ups. He might go there instead one of the ivy leagues because he has further defined his educational needs.

The same can happen with singing.