Hello and thank you for our interest in vocal music. First, I love teaching voice. I can help you no matter how advanced or not you are!
Beginners, please don’t be intimidated by what immediately follows. Most advanced singers tend to immediately inquire about private lessons with local university professors. They often don’t think to inquire with an independent private teacher like me. To survive I have accepted, and still do, beginning students, even without an audition. So don’t be shy. I also teach in multiple genres, including country, R&B, gospel, rock, jazz, and classical.
Advanced and classical students, please be advised: With me you will find the expertise to reach whatever level of improvement you wish. Although I have a Master of Music degree and decades of experience, I’ve never held a professorship in a university. I suspect it’s for this reason there has been some difficulty attracting advanced singers who want to improve.
I’ve had a few, nevertheless, and they improved greatly and rapidly with my help. I’ve also had studio producers refer recording artists to me for specific problems. Unfortunately, I helped them resolve their problems so quickly I lost some very talented students prematurely simply because the focus was so narrow. Very disappointing!
Ironically, or perhaps quite reasonably, the least talented students have provided a huge advantage. They’ve taught me the most about how to teach. They made it necessary to develop over years of experience extremely effective, powerful exercises and teaching techniques. As a result, the most talented students advance enormously in a very short time. Some who had studied for years have told me they advanced more in months than they had in all those years.
The younger students who’ve gone onto university have also informed me that my teaching was clearly superior to that of their professors. The less talented ones never could have learned from the one I studied with, though. His teaching assumed an advanced level of musicality. That’s without mentioning they would have been unable to pass his audition.
I had the extremely good fortune to discover Lav Vrbanic via a student of his in a choir we both belonged to, Musica Sacra of Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was then at the New England Conservatory (NEC) in Boston where I studied with him for three highly productive years. I already had an undergraduate degree in violin with a minor in voice.
From the seventh grade through college, I had sung in choirs with occasional solos. I also had excellent Italian, French, and German diction. As a violinist, vocal music was a breeze for me. So I could read anything he put in front of me accurately at first sight with excellent pitch. That advantage allowed the use of all our time to work on vocal function; never with learning the music or words.
Before Vrbanic, I thought I knew how to sing fairly well. My undergraduate voice teacher was an excellent singer. He was the vocal department chair. Unfortunately, his teaching had little effect on my vocal function. Put briefly, he taught me new songs and little more.
Vrbanic, though, was widely considered in Europe to be one of the four or five top vocal pedagogues in the world. For 26 years, he was vocal chair of the Zagreb Academy of Music in what is now Croatia. It’s still one of the world’s foremost music schools. His students found placement in the top opera houses all over Europe. Of course, a teacher of that rank requires an audition. Fortunately, I passed it. What I learned from him has made what I do now possible. I’m standing on the shoulders of a giant. Importantly however, his approach to teaching assumed talent—quite a lot of it.
The approach you’ll discover in my lessons is much more explicitly designed to teach what the most talented learn to do more easily. They notice and gravitate more naturally toward what works. This allows even unusually talented students to improve much more rapidly than they otherwise would. What aspects they would have had to learn from pure talent and intuition, they learn rapidly from a clear, explicit understanding of what to do and why.
Further, they get special, highly effective exercises for practical application and experience of this understanding. This approach fully eliminates voice break problems and expands range to allow reaching vocal extremes with a highly satisfying, relaxed, full, and rich ease.
If you’re interested in learning to sing better than you ever imagined you could, contact me and I’ll answer whatever questions you have. If you’re already advanced and want to substantially improve your singing, or make it more reliable and consistent, contact me for lessons.
All the very best,
Robert
