I love this picture, and I wish I could take credit for having taken it – but in fact it was taken by a Carthage student whose name escapes me at the moment. The picture is of three of my Carthage voice students – Andrew Spinelli, Craig Reece, and Zach Wolf – listening to the Friday afternoon master class presented by Dan Ihasz (see the “Flash Gordon” entry from Wednesday.) All three guys had already sung for Dan at this point and they were just watching him continue to work with other singers. I just love the look of excitement on their faces; you can tell that they are so grateful to be there and are drinking in every bit of the experience. Dan is a master teacher and he really proved it in this situation.
For those of you who have never seen something like this before, a master class involves a guest teacher working with students in front of an audience. Almost always, the teacher does not know the students ahead of time, so he or she is giving the singers their initial first impression and trying to offer some worthwhile advice. It’s a very tricky challenge and not all good voice teachers are good in master classes- but Dan really is.
I think part of what made it a very exciting experience for my guys (all of the singers in the class were mine, because the master class in the fall involved all women. It was the guys’ turn this time around) is that I am a rather stick-to-the-basics kind of voice teacher; I almost never ask a student to quack like a duck or touch the tip of his tongue to his eyebrows or whatever. So I think it was really interesting and fun for them to work with a teacher who was not afraid to ask them to do some things that were out of the ordinary and new . . . nothing terribly strange, but different things from how I work. And with every single singer, there was tremendous improvement demonstrated. And when you think about it, there’s almost nothing more exciting than to witness that – and over and over again. I almost wish that PBS had a series called “The Master Class” in which you could watch a master teacher working with singers and eliciting great things from them. There is such drama involved in this kind of interaction- with the teacher offering suggestions and the singers doing their best to act on those suggestions in order to achieve the desired breakthrough.
Which reminds me- my guys were SO open to what Dan had to say, and I am truly delighted about that. No matter what, they really went for everything he asked for and – as I said – over and over again they experienced profound improvement. Part of what makes that possible is that the guest teacher is there without any preconceived notions of what the singer can or cannot do – no history to perhaps cloud the picture – and no tendency to steer clear of stubborn problems. In this situation, it’s interaction between two strangers- and although there are drawbacks to that, there is also the potential for tremendous growth.
If there’s anything not fun about this, it’s being the teacher who listening to their singers sing better than they have ever sung for you. I had these fleeting moments when I thought to myself “how come I never thought of that? How come Dan is achieving this breakthrough with Joe Blow that I’ve never managed to achieve? Do I really know how to teach voice? Would my students be better off if I handed them off to other teachers who know what they’re doing, so i could go off to Auto Mechanic school?” Fortunately, those moments of self-doubt receded pretty quickly- partly because Dan was so gracious and generous.
I’m not surprised that Andrew and Craig and Zach were so enthralled. I was, too. This was voice teaching at its very best – and I hope that my students and me will ride the wave of this inspiring and enlightening afternoon for a long time to come.