Is it illness or technique?

Here's one for the voice professionals and students.

So you've been working for a while, or changing your repertoire, or working with a new teacher or coach and you start to notice that something doesn't feel right. You're coughing a little bit more than usual, your mucuous is thicker or heavier, your voice doesn't seem to feel right, you are getting tired a little sooner than usual. It could also be that your breath is a little short. Basically you and your voice are not getting along like you usually do.

One of the things that I struggled with, especially in the early days of my career, was this constant doubt about whether I was ill (cold, asthma, allergies) or that I my way of singing was causing a physical reaction in my body which felt like and illness. I was in graduate school in Boston and I was singing alot. I was working with a teacher with whom I didn't really see eye to eye. To be fair, he was a great guy with a huge international career and deep down I think he really believed in my talent but well, it just didn't work. I was paying a fortune for these lessons and I was doing technical stuff that just didn't feel right. We worked on light lyric opera rep (Mozart, Rossini) during the week. During the weekend I had a church job where straight-tone was required. That's singing without vibrato, and it uses a really different set of muscles than singing with vibrato. I was also working in a fruit and vegetable market about 20 hours a week. I think in the first year I was in Boston I had maybe 1 whole day off.

I was just confused. I mean my body was confused. And very tired. I had very heavy phlegm all the time, felt short of breath. I had no health insurance and felt constantly under the gun financially. Was it illness or a technical issue? If I were to be able to talk to my 22-year old self I would probably give the following advice.

1) you need to get some rest. I know. The rent is due. School is expensive. Everything is expensive. You need a day off, and it is your responsibility to articulate that to the people around you. If you don't say it, no one else will and the world with work you to death if you don't speak up for yourself.

2) Keep a journal and keep track of your symptoms and when they occur. The first thing a good physician will do is to take a good case history to try to detect patterns. This will help a lot.

3) See a doctor. You deserve medical care. If you have no health insurance, there may be programs available to you. In my case, there was the university health service, which I could have used but didn't. It may not have been the specialized care that I needed, but any person with medical training would be able to put you closer to your goal of figuring out what was going on. Your journaling about your symptoms will help them help you. I was diagnosed with asthma a few years later and that would have saved me lots of time if I had known. AND having had a look at your vocal cords by a specialist can be a very calming thing. I have a few stories about that!

4) Hydrate. In my case, the symptoms were super heavy phlegm, and being able to thin my mucuousal covering would have helped.

Now to the question at hand: the meeting point between illness and technique. While in the moment, I thought it was going to be one or the other (either illness or technique) there is a meeting point where the way in which your body reacts to illness can make small changes to your technique. Our sense of vocal identity (what you sound like to yourself) goes very deep in our mental framework. This is why hearing yourself on a recording is rarely a purely pleasant experience. "That's not me!" That challenge to our identity is just as jarring as if you looking in the mirror and saw someone else. Because of this, your body will make changes to make sure the sound keeps on coming out. Especially if you depend on your voice for your income. So while the question may feel binary, it seldom is only one or the other.

The solution is to work from both ends. Start with the body. Have you had a cold recently? Maybe it is hanging on. Have you had your cords scoped recently? Maybe couldn't hurt. It's always best to start with the simplest, most observable things. If you get the all-clear or at least understand what is going on, then you can make a good decision about what to do next. A good friend (asthmatic, much heavier than my symptoms) with a international career had symptoms which had outrun his treatment and as a result his asthma was not being managed. And because he was singing all over the place, his body had started to make the adjustments necessary to keep the voice moving. In short, he was pushing and losing volume, shine, and flexibility. In this case, his vocal difficulties were both illness and technique and he required some voice-use therapy (something other than a singing lesson) to re-educate his way of speaking and singing.

Having said all that, I have been through lots of thorny passages with both minor illness and technical shortcomings, and even in my case, which seemed apocalyptic at the time a couple of minor adjustments would have broken the cycle. Drinking much more water. Talking to a sympathetic person to get out of my own head. Getting some rest. Realizing that the universe is probably unfolding as it should and my schedule and fatigue were not a global problem. Massage works wonders. Listening more to my body than to my voice teacher.

A happy voice heals more quickly.