Framing the “Vocal Traditions” Series

Abstract

Ultimately, the “Vocal Traditions” series is a collection of articles in the Voice and Speech Review (VSR) from 2017–2022 that focus on varying vocal pedagogies. This project sought to offer voice teachers a deeper knowledge of pedagogical history and a wider understanding of different voice training schools and traditions, which highlighted historically important voice teachers and schools of thought in the world of vocal training, particularly as it relates to voice and speech. In many ways, I orchestrated the series of articles that I always wanted to read. When I was in an undergraduate actor training program, the voice and speech teacher exclusively taught a singular voice method, but the teacher never told us that. We just had “voice class.” And while I grew from the training, I knew even then that the training lacked context to the wider field. The acting teachers acknowledged lineages and variety to acting methods and techniques. “I trained with Uta Hagen,” or “We do Meisner in this class.” And they also acknowledged that they offered a perspective on acting, and the teachers acknowledged that many other perspectives existed. This standpoint was not the case in my voice training classes. In graduate school, the voice and speech instructor offered training from several different voice pedagogies, which I believe was a great luxury and benefit, but no resource gave a broader context to the field. For a grad school research project (in circa 2003), I wanted to examine different kinds of speech pedagogy. The VSR had just begun publishing at the time, but I neither had access to it nor knew it existed. And even if I had, those early VSR volumes did not include a systematic discussion of varying vocal pedagogies, at least to any significant degree. And even years later when I decided to focus on becoming a voice trainer, I still could not find a text that offered an expansive view of the field. Suffice to say, this gap in the literature has always bothered me, so when I became Editor of the VSR, filling this gap was a top agenda item. Bartow’s (2006) book on American actor training remains a favorite of mine. He edits a volume that looks at the major schools of American acting, as they existed at the turn of the twenty-first century. And without question, his book helped to inspire me to solicit and create this vocal series. I must also credit Saklad (2011) with her book, Voice and Speech Training in the New Millennium: Conversations with Master Teachers, since