Welcome
Transformational Voice Training was founded in 1997 to provide a new paradigm in voice study for singers and speakers of any age, background, or experience. I am often asked "what do you mean by Transformational Voice Training?" The name correctly implies that what changes is more than the voice! No one has been more surprised by this than me. My training strictly prepared me to become a traditional, classically-oriented voice teacher. I believed my job was to teach people how to sing, and I became very good at it over 27 years, with numerous former students singing on many of the world's stages. Over time I began to notice something wonderful and unexpected, quite unsought by me. My students' lives transformed in a million unanticipated ways! Universally, as their voices were freed from the prison of their perfectionism, fear, shame, preconceived conceptions of beauty, and faulty technical habits, they themselves became free. For the first time, they came into intimate personal relationship with their voice as a mirror of their innermost nature. Its beauty transformed and liberated them, giving them a sense of new-found confidence and access to personal power. They also began to learn vocalism as a meditative practice, in which one's awareness and consciousness of breath flow, resonance creation, and vocal freedom leads to exhaltation, centeredness, and deep serenity.
Transformational Voice Training is a true MIND/BODY/SPIRIT endeavor. You will find your true, authentic, free voice -- your vocal self-identity -- which perfectly mirrors every aspect of your innermost nature. Along the way, you will meet and transcend all of your fears surrounding personal expression and authenticity. Oh, by the way, you will also learn how to sing beautifully and freely with the Four Pillars of Vocal Technique. The Pillars have been handed down to us throughout the centuries in an oral tradition, teacher to student. I did not invent any of them. No single teacher of mine understood and utilized them all, but each communicated some vital aspect of the whole. It has been my life's work and privilege to assemble and communicate their efficacy and power. Without the Pillars, there would be no transformation.
And what about talent? Is this adventure only for the enormously gifted, who may already sing beautifully? It is my belief that a beautiful voice is our birthright, but fear and the body tension it creates are the enemy of the singer, the great destroyer of the innate beauty of the human voice. The Four Pillars, once mastered, eliminate that tension and eventually enable the singer to sing beautifully despite the fear. Once transcended, it ceases to have power over us. Therefore, the only talent required is a burning passion for vocal expression; the only prerequisite is a desire to be the best singer or speaker you can be and a willingness to commit to the journey, the destination of which is yet to be revealed.
