As you prepare for your summer, many of you are probably looking forward to a less hectic schedule and time to retool. Many teachers and conductors take the summer months to rest the voice and/or to continue to learn about the vocal mechanism. When I think of summer, I also get excited about all of the things I will have time to read! Recently, I was re-reading Science-Based, Futurist Megatrends: Vocal and Choral Pedagogy in the year 2097 [1] written by Leon Thurman who is the founder of The Voice Care Network (http://www.voicecarenetwork.org/) and Specialist Voice Educator at the Leon Thurman Voice Center (LTVC), Minneapolis, Minnesota (http://www.leonthurman.com/). I met Leon at the Phenomenon of Singing International Symposium in Newfoundland, Canada in the late nineties and recently connected with him again through this column. For my last Speaking of Voice blog entry, I asked him if I could feature him, his work and his hopes for future research in the fields of vocal pedagogy and voice science.
1) Why have you chosen to make vocal health and voice education your life’s work?
The choice evolved from wanting to be a ‘preacher’ in high school, to being an actor, to being a choral music and speech educator. Being a voice teacher was added when I taught in a small South Dakota college. Then I thought, “What if I did voice skill teaching with the choral singers?” recognizing that voice education was almost non-existent in the choral music field. While teaching at MacPhail Center for the Arts, my personal voice education grew to include “how voices are made and how they are ‘played’ in skilled singing and speaking.” I then met and ‘apprenticed’ with very experienced voice educators, voice therapists, voice scientists, and ENT physicians. As a result, voice health was added to what I could share with choral conductors and singers, general music educators, actors, clergy, etc. Eventually, voice users who had voice disorders that were diagnosed by ENTs began to ask me to help them recover their voices (I never advertised). I started The VoiceCare Network in 1982, and with support from the National Center for Voice and Speech, I became principal author and co-editor of a 3-volume tome titled Bodymind and Voice: Foundations of Voice Education. In 1989, a voice-dedicated speech pathologist and I partnered as The Voice Center, and in 1995 Fairview Health Services bought us. For twelve years we were Fairview Voice Center, part of Rehabilitation Services at the University of Minnesota Medical Center, Fairview. In late 2007, during a financial crisis, I was downsized from Fairview and became sole proprietor of The Leon Thurman Voice Center.
2) Whose work has been most influential to you?
The work and wisdom of many people have influenced me and my work, but three people were seminal in pointing me in the directions that my professional life has taken: Charles Leonhard, Ed.D., a renowned music education pioneer in the United States; Oren Brown, Juilliard School, a pioneer in voice education and voice therapy; and Van Lawrence, M.D., a leader in voice health and protection for people who use their voices extensively and/or vigorously in their work or non-work lives. All three of them are deceased, now, but in my professional life, I have done my best to extend their work into a future of which they could not be a part.
Charles Leonhard, my major professor during my University of Illinois masters and doctoral degrees, opened my ‘eyes’ and ‘heart’ to the relationship between the structural designs of music and the ‘making’ of music so that it expresses out what is emotionally important to the human beings of this Earth. He helped open my curiosities so much that I delved into knowledge areas that were well beyond the usual provinces of academic music, e.g., prenatal and infant music education, connecting musical learning and expressiveness with the neuropsychobiological wholeness of all human beings, and “doing” music education in ways that learners want to connect with it and choose to do so over their lifetimes.
Oren helped me connect knowledge about vocal anatomy and function with how to help people can learn to sing and speak with optimum physical and acoustic efficiency. That efficiency waaay increases the likelihood that expressive singing and speaking can move people to express out the rich feelings that direct our lives. Our expressive voices can connect us strongly to each other, they can dance us, move us into still contemplation or to weeping, they can en-joy us with smiles and laughter, heighten our empathy for each other, and leave us in a state of neuropsychobiological homeostasis (read: balance, calm focus, and positive ‘resonance’ with the people, places, things, and events of our experienced ‘worlds’).
Van took me under his wing to educate me deeply about voice health. We first met at the 1979 NATS National Convention and then at various Voice Foundation Symposia. He offered the use of his laryngeal videostroboscope to videotape what voices do when they perform a variety of efficient and inefficient vocal coordinations, so I flew to Houston to do that. I stayed in his home and met his lovely wife Camilla, over a February weekend in 1983. He was such a warm and beautiful human being who patiently helped me learn how the organs and tissues of voices respond to use and to diseases, what ENT physicians do for the health of singers, and the role that voice educators could play in partnership with ENTs and speech pathologists.
3) What research would you like to see done in the areas of vocal pedagogy, voice conservation, or any other related topic?
Voice, voice medicine, and other scientists around the world are continuing the slow, methodical work of researching the details of the vocal physiology that produce singing and speaking, and the practices that optimize healthy voice use. For some time now, neuroscientists around the world have been researching the myriad effects of music experiences on brain development and function with increasing interest. A huge need, however, is the collection and evaluation of that research and ‘translations’ of the findings into language that practitioners can comfortably understand and use in the “real world.”
Only a very few voice-interested researchers have delved into the neuroscience, psychology, and biology of optimal learning applied to solo and choral singing, speaking, and acting. Learning and human communications happen both inside and outside conscious awareness. The internal processings that produce those phenomena happen 24/7, and they even include influences on the development of secure or insecure self-identity in human beings. The available science-based information that relates to optimal learning and human communications is dispersed in a wide array of knowledge fields and requires long effort to collect it and ‘translate’ it.
A first ‘go’ at doing that is in Volume 1 of Bodymind and Voice [2].
[1] Thurman, L. (1998). Science-based futurist megatrends: Vocal and choral pedagogy in the year 2097. In B.A. Roberts (Ed.), Proceedings of the International Symposium—Sharing the Voices: The Phenomenon of Singing. St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada: Memorial University of Newfoundland.
[2] Thurman, L. & Welch, G. (Eds.) (2000). Bodymind and Voice: Foundations of Voice Education (Rev. Ed., Vols. 1-3). Collegeville, MN: The VoiceCare Network, National Center for Voice and Speech, Fairview Voice Center.
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