The Voice Culture Podcast

“The Voice Culture” podcast recently joined NATSCast, the official podcast network of the National Association of Teachers of Singing. Hosts Justin Petersen and Brian Lee tell us more about their casual and friendly podcast that features conversations about singing, vocal technique, and teaching.

Tell us a little about yourself and your singing careers? How’d you two become acquainted?

BRIAN: I live in Maryland and teach in my home studio and in New York occasionally. I have a very wide-ranging background as a singer, coach, instrumentalist, and teacher. Most of my singing has been with chamber choirs and in art song. Art song in English and Spanish, and strange new solo or ensemble music, are my favorites. I had a disastrous undergraduate voice study experience, which led me on a long road to learn how to help regular singers with regular problems (like me) to improve. Although I do work with professionals, I am just as happy to work with people who are singing for any reason. Some of the most rewarding work has been with teens, who are so fresh and free, and with enthusiastic adults who have big challenges to overcome.

After many years in music, including coaching and accompanying singers for many years, I started becoming very curious about pedagogical literature — past as much as present. I also kept discovering fantastic singers from the near and distant past. How were they trained? What did they know or not know? How did they do it before records and voice science and trademarked methods? Why did I fail to improve as a singer in my first few years of university? I wrote a whole book, Sane Singing, and maintain a blog about navigating the cornucopia of nonsense in the voice world, and I’m always crusading for clearer, better, more organic training of the human voice.

JUSTIN: I live in Boston and teach privately out of my home studio, and I’m also a song coach and voice teacher for My College Audition (MCA) where I help students prepare for auditions for MFA programs all over the United States. My own singing has been largely in a classical vein, and I’ve sung with the Santa Fe Opera, the Sarasota Opera, Opera North (US), and the Lyric Opera of Kansas City. I maintain a blog on historical voice pedagogy and editorialize on forgotten pedagogical texts, with an especial interest in the tumult of the 19th century in voice training. I’m very interested in clarifying and cross-referencing these texts across many extant pedagogues and writers on voice up to the current day.

How we met: In the old New Forum for Classical Singers, Justin first noticed Brian’s posts. We started talking about the functional approach of Cornelius Reid. Our first in-person meeting was at a summer vocal pedagogy program in 2010. It was geekout at first sight! We have been fast friends ever since.

That's awesome! Why’d you two start a podcast, and how long have you been at it? What is your posting schedule?

We have been discussing voice pedagogy several times weekly (or daily!) for years. We saw an opening for a different kind of podcast. We are not presenting research, teaching science, promoting a method, or trumpeting our accomplishments. We are having conversations about singing. We are questioners, journeyers, and lovers of the voice. We prize practicality, humanity, and the magic of vocal artistry. We both are perfectly capable of getting into the weeds and being scholarly (see our blogs and other writing), but in the podcast we are bringing it down to earth and offering something useful for the day-to-day work of helping singers.

We started in December 2020 and post episodes of about an hour’s length twice monthly, on the 15th and 30th of the month. We are currently on hiatus after our first season of 17 episodes, and we will begin season two in the fall.

Can't wait for season two! Generally speaking, what are your favorite areas or topics to discuss and why?

History. The voice pedagogy community would benefit from knowing much more about what has gone on before! Writers such as David Clark Taylor, Anna Maria Pellegrini Celoni, Herbert Witherspoon, and Peter Harrison are unknown to 99% of our profession. The training was very different 100 and 200 years ago, and there are many clues about how Bel Canto came about and flourished in these books. We also discuss how there seems to be a “shiny object” obsession in voice ped, where people chase after the latest thing and don’t get an in-depth grasp of much. We talk a lot about how and why singing and teaching have changed, and where it may be going sideways.

Philosophy of teaching is a huge subject for us. What issues of process, mindset, and values are important? Philosophy guides the way you teach technique, the way you treat students, the goals you set, and the way you measure success.

We talk about “cultivation” versus “production”. This distinction between nurturing growth and manufacturing a product is so important to both of us that we put the old-fashioned word “culture” in the name of the podcast! Fun fact - the term “voice culture” is still used in India.

How to actually teach. Not pedagogy as abstraction and research, but as principles for action in the moment.

What have been some of your most memorable episodes?

BRIAN: One has to be our rollicking interview with Michelle Markwart Deveaux and Christin Coffee Rondeau, and I’m also fond of our Witherspoon episodes.

JUSTIN: With the Witherspoon “Fads and Fancies” series, we took actual passages from the great pedagogue and discussed what they might mean and how they might be used in a modern sense.

Can you give us a hint on upcoming topics or guests on the horizon?

Audiobooks! Many of the old texts are well written and even witty, and deserve to be included in the education of voice teachers. Our episodes on the Witherspoon treatise on singing were some of the most listened-to, so we are going to finish that series and share other great old books out there that people might not know about yet.

We will be having more interviews with singers and bright lights in the voice world for sure! We have some interesting guests tentatively scheduled. Musical theatre people, opera people, and some interesting “renaissance people.”

We also will branch out a little into some of the “meta” issues around the voice pedagogy world. There are so many issues around the profession that are controversial. We will get into those more! 

Here’s a list of some of our future show topics: Husler & Rodd-Marling, Bel Canto rep as vocal exercise, acting and singing, the role of talent, vocal registers, the resonance obsession, pedagogical jargon, plus the interviews, which will probably go all over the place (which we like!)

We will give more details on some of these goodies in September when we launch season two.

Sounds wonderful. What other podcasts do you enjoy listening to when you have time?

BRIAN: Wendy’s Coffeehouse, Latin American & Iberian Art Song, Making Gay History, Song Cycle, Fresh Air, Joe Rogan Experience. I like to break out of the music world when I’m listening to podcasts. Long form interviews on a wide variety of subjects are fascinating.

JUSTIN: I’m a big horror/mystery fan so I love Last Podcast on the Left, political/current events podcasts with thought leaders on all sides of the political spectrum (Coleman Hughes, Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson, John McWhorter), psychology podcasts like The Psychology Podcast, and The Daily Stoic, as well as podcasts in other languages to improve my listening of French and Italian, with L’Histoire nous le dira in an accent québécois a particular fave.

Listen to season one of “The Voice Culture”