The Modern Singing Master...

Introducing....Cornelius L. Reid.
Well, not really introducing him, just to you guys. My voice teacher, Tony, is trained in the Reid school of vocal pedagogy....genius, if you ask me.
Here's some stuff...

"There is a vast difference between "natural and habitual" and "natural and correct." When a student is instructed to sing naturally he is really being told to sing, not correctly, because no principle has been applied to establish this as a functional reality, but in a way that is merely "habitually natural." ... What the singer has really been told when instructed to "sing naturally" is to go along with habitual faults which have become natural to him ... Constructive vocal training cannot proceed effectively as long as "natural" is confused with "habitual." Nor can the student hope to change a faulty technique by any method based on this error."
-- Reid, The Free Voice

I'm reading about Reid second hand, in an essay by Pedro de Alcantara, called "An Alexander Teacher Reads The Free Voice, His Mouth Agape." It's in a book called "The Modern Singing Master: essays in honor of Cornelius L. Reid".

"...Today, eight hours a day, Monday through Friday, passersby on 86th Street and West End Avenue in Manhattan can hear singing wafting from an eighth floor window, the product of the teaching of a Galileo of vocal pedagogy, Cornelius L. Reid. Claiming to have rediscovered the science and the craft of the bel canto maestros, this modern singing master researches and he teaches -- researches as he teaches -- and he invites voice students, voice teachers, and voice scientists to look at what he has found."

I'm looking, learning, listening. In this singing world, "each lesson is another opportunity for discovery".
Worth the move to Lethbridge, to learn this, to sing like this.