Voice and Body in Harmony

Are you one of those people who always hide when group singing takes place, or claim that you have a sore throat, a cold, or are simply "tone-deaf"? Hide no more! Stephen Chun-Tao Cheng's insights mean that nearly anybody can be enabled to produce sounds which, if not quite in the Pavarotti class, are good enough to join in carol singing, to say nothing of a boozy bellow.

Stephen Chun-Tao Cheng first went to Madrid in 1994 to introduce his revolutionary method of teaching voice production. Although in his adopted New York he teaches singers as well as actors and others who use their voice on a professional basis, his method is not limited to perfectioning technique. Rather, it is a different way of looking at singing, which uses some of the ancient Chinese Tai Chi exercises and Taoist philosophy, and links them to a Westsern vocal culture.

Trained in the United States under some of the most outstanding teachers of singing, Cheng began to have doubts about whether Western singing was best served by Western teaching methods. Traditional methods of teaching present students with a difficult reconciliation of tension and relaxation, a balance which can take years to achieve: for example, the diaphragm has to be tightened, but this tightening should not produce tension. In an effort to short-cut the process, Cheng took inspiration from his native China, where Tai Chi gave a clue to a different resolution of the relationship between exercise, breathing and relaxation. From China also came the philosophy of Taoism, Which has much in common with Tai Chi. It teaches that nothing should be forced, and that the strongest is the one who uses the energy inherent in the world, transforming rather than straining.

From this rather unlikely combination came Cheng's The Tao of Voice, a book which is the product of many years of teaching, and of his students' repeated requests for him to put down in written form what he had been practicing. In the book, he explores the relationship between breathing and harmony, in all senses of the word. It is a "holistic" approach, because according to Cheng, singing cannot be severed from other bodilyl and mental functions: if you cannot sing, it is because part of you is not working properly; and if

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