About
Robert Wendell offers the Charlotte area voice training services that range from teaching beginning singers to coaching accomplished professionals in multiple styles. Robert offers lessons for a wide range of ages. Students range from ten-year-olds to retired adults interested in widely varied musical genres.
Robert has been rated number one in the Charlotte area for two years straight:
See http://www.voiceinstructioncharlotte.com/.
Also see http://www.voiceinstructioncharlotte.com/qa-and-testimonials.html for testimonials, almost all of which are verified by a third party and over which Robert had no control.
If you're one of the few these days who is interested in classical training, you will receive the highest level training as well. This includes not only superb vocal function, but expert guidance to achieve excellent Italian, French, and German diction for the repertoire in those languages.
If you're interested in the vocal skill for things like trills and other baroque ornamentation, you will learn the most effective ways to acquire this kind of flexibility and agility. He will help you improve vocal health and completely eliminate range and voice break problems for any style!
Robert's depth of knowledge will suprise you. You will be amazed as he leads you to practical experiences that enoromously accelerate your growth in vocal ease, richness, range, power, and beauty of musical expression! Contact Robert today to enroll.
I enjoy my students' progress immensely. It is a source of deep satisfaction for me. I have decades of vocal teaching experience as well as choir directing and training. I have a masters degree in choral conducting from the University of Florida, Gainesville.
Many voice teachers simply teach songs and how to carry a tune. They pretend to themselves and their students that this is teaching people how to sing. My enjoyment comes from hearing students sing vastly better than when they came to me.
The most challenging students teach me the most about how to become a better teacher. I have to invent new approaches to address their specific problems, wrong habits that are sometimes deeply entrenched and difficult for them to release. Their pleasure on discovering that true quality in singing comes from greatly improved efficiency, naturaleness, and ease in vocal function is my great pleasure, too.
Such efficiency implies a fantastic feeling of vocal freedom that includes a much extended pitch range, improved pitch accuracy and the personal comfort of tremendous confidence in pitch, beauty of tone, power, agility, and the deeply satisfying expressive potential all this brings with it.
My most talented students profit from all the creative teaching tools the more challenging students required to help them progress. The most talented have essentially the same problems, but usually to a much smaller degree. This and their greater talent allows them to progress much more rapidly. Even those who have studied for many years often have basic problems that were never adquately addressed, but are clearly required for true vocal freedom to exist. Their incredibly rapid progress is also extremely fulfilling to witness.
In summary, I enjoy both the most challenging students and the most talented. The most challenging students force me to be creative and deepen my skill in troubleshooting difficult problems resulting from their relative lack of physical empathy and in vocal as well as general musical intuition. When the tools that work for even the most challenging students are offered to the most talented, their enormously accelerated progress is tremendous fun for me, too.
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Frequently asked questions
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It is important to honor the sources of valuable knowledge we have had the good fortune to acquire. The vocal tradition and source of Robert Wendell’s deepest knowledge and personal experience of ideal vocal technique was passed to him through his studies with the late Lav Vrbanic. For twenty-six years Professor Vrbanic was chair of the vocal department at the Zagreb Academy of Music in the former Yugoslavia, widely known as one of the premier music schools in the world.
Later Robert's teacher served for five years on the faculty of the New England Conservatory (NEC). He acquired the latter position by invitation of NEC’s then current president and well-known American composer Gunther Schuller.
After a B.A. in violin with a minor in voice, Robert studied privately several times a week for three years under Professor Vrbanic at NEC. At this point Robert was a very strong sight singer. He was sometimes paid very well to substitute at the last minute for singers who for some reason had become unable to perform. He had developed a reputation in the Boston/Cambridge area for his ability to read difficult compostions at first sight with ease and accuracy.
Robert also already had near-native French, German, and Italian diction. His lessons with professor Vrbanic were therefore strictly dedicated to improving vocal function, since he could read anything put in front of him with no need for time spent on learning either music or the foreign words.
Mr. Vrbanic had a profound knowledge of the traditional Italian school, bel canto, the German approach known as Stimmbildung (i.e., voice setup, formation, building) and modern voice science. He understood each in the light of the other, and so integrated them effectively into his teaching. In Europe, Vrbanic was widely considered one of the four or five greatest vocal instructors in the world.
Vrbanic often invited students interested in teaching voice to sit in on lessons of his other students. The depth of understanding and experience acquired from his study with Mr. Vrbanic has enabled Robert to use unusually well informed judgment in expanding his teaching approach to include tools that he has since acquired from other sources. This understanding has also served to inform a number of very effective proprietary tools he has structured to creatively solve problems encountered in teaching his own students over the years.
Additionally, Robert has the advantage of a technical background in electronics, audio, and acoustics in interpreting the voice science included in the modern works on vocal pedagogy (i.e., voice teaching) that Mr. Vrbanic recommended to interested students.
Robert's musical tastes and experience are widely spread across multiple genres. He occasionally performs as a jazz singer, is an expert scat singer, and improvises jazz as well as other genres on both trumpet and violin. His favorite performance genres include blues, R&B, and Latin as well as classical.
Robert has sung major baritone solo roles in the Boston and Cambridge areas, such as Christ in J.S. Bach’s St. Matthew Passion and many of Bach's cantatas. He was employed for three years at Boston’s Old North Church of Paul Revere signal lanterns fame as a professional soloist and choir member.
He is also a linguist with near native fluency in Spanish and a practical grasp of basic French and German, which served him well during his times in Europe. His deep, practical understanding of how vocal anatomy functions to produce the sounds of human language has allowed him to help people fluent in English as a second language eliminate their strong non-English accents.
Robert has even helped a few students with speech defects who had no interest in singing to overcome their problems even though licensed speech therpists (which Robert is not) had been unable to do so.
Robert has a Master of Music in performance from the University of Florida, Gainesville in choral conducting and well over two decades of experience in teaching voice and directing choirs. He has a choral training workshop of his own design he has delivered in several locations over the years. He has been teaching voice in Charlotte since 2006.
It is important in this context for those interested in popular genres to understand that good vocal function is universally important for all genres. No one has to sound like a classical singer in order to use the voice well. Good vocal function is highly flexible and adaptable to any genre. It is dictated by the natural laws that govern it, allowing it to work efficiently, rather dictated by simple matters of taste.
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$30 intro lesson (one hour) with $15 discount coupon from our Website. Normal fee after first lesson, $45; minimum one lesson per week. Second hour in a week or second person from same family only $35. Pay as you go, cash or check only.