Ron Anderson
Ron Anderson is a classically trained former opera singer, and is now a vocal coach for top notch performers in the entertainment industry. In his formative years, Ron was accepted as a Mouseketeer on the Mickey Mouse Club television show. His parents thought it better that he have a standard youth upbringing, and he declined the offer. Later on, he was asked to join the 60's light rock group, The Association, but due to a medical condition that occurred with his vocal chords, he had to pass on that also. During his recovery process, things really started to change for the better for Ron. He began learning techniques from vocal coach professionals Fritz and Tilly Zweig - that not only saved - but propelled his career. He started singing in fine opera houses all throughout Europe and North America. Eventually, Ron started sharing the vocal techniques that he learned during his career with others here in the States. This blossomed into a new career of helping others sing and preserve their voice. An example of clients that Ron has worked with include: Janet Jackson, Avril Lavigne, Timothy Schmidt, Tom Cruise, Ozzy Osbourne, Neil Diamond, Bjork, Nancy Wilson, Seal, members of Red Hot Chili Peppers (Anthony Kiedis and Flea), and many others. Ron will be having a seminar and conducting master classes in Boca Raton, Florida on April 2nd and 3rd in 2016. I recently interviewed Ron about his career.
R.V.B. - Congratulations on your career as a singer first and also for your career as a vocal coach. How did you first get involved with music? Was your family musical? Did you start off with a instrument?
Ron - No one else in my family was particularly musical, but as early as I can remember, I loved to sing and everyone always responded enthusiastically to my singing.
R.V.B. - Were you involved with school programs such as chorus and or orchestra?
Ron - When I was a child, there was much more singing in school than we have today. We were singing every day, and I joined the chorus as soon as I could. I couldn’t get enough singing.
R.V.B. - What were some of the first recitals that you had as a vocalist and how did they go?
Ron - In elementary school, I was selected to perform on a program that aired on a local radio station in Long Beach, California, my home town. Each week the show took an imaginary trip to a foreign location, and we sang popular songs from that place in the native language. This was so much fun. I loved it. When I was in junior high, my neighborhood friend Bobby Burgess and I auditioned to be in the original group of Mouseketeers on the Mickey Mouse Club television show. Bobby Burgess, who was a friend from my neighborhood, told me about it. We were both chosen, but my mother wouldn’t let me to do it. She believed a more conventional adolescence would be better for me. It was a huge disappointment. Bobby became a Mouseketeer and later was half of the dancing duo Bobby and Cissy on The Lawrence Welk Show.
R.V.B. - Where did you continue your musical studies after high school and how was the experience?
Ron. - While I was still in high school, I successfully auditioned for The Young Americans. This was a clean‐cut, co‐ed group that was originally formed to back up artists like Bing Crosby, Judy Garland, and Julie Andrews in CBS television specials. We also toured with our own shows. It was multi‐part harmony arrangements of popular songs with choreographed routines. We were the first American professional show choir ‐‐ like Glee, only 40 years earlier. Then in my senior year, I was asked to join a California pop group called The Association. This was shortly before they became big with “Cherish, ” “Windy, ” and “Along Comes Mary.” Just before going into rehearsals with them, while I was finishing up some final dates with The Young Americans, I severely damaged my voice. While I was singing, I felt something pop in my throat, and suddenly my mouth was full of blood. William Paley, who was the Chairman of CBS and a big fan of The Young Americans, took it upon himself to make certain I had first rate care for my injury. A team of throat specialists determined that the only chance I had to heal my voice was to avoid all vocal production ‐‐ no singing, no talking ‐‐ for an indefinite period of time. To make sure I would follow the doctors’ orders, Mr. Paley had me flown to his private retreat on a small, uninhabited island in the South Pacific. I moved into a bungalow there and lived alone for eight months. Each week supplies would be boated in by natives from nearby islands, but all communication was written. No one spoke a word. When the doctors finally agreed that my voice was healed, I knew that if I wanted to be a professional singer, I needed to learn how to sing safely. Otherwise, I might injure myself again and my dreams of a career could be over forever. So I began a search for the best professional voice teachers I could find. This led me to Fritz and Tilly Zweig.
R.V.B. - How did you make the transition into the professional field. What were some of your first major performances?
Ron - Although I’d been performing professionally for several years, it was the Zweigs who taught me how to be an authentic professional singer. Prior to World War II, Fritz Zweig was one of the premier operatic directors and conductors in Europe. His wife, whose stage name was Tilly DeGarmo, was one of the most celebrated German sopranos of the era. In the early 1930s, Fritz’s innovative productions were condemned as decadent by Adolph Hitler. So Fritz and Tilly escaped to Prague, then Paris, and finally to Hollywood, where they became teachers. I didn’t go to the Zweigs with the intention of becoming an opera singer. I was looking for a way to train my voice so that I could perform at peak level night after night, week after week, without hurting myself. But soon after I began working with Mrs. Zweig as my voice teacher, it became clear that my voice was best suited to opera. So I decided to become an opera singer, and there was a lot to learn. Mrs. Zweig taught me the mechanics of vocalization and the fundamentals of breath management, vocal placement, vowel modification and diction. She also taught me German, French, and Italian, which are essential languages for every professional opera singer. She knew instantly that my vocal instrument had suffered damage. But she also knew precisely how deal with it, how to exercise it correctly and rebuild it into a strong, agile, flexible, and indestructible voice. Once Mrs. Zweig determined I could sing safely with competitive technique and language skills, Dr. Zweig became my vocal coach. I continued to study with them both for 20 years.
R.V.B. - Can you give a brief description of what you learned from your master teachers Dr. Fritz Zweig and Benvenuto Finelli... and how you took their knowledge and worked it into your performances?
Ron - A voice teacher instructs the student on how to sing correctly. This was Tilly Zweig’s specialty. She laid the foundation with disciplined workouts to develop and maintain vocal fitness, to achieve and refine precision technique, and to avoid injury. No matter what kind of singing you do, you won’t last if you don’t have this foundation and keep it solid. A vocal coach prepares the student to perform specific songs or roles. During his heyday, Fritz Zweig had directed and conducted every well‐known opera in the canon, as well as many obscure ones. He was intimately familiar with an astonishing number of operatic roles, and he taught me all the roles I needed to know to compete professionally. For a professional opera singer, the more roles you know, the better your odds are of getting hired and working steadily. Once I could sing safely, my technique was correct, and I knew a decent number of parts, I began to land work all over the world in operas and as a concert performer. The Zweigs also connected me with other teachers to help develop and refine various aspects of my craft. They sent me to study dramatic interpretation with the legendary diva Lilli Lehmann. As my range increased from baritone tenor, I studied Wagnerian heldentenor roles with Metropolitan Opera stars Jon Vickers and Jess Thomas. I also worked with the renowned operatic conductor Maestro Walter Cataldi‐Tassoni. In 1982, Mrs. Zweig recommended that I stop in London on my way back from Europe to meet with Benvenuto Finelli. Finelli was known in his prime as “The Prince of the High F.” Many tenors can sing a high C or D, but those who can consistently hit a high F are very few. As a teacher, Finelli was recognized as one of the last great masters of bel canto technique. Bel canto, which means “beautiful singing, ” is a system of vocal training and performance developed in the Italian singing schools during the 16th and 17th centuries in what is called the Baroque Era. While Finelli trained a variety noteworthy opera singers in the bel canto style, his most famous student was Queen frontman Freddie Mercury. Freddie could hit the high F, too. Compared to the German School technique I had learned from Mrs. Zweig, bel canto technique produces a brighter, lighter tone. I was seeking this quality in my singing because the darker, heavier German sound had pigeonholed me into heroic Wagnerian roles, ruling me out for many of opera’s greatest tenor parts. I studied with Finelli for four hours every day I wasn’t performing for five years until he died. He revolutionized my singing, especially regarding how to lighten the breath and bring the voice back, up, and over into the facial mask. Much of what he taught me I pass on to my students in the system I teach which is called the VoixTek Method.
R.V.B. - Which performances or venues that you have performed in really stick with you until today?
Ron - The performance I remember most vividly is my first appearance in an opera. I was participating in a classical singing competition in Florence, Italy. One of the selections I performed was “Gioventu Mia, ” the aria by the Marcello character in Puccini’s famous opera La Boheme. As soon as I finished singing, an Italian man came up to me and asked if I knew all of Marcello’s role, which I did. The man went on to explain that the baritone who was supposed to sing the role that night for the Opera di Roma had fallen sick. Could I come to Rome and fill in? I said, “Why not?
So that evening I made my operatic debut on a huge outdoor stage at the Terme Caracalla, a magnificent setting among the ruins of the ancient Roman public baths. The performance was well‐received, but I couldn’t accept the payment they offered because it would invalidate my amateur status and disqualify me from the competition in Florence. So instead, they took me and my friends on a fantastic late night tour of Rome, complete with amazing food and wine. It’s a miracle I ever made it back to Florence for the final day of competition. But I did ‐‐ and I won third prize.
R.V.B. - How did you make the transition from a performer to a Vocal teaching specialist? Did you open up a studio and advertise?
Ron - In 1977, a friend of mine who was a professional musician I met at the Montreux Jazz Festival, asked me for help. He was in the studio working on a song for the soundtrack album of a movie called The Deep. They’d been recording for weeks, but the lead singer was having serious problems with his voice and they were stalled. I went in and worked with him and in just a few days we nailed the vocal. Earth, Wind and Fire were recording in the next room, and when the word got around about what I’d done, they started coming to me for training. Suddenly I found myself working with all the vocalists on Maurice’s label, and my reputation spread by word of mouth from there.
I’ve never done any advertising to promote my career as a teacher and coach or as a vocal producer. For me, it’s been strictly a referral business from singer to singer, producers, label executives, managers, and throat and voice doctors. I’ve been very fortunate.
R.V.B. - There are obviously professional singers that have damaged their voice by overdoing it. Is what you do a mixture of physical and psychological coaching?
Ron - Singing well is a very complex skill that involves the precise coordination of a variety of specially conditioned muscles. Although people don’t think of singers as athletes, singing well involves a lot of very focused physical training. And just like in any athletic pursuit, psychological factors play a key role in success or failure. One of the most important issues a singer must address is confidence. The only way to achieve real confidence as a performer is to believe deeply in your vocal fitness and technique. Without the confidence that comes from doing the work and knowing your instrument, it’s unlikely you will be able to sing well consistently and even less likely that your voice will last. So to succeed, it takes both physical and mental discipline. There’s really no separation between the two.
R.V.B. - Does each singer that you deal with have to be handled differently, such as someone like Alicia Keys to Ozzy Osbourne?
Ron - Francesco Lamperti, who was one of the great voice teachers of the 19th century, once said: “Every voice is a law unto itself.” Each voice is unique because each singer is physically and psychologically unique. No two singers will have the same physical or psychological capacities, and each will need to be trained in accordance with those capacities. Different people learn in different ways and respond to different types of motivation. So even though the exercises in the VoixTek Method are the same for each singer, just as the poses in a yoga system might be the same for each yoga student, the teacher must adapt the teaching process to suit the learning capabilities of the student.
R.V.B. - Can you give me an example on whose voice you may have saved in a nick of time?
Ron - I often get a call when a singer is in vocal trouble and there’s substantial downside at stake: canceled concert or recording dates, or the risk of botching high profile media appearances. Because of my training and experience, I generally know how to get a singer safely back on track quickly. But this isn’t something I like to discuss publically, especially in specifics. On my website are video testimonials from a variety of well‐known singers who speak for themselves about their experiences with me. There are many other stories I could tell about my vocal rescue missions, but I view my relationships with my students as confidential when it comes to vocal health or any other issues that relate to their ability to compete professionally.
R.V.B. - Do singers in different genres have to be handled differently such as hard rock and roll as opposed to smooth jazz?
Ron - Different styles of singing require different applications of vocal skills to achieve the desired sounds, but fundamentally my training system is the same for all genres of music. The exercises in the VoixTek Method build strength, flexibility, and agility which can be deployed to suit any style. The objective is to sing well in your preferred genre with a perfected and protected voice. Style is a matter of where you place your voice, how you pronounce the lyrics, and how you lay the melody on top of the arrangement. But no matter what style you sing, if your voice isn’t properly conditioned and your technique isn’t correct, eventually you’ll have problems.
R.V.B. - What do you enjoy the most about being a vocal coach?
Ron - The greatest pleasure as a voice teacher is seeing my students develop the conditioning, the craft, and the confidence to sing well whenever they want to. As a vocal coach, it’s seeing students master the material they choose and then own it in the spotlight. I find my joy in their joy. I wouldn’t want to be doing anything else.
Interview conducted by Robert von Bernewitz
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For more information on Ron Anderson visit his website www.ronandersonvocals.com
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