January's Signatory of the Month is music teacher Lizzie Perring, a supporter of the Music Manifesto since 2006. Lizzie runs Unlock the Music in Coventry where she promotes an 'empowering' style of learning, has her own YouTube channel for her students and a burgeoning new business in musical life coaching.
"Like everybody I've had lots of ups and downs," says Lizzie Perring. "At one point I had an operation on my throat, a thyroidectomy. Having had a really deep bluesy voice I came out with a little squeaky voice - they forgot to ask me if I was a singer!"
For someone who had been singing since she was a child, "ups and downs" is an understatement; losing her voice was traumatic. But Lizzie worked hard to rebuild it and that experience was the foundation of everything she does now. "I really had to tune deeply into myself to work out how to do this," she says. "I used all the exercises and vocalise I'd learnt, and I did recover it fully." In fact, by working so methodically, Lizzie's voice became stronger than it ever had been.
As well as singing from a young age, Lizzie played piano and was a keen songwriter. She studied at Colchester Institute, went on to teach privately and in schools and spent 18 years working in special educational needs. She also gained a masters in arts education and studied counselling and psychotherapy. But now music is back at the centre of her life, with a thriving music school in Coventry, and a new career in musical life planning.
Her pupils range from talented singers with professional careers ahead of them to students with serious pitch problems, one with severe hearing loss and one child on the autistic spectrum.
Lizzie emphasises what she calls an 'empowering' or 'enabling' style of teaching, very much in line with ideas of personalised learning that have recently come to the fore. "I think it's really important to find out what people respond to," she says, "so they don't find themselves thinking you're the 'expert' and they have to simply try to understand what you're saying."
It's a two-way process and Lizzie stresses that students must feel they can speak up when things aren't making sense. "One person's metaphor is another person's nonsense," she says. "When I was at college, my singing teacher would say, 'Darling, you really must think of the ball on the fountain,' and that was such a mismatch for me. I felt like an idiot and thought if I said 'I don't know what you're talking about' he'd be really cross with me."
Lizzie is a big fan of Jeremy Fisher's Vocal Process videos, where he uses an endoscope to show how the vocal cords work. "It's a bit gory but it stays in their imagination forever." And it gets students working from the inside out.
"I also use some focusing exercises," she says. "There are parts of your body you're not used to being asked to feel or experience, such as lifting your ribcage or feeling where your diaphragm is. We talk about the diaphragm and the lungs and the vocal chords, but until they [the students] have tuned into the sensation inside them, they don't know how to tell themselves that things are going well, so they're always coming to you for the feedback, you're the 'expert'. But no matter how sensitive I am, I really can't say, hand on heart, I know what's going on inside them."
As well as analysing their own physiology, Lizzie is keen for pupils to take some responsibility for their own progress and direction. She doesn't follow the exam system and encourages students to take on a wide range of music although she believes that learning classical song lies at the heart of formal vocal development - Handel and Purcell are favourites - even if her students go on to sing the Beatles or Mariah Carey as well.
She offers pupils a wealth of practical performance opportunities and encourages them to organise their own. "I'm teaching people to communicate through music and if that means to communicate to an audience then we try to provide a really wide range of performance opportunities, and that's put us into all sorts of situations." They range from town centres to shopping malls to churches and even online - Lizzie has her own YouTube channel where students post videos of their performances. After all, the internet is where most young people access and listen to music these days.
The real-world approach is important to Lizzie who has seen musicians struggling with moving from training into professional life, or working out how to make a living while keeping music central to their lives, which is why, with her counselling and psychotherapy background she is putting all her experience into practice as a musical life coach.
"Life coaching is a booming industry but my angle is to offer something specific to musicians." She helps those who are looking for direction, struggling to make decisions or suffering a creative block, people who feel they're underachieving or working at something they're second best at rather than their real passion. She has worked with someone starting up their own teaching business and another client who had been unsuccessful in an audition and needed to deal with the fallout. "There are a huge variety of specific things musicians experience - only somebody who's done this can really understand."
Unlock the Music's next concert is on 9 Feb. Click for details.
Lizzie is passing on some of her expertise in two courses - the Art of Teaching Piano to Beginners and Vocal Technique for School Teachers.
She has also been developing a course in Creative Literacy - email her for more details.