Hang in there, Rowena! I'd focus on seeing what happens if you can release your breath more and experiment with the potentially lighter vocal production that would yield. See my posts on Anatomy of Breathing (particularly #2) and pick up a copy of Steve Smith's book. It sounds like you just haven't started using your entire instrument yet.

I like Brian Lee's perspective on these recordings of legendary performers and how listening to them can affect us now: http://vocalability.com/uncategorized/what-happened-to-beautiful-singing-between-then-and-now/ There are probably no reliable statistics on how well we are now able to help singers avoid self-destruction, but it's likely that science has improved the situation, if not through pedagogy and prevention. E.g. the sublime Patty Lupone ended up needing surgery for nodules, after which she retrained her technique and has since been more fabulous than ever.

It's quite true: no one actually said that. I provided a link to the discussion so that my readers could read what was actually said. However, for me this was a theme of the discussion. Among the actual comments was one opining that current singers only rarely compare favorably with many recordings dating back 100 years and another contributor's observation that "Identifying through hearing the hidden workings of the larynx, and then guiding a student from phase to phase in development is an art not a science…The GREAT masters of the past didn't need the science to identify what they knew was right." This and other comments for me resonated with said oft-repeated idea, which is spelled out quite clearly in The Bel Canto Forum's mission statement: "Bel Canto Forum is an attempt to rebuild the legacy of this great school of singing known as historic Bel Canto. It is a library of every resource imaginable on singing with this technique, which produced voices of power, richness, and beauty virtually unequaled in our own time." I think that comparing vocal technique to new technologies of instrument building is in this case a crucial analogy. As I mentioned at the end of this post, I'd like you all to bear with me. I will get to my reasons for saying that presently. Obviously I had best be as articulate as I can be about this, because I am well aware that not everyone shares my point of view. As I stated more than once on the NFCS discussion, I'm not making a sweeping claim that science can improve singing - I wrote, "science can't teach us how to sing well, all it can do is describe what is happening when we sing well." What I am working on showing here is that information available to us now about anatomy, physiology, motor learning, psychology, etc. has paved the way for a more effective approach to vocal technique. Bear with me. I'm not Deepak Chopra. I don't propose to say anything I can't reasonably support, and as should also have been apparent from my contributions to the original thread, I am swift to acknowledge when my own knowledge and reasoning falls short.

I think it's more like you inadvertently bought a pair of shoes that had a 1" heel on the left and a 2" heel on the right. You just might be able to figure out how to walk gracefully enough that people wouldn't notice all that much, although you'll develop a muscular imbalance in your legs that doesn't serve any purpose at all. Anyhow, there are better ways to learn how to walk gracefully. And the original point was to be able to get from point A to point B efficiently, which is better served when you've got matching shoes.

Glad you found it interesting! Paradoxically, some of the skills that make for a good choral singers are among the most advanced things a singer can do. Producing a clear straight tone without straining or compromising intonation, sustaining a high pianissimo that blends well with everyone else's, etc.

Sharing a comment from an NFCS member (http://www.nfcs.net/forumframe.html): I used to say about a certainly notoriously abusive voice teacher: "for that kind of money you could hire a professional dominatrix and do it right." I used to put up with a lot. At some point I realized that playing games doesn't teach you how to sing. It doesn't even teach you how to play any other game than how to jump through hoops for that particular whack-job teacher. It gets you nowhere. No one person is the be-all and end-all. Good teachers help you learn what to do. Soon enough you should mostly know how to do it yourself. Baby birds don't spend their whole lives in the next. The goal is to teach them to fly on their own. If you aren't learning to fly then what the hell are you paying (or BORROWING!) all that money for. I have sadly know singers who had to transfer to another school in order to change teachers. That's absurd. And having been to a school where this kind of teacher bs either didn't go on or was kept away from the students (and from the student perspective that's 6 = half dozen), I know that it doesn't have to be that way.