It could be very easy to ruin a young voice by having training in singing too soon, particularly for women. Those muscles on the middle of our bodies that actually support singing are still very much developing when we are teenagers. And if we go to those classes, which, of course, are proliferating all over the world now, because kids think if they can just sing on television and be heard by the right person they’ll have a record deal, as it were, sort of overnight. That isn’t the way life works. Not real life. That’s the way life works on television. It really is so important not to try to use those muscles before they are fully developed, because if you do that, the tendency is to use muscles in the neck, and muscles that are not there for that. Those muscles are there for chewing, absolutely. And I’m sure that you have noticed, as well, that one can see rather young singers that participate and the jaw shakes. That’s because the emphasis is being put on the wrong muscles, and they probably started doing it much too early, because these muscles were not developed so the body uses whatever there is. The thing that I say to young singers, to try to frighten them into not sort of taking themselves too seriously before the body is really ready for it, is that these vocal chords are unforgiving. If we abuse them, if we use them in the wrong way too early, they stretch, and like any ligament they don’t go back. They don’t go back. So it’s not a matter of having sort of ruined your voice at age 16, if you can just be quiet for two years everything is going to be all right. That isn’t the way it works. It’s not like a muscle that you can massage, or you can give it an injection or something, or you can rest it, and have it be all right in a matter of time. The vocal chords don’t work like that. So I was very lucky to work with Carolyn Grant to begin to understand how the voice is produced. She was a great vocal pedagogue, what one calls the study of vocal anatomy. So I understood how all of this works: where the diaphragm is in the body, and what part of the body sort of pushes the air out of the lungs and through the trachea and past the vocal chord, and how this all works. So that it’s not some sort of mysterious thing that happens to my body, that maybe it’s good one day and maybe it’s not good the next day. At least I know how it’s meant to function, scientifically.