Gary Catona

Gary Anthony Catona is is an Italian-American voice-builder, author and philosopher. He is also successful in rehabilitating damaged voices. For more than three decades, Gary has served as the voice builder to the world’s top singers and entertainers. Combining physiology and art, Catona works by developing the muscles of the vocal mechanism. Professionals came to appreciate Catona for his innovative breakthroughs in developing the singing voice – as well as for his system’s ability to serve as an alternative to traditional (and oftentimes ineffective) vocal rehabilitation.

Gary Catona

Biography

Catona has had a passion for singing since childhood, but it wasn’t until a chance opportunity from his high school chorus director that he seriously considered a career in music. Praised for his “terrific solo voice,” Catona’s chorus director convinced him to perform a solo rendition of the classical hymn, Tota Pulcra Es Maria. The performance was a breakthrough moment in Catona’s life and marked the beginning of his future – however, not the one he quite imagined at the time.

Supported by his family to continue his vocal studies, Catona spent ten years working with fourteen vocal instructors to perfect his singing voice. As a star wrestler in high school, he forged ahead with the mindset of an athlete, knowing full-well what it meant to undergo rigorous training, and to learn from people who were more skilled and knowledgeable than him.

“Being a good student requires an eagerness to be taught, and you have to be willing to put yourself completely in the hands of your teacher,” Gary says in his book, “A Revolution in Singing.”

Over the course of many years of studying, however, he found that such devotion to the high art of learning had an awful downside.

Every instructor had their own techniques that often contradicted each other. Taking every approach presented to him as seriously as he could, Catona’s voice was damaged in the process. In his book “A Revolution in Singing,” Catona reveals “… my voice had deteriorated into a weak, nasal, and breathy sound. I had also developed an uncontrollable wobble in my upper range. If this wasn’t bad enough, my noble quest to discover my voice left me almost penniless.”

After spending a semester abroad in Rome studying art history, Roman history, and Roman classics, he earned a master’s degree in philosophy from Pennsylvania State University.

Little did he know the studies would provide him with both the inspiration and intellectual tools to forge ahead and create his own revolution in singing. His breakthrough came however, when he peered deeply into the writings of his hero, Enrico Caruso, the immortal Italian operatic tenor, who argued that it is correct to “sing from the throat,” while also emphasizing the need to develop vocal muscles for singing. Both ideas were foreign to Catona’s many voice teachers. Finally, the truth emerged in Catona’s memorable phrase, “Behind the great voice is the muscular voice.”

The phrase – and its reference to the physicality of the voice – was unique to Catona, who was used to hearing instructions emphasizing the importance of breath management and mask singing to achieve the ideal singing voice. It motivated him to study the actual muscular properties of the vocal mechanism and how it contributes to the singing voice. He never looked back from that revelation which led him to create the system he utilizes today.

Voice Building-System Based on the Vocal Anatomy

In creating his voice system, Catona posed an essential question: What is the first principle of singing? This led him to study Gray’s Anatomy and to investigate the muscular structure of the vocal-mechanism.

He found that physical capacity in singing means the work of muscles of the larynx (voice box), the pharynx (throat), and the oral cavity (mouth). There are muscles for virtually every function of vocal behavior. Muscles for closing and opening the vocal cords; muscles for stretching the vocal cords; muscles that move the larynx vertically in the throat; muscles that constrict, expand, and elongate the pharynx; and muscles that control the jaw, cheeks, lips and tongue musculature. These muscles perform split-second adjustments during voice-production or phonation.

Vocal muscles are standard anatomy in all humans. In principle, all people must perform the same muscular actions during voice production. This led to the need for a “methodology.” Although singing should be personal and one’s singing style unique, the development of the muscles that support, guide, and control singing must be uniform – standardized. If the requirement of a methodology is applied to voice-building, then this process will be based on a consistent and uniform foundation. Singing, in this sense, is like a sport in that it is grounded in the athletic performance of many muscles, and more particularly, on voice muscles. This simple idea of a muscular foundation to voice-production is the most important idea in voice-building.

Voice Building-System Based on Isokinetic Exercises

Voice musculature works in terms of stretching in a variety of ways to produce different vocal results. For example, the vocal cords are stretched to different lengths to change vocal pitch. Appropriate exercise routine for the voice muscles should incorporate extreme stretching behavior as the basic mode of exercising. Isokinetics, applied to the muscles of the voice, combines extreme stretching movement with effective muscle-building principles. By modifying exercises from different voice teachers in light of isokinetics, Catona developed exercises that began to produce consistently noticeable results in his own voice, such as increased power resonance and range. The fact that, traditionally, most voice teachers rarely considered approaching the voice from the perspective of rigorously exercising vocal muscles meant that a legitimate method of voice-building was not within their reach. Ironically, the very source of vocal sounds, the larynx, pharynx, and oral cavity, was bypassed in favor of emphasizing breath-management and projection into the head cavities or into the so-called mask. Students are taught not to think about the larynx, but rather to “relax-the-throat” and to “keep-it-out-of-the-way” during singing. As our understanding about the voice deepens, we realize the error of relaxing the throat. This would be equivalent to disengaging the voice muscles all together during singing, which would render singing impossible.

Notable Students

Whitney Houston

Whitney Houston worked extensively with Catona to build her voice. She credited Catona with increasing vocal power, range and resonance in her voice.

Andrea Bocelli

Bocelli credits Catona with dramatically increasing his vocal ability. Speaking about Catona, Bocelli said, “When one has a career, it's always necessary to give the best of ourselves, and to improve. I have been studying with an Italian-American teacher, Gary Catona, a specialist in an old method of developing the laryngeal musculature that influences the vocal cords. Already, I feel that my voice is changing and becoming bigger, stronger.”

Shirley Maclaine

Ms. Maclaine has been a long-time student of Catona’s. Catona accompanied her on her 1992 tour. Ms. Maclaine dedicated five pages out of her book “Dance While You can” to her fascinating work with Catona. Of his method, she relates “Gary's Voice Building System is a miracle to me. Gary's techniques opens the throat and the result is a singing and speaking voice with astonishing power, range, resonance, and endurance.”

Muhammed Ali

Catona worked extensively in building back Muhammed Ali’s speaking voice; his voice had been compromised by the condition of Parkinson’s Syndrome, which caused his speech to slur and diminish the power of his voice.

Seal

Seal has been a student of Catona’s for many years and he credits him with his remarkable vocal abilities and stamina. He likens his work with Gary to “… having a personal trainer at the gym. Gary has a very specific set of exercises designed to stress the muscles that support the vocal cords without stressing the cords themselves.”

Jack Klugman

The actor best known in the role as the untidy sports writer, Oscar Madison, in the hit TV show in the 1970’s, The Odd Couple, had one of his vocal cords removed because of throat cancer; his remaining vocal cord had to be radiated, which resulted in permanent scarring. The doctors saved a percentage of his speaking voice by inserting a prosthetic where the cancerous vocal cord had been. But the procedure did little to bring back his voice. Klugman was left with a raspy noise that could hardly be heard above a whisper. Within a month of work with Catona, Klugman’s voice was significantly stronger as vocal tone began replacing his breathy rasp. He returned to the stage with Tony Randall to do The Odd Couple in 1990 at the Belasco Theatre.

Larry Carlton

In 1988, the noted fusion-jazz guitarist was shot in the throat by an intruder on his property in Hollywood Hills. Rushed to the trauma center at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Burbank, California, he arrived in critical condition. Because the bullet passed through his carotid artery, doctors said he could have died instantly. In fact, he made a great recovery but for one problem: the bullet had severed a laryngeal nerve that paralyzed his left vocal cord and reduced his voice to a whisper. Catona’s strategy with Larry included over-developing the one healthy vocal cord to the point where it began to compensate for the paralyzed one. Carlton’s voice returned to normalcy in three months.

Connie Fisher

Catona’s work with Fisher was featured in the BBC1 documentary, Connie Fisher, I’ll Sing Once More. The film chronicled how Catona brought back the voice to the noted West End singer after she had been told by her surgeon (she had two operations to try to remedy structural problems with her vocal folds), that she would never sing again. The documentary culminates with Fisher giving a successful concert at the London Palladium.

External links

• Official website