All of our energy and awareness needs to focus on what we are trying to communicate to the audience. In the macrocosm of training for years to become the best performer we can become, our voice teacher becomes our assessor, the person who judges how well we are doing and gives us immediate feedback, allowing us to repeat skills over and over and to improve our technique and interpretation. Teachers can be nurturing, supportive, vindictive, egotistical, judgmental, critical, incompetent, uncaring, brilliant, or enlightened. They become the symbols within our psyche by which we interpret how well we perform. The teacher becomes the internal auditor.
Teachers exert tremendous influence on the performing lives of students.
By teaching unselfconsciously, with creative, positive energy, we establish within our students the positive assessor that uplifts the student and encourages. In music, we also have professional assessors in the form of critics who listen to performances with the purpose of reporting to the public on the quality of technique, musicianship, interpretive ability, and stage presence that we exhibit. Many critics entertain their readers by their writing style and by the form of criticism that they present in their columns. Critics easily become tyrants, denigrating performers and criticizing without understanding the situation in which the performer finds himself. Many performers dread the presence of critics and suffer during premieres from internal expectations precipitated by bad experiences with critics.