Of course, he learned music and studied the literature of voice.

In medical school, he learned anatomy and physiology. Lips, teeth, tongue, mouth, larynx, vocal cords, lungs have other and primary functions. Voice is an overlaid function. There can be no direct way to develop involuntary muscles, but Erv developed exercises and approaches that put those muscles into play. Speaking and singing could thereby be made not only more natural but also more polished.

Erv could always say what any individual needed to hear and always demonstrate what the individual needed to do.

warmth; humor; an aura of good feeling; energy, strength, and solidity (physical, mental, emotional); delight in and enthusiasm for life; empathy for performers and for people in general; a non-judgmental nature; openness; honesty.

Lessons are comfortable but exciting, positive, and rewarding.

He does that by example and with lessons that could be applied in other aspects of life.

When he says, “Make your mistakes with confidence” or “For a performer, it’s not the best performance that matters; it’s the worst,” his illustrations become lessons for any undertaking.

First, he has long been sought by professional and near-professional singers and speakers for developing desired voices. Amateurs who find pleasure and satisfaction in singing have gone — and still go — to Erv even though he calls himself retired.

Second, he was and is sought as a voice therapist by singers and speakers who developed nodules or other problems because of incorrect vocal production.

Some well-known announcers with faulty voice placement have been helped by Erv as have professional singers who imposed damaging demands on their voices. When several Japanese singers enrolled in the UCLA opera school, some of them developed problems in adaptation to American techniques. The opera director sent them to Erv.

But then Erv is exemplification of Buddha’s charge:
“A man should first direct himself in the way he should go. Only then should he instruct others.”

And Erv is the model for Henry Adams’s observation:
“A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.”

One student wrote that it is “. . . impossible to convey the exhilaration and warmth he brought into my life, even in the most down times, and in the lives of many other young people. He was, and is, a philosopher and psychologist as well as a voice teacher. He teaches us to sing, partly by technique, and partly by delving into our own resources and liberating whoever it is we happen to be.”