A singer cannot be a liar. Mistresses of deception and misdirection, yes, but not liars. Emotions are not the slaves of thoughts. They are not manufactured with manipulation in mind, and singers who try to sing manufactured feeling to manipulate their audience will soon find themselves without a career.
Here is a fact: humans feel, and feelings are always genuine. No matter what rationalizations our thinking selves generate, the feelings are what they are. We may name our anger: frustration, displeasure, exasperation, rage. We may name our joy: delight, pleasure, jubilation. We may assign past experiences and people to the reasons the feelings are generated, but when we feel radiant, we do not feel drab.
Good singers sing their feelings, not their thoughts. They neither sing the feel of the lyric nor the message of the words. Instead, they sing what they are feeling, and communicate the feel of the lyric and the message of the words. The feeling is the power behind the song.
Good singers can get out of their own way enough to sing what they feel. They don't worry about whether their current tranquility fits the idea of love in the song they have to perform. They trust the power of their emotions and the proficiency of the music to convey its own purpose. In this way they deceive and misdirect: they project an image and an emotion which are not necessarily congruent.
Great singers take it a step further. They decide to know their feelings and to wade into the hard work of learning their naked selves, so that they aren't afraid to bare all before an audience. They not only trust their feelings, they recognize them the way most of us recognize our own faces. Singing from real emotion, uncluttered by filters and fear, bad days and good days are the same in terms of the power to sing.
The singer who knows every curve and texture of her subjective mindscape won't mistake the communication for the reality, and she won't depress or repress. Instead, she will wield her true emotions with all the skill and delicacy of a surgeon operating a scalpel to sing songs. In this way, even the most trivial doggerel can become music which teaches, moves or transforms us. The music communicates something real-a paradoxical mixture of emotion, speech and action that is both inconsistent and still true.
Saturday, September 3, 2011
Monday, July 25, 2011
CONNECT
60,000 people standing in the rain, together wailing a string of notes echoing David's psalm: "How long? How long must we sing this song?" A sparse remnant standing in a stone sanctuary, arms crossed, lips unmoving, as an organist limps her way through "Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee."
The human heart knows things. It is a wordless knowing, and it communicates itself like a puzzle: laying itself against ridges and canyons until its own shape proves a perfect complement. The heart's knowing imparts a kind of completeness, a sense of wholeness when it finds its fit, and a sense of longing and loss while it is still searching.
To sing with power, you have to sing the heart. You cannot sing what the head thinks. You cannot sing what the state imposes. You cannot sing doctrine. You cannot sing repertoire. Not with power, anyway. Not with conviction. Not with truth.
This is because the heart connects. It fits, or it doesn't fit. It is plugged in, or it isn't. What's more, the heart is particularly immune to falsehood. Where the mind may try to fit a feeling into a pattern it believes in, the heart knows what it knows, despite our best intent. Where self-preservation will map an appropriate course, the heart leaps and leans in risky directions. Where the eye tries to impose a universal standard of beauty, the heart is transfixed by a certain slant of light. The heart doesn't know its own mind. It does not pay much attention to its own best interest, and is often blind to the merits of perfection. It is what it is-whole, broken, searching, found.
When a singer sings the heart, the listener's heart responds. If the two have points and curves that match, the two connect. 60,000 connect. Instantly. Without effort, and without regard to any of the day's troubles or expectations; beyond all the worn distinctions that otherwise separate person from person.
The singer with that gift is truly blessed for we keep our hearts hidden for good reasons. It is hard to bleed for other people. It hurts to share our treasures and is terrifying to open our throats. So much safer to rely on the genius of others to carry that burden. It is, however, a curious fact that we simply cannot fake the heart. Pretty soon the power has leaked from our voices. The conviction has fled our psalms, and our children become convinced that we are liars-singing "Joyful, Joyful" when we truly mean "How long? How long must we sing this song?"
May you hear the voice of your heart. May you find the courage to share it. May its songs find other hearts with which to connect.
The human heart knows things. It is a wordless knowing, and it communicates itself like a puzzle: laying itself against ridges and canyons until its own shape proves a perfect complement. The heart's knowing imparts a kind of completeness, a sense of wholeness when it finds its fit, and a sense of longing and loss while it is still searching.
To sing with power, you have to sing the heart. You cannot sing what the head thinks. You cannot sing what the state imposes. You cannot sing doctrine. You cannot sing repertoire. Not with power, anyway. Not with conviction. Not with truth.
This is because the heart connects. It fits, or it doesn't fit. It is plugged in, or it isn't. What's more, the heart is particularly immune to falsehood. Where the mind may try to fit a feeling into a pattern it believes in, the heart knows what it knows, despite our best intent. Where self-preservation will map an appropriate course, the heart leaps and leans in risky directions. Where the eye tries to impose a universal standard of beauty, the heart is transfixed by a certain slant of light. The heart doesn't know its own mind. It does not pay much attention to its own best interest, and is often blind to the merits of perfection. It is what it is-whole, broken, searching, found.
When a singer sings the heart, the listener's heart responds. If the two have points and curves that match, the two connect. 60,000 connect. Instantly. Without effort, and without regard to any of the day's troubles or expectations; beyond all the worn distinctions that otherwise separate person from person.
The singer with that gift is truly blessed for we keep our hearts hidden for good reasons. It is hard to bleed for other people. It hurts to share our treasures and is terrifying to open our throats. So much safer to rely on the genius of others to carry that burden. It is, however, a curious fact that we simply cannot fake the heart. Pretty soon the power has leaked from our voices. The conviction has fled our psalms, and our children become convinced that we are liars-singing "Joyful, Joyful" when we truly mean "How long? How long must we sing this song?"
May you hear the voice of your heart. May you find the courage to share it. May its songs find other hearts with which to connect.
Thursday, February 10, 2011
PATTERNS
Understanding music means learning pattern recognition. Musical sense hangs on specific arrangements of rhythms, or pitches, or chords. Those arrangements repeat in predictable ways, and being able to recognize more and more complex patterns within a piece of music is one of the indicators of the richness of a given song. Entire books have been written which describe the patterns found in studying just one single fugue of J.S. Bach or oratorio of G.F. Handel. That is how complex the arrangements can be. That is how complicated the relationships between the many elements of a tune can get.
Unfortunately, in music, as in life, we sometimes seem to sell ourselves into one pattern so thoroughly, we can't see any of the other possibilities. Taking an example from my own repertoire, I have been singing Franz Schubert's Ave Maria for thirty years. I have to be honest. The words (I always sing it in Latin) have not changed. Neither have the notes (I still sing it in the same key). The arrangement of the accompaniment hasn't changed either. In other words, the patterns seem to be set. I could imagine that there is nothing new in that piece of music. I could imagine, after 30 years, that I know all there is to know about that collection of notes, and that boredom and irrelevance should have set in long ago.
That can happen with a piece of music. It happens all of the time with pop hits on the radio. For some reason, I simply loved Jon Bon Jovi's Wanted Dead or Alive when it was first released. I hear it now, and nothing happens except puzzlement. I have no idea what it was about that pattern of notes, rhythms and chords that so moved me then. Quite simply, it does not now.
Yet that simple prayer by Schubert is still with me. I have never fixed its pattern in my mind. I have never fully committed to one interpretation of breath line, word emphasis or note articulation. It sings differently at a funeral than at a Christmas Eve service. Before I knew death, I emphasized a different poetic idea. I play around with the piano part-playing the chords unbroken, and with more modern rhythmic emphasis. The patterns shift and the music looks a different way. It means a different thing. It communicates a different perspective. It is rich.
If I have one wish for today, it would be that we try to take life a little bit more like Ave Maria and a little less like Wanted Dead or Alive. Rather than claiming a moment as the pattern that makes sense, and working to make the world fit into that pattern, I hope for the wisdom to know moments as parts of many patterns whose lines and colors can be aligned and realigned in a variety of ways which never cease to amaze, delight, challenge and ennoble us.
Unfortunately, in music, as in life, we sometimes seem to sell ourselves into one pattern so thoroughly, we can't see any of the other possibilities. Taking an example from my own repertoire, I have been singing Franz Schubert's Ave Maria for thirty years. I have to be honest. The words (I always sing it in Latin) have not changed. Neither have the notes (I still sing it in the same key). The arrangement of the accompaniment hasn't changed either. In other words, the patterns seem to be set. I could imagine that there is nothing new in that piece of music. I could imagine, after 30 years, that I know all there is to know about that collection of notes, and that boredom and irrelevance should have set in long ago.
That can happen with a piece of music. It happens all of the time with pop hits on the radio. For some reason, I simply loved Jon Bon Jovi's Wanted Dead or Alive when it was first released. I hear it now, and nothing happens except puzzlement. I have no idea what it was about that pattern of notes, rhythms and chords that so moved me then. Quite simply, it does not now.
Yet that simple prayer by Schubert is still with me. I have never fixed its pattern in my mind. I have never fully committed to one interpretation of breath line, word emphasis or note articulation. It sings differently at a funeral than at a Christmas Eve service. Before I knew death, I emphasized a different poetic idea. I play around with the piano part-playing the chords unbroken, and with more modern rhythmic emphasis. The patterns shift and the music looks a different way. It means a different thing. It communicates a different perspective. It is rich.
If I have one wish for today, it would be that we try to take life a little bit more like Ave Maria and a little less like Wanted Dead or Alive. Rather than claiming a moment as the pattern that makes sense, and working to make the world fit into that pattern, I hope for the wisdom to know moments as parts of many patterns whose lines and colors can be aligned and realigned in a variety of ways which never cease to amaze, delight, challenge and ennoble us.
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