BODY

I know people who like drumming because it is music made from the body.  The body is the instrument that plays.  The body touches space and beats time; but I like singing better.  Singing is music made from the body.  The body is the instrument that is played.  The body breathing formulates song.

What's more, singing calls us.  Singing entreats us.  Singing invites us.  Singing allures us, by the magnetic power of connection.  A soloist singing expresses the loneness of the human condition, but when another singer joins, the two singers together express the possibility of community.  

Dry bones beaten together can sound a heartbeat, but only with the animation of Breath do those bones Live.  Rhythm shapes the song, but singing gives human language to the music.  Singing relates us by words.  Singing takes us a step past being and into particular meaning.  The body touches space and beats time, but it also communicates itself with other.

Don't get me wrong.  I love drumming, too.  It is just that I think it must be a kind of singing.  It must participate in Voice to matter.  It must translate into something human to become other than a repetitive percussion; and it misses that vital component to human existence-the profound singularity of a body as it knows itself separate from each and every other.

Singing is a work of the Body, that inexplicable place in which we find ourselves breathing and whose boundaries we constantly seek to define.