SINGING IS FEELING

Singing is, more than anything else, about communicating feeling.  Feeling is often too overwhelming for words.  Thoughts can fail us when we are in places of extreme feeling.  Ideas alone can rouse tumults of conflicting feelings.   What do we do with all that information?  Maybe we scream or shout.

Great excitement finds itself expressed in shouts.  Great pain finds itself expressed in yells.  Great sorrow finds itself expressed in screams.  Feeling is expressed in sound.  But shouts are lonely and inchoate.  They flourish in spirit, but lack in soul.  They do not communicate a meaning.  They do not share.

Singing-music-is formed.  The feeling is pushed "through a horn, until it is worn into a new note."  The feeling can be sung "with a cry in your voice, and before you know it, start to feelin' good.  You simply got no choice."  Willed and intended to say something to someone, feelings are transformed through song into relationship.  The singer uses words from people who have been in a similar place, and then is no longer alone.  The singer writes new words to an old tune, and validates the human-ness of feeling in the sound.

The words may say "Walking on broken glass," but when accompanied by a light, peppy dance groove, a message of deep irony is expressed.  The feeling of the music does not match the meaning of the words, and something powerful happens.  We stop to listen.

True singing, singing that shares something significant with others, singing that communicates, will come from a place of deep feeling.  A simple proverb that hangs on my wall says: "For heights and depths no words can reach, music is the soul's own speech."  Speech only shares our ideas and thoughts.  Music shares the chaotic, unformed movements of joy and sadness that color our experience of the world.