LET IT GO

There is craft and there is art.  There is technique, and there is music.  The Enlightenment, Western world view believes in progression-seeds become flowers, babies become adults, time is linear and attempt leads to attainment.  By this truth formula, any child can be taught to play a note on the piano, and with time and practice, necessarily become a virtuoso.  Strewn on the wayside to this perfection are the hordes of children who simply gave up.  It was not lack of call, that kept them from becoming musicians, it was a lack of self-discipline and focus.

This is a worldview that creates music out of a machine.  Speed and accuracy on a violin can often overawe the crowd into a belief that it has experienced something profound.  A young person who can mimic Frank Sinatra's singing style becomes an overnight sensation, and people use math and electricity to reproduce a composer's intent, without even knowing how to read that composer's music.  Technical proficiency gets the seal of approval.  Efficiency, the machine-maker's panacaea, is awarded the highest honor.

Yet, music is feeling, and machines do not feel.  Children, though full of feeling, do not yet own their feelings.  The composer's mind can only be communicated through a sympathy of experience.  To lift music from a state of organized sound to an expression of human importance requires more than technique.  Speed, fluency and production must be released as milestones of achievement.

To sing, we have to let go of perfection.  We have to let go of progression and allow for inspiration-the infusion of spirit, the life of breath.  True singing is not owned-it goes past ownership to generosity.  It goes to a place where the ability to play the notes is not the point, but the tool.  True singing comes from a place of authentic human communication.  While using our minds to control the flow of air, the accuracy of pitch and the brilliance of diction, we run the very real risk of binding the content in a casket buried six feet under our egos' fears of rejection.

Singing is not a controlled fall.  Singing is not the end result of metronomic repetition.  Singing is not reproducible results, or an even flame.  On its way to perfection, singing comes in fits and starts.  It erupts.  It occurs.  It is messy, visceral, raw, unrefined, and terrifying.  Until the singer can let go her hold on feeling through the vehicle of sound, whether that be iPad or Stradivarius, there will only be technique.  There will only be craft.  There will only be skill.  The singer will be brilliant in spirit, but only dimly lit with soul.


A SOUL FILLED SINGER