Enlightening/Puzzling

There is so much that I am learning about myself by intensely studying, refining, and polishing my voice. The interesting thing about this kind of study is how much the principles that underlie the technique of singing are principles that can guide life in general.

Let go of control.

My voice is inhibited, greatly, in fact, by an overabundance of tension in my tongue. The tongue, actually, is a very large muscle that extends all the way down your throat practically to the voice box where your chords are housed. There is a delicate balance in how much tension should be in the tongue. The tongue must move...it is what we use to articulate consonants, and it helps us to form the different vowels that we use to communicate. But it should not be bound in tencion in order to sing well. The root of my tongue is very thick and full of tension (the wrong kind), basically disallowing a good portion of my sound from actually making it out of my body.

It’s funny, though, since in English, when someone has trouble communicating, we would say that “the cat’s got his tongue.“ In some fundamentally incorrect way, I am using the base of my tongue to form the sounds that I want to produce. Unfortunately though, this kind of control is just the kind that actually inhibits the “real” sound that my voice is capable of.

So, I try to control my sound in an attempt to make it better. But this need for control actually makes the sound worse. Allan likes to use the word “allow”: We must allow ourselves to be open to what life will bring us, not constantly seek to control our world. This is a principle that I have been working on in my meditation for months now. Letting go, or allowing, is not easy for a control freak. It is almost an ironic juxtaposition, one where the cause has the opposite effect as was desired—this principle being turned upon itself once again, since the cause should never have been instated in the first place.

It seems like a sort of Buddhist principle, really. “Do nothing” seems to be the guiding principle of voice, the teacher, through time, stripping from the student all that they have ever learned was correct in order to reveal a fully natural, unencumbered instrument. But “do nothing” is, of course, over-simplified. Really it is just a matter of doing all ther right things and none of the wrong ones.

No one knows everything.

Studying with a voice teacher, especially with one as intense as mine, and at the “polishing” level where every slight mishap is addressed, and condemned, is like going to a very strict church of some kind. After every lesson, I leave the service feeling like a sinner who fears for his very soul. It is frustrating being a horrible vocal sinner, you see, and can, at times, seems like a never ending story, a saga of bumps along Art’s road-to-nowhere. Sometimes I feel like a caged animal in the presence of the Voice Teacher, going slowly mad being continuously poked and criticized. She pushed me to a near break-down just a couple of weeks ago. I felt like a new Christian who’s been to a two-week tent revival and is just plain churched out. Hell, sometimes you just gotta backslide and booze your way right to the whorehouse when you got an injection of Jesus just a little too intense for your recently-baptized soul.

The Voice Teacher just has so much energy and does tend to rant like a preacher “getting’ Jesus”, the otherworldliness of a lesson made poignant by her All Seeing Eyes practically seeing straight through me and catching every last incorrect thought or impulse. Call me human if you must, but I can’t help but get some Schadenfreude, though, when I know that the Voice Teacher has said something that just ain’t right.

Voice Teacher, obviously unimpressed by the size of my instrument, has declared that it is a medium-big voice (as opposed to a big-big voice), that she thinks that I have made the switch to Heldentenor too early, and that I would be a great oratorio singer (singing things like the Messiah and the Elijah.) I was listening to my lesson of just yesterday, and thinking to myself: how could anyone think that is anything except a Heldentenor?

But, you know what? I didn’t come to the Voice Teacher so that she could rethink my Fach for me. I came to perfect my technique. I will rely on vocal coaches and the people like the Dream Agent to help determine what kind of rep I should be singing. Besides, I really could care less what I sing. The most important thing is what I get hired to sing. I know it sounds odd, especially considering how obsessed I am about the subject, but the question of my Fach is moot, or should be.

It’s like the old joke that waiters are neither pessimists or optimists because when they see a glass half filled/empty, they only think ‘I don’t need to refill it yet.’ For me, the point’s mootness at this point in my career is most like ‘get me the gig, and I’ll sing it…whatever it is.”