"Singing is the act of producing musical sounds with the voice, and augments regular speech by the use of both tonality and rhythm ... It may be done for pleasure, comfort, ritual, education or profit. Excellence in singing may require time, dedication, instruction and regular practice."
From my perspective, that's a pretty spot on, down to earth definition. And if the actual act of becoming a good singer is all that you are looking to do, follow the advice above and I'm sure you will achieve your goal.
But I don't think most of us are simply looking to be good singers or musicians. What we are looking for is to be great artists, someone who is able to touch a listening crowd by leaving all of our most personal emotions on stage, moving people in ways that are beyond our own understanding. We want to provoke smiles, tears, happy laughter - if we mean to be funny- and leave an audience of people roaring because they don't want the music to stop. That's when you know you've grown into an artist, that's when you know you've found your real voice.
The Realization
Once upon a time there was a girl named Rosie who wanted to be a nun. Let that sink in. I know it's not a career path most people choose to pursue.
As it turns out - You got this part already, I'm sure. - that didn't happen for reasons that are funny, sad, frustrating, eye-opening and destiny-driven, worth explaining in a separate post dedicated to the subject.
Fast forward to 2010 where I enter the real world, a "normal" life that was mostly *gasp* secular. My first time thrown into a way of living I had not yet gotten the chance to experience as an adult. The first time I had a real job. The first time I had made new and great friends, mostly non-religious and wonderful. All big deals to me.
It was also the first time I fell in love.
Guess that part's important, huh? Something I never thought would happen to me, did. And it was mostly ... awful.
Sigh. Where do I begin?
Since I'm not exactly sure and probably haven't been given enough characters in this blog post to recite years of a truly platonic love and and overall f$%$#ed up situation, I will sum it up in the following words, which I've edited a little, to fit my personal experience. From a post in Thought Catalog ...
" ... the love I [had for him] was too much for me. It was raw, it was passionate, it was all-
encompassing, it was emotional, it was everything. He was the first thing I thought about in the morning and the last thing I thought about at night. I felt incomplete when I wasn’t around him, and when he was near it was like everything was right in the world again. He was my other half [without being my other half], and what I considered the best part of myself. He made me crazy and emotional. It was [always] ... a roller coaster of missing him, loving him, hating him[but never admitting it], and needing him."
That love broke me. Bad. Like - real bad. We're talking Oprah-Ugly-Cry on the bus ride home from work, having a homeless man ask you if you're okay and apologizing for not having a tissue to give you bad. #embarassing
Still, to the people that saw me every day, save a select few, I was the same happy-go-lucky Rosie who could handle anything and never cracked. In my mind, if I didn't mention it, if the majority of the outside world was unable to see my imperfections - because the thought that they could terrified me - than I also didn't have to see them, much less deal with them. I could be this totally fake, perfect person.
BRILLIANT.
This is how I presented myself when I met Neil.
It was rather short lived.
Neil Semer is like the guru of voice teachers, asking his students to dig deeply within themselves and sing from the chakra of the heart. Beautiful, artistic, real voice type stuff. I had learned of him through the oh-so-wonderful Mikhail Hallak who I had coached with years earlier and who thought Neil's teaching style would be a great fit for me - and probably necessary, although he didn't say that. And so, for a very short period of time, I took another shot at the world of classical music and had the pleasure of working with Neil.
Neil is great. Out of the box, non-conforming and simply wanting to help bring out the artist in each person he works with. He had me walk around the room to feel the ground, acting like an ape, fix my posture to love and use my generous body while singing, stretch my neck to loosen up and practice doing four different facial expressions all at once to help me gain control of my face - which not only seemed impossible, but made me look funny.
He also wasted no time. During my second lesson, while my fake persona was less on point than usual, and he felt comfortable enough that he could finally say something - no time like the present -, he stopped and said, "What's going on?".
Almost intuitively, I responded. "... I just want to hold on."
Hold up. Did I just say that? Because I didn't mean to. Is he even going to know what that MEANS??? I don't even know what that means!
And then he said this:
"There is nothing to hold onto, Rosie. Just muscles to tense. Do you know what would happen if you did that while you were swimming?"
"...I would drown."
"Yes. Because you began to panic and, out of fear, it would happen. Right now, this is how you are singing, out of panic and fear. What you need to do is sing out of love."
Wow.
That was the first time I publicly accepted, in fact ever realized, that I hadn't let go of any unnecessary baggage because I was terrified of having to pick up the broken pieces of, what I thought, was failure.
I had failed at being a good Christian. I had failed at becoming a nun. I had really failed at finishing music school because I wanted to follow the path of being a good Christian and becoming a nun - which, by the way, I had failed at. And most recently I had failed at making the person I loved so much love me back. My imperfections, my losses, my sadness, my fears, everything that I didn't think was positive, I did not deal with but buried inside of me while it all screamed to be let out. And in that burial, I had buried my real voice, too.
But, in my realization I also realized there was a difference between my voice and everything else I had squashed down inside. Unlike everything else my voice was not one of my failures. It didn't belong there with all the other b.s. My voice was never and could never be a mistake. In fact, if I wasn't proud of anything else at that moment, when there were so many trials, when I felt like no one could truly understand my life as I had lived it, that was the one thing I knew I could be proud of. I couldn't let it go because it had so much to say. I had so much to say.
"We're going to work on this and help you let go. That's my priority.", Neil says.
"I would love that...Thank you.", I say.
That day I walked away from my lesson knowing I had found a person who could help me through my first real, musical breakthrough. And although that might seem dramatic, you have no idea how truly dramatic it was.
To be continued.
Fast forward to 2010 where I enter the real world, a "normal" life that was mostly *gasp* secular. My first time thrown into a way of living I had not yet gotten the chance to experience as an adult. The first time I had a real job. The first time I had made new and great friends, mostly non-religious and wonderful. All big deals to me.
It was also the first time I fell in love.
Guess that part's important, huh? Something I never thought would happen to me, did. And it was mostly ... awful.
Sigh. Where do I begin?
Since I'm not exactly sure and probably haven't been given enough characters in this blog post to recite years of a truly platonic love and and overall f$%$#ed up situation, I will sum it up in the following words, which I've edited a little, to fit my personal experience. From a post in Thought Catalog ...
" ... the love I [had for him] was too much for me. It was raw, it was passionate, it was all-
encompassing, it was emotional, it was everything. He was the first thing I thought about in the morning and the last thing I thought about at night. I felt incomplete when I wasn’t around him, and when he was near it was like everything was right in the world again. He was my other half [without being my other half], and what I considered the best part of myself. He made me crazy and emotional. It was [always] ... a roller coaster of missing him, loving him, hating him[but never admitting it], and needing him."
That love broke me. Bad. Like - real bad. We're talking Oprah-Ugly-Cry on the bus ride home from work, having a homeless man ask you if you're okay and apologizing for not having a tissue to give you bad. #embarassing
Still, to the people that saw me every day, save a select few, I was the same happy-go-lucky Rosie who could handle anything and never cracked. In my mind, if I didn't mention it, if the majority of the outside world was unable to see my imperfections - because the thought that they could terrified me - than I also didn't have to see them, much less deal with them. I could be this totally fake, perfect person.
BRILLIANT.
This is how I presented myself when I met Neil.
It was rather short lived.
Neil Semer is like the guru of voice teachers, asking his students to dig deeply within themselves and sing from the chakra of the heart. Beautiful, artistic, real voice type stuff. I had learned of him through the oh-so-wonderful Mikhail Hallak who I had coached with years earlier and who thought Neil's teaching style would be a great fit for me - and probably necessary, although he didn't say that. And so, for a very short period of time, I took another shot at the world of classical music and had the pleasure of working with Neil.
Neil is great. Out of the box, non-conforming and simply wanting to help bring out the artist in each person he works with. He had me walk around the room to feel the ground, acting like an ape, fix my posture to love and use my generous body while singing, stretch my neck to loosen up and practice doing four different facial expressions all at once to help me gain control of my face - which not only seemed impossible, but made me look funny.
He also wasted no time. During my second lesson, while my fake persona was less on point than usual, and he felt comfortable enough that he could finally say something - no time like the present -, he stopped and said, "What's going on?".
Almost intuitively, I responded. "... I just want to hold on."
Hold up. Did I just say that? Because I didn't mean to. Is he even going to know what that MEANS??? I don't even know what that means!
And then he said this:
"There is nothing to hold onto, Rosie. Just muscles to tense. Do you know what would happen if you did that while you were swimming?"
"...I would drown."
"Yes. Because you began to panic and, out of fear, it would happen. Right now, this is how you are singing, out of panic and fear. What you need to do is sing out of love."
Wow.
That was the first time I publicly accepted, in fact ever realized, that I hadn't let go of any unnecessary baggage because I was terrified of having to pick up the broken pieces of, what I thought, was failure.
I had failed at being a good Christian. I had failed at becoming a nun. I had really failed at finishing music school because I wanted to follow the path of being a good Christian and becoming a nun - which, by the way, I had failed at. And most recently I had failed at making the person I loved so much love me back. My imperfections, my losses, my sadness, my fears, everything that I didn't think was positive, I did not deal with but buried inside of me while it all screamed to be let out. And in that burial, I had buried my real voice, too.
But, in my realization I also realized there was a difference between my voice and everything else I had squashed down inside. Unlike everything else my voice was not one of my failures. It didn't belong there with all the other b.s. My voice was never and could never be a mistake. In fact, if I wasn't proud of anything else at that moment, when there were so many trials, when I felt like no one could truly understand my life as I had lived it, that was the one thing I knew I could be proud of. I couldn't let it go because it had so much to say. I had so much to say.
"We're going to work on this and help you let go. That's my priority.", Neil says.
"I would love that...Thank you.", I say.
That day I walked away from my lesson knowing I had found a person who could help me through my first real, musical breakthrough. And although that might seem dramatic, you have no idea how truly dramatic it was.
To be continued.
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