Transcendent Singing

When we are in the presence of a singer who emits a sound that we judge to be objectively beautiful, perhaps incomprehensibly beautiful, there is a great temptation to want to attribute such a sound to divine intervention…All that we can imagine can be made real over time and a divinely beautiful tone is first a fruit of our imagination that is then worked out into the physical realm… Jean-Ronald LaFond

This lovely quote is taken from my friend Jean-Ronald LaFond's recent blog post, Beauty of Tone: Purposeful and Effortless Meditation. If you haven't yet subscribed to Ron's blog, this post is a fine introduction to his philosophy! Please read his post first, as this column was directly inspired by it. I've talked about the close connection I feel between my singing practice and my work in meditation. After reading Ron's piece I began to post my reactions in his comments section and soon realized I had more of rant going than would appropriately fit there, so I'm continuing the discussion here instead. 

Water percussion in Tan Dun's Tea: A Mirror of Soul

The voice is designed to respond to your intention to communicate. But you can only effectively communicate what you are able to fully feel. 

In his lecture series, The Science of Enlightenment, Shinzen Young describes what it felt like to be on the receiving end of a torrent of "enlightened anger" from his own teacher, Joshu Sasaki Roshi. Rather than becoming at all upset or offended, he found himself smiling and feeling as though he had experienced a bizarre kind of massage. (I love Shinzen's lectures, but you can also read about his experience with this in his article "Bringing the Monastery Home".) 

When negative emotions (anger, fear, sadness) are experienced without resistance and positive emotions (joy, excitement, pleasure) flow without attachment, they create no suffering or craving. In Shinzen's view, when you are able to experience and express the flow of your emotions with such perfect equanimity, it can have a profound impact both on you and anyone to whom you express yourself. 

He calls this the ability to experience an emotion "completely". 

By contrast, an emotion is experienced incompletely if after it first arises, it becomes distorted, augmented, and/or complicated by your reaction to it.

For most people, this is the norm: a feeling arises; it provokes a train of thought interpreting it, justifying it, repressing it, or strategizing a response to it; it resonates with past experiences of a similar feeling and gets exaggerated; and all of this causes other feelings and thoughts to arise that become entangled with the original feeling.

Here is an example: You sing an incredible audition and the panel openly expresses their enthusiasm; the next day, you discover that a role that had practically been promised to you has been offered to the conductor's amateur singer girlfriend. There are several emotions that could arise in response to a situation like this, but let's say that you find yourself enraged upon hearing the news. 

If you're able to have a "complete experience" of your anger and allow it to flow without censoring it, tampering with it, or allowing it to become entangled with other thoughts and feelings, you will experience it as a sort of catharsis or purifying internal massage, whether you express it externally or not.

However, if when your anger arises you are, like most people, unable to greet it with perfect mindfulness and equanimity, it can set off a chain reaction that could include the following:

• Judgmental thoughts about the conductor and his girlfriend
• Irritation with the audition panel for having led you on
• Hurt and embarrassment for having felt so optimistic
• Second guessing whether you should have taken the audition in the first place
• Fear that you will never have the career you deserve
• Feeling your anger exaggerated because it reminds you of all the other times this has happened
• Impulse to repress the anger so you won't say anything you'll later regret 
• Confusion over whether you should have let the conductor take you out to dinner that time after all
• and so on. 

You can see that what began as anger can become entangled with fear, sadness, confusion, and a potentially endless cycle of mental rumination. 

Now, I am not suggesting that when something like this happens to you there is no need to ponder the experience and take action in response to it. Maybe a company with this sort of casting practice is beneath you. Maybe you need to try to do something to make things less socially awkward with the heartbroken conductor. But the more completely you are able to experience and process your initial emotional response to the bad news, the less you will suffer and more efficiently you'll be able to react.

An essential part of my own Vipassana meditation practice centers on learning to experience all my feelings more completely by identifying and resolving the various habitual thoughts and residual bits of past trauma that tend to distort and inflate them.

A beautiful sound is a free sound. 

I've discussed vocal technique as largely a process of identifying areas of physical resistance and then resolving and releasing them.

To me, this process runs quite parallel to the process of learning to experience feelings completely. 

Transcendent singing occurs when one is able to unleash an experience of complete feeling, wrap it in musical language, and channel it through an instrument free of resistance. It is powerful for the singer because they are able to experience their own sensations, thoughts and impulses so fully and express them in public; it is powerful for receptive audience members because they are physically, emotionally and spiritually massaged by the sound. 

I am in awe of the potential of the unamplified human voice to transport and elevate the listener. As old as this art form is, I feel as though we are still just touching the tip of the iceberg where its latent power is concerned. 

Comments

[Claudia Friedlander]

[This is a comment offered by my friend Jennifer Caruana, a wonderful mezzo with many years' experience teaching meditation. She didn't have access to a computer that would allow her to post and agreed to let me post this on her behalf]

Wonderful post Claudia…One of my favorite lines was at the end "Transcendent singing occurs when one is able to unleash an experience of complete feeling, wrap it in musical language, and channel it through an instrument free of resistance."

Mental resistance definitely leads to physical resistance.

The next step would be sit down, do a little breathing meditation to calm the mind, then bring to mind the audition. Thinking of all of the those thoughts that could've arisen, and start to familiarize the mind with the more beneficial positive thoughts about yourself and your talent etc... does that make sense?

All in all FANTASTIC POST!!