No. 108

The singer is at once in a love and a hate relationship with her voice. In the times when she loves herself, she loves her voice. The greatest challenge is to love the very thing, the very desire, that whittles the singer down to nothing by its sheer nature, its demand to stretch her breath, her heartbeat, her thoughts, her imagination, to house all of its strength and passion. Out of the nothingness that is gradually left of the singer as she is trained by her Master Teacher (her Sensei), music is birthed. Her voice can sing...she is her voice...all questions fall away and there is only song. But first she must realize Love. For the nothingness of hatred is another kind of nothingness: the illusion of the absence of Love. And the pull of this illusion is so strong that it can tempt the singer to deny her voice, to deny herself, to deny Love. So, whenever the singer hates her voice or in any other way tries to disparage or belittle or ignore her desire to sing, she only has to step back and see that, no matter what she thinks or how she happens to be feeling, there is only Love. She is only Love. Her voice is only Love. The only relationship is one of Love. I am fascinated by the possibility of transfusing vocal pedagogy with this knowledge. I believe that, at least, my vocation, my calling, is to live this truth in my own relationship to my singing, to my voice, to my self.