One of the greatest honors I have at this time in my life living Opera Organically is to teach a wonderful artist named Donna Henderson. My teachers have told me tales of singers who are "empty vessels": just ready to be filled with the tools needed to allow their singing Voices the freedom they want to have.
Donna is living proof that the stuff of singing does not have to be sung: it can be written. And when it is written in such a way, the bridge to singing is only as wide as the path to muscular strength and technical knowledge.
Donna has gifted us this piece, and I know it will "sing" to you, as it did so beautifully to me:
There Is a Loneliness
Listen some dusk to the varied thrush
keening its single long, cool note.
This is what the thrush has waited for all day:
the busy light leaving,
shadows slipping home from their exile.
For the spacious
silence that hears it, answers--
a slender bliss you might have thought
despair.
Listen then to your own,
that other
loneliness that is our vast capacity.
You thought it longed for filling.
It longs to sing.
Listen some dusk to the varied thrush
keening its single long, cool note.
This is what the thrush has waited for all day:
the busy light leaving,
shadows slipping home from their exile.
For the spacious
silence that hears it, answers--
a slender bliss you might have thought
despair.
Listen then to your own,
that other
loneliness that is our vast capacity.
You thought it longed for filling.
It longs to sing.
For more of Donna's work, check out her book or contact Opera Organically for more information!
