Why "Voice"?

Welcome to Voice! And thanks for reading.

Why “Voice”?

For the first 30 years of my life, I was a pianist. For the next 30, a music teacher. Now I’m 60 and starting a new chapter.

This time around, I’m going to be more transparent about my process of becoming—by writing about it.

I’m also a singer. Well, not exactly. I’ve always loved choral music and was a high school choral director for 20 years. But I’ve never considered myself particularly good at singing. I’m a “singer” in the sense that everyone is or can be a singer.

Once, I asked a group of parents at my school: “How many of you are singers?”—and a few hands went up. Then I asked how many had sung a lullaby to their child, and every hand went up. Bridging that divide has been central to my work as a teacher. 

When we sing from love, the voice is a vehicle. I still remember the French lullabies my mom sang to me as a toddler. Vividly. She was not always “on key”—but those songs were magic to me. My mom suffered the label “tone deaf” for most of her life, but in her later years I realized it was because no one had taken the time to support and encourage her.

In the right conditions, we’re all singers.

I’m retired from full time teaching, but I still care passionately about music education, and especially about making singing accessible. I’ll be writing about that, too.

I learned piano within the strict confines of the classical lineage, which taught me how to practice and perform and shaped my conviction about the power of deep aesthetic experiences. I believe aesthetic lineages are valuable.

But lineages can also be limiting, because they proscribe how we should and shouldn’t express ourselves.

Since I didn’t have much training in voice as kid, unlike with piano, I’ve felt free as an adult to explore styles as varied as Indian Dhrupad, American Barbershop, European Madrigals, Tibetan Seed Syllables, and the “extended voice” of Roy Hart’s experimental theater tradition.

Those styles are so diverse that they prompted the question: is there a common link? Are there universal elements that comprise aesthetic languages? This is still mysterious to me.

But all that diversity—and the mystery, too—is contained in the voice itself.

The voice isn’t a “thing.” It’s a flexible composite of multiple factors: internal resonance spaces; airflow; emotion; intention; and opposing muscle groups.

Each of these factors can be intentionally conditioned and balanced with the others.

Voice, in this respect, is a perfect metaphor for living an inquiring life.

By definition, the destination is uncertain. I invite you to join the journey.

-Chris