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“I’ve always understood singing as an act of self-abnegation, the creation of beauty through the annihilation of one’s own ego.”
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“Humility is the smart bet. I’ve watched singer after singer and academic after academic take themselves too seriously. In doing so they shut the most valuable things out and fail to fulfill their potential. And so I’ve come to respect the quiet ones, the still small voices who spend their lives keeping the rest of us in tune.”
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“I have no desire to sing alone.”
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“Musicianship to me means phrasing, emotion, intonation. A musician is someone who feels the music in the people around him. Not someone with an arbitrary genetic fluke who shows it off.”
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“My teacher encourages her students to imagine a world full of objects whose job is to help them. The piano, the mirror, the tuning fork – all objects which exist to serve the purpose of their own self-improvement: “The mirror is the singer’s best friend.” But the more I take up this task, the more seriously I feel my own misgivings. Where the eager soloists see a world composed of objects that seek to glorify them, I see furnishings that point out how far I have to go, materials that push me back into the arms of the ensemble, which insist that what little beauty I have to give to the world can be won only through my own elision. The soloists think the mirror is their best friend, but I see only a world where the mirror feeds off of its prey, where the soloists shuffle eagerly up to the mirror’s horizon that they might, through their own narcissism, be engulfed by it. Perhaps it is the singer that is the mirror’s best friend.”
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“Attempting to navigate these narrows is my task now – to find the ways in which I can harness an urge to self-improvement to the ethical requirements of beauty. The way I can justify my own self-absorption by reference to the music that will, hopefully, be created as a result.”
I have recently returned from the annual Gulf Islands Celtic Music Festival, which can only be described as “a musician’s festival.” There is very little there to interest a non-musical member of the public save perhaps the Saturday evening concert, but even that is something of an in joke full of sly references and subtle quotes and moves within tune sets that perhaps echo some of the fun of the days sessions.
Indeed most of the festival consists of musicians sitting in circles and playing tunes with one another, usually starting at 11:00am and going straight through to 1 or 2 in the morning, with only the briefest of breaks for food.
After playing like this all weekend, my body feels as if it has just played three full games of hockey. I am tired and sore, but incredibly uplifted and that is because I have spent three days in what Alex Golub calls the annihilation of the ego.
I must strongly echo Alex’s sentiments about making music in and ensemble. In fact, as far as my practice of Irish flute goes I would consider myself a session musician in that my best form and more pleasurable activity is playing in sessions with others. When called upon to perform, I can and do (as I did Saturday night) but I am not comfortable there and, with the exception of a performance in front of 600 people at Folklife in Seattle several years ago, I am never at my best on a stage. It’s not that I am uncomfortable, it’s that I’m not able to completely fuse my ego with the entire group of people in room because only some of us are playing.
In another place I sing choral music in an evensong chorale which is a very spiritual service. I sing with a small group of six or seven other voices and what we do is not so much performance as facilitate a spiritual experience for the handful of people who come to hear us. These are deeply transcendent experiences for me because i am not only making music with friends but we are participating in a larger project, which includes the “listeners” in designing a spiritual experience together.
There is much to learn from this, including the fact that in acts of performance or communication (including reading and writing) we can choose to operate at the level that recognizes that there is a reader and a writer or we can look beyond that and see that what the reader and the writer are doing is jointly contributing to something bigger. Something people might call culture, something others might call spirit.
Inviting the reader to be a writer and the writer to read is like inviting the singer to become a listener and the listener, by holding space for and consenting to be silent, to become a conspirator with the singer. A true conspirator, one who breathes with another.
