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Saturday, August 8, 2009

Dreams, Screams, and the Pattern In Between





I was driving down a busy street here in Portland yesterday and Kiri Te Kanawa was singing Un Bel Di, nearly lifting up the entire pavement with her voice. I felt like I was driving through a peaceful tornado.

I realized as I was humming, then singing along, that I have developed some sort of mute button over the years on my voice. It took a rather fierce effort to actually sing out, loudly. Even after sternly talking to myself I still never actually sang fully as I drove along, Kiri powerfully, tenderly sorting memories as the world outside the car windows adjusted itself to our passage.

The loudest I've ever been in my life has been as a child, selling puppets at the Rennaisance Faire in Agoura, California. The faire was our family's livelihood, and making puppets for months and having 6 weekends to sell them all meant doing all we could to get every puppet in the hands of a fairegoer when the faire was open. We did our best. There were 4 of us children and my mother, wandering the faire and hawking our puppets.

Every morning at around 10 am, craftspeople and actors would gather at the tall hill just outside the faire proper and then wind their way down into the faire in a noisy, exhuberant parade. My family would join the parade and hold our puppets up high, calling out our rhymes and patter amidst the chaos. Around 4 pm we'd walk the entire faire in a group, hawking again but this time truly making as much noise and gathering as much attention as we could.

It's the only time in my life I can remember truly being as loud as I can. Controlled, yes, and steering through the tight curves of vocal modulation with an awareness of what losing control means, but so freely loud. I have mostly a knife edge voice that slices through the center of a note, and I remember lifting my chin up and letting that clear sound peal up and out and over the faire. I remember my mother looking over at me and smiling, and I still feel the tingle in my hands as they lost feeling, all the blood available in my body racing to support my voice. Floating up and out over the faire, held by the ribbon of sound pouring from me.

There are few chances to be that loud, that powerful in my life. Studio work is limited to the microphone tolerances and is much more about flexibility and reaction time than power. I've not done live work in years, and even then there's that sensitive mic tolerence level to consider. I did a small Renn Faire a few hours away last year, but it was tiny. I found myself walking with my sister and my son, halfway hawking so as to not blast out the fairegoers. I had fun, but I also had restraint.

So where do I use my voice fully? And do I even know how anymore? So much of what I do is subconscious and a mystery to me. Have I lost my clear, soaring self?

Driving down the street, singing of endurance and hope with Kiri Te, tearing up as the pavement around me tears up and swearing to myself, reassuring myself, that un bel di I'll float again.

Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Distorted Reality & You





It's my understanding that a number of religions use meditation/focused awareness to usher celebrants into a higher state of being.

Saying a rosary is meditation - repetitive words, stillness, focusing inward and upwards to a perceived greater/larger. Meditation is prayer through releasing - reaching in and through to a freedom, to a wider space.

All of this effort, relaxation, focus, stillness, repetition- all aiming towards enlightenment, a state of being above and beyond our normal selves.

I get that writing. Not so much singing, since I really have to be present and accounted for when singing. I know most folks think of voice as effortless, but for me it's a lot of split second decisions and keeping the pot stirred so the bottom doesn't burn.

When I'm writing, things expand. Sitting in a coffee house with the world milling around, I apply pen to paper and time slows. Hours can slip by, light distorts, sounds fade away and I'm in a floating bubble of deliberate movement. Pitch pipe softly sounds, the click of the triangle edge on the table, pen scratches.

So is art religion then? Music nourishes me, renews my sense of amazement, brings me peace. When I write music, I move into a state of expanded awareness. After all this time writing I suppose I've become quite adept. Is the distorted experience of time that occurs when moments get tuned and turned into math the same as the reported bliss of the mystic?

Perhaps the biggest difference between art and religion is that artists usually suck at large group organization.

Inherent in art is point of view. All art is shaded by the physical body of the artist - their eyesight, their sense of sound, their body space. This gives every worshipper at the temple of art a different line of sight towards their own viewed goal. Organized religions have a common goal - art insists on individual targets.

I wonder though if everyone was able to sit down at a table in a coffee house with pen and paper and feel themselves unravel at the edges and expand out out out...

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Discipline Into Momentum




I've told myself the best thing to do in all the chaos/whirlwind that outside the music brings is simply keep to one windmill. I'm tilting at writing daily.

I found a box of books today on the sidewalk. Don Quixote/Man of La Mancha dog eared at the top of the pile. Name carefully written - in pen - on the flyleaf of each book. Who Adele was and why her books are neatly boxed on the corner eludes me.

Man of La Mancha rips me back to my father working for IATSE Local 33 in downtown LA and me sitting quietly in a free theater seat as Richard Harris tried once more. Dulcinea's song - born in a ditch etc. - had more of an impact on me than the impossible dream song. I sang it under my breath for weeks, trying to figure out how it was true for a young, untried, unchallenged girl who'd never even seen a windmill, let alone a soldier.

Back then I did think that singing a song meant living the exact words. I considered hitting Hollywood & Vine, bought a short dress. A bit of time living Dulci's world simply brought me a huge wave of frustration. I was trying to find a way into a world that was so far out of my range of experience that no bridge short of leaping into full time immersion would get me the reality I wanted to convey.

I wanted to convey that feeling of being Dulcinea, excelling at one life and yet aching to try another one - knowing the ins and outs of one way of being as another person beckons from inside you. Finding a guide to show the way out of the now, but not finding the trust needed to leap after them as they navigate the corners easily. The same corners that bruise you as you take turns too fast, or lose sight of your sherpa as you hesitate.

It took me weeks to figure out that my frustration at not being able to join Dulcinea's world was the same as Dulcinea's rage at Quixote for showing her a world she could never live in.

I learned from Man of La Mancha that for veracity in singing what counts is the feeling. Not the reality.

Dulcinea was wounded, battered, triumphant, powerful. She saw a world outside her own and reached/withdrew/reached/withdrew for and from it. All that is needed to sing her song is the feeling of hesitant yearning, the fierceness, and the frustration.