Gathering Thunder

 

I did a freebie gig last week for the SHARE folks (http://www.share-sn.com) and sang "Leaving" solo, a cappella, standing at audience level. My voice felt like a skittish horse - dashing all over the place with me hanging on for dear life. It's amazing to me how varied an experience it is to sing live, picking up the meaning of the song and letting the audience's mood color the way my voice moves.

I came earlier than I needed to to perform, sitting through the event itself and letting the ideas and stories of the people there gather inside me. "Leaving" is about violence - it's not an easy song to step into - and I wanted to be able to give my best. As a result, by the time I sang I felt like I had gathered a storm inside me, fits of lightening and sudden crashes of thunder as meanings and reasons ran riot.

After I sang I felt like the moment just after a downpour stops, when everything is still dripping and full of motion but somehow gentle. As I drove home I remembered how exhausted and joyful it feels to head home after a performance and I wondered yet again why I'm not performing regularly anymore.

One reason that pops up is the lack of fellow singers in my life. I prefer to do live work with 3-6 singers, all of us working together to create an experience larger than our selves. I've tossed a few feelers out now and then to the community here but have not really had much of a response. Offering singers gigs that require 2 rehearsals a week with a small bit of cash a few times a month does not seem to be appealing - which once again shows how very odd I am since that sounds fun to me.

Looking back, the one very successful experience I had with creating a singing group that lasted was the Random Choir, in Santa Barbara in the 90's. Perhaps that is what I should do again. Gather singers and simply have them do what they want, find the gigs and then rehearse and perform what they would like to do. Gather singers, let them sing, gather thunder, and let the downpour start.

Art, Rage & the Inner Child

I'm having a temper tantrum.

I'm upset that I'm struggling still after all these years to get my music out into the world. I'm angry that I'm working at such random things in order to make ends meet - and frustrated as less and less time is used for music and more and more time is used for earning money in non-musical ways.

In years past, music has contributed to my life financially, emotionally, spiritually. I've lived simply, focused on art, studied, taught, wrote, sang. The last year has been simply surviving - teaching a bit, writing little, singing less.

Today I'm finding myself exhausted, and somehow empty. I have this load on my back, this warmly bundled pack of unwritten, unsung work and I'm worn to the bone with carrying it endlessly forward.

For the first time in my life, I want to just leave the pack by the side of the road.

What is it like to just live a regular life? Work at a normal job, finish the day and go home to dinner and a night of TV or time with friends and family? I'm trying to imagine waking up in the morning with my only obligation a day job and responsibilities wrapped around the people I love.

No sense of falling over and over as the music does not meet the idea and I try once again. No feeling of pressure in the back of my heart pushing me to write it down, sing it out, translate thought into reality. What if I did not have to write? What if it's not my job to make sure that music gets created? What if I don't have to teach, to learn?

There is nothing glamorous about being a composer. No one applauds when a note is written down. Few people even notice when the note is sung. So why am I doing this? What is the point of all this struggle if the work I'm doing dies with me, unheard? Why the endless pressure, the relentless obligation, if what I am doing makes no difference?

I'm having a temper tantrum. Kicking my heels, pounding my fists, hollering and wrecking my voice for the next few days. I need something back. I need something to happen back, something to come from all of this worthwhile work I've been pouring out into the world all these years.

God I'm tired. Bone tired, and sitting by the side of the road with a load of music I can't carry and can't leave behind.

The Death of Men Nearby

It is a time of death, apparently. Well, perhaps a year of death would be more accurate. The last 12 months have brought the death of my brother, my father, my uncle, 2 family dogs and a family cat.

All of them have been male.

We're mostly a gathering of women now, with the men scattered few and far between, working best they can to keep the torch lit. My brother went first, unexpectedly, then the cat. Then my uncle, one dog, then my father. Lastly, the other dog.

How strong our love is for animals. In my heart the grief is real and profound for the latest of the deaths, a charming dapper fellow named Wolfgang that lived his life full of the wit and whimsy that Lasa Apso's bring to the world. He lived longer than his body would allow, keeping going with a persistent insistence that kept him moving well past when he should have stopped and laid himself to rest. My father did the same thing. Both of them held souls that were greater than the sum of their body's parts.

And both of their deaths were expected. They had practice runs, medical care, near misses and long stretches of simply inadequate health. There were vigils in hospital rooms as my dad went through surgery and long phone calls about different treatments for dogs, and everyone knew that eventually they would die. We talked about it, did the logistics of it, even cried in advance discussing what it would be like when they were gone.

But I never realized the loss would echo so deeply in me. This last death, the death of Wolfgang, has driven home the end of an era. My last memory of Wolfgang was sitting down near him and petting him very lightly as he completely ignored me, his focus on his beloved Gwendolyn and her movements around the room that he could perceive. My last memory of my father is our exchange of I love you's as I walked out of his room at the care center and his focus on getting the words right and loud enough to be heard. One worked hard to keep his love in sight, and the other worked hard to let his love be known.

And who will do that now? Who will focus on us, perservere for us, push himself to be heard? Where will the women of our family turn now for the things that we could get only from the men that were so much a part of our everyday life?

I still pick up the phone to call my brother, dead almost a year now, to tell him about my mother's latest adventure or compare notes about raising an only child. I still feel that rush of chill deep inside when I realize that he's gone, that my father is gone, that so many have left and here we are, women. Strong, capable, creative women that mourn each day for the death of men nearby.

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.

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...