I hope you are staying well and finding calm during this tumultuous time. A singer friend of mine asked me if I was blogging right now.

To be honest? Nope, not for a while.

And I’ve been should-ing on myself about it (and many other things).

Then I realized that this cycle of struggling to start, experiencing large shifts in my energy and ability to focus, and holding a vague sense of guilt about it all was/is familiar. I’ve experienced all of these feelings before in my life as a self-employed vocal musician.

Luckily(?), I have over a decade of practice being self-supervised* as my sister calls it. I’ve had to create schedule and structure to my work life before, I’ve worried about having too little work before, and I’ve wondered how I will pay my bills before. And I have built schedule, found (or created) work and paid my bills before. So while the consequences of this pandemic sometimes take those worries to a new level, they are at least (in some ways) familiar.

In fact, I have already written about a lot of those feelings here.

So, in lieu of finding the energy, focus and head space to write thoughtful, introspective new posts, I am going to point you to some posts of the past. I hope something here is useful, inspiring (or at least entertaining or distracting *smile*) for you.

• Sarah, Meet Stuck
• Thinking Up a Plan
• The Best Medicine (I obviously added the Melanie DeMore song above.)

Be well and keep singing.

P.S. *My sister coined the phrase self-supervised in the early years of her doctoral work.

When I tell people that I teach voice, a surprising (well, surprising to me *smile*) number of them ask me what that means. That’s when I usually say “I teach singing lessons” or “I teach people how to sing.” But as I stand on the other side of another semester of teaching including the last middle school musical, I realize that it’s more than that.

See, I have discovered that teaching people to sing has a lot to do with allowing people to be themselves.

…

I especially see this with young students. They want to sound like all those singers they love. They contort their young voices into imitations of what their favorite singers are doing. And sometimes it is successful, but it rarely sounds natural. Because that is not how their voices sound.

So we have to spend time learning what our “real” voices sound like. The easiest and most natural way each student can sing the note or the song or the exercise. And we often have to let go of an idea of how we want to sound to accept the way that we actually sound.

Let me be clear, this is not about dashing hopes or setting limits, this is about exploring the instrument each of us is given and finding the fantastic sounds each singer can create with his/her voice. Easily and naturally. One student might have to work slowly and for a long time at something that seems to come easily to everyone else. Another might have a flair for interpretation or improvisation. Every singer has something she wishes she did better and something he takes for granted that everyone else can do.

But I have come to understand that we have to love our voices for what they are, not what we wish them to be. And in doing that we learn to love our selves a little bit more.

I am fascinated and gratified to discover (and rediscover) how much of our identities are attached to our voices. That’s why my favorite way to meet singers is by singing with them. (And, it is part of why I started Songtaneous all those year ago.) I have a number people who I see rarely but know very well because we have sung together.

Singing makes connections and communities. And teaching voice always, always, always teaches me something about myself.

Each time I go to teach improvisation (like at my workshop last month), I am struck by the challenge of explaining how to improvise.

I mean … What does it mean for an improv to be “good” or to be “good” at improvising?

How do you get good at something where the goal is invention, newness and spontaneity?

And, who decides if it’s good? The audience? The artist? (Me?)

And (again), since each of us has our own brain, preferences and collection of musical and life experiences, how do any of us even recognize “good” in the first place?

Furthermore, part of what makes improvisation “good” is its changeability and instant invention. So how do we examine something that has never existed before and (unless documented) will never exist again and decide whether or not it’s good?

In short, how do we know when we’ve “got it?”

(At this point, I usually consider cancelling my workshop and taking everyone out for pizza. *smile*)

…

How do we know?

The same way we know a painting is beautiful or a poem is good. (Or a blog post is finished. *grin*)

We know.

For me, there’s a click. The sensation of things falling into place.

With exposure and/or practice, we come to recognize “good” more easily. We learn to hear the click.

(It happens all of the time with these blog posts. I shuffle words, ideas and paragraphs around until … click.)

The click is something about ease and connection. And recognition. It’s about getting out of our own heads (or is that way? *smile*) and outside of our selves.

It’s also about letting go of what we planned to have happen so we can see and appreciate what’s actually happening. In other words, seeing — and telling — a truth.

…

Vibes player Gary Burton says:

There’s a grammar to music, a vocabulary and a grammar and it’s all stored in the brain. And that language ability functions for us as improvisers as well. Our melodic phrases are like sentences, they form in the unconscious, get put in the right order – the right notes to fit the chords and everything and, as they come into our conscious mind, we play them on our instrument. [O]ur goal as improvisers is to become fluent at this process.

I felt a click when I heard the quote above.

Of course, improvising is about communicating fluently! Click.

Yes, yes, there’s a musical grammar that we know and notice (regardless of our musical training!). Clickety-click.

The idea that improvising and communicating are alike makes a wonderful and logical sense to me.

…

The more I study, perform and teach, the more I am learning that, for me, singing and improvising are about communicating. An important part of singing, perhaps the most important part for me, is the telling of stories — in direct and indirect ways.

For me, singing is, has been and will always be about sharing. About having someone who is listening see what I see or feel what I feel in that moment of inventing, whether it’s an image, an emotion or a story.

It’s about singing — and sharing — the click.