Category Archives: Mind

Sunday, February 22, 2015 — By Emily Greenleaf

Singing and Wine

I confess, I like a glass of wine with dinner, and I’m a bottom shelf red kind of gal. It’s better for your budget and it gives you a chance to get some exercise as you peruse the aisles, practicing your squats in order to read the little cards with wine descriptions on them, like this one:

Spicy, “brushy” flavors of black cherry and dried berries accompanying notes of roasting coffee and campfire smells. Description courtesy by the good folks at Lake Wine and Sprits in Minneapolis.
Spicy, “brushy” flavors of black cherry and dried berries accompanying notes of roasting coffee and campfire smells. Description courtesy of the good folks at Lake Wine and Sprits in Minneapolis.

The description is certainly evocative. Already, I can imagine the brush pile I’ve gathered to add to the fire beneath my skillet. In my mind, I see the texture of the sticks, and I can imagine their smell (along with a general sense of being damp and cold, alas). But I still have no idea of how this wine will taste. After all, I haven’t invested any time in developing my palate and taste memory, or a consistent language for talking about these things. I am reduced to relying on descriptions given to me by the wine merchant, and the vague recollection of having enjoyed wines in the past whose descriptions invoked the fabled black cherry (a fruit I’ve never tasted).

Talking about singing shares some of the same challenges as talking about wine. Your experience as a singer, just like your experience tasting things, is completely subjective. No one else gets to hear or feel what you’re hearing and feeling as you sing. We can certainly take guidance from other singers and from our teachers. But ultimately, we must develop our own memory bank of sense experiences, our own language to describe them.

The downside is that there’s a lot to learn. The upside is that the mind loves novelty. When you learn something new in the body, even in an area that seems outside the realm of vocal technique, your sound will benefit. For the singer, the entire body is the palate for the voice.

For inspiration, I offer up the advice of Victor Hazan, from the chapter on tasting in his 1982 book Italian Wine (page 10):

Using one’s nose is the most elusive exercise in tasting. To harness this impetuous organ we need to learn how to add mindfulness to instinct. One difficulty is that the words that describe scents usually reach us with more force than the scents themselves. Such words as rose, violet, pepper, coffee rush to our brain, arousing imperious sensations that do not seem quite to match the ethereal fragrances in wine that go by the same name.

Another problem is our impoverished store of remembered smells. The fragrances of honestly ripened fruit, of wild berries and mushrooms, of field flowers, of wood have been edited out of everyday experience and replaced by those of plastic film, metal foil, polymers, and acetate.

For many of us it will be necessary to replenish the depleted stores of our olfactory memory, conducting our noses through produce markets, gardens, fields, woods, wherever it can assemble the most varied collection of well-identified impressions. Most of what a wine has to tell is spoken by its odors. Smelling is the most intimate contact we have with wine, when we draw close to, as it were, its very breath.

Go forth and smell the world, oh singer, lest ye be reduced to buying the voice based only on the label.

Sunday, February 8, 2015 — By Emily Greenleaf

Singing After the Fallow Times

This garlic is pointing toward spring.
This garlic is pointing toward spring.

This morning, I sacrificed an onion for my breakfast. When I cut it in half, I noticed its center was greening up. February barely has its pants on, I thought, and yet this onion, at least on the inside, is thinking about spring. And it isn’t the only bulb in my kitchen with such thoughts; the garlic is sprouting, too. I found myself looking out the window at the snowy yard and wondering if, down below, the bulbs were flexing their sense of green, listening for cues from sun and dirt for the right moment to send forth a shoot.

Even in the fallow times, when the days are still cold and the night is long, growth happens, though it might be hidden from sight.

When I was a kid, we had a resplendent vegetable garden, mostly tended by my father, who also took on the annual task of food preservation. Our winter pantry was filled with jars of dried legumes, canned tomatoes, courses of braided onion and garlic bulbs, newspaper-wrapped cabbage heads and wooden boxes filled with carrots packed in sand. ‘Round about now, in early February, those carrots would become perfect; incredibly crisp and sweet. Later, when they turned woody and unpalatable, we’d feed them to the goats or go back to putting them in stews, but for a few weeks, we’d revel at their sweet crunchiness, a balm for a dark time of year when our apples (and the hands that pared them) were inclined to wrinkle and dry out.

This week, I find myself reflecting on my sprouting onions and those sweet carrots. I’m thinking of the ways, as a singer, I might green up from within after the voice has been fallow: after a sleep; after the dark times of sorting through tax records; after a pause for illness.

How can I sing from my innermost layer?