The kind of snow that promises a nice, quiet walk, come 2:00 am.One of the things I like about winter is that even in the city, you can find a kind of silence we rarely experience any more. Granted, you have to wait for a still, snowy night, stay up till two, and brave the chill of out-of-doors, but then you’ll have it; an urban silence, without traffic noise, without airplanes overhead, without snow-blowers or -shovelers, where the loudest sounds are those you make — of walking, fabric swishing, your breath.
For me, silence is a kind of holy space, and I would worship there more often if I could find it (and didn’t have to get in a car to do so). I’ve made an effort in the past couple of years to seek out a few out-of-the-way places so I might visit the church of silence. Included in this itinerary: the Valentine National Wildlife Refuge in the sand hills of Nebraska, Des Lacs National Wildlife Refuge in North Dakota, Bowdoin National Wildlife Refuge in Montana, and Grasslands National Park in Saskatchewan. Mostly, I’ve gone to listen, to have a break from the normal cacophony of my life. And I am very grateful to the governments that have set aside these spaces to preserve that which is increasingly rare; a place where non-human creatures and their habitats can get on with life unmolested, and where a gal like me can occasionally visit and humbly submit herself to the church of silence.
Of course, what I really mean by silence is the absence of sound from my own species.
There are all sorts of songs in this world, and many species singing them. One function of these songs is to claim territory, which is what seems to be going on in Oregon’s Malheur National Wildlife Reserve1. Our own invasive, highly territorial species has moved in and set about to crowing, as we are wont to do.
Maybe it’s time for us to shut up and see what we might have been missing.
Listen!
Recorded in Grasslands National Park, Saskatchewan, during an August sunrise. You’ll hear a variety of birds, distant lowing (bison), also-distant coyotes (with a real drama queen among them), and my squeaking boots, even though I’m trying my durndest to stand very quietly. I recommend headphones.
The foot of the one-leggèd chorister hurts even more than those of us with two legs. This fellow is from a section of the 1493 Nuremberg Chronicles — written by Nuremberg doctor and humanist Hartman Schedel and illustrated by Michael Wolgemut and Wilhelm Pleydenwurff — describing odd peoples of the world.
I’m standing on my riser, shoulder to shoulder with my fellow choristers. During rehearsal, I thought we had a little more room; now it seems we have all become slightly swollen for the performance, and I cannot move in any direction without accidentally leaning on my neighbors. I am trying not to rest my music on the head of the person in front of me, and I can tell, by the regular rearrangement of my hair, that the person behind me is having a similar struggle. In spite of the fact that I’m wearing my ugliest and most comfortable black shoes, we’re only one song into the piece and already my feet hurt.
But when we expressed our concern during rehearsal about standing for so long, the director said: “Hey, I’m standing the whole time, too! Wear comfortable shoes.”
It is hard, at times like this, to keep my mind from wandering to thoughts of my new performance piece. It is written for 40 conductors and a single chorister. The chorister stands on a large, raised platform, where she has plenty of room to move around as the music demands. She has a stand so she doesn’t have to hold her music, and so she can give her full attention to the conductors. They stand on risers in front of her. Since there isn’t enough room to accommodate music stands, they are asked to hold their scores with one arm while conducting with the other. This obviously isn’t ideal, but fortunately there are enough of them to divvy up the task. One section conducts the beat. Another leads dynamic changes, and yet others are in charge of onsets and cut-offs. They can have a committee meeting later and decide who does what. In the meantime, conductors, please make sure you can see the chorister; you may have to shift a little to have clear sight lines. I realize it’s very crowded. Please do your best not to hit each other. This piece is 60 minutes long. Smile with your eyes!
If I were a better person, perhaps my hurting feet would not lead me so quickly into fantasies of vengeful performance art. Alas, I am deeply flawed. But here’s the thing: I spent years as a chorister trying to find shoes that were comfortable enough that my feet wouldn’t be in agony by the end of the concert. This was before I understood how the sensory receptors in the foot work.
We have sensory nerves (also called mechanoreceptors) throughout our bodies that send feedback to the brain about things like movement, pressure, and vibration. The feet have a lot of them.
One distinction that is made between these receptors is whether or not they are fast or slow adapting. Say, for instance, you get up in the morning and put on your shirt. The fast adapting sensory receptors in your arm will say: “Oh, hey, there’s a shirt!” They’ll send that signal to your brain for a short while, and then they’ll stop. Your brain really doesn’t need to be told all day that there’s a shirt rubbing against the skin of your arm. At the end of the day, when you take your shirt off, those same sensory receptors will fire again, and say: “Oh, hey, the shirt’s gone!”
Slow adapting sensory receptors, on the other hand, will continue to send a signal as long as the stimulus is present. This type of sensor is very important in the foot, because, among other things, it enables us to maintain our balance while standing and walking. If you’ve ever had the experience of trying to walk on a foot that’s “gone to sleep,” you know just how bad it can be when these sensory receptors go offline.
As choristers, when we are standing on risers, crowded enough that we can’t even shift our weight from one foot to another, the slow adapting sensory receptors in the foot will send a continuous signal to the brain, and before long, that message will be: “Ow. Ow. Ow. Ow. Hey, you’re still standing on me. Ow.” Comfortable shoes will help distribute the pain evenly over as much of the foot as possible, but they won’t do anything to change the essential nature of the mechanoreceptors in the foot.
The antidote? Movement.
In my fantasy piece, even though both the chorister and the conductors are standing for the same amount of time, the chorister’s feet don’t hurt. She has enough room to shift her weight from one foot to another without bumping into someone or having to worry about blocking the view for the people behind her. The conductors, on the other hand, crowded on their risers with no room to move, are starting to have trouble focusing on their music as their feet clamor for relief. They may start making silly mistakes, missing cues, or getting off of the beat.
So what’s a conscientious choir director to do?
A little extra space goes a long ways. When we shift our weight from one foot to the other, our whole body shifts so our weight is over the standing leg. Depending on the size and stance of the person, the head can easily shift between 4 and 8 inches to one side. That extra room means you won’t bump into your neighbor or block the view of the person behind you.
Got a big choir and not quite enough space? Gospel choirs have figured this one out! Everyone shifts from one foot to the other together. Sing some gospel tunes!
Got a big choir and not enough space and you’re not singing gospel music? I just invented a new notation for you! We notate breath marks and consonant placement for cut-offs in our music. Why not coordinated shifts from one foot to the other?
New symbols to be added to the music notation lexicon, indicating weight distribution through left and right foot, respectively.
Recently, someone showed me a handout she’d been given on vocal warm-ups. She pointed out a paragraph advising against exercises using the ng consonant — the hum created by placing the back of the tongue against the roof of the mouth. It’s the sound you make, for instance, in the word hangup. According to the handout, making this sound can cause a habit of tongue tension that is difficult to correct.
Prohibitions in the voice studio can be very useful. Here’s one I use all of the time:
Don’t you dare put your coffee cup on my piano.
Back to the ng.
If the ng is prohibited on the basis of its potential for causing tongue tension, then how is the singer supposed to sing this:
Thro’ all the tumult and the strife
I hear the music ringing;
It finds an echo in my soul—
How can I keep from singing?
I’m not sure how you’re supposed to get through all of that ringing and singing without the good old ng consonant, and hey, there’s a [k] – the back of the tongue comes up against the roof of the mouth to make this consonant, as well. Perhaps it should also be prohibited, just in case it causes a habit of tension. (According to phoneticists, the [k] is a near universal language sound, so perhaps excessive tongue tension is also nearly universal. It’s nice to think we’re all in this together.)
When we swallow, the tongue comes up against the roof of the mouth. (Try swallowing without letting the tongue touch the roof of your mouth, and let me know how it goes.) Maybe we should prohibit swallowing so we don’t develop patterns of excessive tongue tension.
Perhaps you get where I’m going here.
The tongue has to move when we use language, whether for singing or speaking. It moves a lot. It’s probably the most flexible group of muscles in the body (good for you, tongue!). At the same time, excessive tongue tension (which you can probably invoke by saying “excessive tongue tension” ten times fast) is a very real issue for speakers and singers alike. Every singer needs some skills to help find a balance between necessary tension and necessary relaxation in the tongue.
Here’s just one I’ve been using recently.
It might not work for you, but there are days when a nice, plump lava tongue does the trick.
Imagine your tongue is a river. You can think of it as having a unidirectional flow through its length, or you can think of a flow that eddies and swirls.
You might feel like you have some increased salivation with this exercise. Saliva is part of the alimentary system, and we salivate more when we’re relaxed and the parasympathetic part (rest and relaxation) of our autonomic nervous system can get down to business. (Conversely, lack of salivation, or dry mouth, is often a component of performance anxiety. Your fight or flight instinct kicks in, and your body figures it can take the production of saliva off line for a little while, while you channel your energies into getting away from the tiger that’s chasing you).
Because I live in Minnesota, where, as I write, it is still winter, I also like to use a little flow imagery I collected some years ago on a trip to the Big Island of Hawaii. There, in addition to being toasty warm, I was lucky to visit an active lava flow in Volcanoes National Park. Try thinking of your tongue as a slowly flowing and expanding tongue of lava.
Which reminds me of another of my studio prohibitions.
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 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.
