Why sing?

I wrote this piece in 2014, at his request, for a newsletter put out by a retired academic Bob Steele.

Why sing?

I fall off the rolling log of singing practice as often as I scramble back on. Embarrassed to be heard, and teased as has happened more than once, I’m the only person who sings in my apartment building, and have a voice that carries punch. It is hard to hide, and hard therefore to keep on the log, to keep my voice flexible and strong enough to climb the songs I feel most moved to sing. But...

As an infant, I cried without thinking, opened my voice and swallowed up the world with my sorrow and my rage. Unworried by my drooling, I gurgled happily, my meaning clear to me at least, and clear I am certain in my eyes, the texture of my voice, the wobblings of my limbs, to anyone who cared to understand. I was at ease with my body, inside and out, and the sounds I made were as natural a part of it as the skin that held me together, the hair that curled from my pate, the sensations that bubbled through me and rippled into emotion and from emotion, yes, into sound.

What were the sounds I made? Were they speech, or song, or some thing from which the two arise, a primitive ancestor of all the civilization of voice that surrounded me, embedded as it was in the mew of cats, the chitter of birds, the scrape of chairs on linoleum, the sound of my own sigh as I was falling into sleep?

It was only with instruction that I learned the strange idea that certain sounds were acceptable, even delightful, even beautiful, and other sounds outrageous, irritating, wrong. And as this instruction continued I learned as well that in the category of sound called singing, there were true notes, off notes, notes which hit me so sharply sidewise that I laughed in fear to hear them, and shrank in fear from making them. I endeavoured to be true. To be right and strong and delightful. To be flexible and controlled and Good. But knowing how close the wrong note sat to the right had me live in subtle fear.

Oh, there were many lessons regarding singing as I grew up. One strange one was that, outside of the enclave of my singing family, it seemed that any time I began to sing people would turn the radio on. Rather than, gods forbid, joining in, the reminder of music had them reaching for its proper type. Music, I learned, was being wrested from the familiar, the shared and the bonding, and plugged into the professional and remote. Only those with recording contracts were good enough to be heard to sing.

But. And here is the rub.

Have you ever run? Run, not just in panic for the bus, spleen stitching and lungs afire, but run often enough that your body builds in strength and you begin to feel the antelope in you stretching supple powerful muscles and coursing with the birds?  Have you ever learned to dig? Learned the placement of the spade and the pressure of the foot and the easy swing that bites the earth out of its bed and shapes the land? Have you ever played a sport, or immersed yourself in yoga, or taken to the mountains so many times your legs and heart and eyes grow bright and strong and you can breathe a giant breath and take the world into yourself and exhale it out again?

Well, that is singing, too. But it is inward exercise. Muscles no one sees, let alone thinks much about, a cage of muscles that supports and connects you to organs and bones and synapses you barely knew you had, orchestrated by the vast intake of air, the training of your lungs till they become not just flabby bags that keep you aerated but bellows capable of more than you had ever dreamed, instruments as precise as a jeweller’s tools.

Running that marathon with your breath and vocal chords, standing still or swaying in your place, fills out the last remaining territory of your body and wow—the strength you find in that. The joy in it. To feel utterly your own body from within and without and, just as in your infancy, to find no blank spots in your self: toe tingling from breath powered by note set free by diaphragm, and mind, and heart. An athlete of the voice.

I urge you, dig your garden, run your kilometre, bow and rise through your dozen vinyasas and then stand still and engage your voice. Discover the union of inner body and outer—both toned, both gleeful in their strength—of breath and stance and sound.

Another thing. Who sings? Who sings what? Who are you when you sing? That subject is as vast as humanity.

Long ago I wanted to learn something of my ancestors. The first thing I did was to listen to their music. To begin to learn the metre of their language. To link my voice with theirs and wonder, why was it sung that way? Why so much sorrow in their songs? Why so much hilarity? I didn’t even like the music when I first heard it, the strident fiddles and the driving rhythms. But that time is long since gone. Their music is in my muscles now. It is in my tears and my dancing feet. It rescues my vocal chords from disuse and brings past and present face to face in me. Over time, of course, I learned more of their story, fleshed out the breath of their music with grittier details. But the stories alone would be empty without their voices. I sing now with my great-great-grandmothers, warning of false young men, and I laugh and cry along with them. I sing with my great-great-grandfathers, who might never see land again, and I cherish their labour and their risks. I sing with the people I never got to meet, and find them in me, and love them still.

Why sing? So many, endless reasons. Better to ask, why live? What else can a child do?

Note: In Memoriam: Dr. Robert Steele (1925 - 2018)

Image: Cropped from "Dancing and singing to forget the pain of Syrias conflict.” Photo by Russell Watkins/Department for International Development. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.