Various Posts

Here we are again, in “the holiday season”. We’ve just seen Thanksgiving and are in the middle of Hanukkah. Then there’s  Christmas, New Year’s and, if you celebrate them, Kwanzaa, and maybe “Festivus” (for the rest of us), created by a Seinfeld episode. We will be bombarded by mostly Christmas messages and music from now until the end of the year, everywhere, relentlessly. The inevitable complaint is that Christmas has become Consumermas. The argument that Christmas shouldn’t be about “buying stuff” is very old and in my opinion quite valid. How many people, for instance, actually live the message in the lyrics of “Good King Wenceslas”? The patterns, however, are unlikely to change anytime soon, as the culture feeds on these  behaviors and to some extent even depends upon the sales made at this time of the year to keep the economy alive. That’s another topic  – one which I can’t really address.

Personally, I love holiday music and have fond memories of singing it going back to my early childhood. It brings me happiness to sing the carols with friends at holiday gatherings and I feel happy whenever I see people gathering to make music in this way. At my house, we sing Hanukkah and Kwanzaa songs alongside the Christmas carols, as we are a non-religious household that celebrates and honors the sacredness of life in all its forms and expressions.

Nevertheless, I have had more than one occasion when I was subjected to music coming at me in department stores and on mall escalators that was, to be kind, less than fabulous. Recordings abound of people singing holiday music with no clue at all about expression or vocal quality or anything that would make it “uplifting” or “joyous”. A really bad version of “Silent Night”, with someone screaming out the song in a screechy belt (it’s a lullaby, after all), is enough to make my hair stand on end. “Frosty the Snowman” doesn’t much mind if someone wants to mangle his signature tune, as he isn’t a heavy dude, man. But a “O Holy Night” that ends up sounding like “O, Holy Smokes!” is just plain revolting. There are plenty of clueless, rotten versions of that gorgeous song available on iTunes and Amazon.

If you have occasion to attend a live performance of holiday music, and it’s good, be sure to thank those involved for making the performance possible. There are far too few opportunities to hear live singers doing holiday music in a way that gives the words meaning and the impact of the various messages real validity. No matter what holiday is being celebrated through song, if the singers are good, they deserve your support and praise. Don’t forget! Fa la la la la la la la la!

Can you ever not “be yourself”? Can you be John Malkovich?

You can always only be yourself. There is no other “self” to be. The image you have of your self, your identity, is a mental concept, and it is liquid. “That’s just my nature”, “that’s how I am”, “I’ve always been this way”, “I can’t change myself”. These statements keep you stuck. Yes, we are mostly creatures of habit and we mostly operate the way we do just because, but that doesn’t mean that profound change is not possible, and, further, that the changed you is still your SELF. Just a different version of your self.

In metaphysics or spiritual teaching there is the idea that, as you go deeper, there is no “personal me”, there is just the vast unlimited sense of loving kindness and presence that is all in all. Few of us get to realize this directly (unless we get very lucky) but those who have touched these moments do understand more clearly how that could even be possible. If you believe yourself to be anything, and that belief is held firmly and without question, you could not possibly understand how anything you believe, no matter how real you find it, is always just belief. The exceptions to that occur in the physical world. Water is always water, rocks are always rock. There will always be birth and death as our alpha and omega in life, but as the saying goes, nothing is certain except those two and taxes!

So, when someone tells you, “Relax, just go on and be yourself”! as if this was a specific way to behave, you can be fooled. Every moment, you being you, doing whatever you do — good, bad or mediocre — is being yourself and you cannot escape that in any way. This is an issue only because we make it one.

If you are a student and you are doing your best to sing from your heart, in a free way, without any agendas other than doing the song justice, and someone outside (an authority figure) lists for you all the things you do that are “not working”, how do you react to that? The list of what you are doing to “not be real” can be very long when teachers, coaches, music director, choral conductors and your uncle Fred recount to you all the ways you are being false and “trying too hard”. Add to that the messages in your own mind that say you are not good enough, you are not as good as Mary or Albert, and you will always be a mess, and you have a recipe for failure, struggle and pain.

The balance between being yourself without judgement, moment by moment, doing the best you can to be spontaneously open and present, weighed against the next you that is showing up and emerging as you live and breathe, is challenging. If you are someone who is “just naturally” cheerful you will annoy, just by being yourself, the person next to you who is “just naturally” gloomy. If you are someone who is emotionally open and comfortable being emotional, you will make the person next to you who is very quiet and keeps everything inside, pretty angry, just by begin yourself. On the other hand, if your way of “being up” is perceived by others as being “over the top” or if your idea of yourself is that you have to be emotional all the time in order to be free, others may think that you are just a drama diva and that it’s hard to be around you. It’s the risk you take.

So it is with singing. If you have a big full voice others may find it amazing or horrifying. If you have a light delicate voice, others may find it charming or lifeless. As always, it depends on the ears of the listener.

Therefore, take heart. You can always only be yourself, and that self can learn, grow and change while remaining true to your essence, if you remember that you are not your thoughts, your behaviors, your characteristics, your physical appearance or, even, your sound. AND, of course, paradoxically, you ARE all those things while you are walking on this earth in a body.

Be yourself. Being John Malkovich is over-rated.

I have had occasions in a lesson where the student mentioned something that was calling his attention which seemed to me to be of little import. A student might say, “When I sing that sound, I feel a kind of funny pulling in my neck, up by the base of my skull.” In looking at the student, I might not see any tension or misalignment in their head/neck and I might not hear anything significant in their sound, but I note the feedback and say something general like, “Well, maybe as we go along and things get a bit easier, the tension back there will let up. Are you OK to go on anyway and see what happens?” If the student says yes (and that is the typical response), we go on and do not dwell on this issue. Sometimes, it indeed “just goes away” as we continue to sing.

If, however, it comes up again in another lesson, I might stop and give it more attention the second time and say to the student, “OK, let’s try massaging that area a bit and do some neck stretches”. I proceed to show the exercises and have the student do them, and we talk about how they are working. Then perhaps we go to the vocal exercises with an awareness of that area while singing, but, again, if it isn’t making an obvious difference (to me) I will ask the student to move on anyway and work on it here and there during practice.

If the same response surfaces a third time, I really pay attention and we spend some significant amount of time in that area of the body, doing massage, movement, adjustments and talking about how this particular area could be giving the same message over and over. We talk about what it could be from historically (and old injury? a fall? an accident? something more recent?) and we discuss what kind of body work would be effective and what sorts of things could address the issue in other ways, outside of lessons. Then, throughout the rest of the lesson, we really focus on that area, searching for ways to sing that do not incur this response. I might give him the names of bodyworkers I recommend or ask him to buy a certain book about a specific body discipline.

All of this is important. The first thing it does is allow the student to notice what is going on in the body while he sings. It allows him to share his feedback that at least some small part of him is unhappy and that he is noticing that. It allows him to know that the issue isn’t being diminished but that we are not worried about it immediately either. It opens the door to having him share other things that come up in his mind that he might want to inquire about and validates the idea that it’s always OK to share anything that he would like to communicate, whether or not it makes sense to anyone else.

The second thing it does is let him know that he has a right to his own experience, good or bad, and that having it is part of owning his authority as a person, an artist, and a vocalist in particular. It means that he is more likely to share something else next time because his first feedback was not dismissed nor ignored. The “don’t bother me with your questions, just trust me and sing” attitude is not something I like in anyone, and I certainly don’t want to teach from that mindset. I do not know more about what someone else is experiencing in his own body than he does.

The third thing it does is acknowledge that sometimes the body has gotten into a “funny” situation that can’t be handled directly in a singing lesson but that needs to be handled somewhere outside the lesson if the singing is to proceed to a better place. This is a crucial piece of information for the singer to have. Things go astray in the body all the time and we need to see to it that our “parts” like each other and cooperate so they can “play nice”. If you have reflux, spinal issues, severe allergies, old injuries from dance or sports, a family history of hoarseness, or any other factor that could impact your vocal well-being, you need to see the requisite experts for help until you can address and solve those issues that compromise your body. Medical advice, yes, but not just medical advice. There are a whole host of people out there to help you feel and experience your body until it gets better.

If a student brings something up, I listen. I will do my best to give that question, thought or perception some time, investigating it with some degree of seriousness, even if it seems to me to not be particularly important. Sometimes, in doing this, I have discovered problems that were just beneath the surface that I might have missed had I not honored the student’s feedback. Sometimes, it has opened the door to an entire new kind of awareness and I end up learning something important alongside the student.

If a student is uncomfortable and says so, pay attention, even if you do not see or hear discomfort. If the student says that something is wrong, even if you do not see or hear anything wrong, pay attention. If the student says that something is coming up on a regular basis, even if you do not see or hear anything in what is being sung that is causing a problem, please PAY ATTENTION! Somatic Voicework™ is somatic for a reason. Learn to trust your students and they will trust you, without you having to ask.

 

Does stiffness in the upper back make it harder to sing well? Does an issue with your knee interfere with vocal production? If your foot hurts, how can that make your singing different?

The body is a whole. Everything affects everything. You may not notice it, you may be used to whatever is going on, but it all makes a difference, whether you realize it or not.

If you have something happening in your body that causes you pain, or makes you stand in an “out of alignment” way, or you take medications that affect your entire system, sooner or later that affect can creep into your singing. Your larynx sits in the middle of your throat, on top of your trachea (windpipe), and those are both in front of your cervical spine. The cervical spine connects your skull with your thoracic spine (your torso) and that is supported by your legs and balanced by your arms. If your stance is skewed, your ability to inhale and exhale may be compromised, as the placement and movement of your ribs could be inhibited.

If the muscles in your body are very tight, unable to stretch and move, or very flabby and out of condition, responding very little, it may be difficult if not downright impossible to use them well. If they don’t move, you might find your inhalation shallow and your exhalation weak, if they don’t respond, you may not be able to engage your upper body to hold it erect and your lower body to stabilize your rib cage from below. If you can’t find a solid center of balance without locking your knees or perching on your legs as if they were stilts, you will find it hard to breath in deeply and freely, and that makes it hard to sing well. Your vocal folds work best when the larynx is sitting comfortably in your throat, but it can’t do that if you have tension in your body that shouldn’t be there (and who, in this crazy world, doesn’t have that somewhere or other?).

Being in touch with your foot might sound like noticing the thing that has the least possibility to affect your singing but this would be wrong. If your foot hurts, it can affect your entire body, as most of the nerves in your body end up there. Same for your hands. If you have a pain in your body anywhere, it saps your energy, draws your attention and generally makes it harder to function well.

Things that are far away on the edges, the periphery, of your body and your consciousness about your body, can and do make a difference in what your vocal folds can do. They are not directly the source of the sound and you can certainly sing when you are not in perfect condition. (If we had to be in perfect shape to sing, we wouldn’t have very many good singers in this world). If, however, you are to maximize the potential for your voice to respond and for it to be both strong and flexible, then you need your body to function as well as it can, and you need to attend to it for this, if no other, reason. Just because your feet and hands or your legs and arms or your pelvis or head are not causing your vocal folds to close and vibrate doesn’t mean that they don’t contribute to their ability to do so.

Learn to pay attention to everything in your body and to the messages those areas are sending you. If something is calling to you, asking you to notice it, listen! It could be that something seemingly unrelated is far more important than you realize.

 

What happens when something you work with that is always successful suddenly does not work? What do you do?

When teaching functionally, using vocal/singing exercises with a clear knowledge of what they do and how they do it, it is possible to elicit a specific response from the vocal mechanism that is free and able to respond in a normal manner with little fuss. As long as there are no interfering factors, the exercises will work when done correctly. Period.

But, those interfering factors can be tricky little buggers, folks. They can be very stubborn and tenacious.

If you have a conscientious student, who practices, who is motivated and who is responding decently over a period of time it would seem to make no sense when you hit a road block when a persistent problem refuses to go away through any available means of functional correction. It’s like a cold case that refuses to be solved and gets put on the shelf begging to be forgotten or overlooked.

Even after 42+ years of teaching and a lifetime of singing, and thousands upon thousands of hours of listening to people sing in lessons and outside them as well, sometimes I just don’t get where I want to go with a student who wants my help and who is cooperating fully.

What do I do then? First of all, I discuss the issue with the student. We discuss what could be interfering with the singing and why it would be so. We agree to dig deeper into the process and sometimes I ask the student to make note of certain aspects of the practice regime in order to see what is happening there.

The next thing I do is go back and go over virtually everything I’ve done with the student, approaching it as if for the first time. We look at every possible combination of vowel sound, volume, pitch range and register quality; every physical behavior of the jaw, mouth, face, lips, tongue (front and back), and soft palate, as well as the posture, breathing and the coordination of all of these. We re-combine combinations of vowel shape, volume and pitch change with the idea that something, somewhere got overlooked and put in the cold case file by mistake.  Particularly if the problem has moments when it goes away but doesn’t stay gone, it is often so that something was missed the first time around. We talk about mental concepts of singing and sound.

There is no reason why a person who desires to sing and works at getting better at singing has to settle for a compromised vocal output because something isn’t working right. There is always an answer in the body. Looking for that answer requires a great deal of patience and persistence, as well as curiosity, creativity, and a subtle awareness of both movement and sound production. Sometimes, with that attitude, the thing that was blocking the final goal turns up, right in front of you, and says, “Hi! Thought you’d never find me. I have been locked in that room for years! Thanks for letting me out at last.”

Resistant problems are very good teachers. Being a cold case detective of the voice is a particular kind of attitude to cultivate. We can all solve those difficult cases if we just don’t give up.

How about considering singing as a sport? I think singing shows could do well to have a “voice over” of performances like they do at the Olympics, with the TV commentators.

Commentator #1: OK, folks, this cadenza coming up, with all the melismas, is a 3.5 in difficulty. If she does it in one breath, she might get all the points, but if she has to stop in the middle, she will lose some for that.

Here it comes. (We listen.) Oh! She cracked the high note! That will cost her 1 point and may put her behind Contestant #4, who just came in with a total score of 47.6 out of the 50 possible. (We listen again). Wow! That was the longest riff I have ever heard! She must have gone on for at least 90 seconds there! That will certainly redeem her from the lost points of the crack.

Commentator #2: That’s right, Bob. Contestant #5 has a reputation for dramatic variances of her phrasing and high notes. The phrasing is always her strength but about half the time her high notes are not what they should be, sometimes going all the way to not coming out at all. She’s been working on that with her voice coach, but when she’s under pressure, she seems to lose some control.

Commentator #1: OK, here comes the big finish. (We listen). That was a bit disappointing. There wasn’t much volume there and the last note didn’t really sound open or free.

Commentator #2: Yes, Bob. I agree. I think her throat is getting tired and starting to constrict. That last note was slightly grabbed and I thought maybe it might also crack, like the high note did. It will be interesting to see how she does.

(We wait).

Commentator #1: OK, here are the scores: 40.6, 43.7, 41.8, 44.5 and 43.0. That puts her in second place! Amazing. The pressure is on now for Contestant #6!

OK, I know. It’s crazy. But, really, some of these competitions aren’t far from that. Imagine a group of opera singers standing on stage, all singing “Vissi D’Arte”, one after the other, with the commentators explaining what it was in each phrase that was difficult or required a certain kind of execution. The public might learn a lot and develop an appreciation for something they don’t get exposed to or ever have a chance to study.

My point, really, is that the physical training for singing is closer to being a sport than to any other activity. If you don’t have the coordination, the strength, flexibility, stamina and extended behavior that high level professional singing demands, you will not be able to express very much of anything beyond ordinary conversational topics. Learning other things like languages, diction, phrasing and fine adjustments in the way we shape vowels, is different from learning to control the sound itself for its own sake.

If we ever figure that out, it might be that we could give points for “school figures” but that we would have to measure that against the “artistic content”. Don’t laugh. Figure skating was an activity long before it was ever “scored” in a competition!

 

If you are a good artist, you will serve the music. That means you will not only understand what the words mean, literally, you will understand what they mean to you. You will also understand how that meaning effects you, what it does to you emotionally and how that emotion (or state of mind) shows up through your face and body while you sing. You will allow the words, the music and the inner reality of both to flow through you as sound and as movement in order to express the personal truth of that piece, character or moment. If you have trouble doing this, you will not be successful as an artist, as singing is not about making sound alone, even if your sound is very impressive.

I have said before it is imperative not to be OK as a performer, or good. You need to be memorable, distinctive, unusual, unique, special, incomparable. THEN, you and your voice will also be unforgettable and will make a deep and lasting impression on your audiences. Some people have a lot of that quality naturally (bless them), but anyone can work on being special, as long as they are willing to put aside their ego in the process. That seems like a contradiction, but most truth in life is contradictory, in that two opposing things happen at the same time.

Ah, the famous ego!! We should not let it get in the way, or get too big, or get out of hand. Right. Except no one tells you what, specifically, an “Ego” (with a capital E) is. What’s the difference between being very self-confident and having a “big ego”? What’s the difference between being a leader and being “too self-absorbed”? This discussion can go on forever. No one really knows what an ego is, good or bad, except when they encounter a person they don’t like…….then it comes up.

I care about this issue. I don’t want to be considered an “ego-maniac” even though some people put that label on me. (She thinks she is the only person who knows anything.) Right. I am actually interested in getting away from that as behavior, but, may I assure you all, it’s easier said than done when you find yourself in a position of leadership that you did not ever consciously intend to have.

For me, “ego” is when your opinion and feelings (emotions) are more important that getting the job at hand done. If your feelings or considerations about yourself make you choose to do something that “makes you look good” or “gives you the respect you deserve” or “makes those other people look bad”, your choices will reflect that and cause trouble, not just for you but for all concerned. This is the opposite behavior of not thinking at all about others, about not paying attention to what you do because you don’t care about the job at hand other than getting it out of your way no matter how. That’s “ego”, too. It can also come up in the form of “I’m terrible at that”, “I can’t do those things”, “I will always fail” because that is negative “ego”. The issue is still about YOU and how you feel, and not about getting the job done.

Many of us spend our days wondering how we look to others. How do we measure up? How do others perceive us? What do others think of us? If we spend most of our time trying to please other people, we will end up in a big hole. On the other hand, if you never wonder about what  others think of you, if you never wonder how you measure up to others, if you don’t care at all about others’ thoughts or feelings, you are in a hole there, too. It’s just a different hole. As with everything, you have to find a balance. Self-evaluation has to happen on a number of fronts, including measuring yourself against the expectations of society at large, against your own set of values, and against your goals for the future.

If you concentrate fully on a piece of music and work to sing it as well as you can, you will have to work through the technical issues, the musical challenges, the lyrics and their import, and your clear communication of the entire piece, and then be able to share it without any kind of mental filtering or distraction, moment by moment, as best you can. If you do that, then you can say you have done your honest best to “let go” of your ego. If you are confident you did not hold back or interfere with your communication, and someone tells you that your performance was just a big display of your own ego, that is the problem of the person who saw your performance, but it is not your problem. Others will judge you, no matter what, and their judgements don’t matter more than your own brutal self-honesty, provided you have brutal self-honesty!

“Just go out there and be yourself’,” people say. OK. How do I do that? What “self” am I? If you are doing your job as a vocalist, you are the self who is in the song, and only that self, while you sing. After the song (or show) is over, you go back to what you were before. Remember, however, that in the world people are flexible and no one is just one “self”, but many “selves” that change as we go through life’s experiences. That which remains is your behavior, your attitudes, and your way of interacting with the world. People notice and remember the overall quality of your energy as they watch you intereact with life.

There are no answers here, just things to think about. Breaking through your own Ego is a lifelong day-to-day task. All that’s necessary is that you engage the question, how can I break through my own Ego?

OK, to continue from yesterday’s post.

Does knowing that you have an engine in your car make you a better driver? No.

Does knowing that your piano has strings, hammers and a sounding board make you a better pianist? No.

Does understanding you have a heart that beats all day long make it beat more efficiently? That would be nice, but no.

Does being ignorant of something benefit you in any clear way? NO!!!

Being ignorant of anything is not a plus unless the thing is some kind of awful horrible way to hurt others. Being ignorant in any way at all of something you want to confront every day for the rest of your life, will not be helpful or useful to you at any point in the game. Yet, I continue to encounter teachers of singing who say, “Well, knowing voice science is nice, but it won’t help you sing”. Not knowing is certainly not going to make things better. Knowing [not imagining you know] might not help, but it can’t hurt. In the hands of someone who understands how to APPLY that information it could help you sing very well indeed.

One of the reasons our culture is anchored to science (although there are people who would like to undermine science, too. Now that is stupid!) is because what we have learned from science has helped us advance our present civilization in many ways, ultimately allowing many of us to live longer, healthier lives and do more with them. It has allowed us to explore our universe, both here on earth and out in space, so that we may someday learn to live in harmony instead of hurting each other and our holy planet. I don’t think we would be happy if we hadn’t by now discovered that infections, which can be serious, can be cured by antibiotics, which also had to be discovered, ultimately making us safer than our ancient ancestors ever were. Imagine if no one had ever tried to find a way to explain infection. Would we still think it was the evil spirits that had taken over our bodies? Would this be……OK?

Singing teachers will argue that we need to make room for the person who says that learning to sing requires that you put an actual egg in your mouth (seen that) and for the person who teaches that your sinus cavities are what makes your sound good (seen that, too). We need to “allow for” the teacher who says that singing requires you to “support from your diaphragm” which is down by your belly button (yes, seen that as well). It goes on. OK, maybe these people had talented singers for students who just needed an outside authority to tell them “you are good” and that was enough to get them out there singing and securing a job. We should make room for teaching like this?

Well, not in my world. No. NO!

If teaching is about illuminating the path, shedding light on it for someone else, lest they fall, then the items above do not qualify as teaching, or education, or guidance, or advice or anything useful. They are examples of everything about the profession that makes it unprofessional.

Yet, my colleagues seem to think that making no standard, allowing for any and all kinds of “instruction” and giving people permission to use “artistic license” as an excuse for not knowing what they are doing or what their students are trying to do, is valid.

As long as that is the prevailing attitude, and it seems to be, then we are doomed to live in the land called, “let the buyer beware”. There will never be anyone to set a standard that can be trusted by those in the outside world who wish to learn. Woe be unto them!

As for me, you can count on me to set a standard through Somatic Voicework™. You might not like it, you might reject it, but, by golly, you are going to know what it is and you will know it is based on solid pedagogy, solid science and the balanced application of both, to serve the goal of authentic artistic expression.

Everyone is ignorant at some point. No fault in that. Hanging onto ignorance when there is reason to let it go is…….stupid. I can’t defend that at all.

Why is it so hard for singing teachers to decide anything concrete? WHY????????

They can’t decide that you have to know even one single factual piece of information. The argument for this is that people have done very well learning to sing by knowing nothing and teaching only flowery images for technical training. Great. For all the people that find this useful, GREAT! The rest of us, however, would probably do better with someone who actually knew that we had a larynx.

Plus, even though knowing vocal function doesn’t mean you can teach or that you can sing well, not knowing vocal function pretty much guarantees that you are going to make things up. Why this is tolerated in the profession is because people are TERRIFIED to admit they just don’t know what they don’t know and they aren’t about to go find out while they hold jobs. They can’t admit they don’t know so they want a “standard” where no one has to know. It certainly works to protect the guilty.

I for one think this is truly astoundingly stupid. If you want to talk about pearls on a string or elephant’s trunks or sending the sound across the road, go ahead, but in the back of your own mind have a clear idea of what it is you’re trying to get the student’s throat to do. If you want to say that the sinus’ create lots of resonance, no one will stop you, but it would behoove you to read that NO voice science has ever found the sinus cavities to contribute in any way to “resonance” or to acoustic behavior in the vocal tract. If you want to tell someone to create a “watermelon sized space in your throat”, well speak up, but understand that your throat couldn’t ever open that much. We couldn’t even get a tangerine in there, although it might fit inside someone’s mouth if it were big enough. If you have some wacky idea about what people need to do when they are singing, and if you have not run that idea in front of someone who should know, like a voice scientist or a skilled Speech Language Pathologist, but you teach it as if it were “real” because you think it is, no one is going to pound on your door and lock you up, but I certainly wish there were some voice police who would!

Yes, being functionally trained does not make you a communicative artist. It does not help you share what you know with passion, but it does make it possible for you to do so without hurting yourself and it allows you to know how to change gears if you want to, and emotion alone won’t do that, no matter how crazy you get when you sing. Being functionally trained isn’t the same as being unique in what you have to say through your singing but not being functionally trained sets you up for more vocal health problems, limits your artistic choices and leaves you helpless if something technical goes wrong.

Why, then, would there be any sane reason for teachers of singing to undermine the goal of having every person who teaches singing know about how we make sound as human beings?????

Because teachers of singing are ……… figure it out yourself! Argh!!!!

When I attended the lectures of Eckhardt Tolle last year one of the questions he was asked was “how can we make the world a better place”? The answer Tolle gave was for each of us to be as present as possible, one moment at a time. Simple, but profound, advice.

If you think about it, singing is a great way to learn about this concept. You can only sing one moment at a time. Each note, each word, each breath going out of your throat as sound, is alive moment by moment. If you are allowing the process to unfold as you are in the midst of it, you have to be in each moment as it is happening. Nothing else is possible.

The odd thing about this is that as soon as you stop the process to observe something about it, you are no longer “in the moment”. And, of course, we do this all day long. Very few people are capable of “staying in the moment” for anything longer than a few minutes, if that. The artistic process, when taught properly, should help you acquire the mental discipline to concentrate only on the task at hand while you are in the middle of it. If you are blessed enough to be in love with what you do (in this case, singing), then you don’t need much prompting to allow your fascination to be the  engine towards your destination of continuous presence. Being present on the stage (“stage presence”) is always the goal and it isn’t so hard to do after you discover what that means.

The duality of life – what we live with each day without seeing it  — rules our perceptions. The  right/wrong, good/bad, me/them attitude that we are taught from infancy is still the dominant idea of our world and that prevents us from getting out of the messes we make. As long as we are incapable of seeing things as lessons and challenges, and of seeing each other as being OK even when we don’t like each other very much, we will continue to cause misery to be the predominant theme of many sad lives. If we don’t learn to be unselfish, regardless, life will continue to be hard.

The only way to get even remotely close to that goal is to be fully present wherever you are and not judge your experience no matter what it may be. If that were easy, we would be living on a totally different planet. What can help get us there, however, are the arts (all of them). Whether we are performing or watching a brilliant performance, for as long as it lasts, we are in the moment, and nothing is in the way. Live performance (and sometimes film and TV performance) that completely captures our attention keeps us in the moment and, in that, there is no room for outside sorrow, anger or fear.

A society that values the arts over fame, money and power can only be a society that values life, beauty and humanity. If you can add to that with your own gifts, be bold, step forward, and do just that. We need you. Each person, right now. If you can do that through your art. If you are not an artist, do it by being yourself, in love with life. That’s enough.