Non-commoditised music

I had a nice time in the British Library yesterday. Here's one thing I read:

“In our own society, creative symbolic play tends to be closely associated with a class of specialists we call “artists”, and the results of their activities are treated as “works of art” having (for better or worse) value as commodities.” (Basso 1985:2-3) 

I read it again. Exactly. And that's reasonably specific to our culture, not so to some other cultures.

So I don't do "creative symbolic play", I do "creative musical play" - and I think I want to keep the creative play, but drop the commoditization.

So the first thing in my mind when I woke up today were some rules to try playing by.

1. Love what you are doing. 

It's for your joy. It's about now, not outcomes. If it feels wrong, or bad or tight or forced, take a break, step back, rethink if necessary. You'll find your way back.

2. Play

Play in your practice, play in your sharing

3. When it's time to share, share

There is no performance. There is only sharing. In various forms.

- playing with others

eg a jam, a choir, a band, a quartet

- helping others play

eg, leading campfire singalongs, knowing the chords and words, helping it feel good

- an extended listening

when you feel you've got something long and beautiful to share, invite people to an extended listening where they lie and listen, and you give them something rich to listen to

ok a fourth rule has just come to me

4. It's not yours, it's God's

I don't mind what God means to you: alternative names may include Nature/Geist/Allah/Life/Buddha/Tao/that general sense of some kind of 'higher power'/Music itself - why not.

A musician is like one dancer in a partner dance. Our partner is Music, mysterious music, this immaterial landscape we've been given to get lost in like some enchanted woods.

I think what we are doing when we make music, when we practice, when we take care of the music we are able to 'make'

oo there's a problematic word.

I don't think we make music.

I think music is made through us.

My Indian singing teacher Atul says that he's like a track maker and God is the train. He has to lay really good tracks and take care of them so that when the train comes it can go whenever it wants. He's a violin player. He's incredible.

Right now, my tracks are quite shit. Whatever instrument I'm playing, voice included my body cannot keep up with the music in my mind. I can dance with music a bit but it's not great.

A really great dancer does what Atul does.

A really great dancer takes really good care of the material elements - what the fingers / body can do - so that that immaterial enchanted wood can come into the material world.

But we didn't 'make' that wood. No-one did.

...

I do a lot of yoga. At the end of every class we sit in crossed legs with our hands in prayer position, and every single class for the last four years at least, Alaric has said, softly, "lift your heart and bow your head."

Finally last month he explained why he says that. It's so you don't take personal credit for your successes, he said. That's really important. You have to dedicate your successes to something else. Otherwise you get fucked up like Amy Winehouse.

Ok. I think that's my manifesto of the moment.

Let's see how that goes.

What a musician might need

There are some things I need as a musician. That I think anyone needs in order to practice something when they're alone. It starts with not being alone any more.

1. An Elder. Doesn't have to be older. Has to be someone to inspire and guide and help you: someone who wants to do that and is interested in your development.
2. A community. Loads of functions there. To make it fun. To make it social. Not lonely.
3. A point. In yoga the point is to feel and look good. Later it's to pass a difficult exam and gain a qualification, to further ends. What is it for this art? Joy! Pleasure! Your pleasure, and the pleasure of the community. So, you need opportunities to share what you're doing with the community. Like, Lucy's 'Little Show-Offs' community cabaret.
4. A sense of development path. A sense that there are people further advanced than you – and people less advanced than you perhaps – that you have a collaborative and supportive relationship with people at every stage – and a feeling that you are able to progress.

   
   

   On performance

   I've been quite anti performance for a while. I prefer things where everyone is a participant.

   
   

   I've been gently playing with the idea that there might be an interesting middle ground.

   
   

   I'm thinking of a performers playground, a place to practice. My music – a music of honest, heart led improvisation – has more in common with the Clowns and the Fools than with the jazz singers and open mic kids.

   
   

   So it would be a performers playground for all those working on honest, partly or totally improvised, heart led performance where the relationship with the audience is messed up.

   
   

   In Jonathan Kay's Fooling performance, he had the audience forming a vagina and someone from the back being born onto the stage through us. He had us facing each other and pulling faces and hurling insults. And he had us crying with laughter with some straight forward standup. Perfect.
   Bobby Mcferrin: same. Solo performance and playing with the audience.
   So. How would I do it? What would I do? That's the thing to play with.
   Why perform?
   
   
   I'd like to perform for people who are also doing stuff. I loved performing with the scratch band at Findhorn when everyone else was either dancing or singing. I loved that! I'd like to perform for people life drawing or dancing or something. I'd like to improvise with and for them. I'd like it to be woven into an activity; part of it but not the central focus.
   So why claim a stage all for yourself?
   Partly it's to show off, right? What experience does Bobby Mcferrin give people when he stands up and does Opportunity? We're impressed! We see what a human can be capable of. We're entertained I guess. We enjoy it! Do we? I get a little intimidated too sometimes. But only by musicians. Not by dancers or comedians, because I'm not in their game. I just watch / listen / laugh with delight.
   Is there something about... sharing?
   “You made the whole room feel like being inside honey”
   “Listening to you sing is taking an asthma inhaler. It slows and calms you down and makes you breathe.”
   “We were having an intellectual and aggressive conversation. Then you came in the room and started playing and the atmosphere totally changed, became gentle.”
   That's good, isn't it? Isn't that something worth sharing if you can?
   When we see hearts on stage are we reminded of our own?
   When we're rushing and then we see someone being slow, are we reminded we can slow down too?
   If we are fretful and we see someone at peace, can that help us find our own peace?
   ..
   I watched a Bobby workshop on Youtube and all the people he was working with were coming to the front and basically copying him, with quite boastful performances.
   Bobby spent four years not listening to other music, finding his own sound.
   What is your own music? Your true music?
   What is mine?
   What are the status of our performances? Are they to help launch our professional careers? Are they events in and of themselves – for the joy of the performer and the community present?
   So, after any performance, the question will be: was it joyful for you? Was it joyful for them? Yes? Then it was a success!
   ?

My Way

OK so if I'm a pioneer of a “new” approach to singing, (it can't be new, what are it's roots? Anywhere in space and time?) it's about:


honesty


playfulness


The pleasure of the people present in that moment


It's not about recording. Is it about performance? Hummm, performance is a sticky one I have yet to untangle, and I've got a love-hate relationship with it. What is the cross-cultural history of performance? In campfire jams, prima donnas and domineers are not tolerated.


The course director is on stage right now singing his interpretation of a Maya Angelou poem. “Nobody can make it on their own,” he sings. 


Yes! Who are my playmates?


More... On singing courses, we'll learn 'theory' with our ears and bodies and tummies. We'll do yoga and dance and drum. We'll sleep well and eat well, sing for the trees and slugs, amplify the soul with clowning and quieten the ego. We'll sing with our bodies in dance, sing with our hands on the drums, dance our voices, dance our hands, drum our voices, drum our bodies.

Anth is sitting next to me in the theatre while I'm scribbling away. “I've always found jazz like this kind of self important noodling,” she says in a low voice. “Is that OK?”

“Yes!” We cackle. “Sorry, I just have to quote you.” I pick up my notebook. 

She leans over again. “Is it a coincidence they're all men?”

Head. Science. Rationality. Control. Individualism. Showing off. No! :)

notes get wilder

• start a choir. Audition.
• Try things at the Fun Fed.
• Create a performance troupe: a) musical – vocal performance: b) variety
• JAM SESSIONS RULE. What can I offer?
• Structures for improvised pieces. Segments. Rules, eg, note boundaries, tempo, rhythm, accompaniment
• Not a pro! Just a student. And a player :)
• NO ONE TEACHER. MANY INFLUENCES.
• :)
• What are the limits to whale song? In terms of group size?
• Audience – set them up as a backing track, and impro over them: a) write it, b) impro it
• Invite audience members who want a bigger role to come forwards; if you want an easier life, go to the back. Concentric circles: inner circles, harder, middle circle, easier, outer circle, listeners (really? Is that allowed on participatory things? They could click, clap... ). Free: can everyone get here?
• Sing for artists and dancers at play. Sing with friends – singers, musicians, neither, but still somehow participants. Sing alone
• Weekly jam sessions – a different key signature each week, instrumentalists get to know them. Post them before so people could familiarise themselves in practice if they want.

You're on yer own, darlin'

I'm in the tea line. “Are you singing tonight?” asks an old Jazz man in a long anorak. “What you did last night was beautiful. Beautiful. It was like a piece of old lace. Delicate, and full of holes. Some of them were big holes! But beautiful. Beautiful! What next? It was a tiny piece of lace. The lace needs form... edges. That genre...”


“Ah! Is it a genre?”


“Well, you've just invented it, haven't you?”


“Really? Don't other people do that?”


Jazz man furrows his brow. “Well, there were a few in the seventies, but... No. You're on your own, darlin'. It's a new field. A big, wide open space. With a sign on it: Here be wilde things.”


Humm. I wander thoughtfully to the milk and de-tea-bagging stand. Duncan the guitar tutor comes up. 


“You the trombonist?” 


“No, singer.” 


“How's the week been?”


 “Humm.” 


“?” 


“Well, I think... I think that what I want to do isn't normal.” 


“What do you want to do?” 


“I think it might be called free vocal jazz.” 


“Ah! Free Jazz! Well you can't teach that,” he grins cheerfully. “You just have to start and see what happens.”


“That sounds like fun!”


“Yep, it is. I used to know some guys who did it. They'd have a set list with titles on, like 'Red Sunset...  Thick Brown Water...' and they'd start and they'd all stand and imagine what a red sunset might feel like, then one of them would start playing and the others would think of what might sound good with that, and join in.”


“Ah I see. Thanks!”


I walk towards the studio theatre and bump into the course director. We talk about free singing and different cultural approaches to vocal music.


“Your singing last night was very beautiful,” he says. “In some ways it was extremely simple, musically, but it was absolutely full of emotion. You probably couldn't get that if you were playing second violin on a Bach Fugue.”


Humm. I go into the concert and sit at the back listening and scribbling notes.


Is there a spectrum with complexity and one end and emotional content at the other? I think of the Peulh and Richard Quantum Lightbreak Bock and the power of singing a single note.


It can't be that simple. Atul's music is quite complex – it gets very fast, at least – and it's packed full of emotion. Bobby Mcferrin on the other hand can get really complex and lose emotional charge, gaining impressiveness – but that's a different experience.


And how do you learn complexity, or things that make your improvisation sophisticated, without smothering out the emotionality? It's as if once we know what we're doing, we leap confidently in and reel it off, but when we're not sure we explore like raw curious things. I like raw curious things. We explore like raw curious Clowns.


How do you keep the clown, and make it a clever clown? How do we feed our little voices? Maybe we feed it in the language it knows, the language of the heart and ears and rhythmic guts. We feed it aurally and through experience, like in Indian and Zimbabwen music, rather than through mathematics and diagrams. ?


“You've got to have form and structure,” said Jazz man. Yup. This is my question: what kind of rules and sections can you have in an improvisation to give it form, like Indian improvised music? Maybe just using the rules from Indian classical music would be a good start. They're good rules. Then you could just make them up. For the first five minutes, no drum, and you don't sing higher than a middle G. Second five minutes, you only use the pentatonic scale, and you can have a drum but it's quite steady and spacious beat. And so on. It could be a whole different approach to writing music: to establish the sectional and overall principles and set it free.


Gosh. That's exactly how a chaordic organisation works: establish the principles and set it free.


I'd like to turn the fun fed into a chaordic organisation.


Humm.


“You're on your own darlin'. It's yours to explore.”


“You can't teach that.”


“Genre? You've just invented it!”


“Your piece last night was the highlight of my week.”


“Breath of fresh air.”


“You are the most free person I've ever met.”


“Can I hug you?”


“There's a sign... Here be wilde things.”

feed the little voice

Everything a singer could want to play with and practice might come under four headings. ?

North: rhythm

South: melody and vocal dexterity

East: Playing nicely with the kids (this would include harmony)

West: your instrument (this would include body, heart, mind, and soul. Tone. Honesty. Health. Exercises to get into the right place to sing from. How? Clowning? Singing and clowning? 

There might be something else... Something about form and structure, the overall shape of the improvisation. Is that something to practice?? Or is it more of a set of creative decisions to take about a piece in advance? Or during? ?????

Free Birds

I lie in the park at the end of the penultimate day of Jazz Summer School, almost in tears. All day, almost all week, my noise-making has been tightly controlled by a central person – a composer, a conductor, a tutor.

Where is the space in our world to sing like a free bird?

Who puts the birds in a circle and dictates what they must sing?

Who rounds up the Whales?

Simply left to make noise together, humans create such beauty and magic. I've felt it time and time again. With central control, quality, pleasure and presence get diminished.

Walking slowly away from the Guildhall building I feel such a terrible weight. I feel it in my body and I've seen it grow on everyone's faces as the day progresses.

I feel angry with the rigidity of the structures that try to control us so tightly and kill our pleasure.

For our beautiful innate music is not allowed to find itself.

Last night in the studio theatre I did my first ever entirely improvised performance. Actually it wasn't entirely improvised. I knew the five or six chords on the piano I'd be using, but I didn't know in which order. I knew the rhythm and tempo of the piano playing that I'd use as a base. And I knew the first note I'd sing.

It went down really well. “You make being in the room feel like being inside honey.” said one. “I felt as if I was walking by a river, calm and free,” said another. Many questions about my training.

I am extremely untrained, formally. I am simply incredibly honest, and I listen for what the small singer in my tummy is singing, and I copy. And when it is silent, I let myself be silent too. And I trust it. Most of the time...

I have never got on well with formal music education because it seems to ignore that small singer inside me. It tries to paste over it with its knowledge and rules and theories and scientification of music which it assumes to be superior. For many years I simply thought that I wasn't a proper musician, I was inferior. But now I think actually, I am a real musician, and I just disagree. 

I disagree.

And here, even where the course director is a singer, singing is somehow inferior. The instrumentalists in their small bands pass the improvised solos round like sweeties, while in choir we sing exactly what the choir master tells us. Finally solos time comes! With the exception of me, everyone gets their solo at the same time – unlike the instrumentalists - with no guidance at all about how to approach simultaneous improvisation, and the result is uncomfortably chaotic.

I find myself feeling offended that the voice is not considered an instrument in the same way other instruments are. Maybe the whole issue is just the course but these people run the jazz master's course at the London Guildhall and as far as I know that's pretty high up in The Establishment. This perspective feels systemic.

I feel sad and a little angry.

Where is the space to sing like a free bird?

Birds, come along. We can create it! :)

How to learn music?

After lunch is harmony and improv class. I've been really excited about this. I'm pretty good at harmony and improv so I pick the level 3 class. But the teacher's diagrams and language make no sense to me at all. After 10 minutes I pick up my bags and go find the level 2 class.

I enter and sit. “The best way to make a chord,” the teacher explains, “is to play one note at the same time as another one.” He turns to the white board, and draws a round 'E' note above the 'C' note already on there. I promptly pick up my bags and skidaddle, along with about 80% of the class.

What are these people doing?

What can you teach me about harmony and improvisation with theory, mathematics and diagrams?

You're putting me into the wrong place to make music from! Music comes from the heart and belly, the heart and soul. You're putting me into my head! What's that about?

I'm confused.

And the singing teacher earlier was putting us into our noses. Why on earth would you want to sing from your nose? Do you love from your nose? Do you feel from your nose? What do you want to receive when a person sings to you – soul or snot?

When the tutor sung from her nose in a performance, I have to say I didn't like it at all.

The heart, the belly, the groin, the loins – this is where we must sing from.

I'm wandering the corridoor and I pass a room full of rhythm. I peer in. Ah! A group is learning about rhythm by tapping their feet, clapping their hands, hitting their knees, scatting with their mouths.

This is the way to learn music! I go and join in. It's great.

Later I bump into the teacher outside. “The old head of music here made an official complaint about me for not showing him due deference,” he tells me. “He had them all learning by the book! I said to him, how do you teach a child to speak, through writing and grammar? That comes later. The body comes first. Shame was, he was in charge of all the learning here.

“You go up to a Brazilian master percussionist and say, teach me that rhythm, he won't go and get out a notepad and write some phenomenally complicate lines and dots for you. He'll slow it down and sing it to you. He'll play it on your hand. He'll dance it for you.”

When Atul taught me Indian vocal improvisation, he did so in temrs of rising suns, bouncing balls and a road trip around Europe.

“When the Sun enters the sky, how does it come - with a loud burst? No! It begins to arrive with a delicate, gentle lighting of the whole sky. Your sonic arrival must be like this.

“When you go to Europe, and you go to France, do you then go straight to Germany? No! You play around in France. You get comfortable in France. Then when you go to Germany it's a Big Deal to get there.”

France is Pa. Germany is Da. Italy is Ni.

He plays me a recording of a woman beginning her Alap, the first slow part of the improv. “Listen to her. She's been singing for twenty minutes and she's still in Germany! She hasn't even touched Italy yet!”

Here it comes... Then BAMN she's in Italy and it is a Big Deal. I feel it all through my body.

Discipline in creativity. You need discipline in creativity. What is my discipline? He's given us some rhythmic exercises and I bunk my next class (Hello, please tell me your name and what you want out of this song performance masterclass – my name is Briony and I don't want to be in this class, I'm only here because you said I had to be – Oh! Fine! Go then! - OK! Thanks!) Excited, I skip off with my Mbira, sit down by the Barbican's fountains, get playing my little song and practising his rhythm exercises over the top, gradually working melodic improvisation into them. I've been practising my little song All Week at Findhorn and I haven't been able to improvise over it. Now, using this technique, I begin to be able to.

Ah! This is creativity, and discipline, and fun. It's challenging and it sucks me in for hours like a computer game you want to get better and better at.

Good.

Good.

The teachers on this music course have been talking at us a lot in words. I seem to switch off.

A couple of years ago I was hired by a government-funded R&D lab to conduct an independent evaluation of a new technology for learning and teaching physics. I did focus groups with all the kids in the study. What do you like least? “When the teacher talks for hours,” they unanimously replied. What's good? “Class discussions. We learn a lot from each other.” What's best? “When we get stuck in and play with things! That's how we find out the most.”

A teacher's dialogue and language must accompany the play to make sure the kids are learning what they can from their exploration. But why do teachers so universally think that they should spend so much time talking?

Choir?

I'm on a jazz summer school at the London Guildhall. I'm in choir. The mood is low. The leader is great but I think it's the form that doesn't work. The youngest, a girl of about eleven, is getting increasingly miserable. She's punching her thighs now in a cute little rhythm. She's the daughter of the saxophone tutor, a big soulful black papa, and her mother is evidently a long lean leggy beautiful white woman. It's as if this child is unselfconsciously embodying the discontent of the group, who, being adults, sing along obediently with joyless faces.

Is it the central leadership, the central control of our musicality? The little pre-designed part-boxes we're being put into?

In Indian music there's no such thing as choir. In Shona singing there are songs everyone teaches each other, which are repeated endlessly and become the basis for a whole lot of making it up.

What happens elsewhere? Am I saying I reject choir?

At my friends Rachel and Alex's wedding, a choir of friends, conducted by a friend, sang “Thank you God for this amazing day” in the service. It was totally magical.

I once walked, late of course, in from a cold December evening inot the Royal Albert Hall where my siseter was performing Christmas carols with the Bach Choir. Almost immediately, tears welled up in my eyes at the beauty and the warm feeling of homecoming.

I don't want to reject the choir form, the form of coreographed, taught and centrally controlled music.

But do I want to take part in it personally?

Does it have anything to do with the fun fed?

How did the young Vin Marti, big papa of Ecstatic Dance, feel going to dance lessons where his movements and interactions with other dancers were controlled by the choreography and direction of another? Where beauty was prized above honesty, technique above expression? His response was to ditch the audience and professionalism, say “Dance Ugly and Drool”, and spread a form of dance that everyone can participate in, love every minute of and get mighty high on.

Ecstatic singing? I've experienced ecstasy through singing twice, and something approaching it a lot.

I google the term, and retrieve lots of stuff about Kirtan, the Indian call and response form of singing, and devotional song, the repetition of mantras. Repetition is one of the routes to ecstatic singing, but I'm not sure about Kirtan and mantra.

How do we do it, then?

I don't want to come back to boring 'sing-as-you're-told' choir. But I form 50% of the tennors section. “You two”, says the choir leader pointing at me and my fellow tennor, “as long as you come back all week we'll be fine!”

Argh! The dilemma! It's lunchtime but I've been drinking my whizzed up breakfast all morning and I'm not hungry. I sidle off to another practice room, get out my Bach prelude and, under the instruction of my unmet Hero, Bobby Mcferrin, sit down at the piano and learn to sing it.

I sing for my pleasure, and for the pleasure of the community, I think. This week, this is the community. I'd be letting them down to bunk choir and sharpen my teeth on Bach instead. I decide to stick with choir and keep Bach for lunchtime.

Tiny singing

In The Tent in the evenings of Mbira camp, I play the first two easy songs on the Mbira and then put it down and sing along for the rest. I don't know the parts so I copy people and make it up. One time I was singing along on a self-created part, thinking, god, why do I often feel so tense when I'm singing?

Maybe it's because what I'm singing doesn't feel right, I think. So I listen for what might feel more right. I imagine a far simpler line. So so simple, a modest repetitive part of just two notes to fit in the whole. I start singing it. It feels right. I relax. And ever, ever so slightly, so does the whole room, it seems.

A lot of what I'm singing I hear a fraction of a moment before I sing it. It's as if there's another singer I'm copying. I just listen. And when I hear it I follow it.

It's funny that I'm always a little fraction behind the timing of the first voice. Though if the first voice is a good leader, maybe it comes in a fraction early to leave the audible voice right on beat.

Sometimes I'm following the voice note by note, rhythm by rhythm, but often I'm following more of a general sense of the kind of sound to be making now, whether a presence or absence of sound, a slow low and fat sound or a sound like a butterfly.

“When I get the feeling in my tummy,” Chartwell said, “I just sing.”

“I can feel tense and insecure about singing in a jam”, I once told a stoned dreadlocked Israeli during a jam session on a moonlit Indian rooftop. “Well,” he replied, “you have a beautiful voice and you contribute great stuff. So just do it when you feel it and don't do it when you don't.”

I liked that advice.

“Briony?” My writing is disturbed by a voice in the night. It's Chartwell. I'm surprised. I lean out and unzip the front of my tent. He's standing a few feet away in the moonlight. “I brought your Mbira.” He'd been playing it with everyone in the main tent. “I didn't want you to go to sleep without it. It's got a bit of Vaseline on it, I'm sorry about that. What are you doing in your tent not sleeping?” He chuckles.

“I'm on my way to going to sleep! Thank you so much.” I take the Mbira and he bids me farewell and walks his slow swaying walk back to The Tent.

He's amazingly humble and generous. And also something of a great man. Often the two go together I've noticed. There's a documentary crew here this evening, they're making a film about him. He wrote and performed the music for Breakfast with Mugabe, a play that started on a six week run at Soho theatre and was moved to one of the biggies in the West End where it stayed for 42 weeks. He played Mbira day and night, Matinee and evening show, until his fingers were blistered and raw and he kept going. He's taught at Soas and been interviewed on the BBC World Service, according to Sebastian the Mbira maker who was making an Mbira for the man before he met him, turned on the radio in his workshop in Germany and there was Chartwell talking away.

And he has gathered us to him. There's something like 35 of us on this camp. We're all sorts. Rich, poor, young, old, fat, thin, men, women, hippies and regular folk. We've got an Oxford University student and a care worker. We've got two pop stars – well, professional singers with signed bands – some first timers who play no other instrument, and a handfull of people who have made Mbira their lives, and who hold the core thrust of the sound in the tent. And we all take a week off work, pay £180, pack up our tents and sleeping bags and gather to him, to the Mbira and to each other sure but more than that, to Chartwell.

I lie and listen to the music from the main tent. This music is not about the soloist or musical gymnastics, showing off. It seems to be about tiny, repetitive sounds that fit cohesively into the overall sound, with the occasional spontaneous moments of ad libbing up and over the sound when the feeling takes you.

It's like a metaphor for behaviour in a community, I guess. Mostly small humble, generous and considerate acts that fit cohesively into the community, with the occasional moments of wildness, free self expression, when the feeling takes you.

Denise once said that in the Baka tribes of Cameroon, which the band she's in - Baka Beyond - have collaborated with for years and years, when singing together you can error in two ways. You can error by not contributing enough sound, and you can error by stealing the limelight all for yourself with endless Diva moments. The thing to do is to sing loud enough for the person opposite to hear you, and quiet enough so that you can hear them.

I like this way. The way of Baka, the way of Shona.

Now it's 2.40am and I can hear Chartwell in the main tent yodelling a soft tired yodel over the musicians. It's beautiful. He must be feeling it in his tummy.

Why I sing

I sing for my pleasure and joy, and for the pleasure and joy of the community. That is all.

I figured it out in the car to the airport with Todd.

Why sing?

Twice in the last six months I've had conversations with Guru type people. They've asked me why I sing. 'I don't know,' I've replied. 'I'm just compelled to sing.' They've looked deep into my eyes and told me to find an answer to that question. “It will be a vulnerable journey,” said yesterday's man.

He was Richard 'Quantum Light Breath' Bock.

I'm searching for the source and community around my singing practice of singing long long notes up and down the scale and paying close and subtle attention to the nature of the breath and the source of the vibrations in the body. I was taught it 8 years ago by a woman named Kim who'd learnt it in Varanassi, India. I finally went there in February and I found some great things, but not the source and community of this practice.

I asked Richard if he knew of anything or anyone.

“No,” he said simply. His singing teacher in India had been asked to sing nothing but Sa (a single note) for a year. The teacher was an old man. They'd met him at a concert where he'd been in the audience. A 90 year old renound local singer, he'd been asked to come to the stage and sing. So he did, and he sang a single note, the Sa.

Within moments, Richard recalled, he and his partner wept.

They were speared by the experience. How can it be that a single note can touch their hearts so directly and instantly, melting the casing away? The voice wasn't perfect, he recalled, but it was human and deeply honest and raw.

Kim, my source of this practice, had been told to sing Sa for three months. Mercifully, we'd only sung Sa for half an hour in her workshops and then sung the other notes for about five minutes each. This was in 2001 and I've kept up the practice on and off ever since.

And now this is what people say about my voice. Not perfect. Not well trained. But honest, and raw, and touching. “I could listen to you sing endlessly”, said a woman at dance camp after hearing a song around the fire one night.

As I'd been singing Sa for about 8 years by the time I got to India, my two singing teachers there got me straight onto the vocal acrobatics. So I never found the people who sit together and simply sing Sa for, maybe, an hour.

I feel like I'm sniffing around the edges of a mystery.

This is a beautiful, profound practice. It has awesome effects on the voice. It is beautiful to do, particularly in a group; a profoundly calming practice. I've called it my singing meditation, though in truth when I'm alone I rarely concentrate sufficiently to get a meditative quality to it. But that happens very easily in a group, I find.

And if you buy into the Eastern ideas, it's very good for your 'energy' too. Prushant Iyengar, son of BKS Iyengar, big daddy of Iyengar yoga, says that the whole biscuit is to keep the 'chakras' well and healthy. There are seven chakras going from the base of the spine to just above the top of the head, they say. In my singing practice, you breathe into each chakra area in turn and then let the sound resonate from that area of your body. After you've done all seven in seven long breaths, you take a few breaths where you're trying to balance the resonance from all parts of your body, or each 'chakra'. Then you move on to the next note and start again.

From my point of view it's less about the chakras and more about using the full resonant capacity of your body. Usually our voices are tightly tied up in our noses, throats, shoulders and upper chest. Move the source down and up from there and the beauty and comfort of the sound and experience increases. Simple.

In the practice you focus on relaxing and letting the sound come out of your body, rather than forcing any sound onto it, so you're developing and strengthening your body's own true sound.

“Your voice is the sound of your soul,” said Tim Buckley. That might be why people find the raw honesty of the sounds that come from this practice so beautiful.

So, the idea is that Chakras are part of the energy body and deal with your psycho-spiritual wellbeing. Each chakra has a different department, like one is fear, and another is communication/expression, and so on. Exercising them energetically, like by singing in and from them, keeps them healthy.

I don't know about all this stuff. Some people take it very seriously.

All I know is that I find the practice yummy and great for the voice and leaves me feeling really good.

So it's quite strange that there's not an architecture around it the way there's an architecture around other things that are yummy and great for you and leave you feeling really good, like yoga.

I will keep searching. There must be people who share the practice.

The Nada yogis do something similar, with the difference that they focus on different chakras for different notes.

I've been wondering if that's what I should do too. I put the question to Richard. “It seems to me,” he said, “that you need all the types of resonance in each note. You need the base chakras in the high notes, otherwise they're too flighty, and vice versa.” Ha! I felt vilified. Great. I agree. I'll continue with what I'm doing.

So. I started writing this morning because I was thinking about their question of why I sing.

It's been niggling at me all year.

OK here goes.

1. 
   
   I sing because I can't help it. I am a singer. I was singing as a small child. When I am an old woman I will be singing, and I will have the voice of someone who has been singing her whole life. While everything in my life changes, including what I am singing, this never does: I am a singer.
   
   
   
2. 
   
   I love to sing in groups. I love the sound of a group of voices. It makes me feel at home wherever I am.
   
   
   
3. 
   
   So, singing is a kind of an act of primal aliveness. I hear the sound of my being. It is true. I am real. I am alive. It's affirming. There's something very core about it.
   
   
   
4. 
   
   Singing is the sound of that 50-50 relationship with life you've got, where you do 50% and life does 50%, give or take. I sing. I am sung. I am given a voice. I take care of it and sing with it. Sometimes life takes me back and sings me. It's great when that happens. Rare.
   
   
   
5. 
   
   I don't want to do this on the computer. I want to figure it out in conversation and squiggles in my note book.