Consider for a moment the visual image of a bicycle wheel. All of its spokes are balanced and lead to the center or core of the wheel. The strength of each spoke affects the overall strength and performance of the wheel.
Artistry for the singer is similar. The core represents a perfect blend of craft and artistry, which supplies power to the artist. The spokes are the connections needed to help the singer arrive at this highest level of artistry. Some singers may need help with only a few “spokes,” such as proper breathing, placement of tone, and foreign language diction. Other singers may need a different combination of “spokes” to arrive successfully at the core.
“Organic artistry” is the result of body and spirit working together seamlessly to achieve easy production of sound and drama. It is a cohesion of technique, intellect, and imagination that embraces the following areas:
• Technique: The instrument, the sound, and the physical coordination
• Interpretation: The thorough understanding and amalgamation of words and music through imagination
• Mindfulness: Being present in the moment
Organic artistry encourages experimentation, personalization, commitment, and ownership of musical styles and sounds. It preserves and increases the natural joy and individual passion young artists bring to their craft. When learning is joyful as well as practical, singers begin to live their art, and the music becomes a genuine expression of their selves. Technique is crucial, but it should never extinguish the spirit.
Organic artistry invites singers to frame new possibilities, to dispel preconceived judgments about their abilities. An article such as this one cannot readily capture the inspiration and process of these ideas, but here are a few of the ideals that a whole, complete artist aspires to achieve.
Technique and unique sound
Freedom (the natural use of our bodies) when we sing creates a tone free of tensions, a tone able to give off beautiful overtones. These overtones produce the uniqueness or add to the uniqueness of the voice. Freedom of tone helps identify and facilitate your specific talents, such as an ability to sing coloratura, messa di voce, pianissimo, extended legato phrases, and other vocal aspects that project various styles.
Take the right risks
When singers use superficial means of expression, they risk becoming generic in art and sound. This “presentational singing” allows you to hide out, cheating the audience of your true self. The audience can feel and hear the difference between a presentational singer and one in whom they sense an honest emotion. “Generic” means a non-unique sound (no freedom for your unique overtones). It is well worth the risk to correct.
Singers sometimes confuse vocal tension with expression. Don’t make this mistake. Most singers have enough tension as it is. Releasing small points of body tension often results in a domino effect of muscle release that allows the truly needed muscles to engage in the most effective manner.
In those isolated instances when tension is particularly inhibiting, you must separate your vocal technique from physical and emotional dramatic expression so that nothing is dependent on tension and all is dependent on strength, effortless coordination, and focused energy. Remember that concentration creates and transforms energy.
To stimulate, engage, and encourage organic artistry, you can call upon or imagine many natural impulses, such as the urge to laugh, or a bubbling up of feelings. Go on stage with a sense of humor. Inner laughter releases your body and spirit and therefore frees your voice—and, by the way, enhances your charm.
The professional sound, which requires a consistency of tonal production, is the desired result, of course. You must first have the firm foundation of a solid vocal technique. As Lotte Lehmann wrote in the introduction to her well-known text More Than Singing, “Control of the voice is the soil from which interpretation springs.” After significant work with a teacher and coach, take a risk and go with your own instinct. It might give you the spontaneous energy you need to produce that seamless sound.
Have courage
Without courage, you cannot achieve organic artistry. Why? You must be willing to share your true self, your personality. In other words, you must be transparent rather than opaque. Your willingness not to manipulate gives you a better chance of producing your best tones. Have courage to immerse yourself in the music. Clothe yourself with it. Try to trust yourself so the audience will trust you.
Use your imagination and memory
In this technical age we tend to overlook what imagining can bring to our singing. Developing a professional sound requires a huge imagination that enables you to create art with big colors and wide dimensions, to create something larger than yourself.
Imagination is vital for organic artistry. Imagine your own expression of, and reaction to, your words, and expand on them. Perhaps you can exaggerate a natural emotion momentarily. This inspires greater color. You should have a feeling of life and death in your singing. Access all passions—open yourself to the music to create something new and fresh.
Organic artistry means no manipulation, and no stagnation of breath, tone, or thought. Relief comes with imaginative communication. As we color and communicate using vivid expression, our tone will be consistent and the energy of expression will suffice. At this point the easiest path is to respond to the music and the words.
When you were very young, what did people say about your voice? How did your grandmother compliment you on your singing? What was easy for you? The memory of these events will bring back the uncomplicated nature of your singing and may unwind those tension-producing muscles. This might help you to be receptive to the natural joy of singing. Remember, you already breathe in a natural and consistent way. Singing is a consistent stream of vibrant sound on the breath. Imagination creates the energy for that vibrant sound.
A word about your ears
Your ears help you only in a peripheral way. If your tone is too far back (creating tension, by the way) it is closer to your ear, and your ear accepts and remembers it as “good.” Your listening memory must change. Do you remember the Shakespearean quote, “There’s many a slip twixt the cup and the lip?” The singer’s version is: “There’s many a slip twixt the ear and the lip.” You must “feel” your voice in a way that goes beyond acoustical awareness.
Mind power
Never strive for “perfection” (which is likely to cause manipulation). Strive for the completion of thoughts, emotions, and passions. Your mind is so powerful. Thinking of expression is the first important step to making your tone happen naturally. Practice with spoken dramatic readings and the natural expressions in tone will follow. The music must speak to you. After you have combined the music and text with your technique, after you have welcomed it in, after you have owned it so that you feel you might have written it, you are ready to communicate it to your audience.
Always remember: Once you are on stage, everything you do, every decision you make, is right. So sing with great confidence. It will free you and you will be on the road to organic artistry.
Pinpoint what you like about another artist. It could very well be a mindful projection of yourself and you may find that you are equally adept, after some “freeing” exercises. Be sure not to imitate, however. Imitation brings too great a chance for manipulation. It is, as Lotte Lehmann wrote, “the enemy of artistry.”
Listening to non-vocal classical music—a great symphony, or a violin or cello concerto, for example—brings about sympathetic vibrations and is a musical learning experience without having to try to imitate or emulate another singer.
The power of touch and rhythmic freedom
Kinesthesia, our “muscle sense,” allows the body to work naturally and in tune with itself. The sense of touch and lean—appoggio—frees and energizes us. It works like magic. [Join Munzer at the CS Convention in May for an exercise or two that demonstrate how fun this can be. – ed.]
Adding a rhythmic beat heightens the feeling of freedom. Feel the lilt and lift of the beat. As we glide from beat to beat, kinesthesia hooks up with Dalcroze Eurhythmics (Émile Jaques-Dalcroze’s system of rhythmic, physical movements used to increase musical understanding). Eurhythmics is particularly organic because we automatically react to rhythm and free ourselves naturally as we feel the beat. When we are one with the rhythm we can communicate better.
Conclusion
I’m sure you will love the descriptive words I recently read in a review of a musical performance: “effortless,” “soaring,” “elegant”—or imagine seeing words such as “joyously alive,” “astonishing,” “could float like a butterfly and sting like a bee,” “stirring,” “rhythmic vitality and flirtatious dynamics,” and “in perfect control yet utterly free.” With your integration of technique and your practiced imagination, all of these quotes could be in your reviews.
I conclude, again, with imagination. Imagination is creative resourcefulness. Imagination is the power to form mental images of what is not actually present. Heather Harper, world-renowned Golden Age soprano, said, “No amount of skillful invention can replace the essential element of imagination.” Imagination is our most powerful asset.
