During the weeks since last month’s article, “Why Singing?” [Classical Singer March 2004] I’ve been thinking about how easy it is to “break eggs without making omelets.” The questions I asked in that article were intended, of course, not to break eggs, but to simply encourage a review of the recipe, to ask ourselves whether our current pathways are leading to what is best, both for singers and those for whom we sing. They were intended to encourage an expanded view of the whole world of singing and singers, and to examine the paradigms from which the singer’s world operates. My hope for this month is to open a few doors, and perhaps shine a little new light on the path, that recipe.
Wholeness
Wholeness is an overarching and underpinning concept in this excursion.
Increasing specialization is dividing today’s world into smaller and smaller parts and ever more competition for the prizes. It’s like the characters we sometimes see in cartoons, who fall off cliffs, walk into walls, or meet other equally dramatic fates. We can end up feeling as cracked and fragmented as they are—only not as funny.
Wholeness has become a much sought-after state of being, reaching into a wide range of professions, such as law, medicine, education, and many more, including music. As singers who are often too busy to take our next singer-breath, we need that wholeness for ourselves. What’s more, we need to spread it around.
This brings me to the key point upon which this article is based, a quote from Herbert Whone. I hope you’ll memorize it as though your life depended upon it:
“Artists are…the vehicle of laws much higher than themselves.”1
The statement bears pondering—not for a moment, but for a decade or two. Such laws, if understood and applied, could have an impact, to say the least, carrying with them far-reaching opportunities and responsibilities. Let’s explore further. Last month I used the analogy of not seeing the forest for the trees, and suggested our need to remember the big picture: not just the forest, but also the roots that will inform and nourish us, if we allow them. A search for the higher laws must begin with those roots, those beginnings, and move out from there.
In the first book of the epic fantasy “The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant,” which I first read many years ago, Stephen R. Donaldson writes of a simple group of people whose every living moment is defined by their relationship with the earth and its energies. In one particularly touching scene (think of it as a big opera moment), one couple from this group has broken a treasured earthenware jar. Instead of grieving, they perform a ceremony in which they simply sing the shards of the jar back together: no glue, no cracks left to remind them of the former shattered condition of the jar.
Singing, in combination with focused intent, restored what was broken to wholeness. This moment, which is rather small in relationship to the greater story, struck me hard and deep, and something inside me said a great, big “YES!”
Roots
In the ancient societies of Egypt, India, Greece, and China, to name a few, music played a role in everything from health to architecture to politics. They considered music the basis for everything, the bridge linking all things together. Physical forms were considered manifestations of music, and it was held that life and health (wholeness) depended upon harmonic balance of ratios and relationships.
In ancient Greece, for instance, one could not become a physician until he had first become a musician, and prescriptions often included rhythmic singing and chanting from selected sacred melodic sequences. Among some societies, vowels were considered sacred, and written words were spelled with consonants only. Among others, music itself was considered sacred and its practitioners were considered acolytes in a holy cause. Oral histories from Peru and Bolivia regarding the monolithic stones used to build some of their edifices suggest that those impossibly large stones were placed not by machines but by sound…
To read Part One and the rest of this article, go to the Classical Singer website at
www.classicalsinger.com. It is available for all to see.
