Lighten up

Yesterday was a great day of creative discovery. I am singing the role of Schaunard in La boheme and the conductor pulled me aside and told me that I was working too hard at singing the role. He said I needed to find lightness in my sound so that I would, not only be truer to the character, but sing the role better. He told me that there is a time and place for the bigger singing, but much of the role was about the language and expression. I tried it in rehearsal and it worked well. It felt like my voice, but different, less controlled and more “wild” in a sense. Dare I say, playful?

I relate this story because I am in the final week of Julia Cameron’s The Artist Way. For those not familiar, the book is a phenomenal way of tapping into our own creativity and releasing a lot of the interior issues that keep us from being our best creative selves. One of the main themes of the book is synchronicity, where it seems like multiple coincidences are happening. Think a series of events that answer questions asked or solidify thoughts that one is indeed on the right path. During the final week, one works on a sense of faith (trust) and releasing things that bog down our creativity.

Just yesterday morning I filled three pages of my journal with all the bad habits, fears, anger, resentment and pains that I am more than willing to release to be a better creative. So it came as no surprise that I was being asked to do the same thing with the way I produce my singing. Since a singer’s voice is so interconnected with one’s emotions, it can be a very difficult hurdle to jump over when asked to alter what one thinks of as “their sound.” My desire to be taken seriously and considered a “real” artist was clouding how I envisioned what I needed to sound like. By asking me to “lighten up” I was really being asked to let go of what I think I SHOULD sound like and just be. Scary, right?

On the way home from rehearsal I kept thinking: what was I gaining by singing “heavy”? Would singing lighter make others think that I had a less “rich” voice? I think on an even deeper level I felt that if I sang with my “lighter” sound, would I like it? Would others? Of course, this is where trust (faith, belief) comes into the picture. By releasing, I was allowing more of my true self to been seen. By having faith in other ideals, I was letting go. Sometimes we think the real us is less interesting than the imagined “us” we want to present to the world.

We study, practice, rehearse and develop as technicians as a way to serve the stories that we tell. We work to make our singing something beautiful, expressive and correct, but more than that, we want to achieve a visceral high where our voice, our acting and our artistic sensibilities are fused into one vessel for some of the greatest music in the world (in my opinion.) Why add something that makes it harder?

One of my favorite quotes is “Leap and the net will appear.” I have been leaping for that last two years and while it seemed like sometimes the net was not underneath me, I have always landed safely. Each artist has his or her own set of hurdles to overcome on their journey to creating, but we must remember that creating is fun and that sometimes the very thing we need to be that magnificent artist is to just to lighten up.



Peace,
Eric