Breathing

They always wore the most flattering shades of lipstick and the sexiest, must-have-been-bought-abroad shoes. Their necks never without a prettily patterned scarf, they talked of where to go for perfectly plucked eyebrows, fresh lemon wedges and curative cups of tea. The men carried their ribcages high, but effortlessly, mindlessly; I always envied that ability to preen so easily. Singers. So bee-yoo-ti-ful...but not without a bad rap: can't count, can't read music, and completely paranoid about the "health" of their instrument. Accompanying my way through their (also enviable) art song repertoire, I developed a quick "like it" or "don't" response to vocal quality, to the tone of individual voices, but I found it more difficult to qualify the actual mechanical skills of singing and what, exactly, made one singer so musically convincing and another one just kind of fumbling to the end of the song. I allowed the superficial veneer of "being" a singer to entertain me for many, many years, but I think I've finally pierced through all that and begun to appreciate a key technical point of great singing: that is, of not singing.

Singers, more so than some of us instrumentalists, love to take their editing pencils to the scored notation, subtracting beats here and there and replacing those sounded moments with rests. Sometimes these rests indicate a physical breath, but at other times they simply give a precise, rhythmic finis to the sounded note and articulate a silence. The contrast between the articulated silences and a sung phrase of music never fails to delight me. Like a Gothic cathedral's stone carvings, a song can build its drama in the relief (or bas-relief) of singing and not singing: in between the sung and the not sung an interesting accompaniment might push its way into the foreground. This sort of sculptural singing, sculpted by breathing, is a subtle technique that can be easily mangled, but I hold in high regard the masterful and nuanced singers who can pull it off.

Consciously or unconsciously, art, music, theatre and sport needs to breathe. A "good, solid" performance transforms into something memorable and electrifying when it breathes. Conversely, when the breathing lags or occurs in a "wrong" place, the performance loses its focus and becomes rather vague. Attention to the breath is really a silly paradox, a tool used with great intention but which we hope goes unnoticed. Again I'm reminded of sculpture, but vocally, with the lifts and cut-offs shaping the overall musical vitality as much as the actual notes. Perhaps, too, in "being" a singer, the scarves and shoes punctuate a dramatic persona in artificial relief to the more natural acts of singing and breathing. Hmm, I'm liking this: notes and breath, sculpture and artifice, singing and ... not.