Healthy functionality gives artistic freedom

Posted on | August 2, 2007 | No Comments

Have you ever thought about why you aren’t able to express yourself vocally as freely as you would like to? Is it a result of “talent limitations”, have you been told that those notes are just not in your range? Do you think it is normal for singing to hurt, or strain, or to feel some tension as you sing higher, lower, in the middle of your range?

Consider this: healthy functional voices are free voices. A free singing voice is able to sing the pitches the singer desires, with the expression the singer dreams of, to impact emotionally on the audience, whether the audience is just you, the singer, or a thousand people.

A healthy functional voice can colour the sound to create atmosphere and mood in a song. Freedom of singing expression grows out of a healthy functional singing voice.

We don’t learn to sing in order to sing perfect scales, to understand how our voices work, to have a muscular freedom. Ultimately, we learn to sing because we love singing, it is an expression of who we are, what we feel, or what we want our listeners to feel. It is a desire, planted inside our soul, that desire to express ourselves artistically, with beauty, or passion, or anger,  or joy, or love. However, the success of the singer in performance is often a result not of “natural emotional expression” but this expression being overlaid onto a free functioning voice. The technical practice enables the artistic expression.

Sometimes parts of lessons can be dry in their technical focus, but we should never lose sight of the fact that our goal is to become functionally competent only in order to perform with artistic freedom of expression.

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