Today, I am feeling very happy after a fully lived day of things oriented around music.
This has included working on my mission statement, which has helped me reconnect to why I’m doing what I’m doing, preparing beautiful songs for upcoming choir sessions, practising new things on flute and accordion, the admin of it all, and teaching singing at Under The Bridge.
When I was teaching singing today, I felt particularly grateful for and aware of, everyone I have learnt from, directly or indirectly, whose input influences what I bring to the table as a teacher.
Input ranging from the very recent… such as a CPD I undertook earlier this week with Amanda Flynn at the Voice Study Centre around Belting, which was brilliantly informative both about practice, history, semantics, acoustics, excercises and all sorts of useful and thought provoking things.
To the longer ago… reconnecting with some of the wonderful embodied voice work I did with Frankie Armstrong when I did my Natural Voice teacher training with her in 2007 and apprenticed with her in my early 20s. I’m so thankful to have been activated by the presence of such a dynamic singer, mover, activist and human, as a young adult.
And longer ago still, as well as throughout my life intermittently… learning to use my voice in such a variety of different ways, seemingly ‘not permitted’ by the dominant culture around me, and with such greater freedom and fuller humanity, on Village Harmony and Northern Harmony study sessions, camps and concert tours.
Learning folk, sacred, secular and traditional music from around the world, authentically taught by wonderful guest song leaders from each culture and well studied Village Harmony leaders. I started having these incredible, life changing experiences that give such a different perspective on, well, everything, as a child, and carried on as often as possible.
I feel incredibly grateful for the vocal, emotional and worldly learnings that everybody I encountered on Village Harmony experiences has given me, that I bring to the teaching studio with me. I am also aware of the people whose cultures I have learned from in this process, who have passed these songs on and the routes by which I have come to sing them, some of which are more/less comfortable than others (but that is a different essay altogether). I am most especially for the late Larry Gordon, founder of Village Harmony, and Patty Cuyler, whose organisational marathons and great passion for the music have inspired so many people sing, sing, sing. As Larry would say: “it’s time to sing everyone!”
Starting even longer ago, and continuing more consistently through my life, my mother’s massive passion for all things music, and my dad’s and sister’s musical interests and joys too, have also been a great motivating factor in my being so sure about wanting to dedicate my life to bringing music into the world. Time spent around the kitchen table with all four of us singing shape note songs together, will be some of the most cherished of my life, such a strong sense of belonging and transcendence.
I’m also grateful for everything I learnt at Rose Bruford college doing my Actor Musicianship training in my early 20s, and at Chichester Festival Youth Theatre as a child and young teen, hurling myself into lots of different roles with full body and voice and getting to explore being more fully human in the process, and to the wonderful humans involved in those and many other related experiences.
I feel thankful for the Estill Training I’ve done, which is quite mindblowing and very helpful for demystifying what is happening when we sing! Although I do sometimes struggle to retain all the helpful anatomy words, despite doing the course twice (more of them are starting to stick – if any voice nerds want to revise with me, I’m game!). Its richly factual and thoroughly practical content has informed my teaching very much, and I honestly feel like I could probably do that course again several times and still keep learning more.
Also very thankful for a super duper singing teacher who I found recently who holds space for me to explore singing what I want to sing, for me, for fun, and to put my own voice under the metaphorical microscope semi-regularly: which helps keep me inspired and fresh and musically nourished, connected to myself as a singer, and ready to keep holding space for others to sing.
I think I’m also thankful for the singing teachers who I would rate as “bad” teachers (no hyper links here lol), or rather, teachers with some qualities that I think are damaging, who I have encountered over the years (gasp! A negative comment! From Hannah-Rose! WHAT!). I won’t make a “list of sins” but I think that in hindsight, and with clarity (and the chance to undo any damage done), negative experiences have shown me what kind of teacher I don’t want to be, which helps me be clearer about the kind of teacher I am.
As I watch the tools as my disposal flow out of me in response to my student’s requests in the moment or before a session, I feel a crowd of wonderful people at my back, a sense of musical family whose influence I bring forward into this moment, with this person. It is such a special thing.
As self employed teachers, we can spend a lot of time leaning on ourselves, working alone, self motivating, and being the ‘driving force,’ of things. I think it’s really important to step back, focus wider, and remember that we are a part of a big, wide web of music, across time and space, and we bring with us all the influences to date – filtered choicefully to make our own unique creation that is a part of the web also. We are not alone.
So – thanks everyone. Including the wonderful people who are or have been part of my music and singing life that I haven’t had time to mention properly here.
I’m so grateful you sang with me, encouraged me, inspired me. I’m making ripples of the same in my work and it is my honour to do so.
Thanks for reading my musings today.
We have fallen into the place where everything is music - Rumi 