What Reluctant, Un-trained Singers Know

There is an expression in Spanish with which many are familiar that translates closely to “I’m sorry.” We English speakers say “I’m sorry” so much (especially those of us in customer service) that I wonder if we’re becoming desensitized to its meaning. Think about it… I have sorrow… I feel miserable and downtrodden, sad that you have so much pain. The commiserating expression in Spanish, however, translates as “I feel it.” We don’t say in Spanish, “this is the condition that I’m in,” we say, “I actively feel the hurt that you feel.”

Schoolchildren are taught that humans have five basic senses, which, if one recalls the wave/particle theory of light, all have to do with physical contact… smell particles, light particles, taste particles, sound waves, and texture.

Through my work in choral music, I am discovering how much I know that I didn’t realize, knowledge that came to me gradually through my commitment to attending my classes and participating in choir, and, thus, being part of quality sound. I learned these things without always thinking about them, but I learned what they felt like. I hold a degree in formal music education, but I believe that that omnipresent teacher, experience, teaches all of us, often imperceptibly. There are things that we know without anyone having to tell us which we don’t discover that we know until we’re questioned about them. Largely as a result of my belief that we often know things without ever being told in words, I had an epiphany recently.

I attend karaoke nights at local cantinas regularly, and I, as my returning readers will know, am seeking out ways to bring more people into the Barbershop Harmony Society, a prominent singing organization. Since I feel that people have a sense for realities without always being cognizant of their awareness, I now present to you two statements that one often hears when encouraging others to sing. The first, that I hear at karaoke nights: “Maybe if I get really drunk.” The second: “I only sing in the shower.” For a time, I felt that I was hitting road blocks every time that I heard these statements, but then, about two weeks ago, my aforementioned epiphany graced me with its presence.

In etymology, we learn that, if a word doesn’t make sense to us, we often can trace its origin back to the physical world. For example, while tutoring this past school year, I learned that the word “auspices” comes from two Latin words meaning “bird” and “to look.” “Auspices” has taken on a metaphorical meaning, “under the protection of,” and, if we think about what people might look at birds for, remembering that members of our species have long observed that certain animals seem to have senses to know when dangerous things are coming, a "bird-looking" was a method of trying to divine the future. University professors might get a little more egotistical if they realized that their university thought that they could predict the future.

In my struggles to overcome people’s reluctance to sing, my reflections turned me, too, to the physical world. Combining my physical-world-has-many-answers mentality and my belief that folks know things even if they don’t know how to express them, I asked myself the simple question, “What do people know about their body that tells them that they’d sound good only in those two states, liquored-up and in the shower?” The answer, as it often does when questions with functional brevity are asked, arrived swiftly like the proverbial “thump on the head.”

We take the epiphany for both venues, first bar singing, then shower singing.

For bar singing, yes, of course, there’s the liquid courage, but where does liquid courage come from? Alcohol is a depressant, relaxing muscles and saddening our mood. When our mood is saddened, and we’re pushing ourselves toward a deathlike feeling, we do things that make us feel alive, that bring out our senses. Since singing is a powerful and personal form of expression, I submit to you that drunk singing is a body’s way of saying, “ I’ve gotta get this out before I die, so that someone, somewhere, will know at least a little bit about what it was like to be me.” Emotional release is part of it, but, as a semi-pro vocal musician, I lucidly understand the importance of relaxation in good singing. Tension in the throat and jaw severely limits free production of sound. In other words, what drunk singers know is that they do sound better when they’re drunk because their voice is freer! But, before any reader goes rushing off to take shots before a concert, remember that, while alcohol relaxes muscles, it also dehydrates. In cave –man speak, dehydration bad. Massaging of the jaw, face, temples, and throat is a much more preferable way to gain the necessary relaxation for quality sound.

As for shower singing, similar to bar singing, there are two aspects (a-“spect”. There’s that Latin root of “to look” again!). The first is audibility while the second is the steam factor.

If an individual has been listening to music all his/her life, said individual is accustomed to hearing pitches. So, if we sing, at least to ourselves, we’re accustomed to trying to match the pitches we hear with the pitches which we produce. The smooth walls of a bathroom provide us with the constant feedback to ensure that the pitches that we expect to hear in songs are the pitches that are coming out of our mouths. Until a singer becomes truly advanced, knowing what different pitches feel like, it’s of paramount importance to hear the sounds that are coming out, to hear what our voice sounds like. In vocal training, singers are often instructed to record their voice and listen to it. The goal is to start to hear the difference that using technique can make. Singing in the shower gives the un-trained singer a ready-made way to accomplish this goal. As to the steam factor, this one provides a practical physical aide to improve vocal quality. The un-trained singer spends little time thinking about the environmental factors which negatively affect the voice; air conditioning, stress, soda (and alcohol), recreational drugs, milk, and lack of exercise (especially the aerobic variety) can all negatively impact a singer’s sound. The steam from showers helps negate these effects and facilitate a positive singing environment; the warmth of steam relaxes the singer, the humidity moistens the vocal mechanisms, and sweat rids the body of toxins (not to mention the pleasant, constant sound of falling water which can relax the mind and provide a steady rhythm). The un-trained singer may not realize that he/she is taking advantage of good instincts, but like the bar singer, it is highly probably that the shower singer does sing much better in the venues of porcelain and pewter.

All this established, for leaders of vocal groups, I suggest the following hypothesis:

If we draw attention to what un-trained singers know intuitively, perhaps we can succeed in encouraging them to control their environmental factors and, perhaps, lead them to our joyful form of self-expression.

Let’s get the whole world singing.

Utilizing Human Adobe

Adobe is not just a computer application for reading .pdf files. It’s a building material. Most of us learned this some time between 2nd and 5th grade. We learned that people out west, including various native tribes and white settlers, made huts out of the earthen material.

A quick wiki search reveals that adobe is used all around the world. Humans, of course, prefer shelter from the elements to un-shelter from the elements, and, being resourceful, use whatever is available to create their shelter. We know that humans can and have done many impressive things in construction. Homo sapiens has become so good at building things that outside observers might be tempted to call us homo constructus. We’ve mastered many methods of constructing in the physical world, but I believe that we could use more practice refining our methods of building up our societal organizations, of building up individuals’ skills and confidence, and in education.

Progress is not simple, but great progress starts with simple steps founded on simple logic. I don’t believe that there is such a thing as common sense (we teach children many of the “common” things that they know), but I do believe in trying to keep things simple. Using comparative logic, let’s look at what it’s like to build in the physical world. If you asked someone to build you something, would you ask said constructor to use materials that he or she cannot acquire? Certainly not. Subsequently, would you expect the individual to use the materials available as well as possible? Certain-ly. Comparing structural practices of organizations, it seems that we use pillar mentality and pleas from authority (“trust me, I know what I’m doing”) to try to increase the functionality of our organizations and to teach. I propose an approach of asking ourselves “What materials are available?”, “How do they work best?”, and then using them accordingly. For example, if I’m working with a barbershop chorus and I find that a particular singer does something really well, like, let’s say, he’s good at singing lightly and freely at E4 (the E in the top space in tenor clef), I might say to him, “Hey, I’ve noticed you doing that really well in the past. This song needs more of that feel. Could you use a little more air support and sing that note louder? You could carry us in that song.”

Therefore, I suggest a protocol of finding the tool, figuring out how it works if necessary (in my hypothetical scenario, this would be encouraging the singer to feel good about his tool so that he keeps it), and then inviting him to use it well at the appropriate time. It really is quite simple. A chorus director can build a good sound by finding quality “material” and making use of it, tweaking the material when necessary. If we want to build up individuals, and build up organizations, we simply need to do like the members of our construction and home improvement community and use what we have and improve it over time.

Fighting Perfectionism

As a barbershopper and encourager of vocal musicians everywhere, I’m trying to bring people into the world of singing, into our organizations. I face a major challenge because people are just not gathering in groups these days. I hear a number of explanations as to why it’s hard to get people to do this. It’s easy to blame television, blame sporting events, or blame popular entertainment in general. I’ve fallen prey to this blame-game as well, but I now have a different answer. I don’t blame television. I blame perfectionism.

Let’s define perfectionism as the belief that entities and humans should always be perfect, and only take action if they can be perfect, and that only perfection is worth our time. To illustrate my point by showing the opposite of perfectionism, take the reality TV scene. You know what it’s doing? It’s exploiting what I believe is an innate human desire to be human. People can listen to a CD if they want music to sound perfect, they can watch rom-coms if they want to see people who look perfect, but humans feel more connected to people who are like them, that is, flawed and passionate.

There’s a darker, more sinister side to perfectionism, but, before I get there, let me be clear on something. I don’t have a problem with the notion of perfection itself. After all, perfection is a beautiful idea, and we could have another discussion about what perfection is. For now, let’s proceed with the idea that perfection means effective and flawless. Anyway, when it comes to perfection, I find that we humans are often afraid to pursue it simply because we think that there’s something wrong with us because we aren’t perfect. We should understand that there’s nothing wrong with not being perfect.

So, on that note, we go back to what it’s like to be a recruiter.

In recruiting others to join societies and clubs, I hear expressions like “you don’t want to hear me sing” and “I only sing in the shower.” I’ll save my thoughts on singing in the shower for another post, but let’s look at the underlying hesitance. Are people saying that they don’t want to sing? Or are they saying that they’re afraid of their own imperfection? It’s hard to know because everyone is different, but what we do know is that there is a hesitance. Some try to recruit to artistic activities like singing, dancing, and speaking in public by treating them as pillars to achieve: “Strive for this, for it is great and worthy of your time!” I don’t like the pillar mentality. I believe in people, and I’ve met my share, and I feel that I can see behind people’s eyes to read people saying, “I feel that I have greatness in me, deep down… If only someone would give me a chance." Many of these people never achieve greatness because they don’t “make opportunities for themselves”. I pity this mentality, and I believe that it is the fault of us leaders that so many people don’t achieve.

We in leadership positions fail when we don’t look for ways to put people in positions to succeed. If we wait for people to tell us that they want something, how much of their time and ours are we wasting when they could have already been succeeding? As a leader, I am fighting perfection by looking for imperfect people and trying to give them chances to pursue perfection. I do this because I find growth more exciting than elitism.