I sat down to write something very different than this today. I was going to write about acting a song, character development, and the cyclical relationship of composition, technique, and emotion (With a little dungeons and dragons thrown in there too). I may still write that post another time. But today as I bent my heart and my mind towards writing about the voice, I found my thoughts bending towards another direction. The voice of anger, sadness, and helplessness, but also the voice of resistance, community, and above all things: hope.
As important as technique and craft is to the art of music, at their core those things enable what is truly at its heart: emotion and the human experience. There is a reason we feel validation and release when listening or singing along with a song about heartbreak; why a symphony rising to a crescendo may bring you to tears; why at the heart of every protest movement there are song lyrics and chants that bring people together under the banner of common purpose. In my academic studies we talked about the emotional landscape of a musical. When we have something to say we speak. When that emotion is too large for words we sing. When that emotion eclipses words we dance.
In times like these I sometimes struggle to find motivation to sing.
It feels so small, even selfish in the face of such turmoil. I should be doing something bigger, something more constructive: I need to do something, am I wasting my time spending hours doing something so frivolous? And then, I think about the history of music. Woodie Guthrie and his guitar “This Machine Kills Fascists”, Billie Holiday and the Power of ‘Strange Fruit’. Even further back to Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’ which in itself was not a celebration of something, but a plea and an appeal to the better nature of humankind. An aspiration that was taken up decades and centuries later by priests in Tiananmen Square, and conducted by Leonard Bernstein in Berlin to celebrate the toppling of the Wall.
I think about all of the parents around the world in every era who sang lullabies to soothe the nightmares of their troubled children from the terrors of the night. Of feeling catharsis upon hearing someone sing out an emotion I could not put into words, and I no longer felt so alone. Of the joy I felt as a young person when I first learned to hold a harmony, and listened to my voice joined with my sister’s as it became something new, and different, and more.
Because that is the power of music.
Pain shared is pain halved; Joy shared is joy amplified; Aspiration shared becomes purpose. Music is the machine that magnifies all of these emotions and demands that they be shared. Music cannot exist in a vacuum, or in silence. The very physics of it affects the world around us. So sing loudly. Sing your aching heart. Sing your hopes and your dreams. Sing your love for yourself and those around you.
“The World is facing a crisis of meaning. Art is the remedy. When we create we gain agency power and purpose.” — Amie McNee
