Further thoughts on vocal identity

Years ago, a singing teacher gave me some sage advice: “Sing with the voice you have, and you’ll end up with the sound you want.” At the time, as a young, ambitious singing student, this was the opposite of what I wanted to hear. I felt my voice wasn’t big enough, wasn’t powerful enough, wasn’t beautiful enough. And to compensate, I tried to produce the sound that was pleasing to my ears. Unfortunately, it wasn’t impressing anybody but me. “It’s sounds too heavy, it’s overly darkened, it sounds mannered, it sounds false. It doesn’t sound like your voice.” I felt like screaming, “Well, what does my voice sound like?!”

As vocalists, we spend so much time and energy - and money! - trying to change our voices. We want to be able to sound more beautiful, we want to be able to sing higher, lower, louder, softer. Maybe we just want it to feel easier or freer. And yet, when we try to make these changes, we often become frustrated and angry with ourselves, and may feel further from our goal than ever.

I think one of the reasons why is that we’ve often spent years working in high-pressure situations, having superhuman expectations placed on us by others and by ourselves. We feel that we have to deliver a product, right here and right now. At some point, we no longer allow ourselves to make “ugly”, “weird” or “strange” sounds out of fear that it could be damaging somehow. And yet, the only way to “change” a voice is to change our expectation of what we are going to hear. In fact, once we let go of our expectations of the sound, we start getting out of our own way. We start enjoying sensation, rather than fighting against pre-conceived ideas.

How freeing it was to learn that the greatest singing comes from taking that leap into the unknown. Fear can dissuade us from embracing our true identities, afraid that they won’t be enough, or they’ll be too much. But who can describe the bliss of singing without caring for the effect, enjoying the sensuality of using one’s own body as an instrument? How quickly fear dissolves when we place that fear right in front of us, and laugh at it, right in its face.