Imagine

John Lennon’s song might have been a political statement, yet, within it he invites pictures to swirl around your head as you think about the concepts.

He plays into the richness of being human, the ability to use imagination, and this is also the world of singing. There has been an alarming trend to take imagination out of singing teaching and replace it with the bare reality of what is happening. How many lessons do I witness where, once again, the singer is taken back to some technical aspect when they have the ability to sing well enough, and what is really needed is the freeing of the imagination for the next ‘stage’? Somehow it is as if we never get beyond that; we can’t let the singer grow up.

There is a credible argument that not everybody thinks the same way, therefore what is valid for the teacher, may be a vacuum for the other learner in the room. Using more neutral, less colourfully imaginative ideas is more helpful. As a former classroom teacher, I could concur with that. On the other hand, I don’t believe it means never relaying anything in a visual, imaginative way or using concepts. I personally have had some success inviting my singers to imagine being a tree and singing to the very tips of the twigs on the branches! I do see, however, that is my imagination and not necessarily a conceptual rock on which to base technique!

Some current research looks at gesture and how that is captured by the brain and then inspires certain sounds from the muscles reacting. I know of no singer who would disagree with that. The struggle is to get this into an empirically robust academic paper. Maybe it will never be proven in the traditional manner, because the manner of proving is actually inadequate.

After all the technical advance in a singer, there still comes a moment when the imagination has to soar and the technique has to serve the story telling.

That technical aspect of singing is of course the foundation, but it is also merely the starting gate. Beyond that, is how we convey emotional content credibly. We sing to communicate the poetry and elicit a reaction in our listeners. We share the emotional outpourings, and hope to transform our audience in some deeper way, or at least help them understand why the poet feels the way they do. The composer has already done the hard graft of this, we then have to interpret that.

When you think about it, we are all in a shared space, hearing the same thing. The air we are breathing is the same, the sounds we are all hearing are shared, along with the text. It is a unique opportunity to elevate the ordinary to the extraordinary.

Sometimes, all it takes is somebody to unlock the pathway and often in doing so, a technical aspect is understood for the first time, despite many hours of usage already! It is akin to learning to drive on a private estate and then having to face other road users.

A classic example in classical singing is when we are called to infuse the desperate or even frustrated emotion of a character we are singing. We ‘become’ the character and immediately our body joins in as we get into the words. This often means tensions creep in, as they would if acting out the words. Our jaw tightens, our knees lock and we ‘experience’ the emotion in order to convey it. All of these things change our vocal ease and are very unhelpful along with being totally unsustainable for any length of time!

It is not always about tension either, sometimes, we are called upon to portray the fragility of the human spirit and this invites us to sing in a more ‘ethereal’ manner and can lead to singing in an unsupported or equally ‘fragile’ manner.

It is only by going beyond the text to the emotion behind that we begin to understand how in performance we are not going to sabotage ourselves. It might mean getting upset in a practice session when singing and understanding that while empathy is vital, it has no place on the concert platform. No audience wants to see you lose control because you are experiencing the same as they are.

So, the technical aspects are a given as the root of all we do.

The rest comes down to your imagination and how you portray the words and carry them to signify with your listeners. The singer must be somebody who has curiosity about the human conditions. Somebody who wonders why one thing can crush one person, yet bring out the fighting spirit in another. We must be curious about the devastation of loss alongside the joy of discovery.

When singing a recital of a number of songs and different poets across a range of emotions, it is vital to get inside the text and it adds to the richness of experience for the performer(s) too. When the audience is receiving text that is not their native language, our ability to show how the character feels, becomes even more important.

I think imagination in singing does two things. It does the obvious conveyance of the words but can also, as mentioned, unblock technique.

There is a story of Kathleen Ferrier singing Dream of Gerontius (Elgar) where there is an optional high ‘A’ towards the end on the word ‘Alleluia’; a triumphant exclamation. The ‘A’ comes on the ‘U’ part of the word and Kathleen struggled with this leading up to her first performance. She panicked because as a contralto, she rarely entered these heights and it was agreed that she could sing the octave lower. During the performance, she got carried away and executed a perfect top ‘A’. In the heat of the moment, the emotion released her to sing what had previously seemed impossible. Thereafter she never had a problem with it.

It stands to reason that the more the singer experiences away from singing, the more natural it will feel to add appropriate emotion. You do not have to have experience the exact same situation to be able to convey the confusion of thought around it. Heaven forbid that we sing Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder from the root of experiencing a child’s death.

Ironically, when Mahler composed these, Alma, his wife, had only just given birth to their second child and expressed her unease about the songs, feeling he was tempting fate. The poems by Friedrich Rückert were reactions to the death of two of his children to scarlet fever and actually were not published until after his death. Alma was right to be concerned. Three years following the publication of the songs, their daughter died, also of scarlet fever. Mahler said that when he wrote the songs, he put himself in the position of somebody who had suffered such loss; now that he had, he said he could never have written them.

We are often called upon to engage with the unthinkable.

It is not only the depth of emotions, but the range that we will need to embrace and yet, for all of our work on engaging with the emotions, it is not enough to ‘experience’ something of them, even if imagining the idea. Feeling it internally does not guarantee that it is shown externally.

In fact, most performers have little idea of how effectively they are doing that until they have seen a film or photographs of their performance. In opera, it is the whole body which has to match what is happening. That requires going very far beyond how you might react in real life. It requires extreme energy, extreme, nee ‘hammy’ acting (reacting) and extreme vocal control. A slump of a shoulder, a downward stoop might be necessary for your character, but how will it affect your singing? To sustain that sound over a whole aria you may well need to ‘cheat’ the look otherwise your singing will start to suffer from lack of breath and energy.

In recital, there is less scope for the extreme body language, but here, facial expression will allow us into the heart of the text. Until provoked, we are often absolutely rubbish at showing what we feel on our face.

The use of imagination is our saviour. The number of Lieder that has nature as an emotional barometer is overwhelming; the breeze that blows the poet’s words to a girl asleep beneath the tree; the river that gurgles with the delight of love felt by the writer; the spinning wheel that portrays the tedium, stopping on the dramatic turns of the text, only to restart when the emotions are distanced once more. In long texts about birds in trees, open countryside and weather, it can get very boring if you are unable to show the appropriate delight or dismay or the hidden meaning. The composer might have given you hints but it is up to you, the singer, to enact those out, painting a picture so your audience uses their imagination too!

Even in oratorio, that bastion of upright propriety (I don’t think!) it is not good enough to stand and deliver with no willingness to take the audience on the story through the great religious texts. There is little more dramatic than the ‘Passion’ story, but you wouldn’t think so from the number of performances I have been involved in where the singers are so tied up with the challenges of the notes, they completely eschew the heart of the piece! And, yes, the text may be repetitive, so it is your job to make it interesting.

Imagine what would happen if all singers rose to this challenge.

Just imagine that!