Fear of Feeling

It’s a strange thing, this matter of vocal feeling.

Depending on who you are reading at any given time, it’s something to be depended upon and cultivated, or ignored entirely—a matter of personal preference.

The old school? It’s full of paradoxical feelings. On one hand you have sayings like “the Italian singer has no throat,” and on the other, “appoggiare la voce,” which is all about doing something, usually in the lower half of the body.

So, does one feel in order not to feel?

You see how confusing this might be to the beginner.

Margaret Harshaw, who was in the cultivated category, was wont to say that, for the singer, up is down and down is up, and to go forward you had to go back.

More confusion?

You’d have to be a singer of some experience to understand her meaning. You’d have to have ears; and by having ears, I mean the ability to discern vocal feeling as it relates to sound coursing through the body and coming out the mouth. This happens—btw—via the semicircular canals in the ear, which ‘know’ where everything is in the body, and enable the singer to feel their voice. Have a couple drinks and this system is thrown off-balance. Keep going full tilt and the head will be in the toilet—spinning—which is not the same thing as spinning the tone—another old-school teaching.

Fear of feeling—a heady cocktail all its own—can throw the whole vocal mechanism out of whack too. Whether this arises as a result of prior trauma—psychological or physical—is a matter to be unraveled slowly and with great care.

It’s also a matter of technique.

The mezzo-soprano with a break doesn’t get anywhere by pulling back and soft-pedaling between her registers; no, she needs concrete tools, more feeling, and courage.

Anna Schoen-René, who was Margaret Harshaw’s teacher, reportedly said that singing was 75 percent technique; and the more I teach, the more I believe she was right.

If you know what to do and how to do it, there is no need to fear.