Weekly Voice Insights #104 – 104 Weeks Later: What Bears Repeating

This week marks two years of Weekly Voice Insights, and as I started looking back through the 103 articles that came before this one, I found myself thinking less about the number 104 and more about what has happened during the process of getting here.

When I began, I did have some imposter syndrome. I think some of that is healthy. It can make me check what I am saying, go back to a source, question an assumption, or make sure that what I am putting in front of someone is actually useful. I still have some of that now, and I am not sure I would want it to disappear completely.

But the question was never really whether I knew enough about voice. I have been fortunate to spend a lifetime learning about it through singing, teaching, conductors, other singers, extraordinary teachers such as Margaret Harshaw, the writings of Giovanni Battista Lamperti, and performers such as Frank Sinatra, whose understanding of words and phrasing continues to give me things to think about.

The harder question was what to do with all of that information.

n his book 46 Rules of Genius, Marty Neumeier writes, “You can learn anything, but you can’t learn everything.” I think there is something similar in teaching and writing. I may know a great deal about a subject, but I cannot put all of it into one article, one lesson, one rehearsal, or one conversation. At some point I have to decide what is most useful right now.

After 104 weeks, I think I am more comfortable making that choice.

Looking back at the articles with the most views has been interesting because the subjects are quite varied. Some are about the mental side of voice. Others are about hearing yourself objectively, breath, vowels, practice, trust, or the way we listen to another person. What connects many of them for me is that they take something fairly large and bring the attention down to something a person can actually notice.

I keep thinking about the familiar experiment in which people are asked to concentrate on one task so intently that they can miss the gorilla walking through the scene. Attention has a hierarchy. When I am using my voice, there are many things I could think about, and I cannot give all of them equal attention at the same time.

It is remarkably easy to open my mouth and make sound. I can start saying the words before I have really considered what I intend to do with them. Breathing is something I have done all my life, so it is equally easy to assume I do not have to think about it. Yet those are two things I would like to have available to me before the sound begins: What is my intention, and what is my breath doing?

None of this is especially complicated, but there are a lot of things happening when I use my voice, and I cannot think about all of them at the same time. Part of what practice does is make some of those processes familiar enough that I do not have to keep attending to them. Then I can give more attention to my intention and to how what I am saying is actually being heard.

This may be one of the reasons Epictetus has become increasingly useful in these articles and in my own practice. The quotation I put on the back of my Epictetus reflection journal says, “You cannot learn that which you think you already know.” I find that especially relevant to voice because so much of what we do feels familiar. We already know how to breathe. We already know how to speak.

Knowing something well does not mean I am finished with it. I may know a song from memory, but I still have to think about the phrase before I sing it so that it comes from a present thought rather than simply from recall. The same is true when I teach or speak about an idea I have explained many times before. The words may be familiar, but the communication still has to happen now.

For me, the answer has often been repetition. That word sometimes gets treated as though repetition automatically means mindless practice, when it can be exactly the opposite. Repetition is how I make something available when my attention is occupied elsewhere.

I see that in my morning Stoic routine. There are mornings when I am interested and ready to do it, and there are mornings when I think, really, again? After hearing so many variations on the importance of discipline over the years, I found my own way of expressing it: “Discipline prevails when motivation fails.” I do not have to feel particularly inspired for the practice to still have value. I repeat it because the repetition itself keeps certain ideas accessible.

If I repeatedly return to intention and breath in practice, I do not have to start analyzing several different technical ideas when I am actually using my voice. The work I have done beforehand helps me know, without having to think about it, what belongs near the top of the hierarchy.

Perhaps that is one of the things these 104 weeks have taught me.

Two years ago, the amount of information I had about voice could sometimes feel almost like the problem. Where do I begin? What belongs here? What will actually help somebody?

I feel that uncertainty considerably less now. The writing itself has been a form of repetition. I have returned to breath from different directions. I have looked at intention through performance, communication, Stoic philosophy, and the practical experiences that happen in ordinary life. I have gone back to ideas I thought I understood and discovered that there was still another way to look at them.

Maybe the useful part of imposter syndrome is the part that continues to ask, “Have I looked closely enough at this?” Experience gives me another question to put beside it: “What do I already know that can help me decide what deserves my attention now?”

After 104 Weekly Voice Insights, I do not feel the same pressure to come up with something earth-shattering every week. Sometimes an insight is something I have thought about before that becomes useful again because of what I am seeing, hearing, or working on now. Those ideas may bear repeating. In fact, repetition may be part of how they become useful in the first place.

#DevelopingYourAuthenticVoice #WeeklyVoiceInsights104 #TwoYearsOfVoice #IntentionalPractice #StoicWisdom

Weekly Voice Insights #103  The Moments in Between: What I Say and What I Do

The moment before...

As I prepare for another performance of the Foster 200 American Song Jukebox this weekend, I have been going back over the songs and thinking about what happens in the moments between phrases. I have performed this program a couple of times now, so the music and texts are becoming familiar, but I still have to approach the words as though the thought is occurring to me in the moment.

The musical score gives me some help with that because the pauses are already written into it. A rest tells me how much time passes before I sing again, but I still have to register what is happening during that time. I have to take in what I have just sung and allow the next thought to occur before I begin the next phrase. Otherwise, I am simply observing the correct number of beats before making sound again.

The musical score gives me some help because the pauses are already written into it, and of course I have to observe the correct number of beats. At the same time, I have to register what is happening during that pause and know why I begin to sing again when I do. Something has to be going on in the silence so that the next phrase sounds as though it comes from the thought that has continued through it, rather than simply from having reached the end of the rest.

That has made me think about the equivalent moment in speaking. In music, the length of the pause has already been decided for me. In conversation, there is no written rest telling me how long that moment should last; I have some control over how much time I take to register what I have heard before I respond. That brings me back to this week’s quotation from Epictetus:

“First learn the meaning of what you say, and then speak.”
— Discourses 2.23

The word that catches my attention is then. There is an interval between learning and speaking, just as there is an interval between one musical phrase and the next. What happens during that interval?

Original Greek 

• σιγή (sigē): silence, stillness
• λόγος (logos): speech, reasoned expression
• κρίσις (krisis): judgment, discernment
• μέτρον (metron): measure, moderation
• χρῆσις (chrēsis): use, practical application

Silence That Is Doing Something

Sigē gives me a way to think about what happens when I become quiet enough to listen. In that silence, even the act of breathing can help settle the activity of my own thoughts so that I can actually hear what someone else is saying. That pause can give me enough time to hear the other person before I begin deciding what to say.

Learning Before Speaking

Logos—speech or reasoned expression—brought me back to the first part of Epictetus's instruction: learn.

I notice this constantly in my own work. Before I speak about something, send an email, or write one of these articles, I look up names, ideas, facts, and context. Sometimes that takes a few seconds. Sometimes it requires considerably more time. What I know changes what I am able to say.

But knowledge by itself doesn't finish the process. Chrēsis, practical application or use, asks what I do with what I have learned. I can study a process or learn a musical text, but eventually I have to use that knowledge at the moment when it is useful.

Judgment Before the Word

Krisis has been a more difficult word for me because of the negative quality we often attach to “judgment.” Yet judgment can also mean discernment.

Before words come out of my mouth, I am making judgments: Is this accurate? Is this the word I mean? Have I understood what I am responding to? Do I know enough about this to say it?

Metron, measure or moderation, adds another part to that process. In speech, I have to decide how much time I need before responding. Sometimes that may be only a beat; at other times, I may need much longer before I am ready to speak.

Intention to Action

I recently published a reflection journal built around 52 quotations from Epictetus, one for each week of the year. Each week includes the quotation, some of the original Greek, and space to return to the material over seven days. When I use the journal myself, I usually begin with one of the Greek words and see what it brings up for me. I try not to overthink the process. I look at the word, consider what is happening in my life or work at that moment, and see where the connection is.

In that respect, the journal sometimes intersects with another practice I have had for quite a while, which is using a Panda Planner. The planner is organized in three-month sections, and I use it to record what I am planning to do on a particular day, along with the schedule and tasks that go with it. I also use the notes area to keep track of earlier planner pages that I have gone back to review.

There is a slightly serendipitous part to that review. I will sometimes ask ChatGPT to choose a random number for me, and I use that number to decide which page or day I am going to revisit. I may end up looking at a day from September, then one from March, then another from April, sometimes from entirely different three-month planners. Because I am not choosing the pages based on what I remember being there, I do not know in advance what I am going to find.

What has been interesting lately is seeing how often I have actually followed through on what I wrote down. I can look at something I planned months earlier and recognize that I did it, or that something I was working toward then has since happened. Seeing that across several different periods gives me some confidence that the intentions I record are not simply things I write down and forget.

That brought one of the questions in this week’s journal into a different focus for me: Do my actions match what I say I am going to do?

The Epictetus journal does not keep track of those things for me in the same way the Panda Planner does. It gives me a place to encounter an idea and see how it connects with what I am doing now. The planner gives me something I can return to later and compare with what actually happened. Somewhere between the two, I can see both the intention and what became of it.

Turn of the Breath

At the other end of all these longer intervals is a very small physical one: the moment when the inhale becomes the exhale. I’ve been thinking about that transition and about what I can do with it before whatever comes next begins.

That may be where Epictetus’s then becomes physical for me. “First learn the meaning of what you say, and then speak.” The then does not have a prescribed length. It might be the time needed to research something before writing about it, or only the brief turn of the breath before expression. What interests me is recognizing that moment and actually using it.

The quotation itself describes a sequence: first this, and then that. I recognize a similar sequence in the voice: first the intention, then the breath, then the tone, and then the connection. The time between each may be very small, but there is still something happening in those moments in between.

Inner Check-In

• When you are trying to understand something before you communicate it, what process do you use to find what is relevant?
• Where do you keep information you may return to? When the time comes, can you put your fingers on it?
• How does understanding your subject affect your confidence?