about creativity: musing on the muse, sort of a newsletter from corey fischer

I've found that I like having some back-up, some support, something to bounce against when I play around vocally, often in the privacy of my car, at home when I'm alone or with like-minded friends. I've uploaded a 2 minute long audio rhythm track of the sort that I mention in musing # 9.

You can play it right here or download the file and load it on an mp3 player or burn a CD of it. If you're new to this, try picking one "instrument" (hand claps, cymbals, whatever) and listen to it as it repeats. See if you can join it. When you feel that you're in sync with it, in the groove, then just let your voice go. Play with rhythms, play melodically, singing fragments of tunes known or new, improvise words to the rhythm, spoken or sung. Enjoy!

If you're curious about making tracks of your own and are comfortable with computer stuff, drop me a note and I'll point you toward the software and processes I use.

[You can read something about my own years of working with voice on my blog. click/go!]

Working out vocally alone can be scary as hell especially if you’re trying to do something other than conventional singing or speech exercises (how now brown cow…). It helps to go towards it with a certain amount of fierceness – not strain, mind you – and with the support of your most benevolent imaginary witness. Better yet, find a friend who wants to play with their voice and take turns sounding and listening. Trade off guiding each other through these instructions. Remember, in this approach there is no such thing as a bad or wrong or “off” sound any more than a bad pebble or a wrong breeze or an off-key call of a bird. I find it helpful to think of the voice as a living being, an animal or a spirit than can guide me if I stop trying to control it. It’s much easier to do that in a place where you feel safe and supported. That might be anywhere from a class or workshop to your car or bedroom. The sequences that follow were inspired by many different teachers and colleagues over the last 40 years. Embedded in them are ways of working that have been shaped by Kirsten Linklater, Jerzy Grotowski, Marita Gunther of the Roy Hart Theatre and others. The Linklater work came to me via members of the ProVisional Theater, sadly defunct since the early eighties, and the Grotowski work was passed to me by the late Sam Blazer. I make no claims to any sort of purity of lineage, having simply kept on doing what felt right and adding new elements and insights whenever and wherever I could.

1. Lie down on a firm surface like a yoga mat on the floor and take some time to do nothing. Let your body become heavy and soft, as if it might melt into the floor. Remember that under the floor, it’s the earth that is supporting you. To strengthen your own sense of safety, it helps to visualize a place you know, for a few minutes, where you’ve experienced great peace and well-being.

2. After two to five minutes, allow the memory of your “safe place” to move to the background and start paying attention to your breathing. How do you know that you are breathing? In what part of your body do you fee the movement of breath?. After you are easily able to track the movements of your breath wherever they occur, start allowing your out-breaths to empty your body of any residual tension, physically and emotionally. Exhale your worries and your muscle tightness. Let the in-breath take care of itself. It’s natural to pause between out and in breaths. Don’t try to control the length of your breath. You’ve been breathing all your life. Your body is a master at this. Just let the in-breath fill you. See if you can imagine that you are being breathed rather than doing anything to pull in the air. Let it fill you and then, as you exhale, let it carry away whatever needs to be carried away.

3. Introduce a small bit of vocal sound on each out-breath. Physiologically this simply means engaging the vocal cords with your outgoing breath so they vibrate. Just think of it as touching your voice, gently, with your breath, as if waking it. I sometimes imagine that each small sound is a pebble being dropped into a deep well that is located in my abdomen and pelvis. After exploring this and similar practices for some time, there came a moment of great excitement when I discovered that I could feel vibrations in my pelvic bones, my legs, feet and hands. In my blog, I relate Grotowski’s notion of resonators existing throughout the body, not only in the head and chest. As you continue to sound, let it become a series of full out yawning sounds Aaaaaaahhhhhhh. You may start yawning for real. Wonderful. Yawning opens the throat. Now let your voice slide up and down like a roller-coaster, using all the vowels Aaaayeeeeeeohwahhhhhhoooooooayyyy and so on.

4. Purse your lips and make a sound like mmmmm without opening your lips. Notice where you feel the sound. Can you feel your throat opening and your soft palate lifting as you project your pursed lips forward? Mmmm a few more times on different pitches. Now start the mmmm but about halfway through your outbreath, open your mouth into an Ahhhh sound, an open full sound. An image: the mmmm is a gathering of energy as the sound vibrates in your mouth, throat and face and forehead and the Ahhhh is the release of those built of vibrations, a fountain of sound splashing against the ceiling above you. (Important to have your eyes open so their energy supports your vocal energy)

5. Let silence return. Enjoy it and see if the sounding you’ve just done has left any traces of its passage in your body/awareness. Also let your awareness sweep through your body and see if you can still feel any places of holding on, tension or tightness. Gently stretch in any way that can help you relax even more. Roll on to one side, bring your knees close to your chest in a kind of fetal position and then roll onto your hands and knees and then to a comfortable sitting position.

6.Take a moment to check in with yourself and find a phrase, in spoken English (or, any other language if English is not your first language) that captures something of how you feel right now. “I can feel my voice. From the inside. It’s very strange, but also exciting.” or “I’m irritated that my son broke his new x-box” or “I’m still back there in that place I remembered.” Make sure that the phrase isn’t too long to remember, or choose one part of it so you’re able to repeat it without any effort.

7. Lying back down, take a moment to center on your breathing again and then whisper your phrase a few times. Keep your eyes open. Focus on a particular spot on the ceiling and direct your phrase to it. Now speak the phrase very slowly so you can feel every sound that makes up each word it in your mouth, tongue, lips, teeth. The smallest unit of verbal sound is called a phoneme. In the word “feel” the phonemes are fffff, eee, and llll (of course the consonants need at least a hint of a vowel attached or they won’t be audible). Now slow things down even more and voice your phrase repeating each phoneme in as many different ways as you can. Be sure to work at a volume sufficient to be heard by yourself or your partner, to feel the sounds in your body. Take an imaginative leap and see if you can stretch the phoneme so that the sound you produce can communicate an aspect of the meaning of the whole phrase. This might mean using the llllll sound in the first example to connect with a feeling of strangeness or the I (eye, ay) sound in the second one to express frustration. In this way, the part, tiny as it is, becomes an emblem of the whole. At the same time, proceeding this way through the phrase will start you off on a process of mapping the landscape of your voice. Take it slowly, exhausting each phoneme before going on to the next. If you get to the end but feel that you were rushing, go back through any of the phonemes you want to.

There’s a preparatory step to this one and it’s very simple. Find a recent piece of your own writing. It really doesn’t matter whether it’s a grocery list or a poem, a letter or the first paragraph of a memoir. If nothing seems to be at hand, just do a five minute free-write. I shared some of Natalie Goldberg’s “timed-writing” exercises earlier this year and you can click here to find them.

Now. let’s see what happens when we mess with the boundary between talking and singing. What’s the difference between these two ways of using our voices? When we talk we don’t let our voices move as much as when we sing¹ When we sing, we often extend a syllable for a much longer time than when we speak. That’s enough to play with right there.

Take your writing sample and first, read it aloud “normally.” Read it aloud again, but this time, extend the sounds of as many words as you can. It will take much longer to get through it this time. For the third read-aloud, in addition to extending and lengthening the sounds of syllables and words, try letting the pitch of your voice move. Not with every single word necessarily – you can stay on the same note for two or four words before moving to a higher or a lower note. Hear is where is can get interesting. Notice what sort of self-talk happens as you move your voice with more freedom, as you really support your voice with your breath. Can you put aside notions of how you’re supposed to sound when you’re singing? Keep going. If you come to the end of the writing, start over. Anywhere. Repeat a word or a phrase a few times. Can you sense any relationship between the sensations of giving voice like this and the meaning of the words? Maybe new meanings that you hadn’t thought about while you were writing are appearing through the sounds. Stay with your voicing of the text a little bit past your first impulse to stop.

This exploration can yield very different sorts of discoveries depending on your relationship to your voice, to speaking and singing. If you’re someone who sings all the time, it’s a chance to let go of the structure of songs or practice scales. If you sing rarely, perhaps this will be a back door entry to a new landscape your voice can inhabit. In any case, I do hope that you find it fun – serious fun – which is, after all the most important part of creativity.

You can easily continue this exploration (or begin it even) with a partner. Start by listening to each other, then try having a conversation in which you gradually erase the border between speaking and singing – in dialogue with each other. At some point near the start, it might sound like “bad” opera recitative, but you’ll soon get past that if you don’t resist it in the first place. Enjoy.

¹ This doesn’t apply to languages like Mandarin that derive meaning from pitch as much as from the shape of a word and that’s one of the reasons that language and others that use pitch are thought of as “sing-song”