Sensing Sound by Nina Sun Eidsheim

Author:Nina Sun Eidsheim
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 2015-10-30T16:00:00+00:00

All Voice: An Action-Based Voice Lesson

Applying a shift in focus from the finished product to the action that produces it (exemplified by Noisy Clothes and Body Music in chapter 3) to the dilemma of vocal epistemology and heuristics described above, we understand that a song or any piece of music is created through the collective musicking— the cooperative participating in sound—of each person and community. We can apply these insights to strategies of vocal instruction and, more broadly, to the ways we conceptualize singing. As I explained in chapter 3, singing is the action that takes place before the sound is materialized. In the words of Catherine Fitzmaurice, music “has no location in the body except when it is in action, sounding.”40 In addition, sound is not an a priori index. In relation to singing and its teaching, we may recall the analytical shift surrounding Jackson Pollock’s work in which emphasis was transferred from the finished painting to the actions that created it. Similarly, vocal instruction’s emphasis could be shifted from the resultant sound to the actions that produce it. And maintaining that sound and singing are singular, unrepeatable instances and articulations, and that we can engage with them only at that level, would preempt all efforts to reproduce a named indexical that has since vanished.

I have taught voice since 1994. Through my intense engagements with the teaching and learning process I not only began to question conventional methods, but also to experiment with alternative frameworks and methods. Needless to say, my theoretical work on voice has influenced my practice, and vice versa. If pedagogy were to cultivate the concept of sound that I articulate in this book—the notion that sounds are actions leading to singular, unrepeatable articulations—what would such pedagogy be like? First, instructions would be action-rather than sound-based. Second, this pedagogical model would create scenarios in which the student is prevented from judging the sonic outcome and from adjusting her voice according to a feeling of success or failure in relation to the outcome.

Developed through weekly interactions with students, and with the help of their feedback, my action-based voice lesson begins by giving the student a series of aerobic physical exercises that do not involve producing vocal sounds—for example, running around, jumping up and down, and so on. I then resize these activities and transpose them to the anaerobic realm, but I work to maintain their general level of energy. So, for example, the activity of moving the arms while extending them away from the body’s trunk is slowed down and moved closer to the body. These exercises are intended to initiate the use of the vocal apparatus (the entire body), and also to guide the student’s concerns away from the voice per se to fully physically engaged activity. When we finally start adding sonic components, it is crucial to prevent the student’s attention from moving from the action to the sound. To this end we work toward three specific goals: (1) building on actions that can also

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