Category Archives: voice

The Joy Ratio

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So many tabs… so little time. That’s what my computer browser window looks like. Picture the virtual equivalent of a very messy desk. I have a tendency to keep things open far longer than I need to, often to the point where I can’t even see what’s up there. And even when I try to do a clean sweep, (which I do attempt every few days) usually half the tabs stay open. There’s my theasaurus, my yoga site, my calendar, text message tab, email, weather–things I do use nearly every day. But also there’s articles I plan to read, actions I’m planning to do and/or publicize, shared docs I’m in the middle of working on, organizations I might donate to, events I might attend–a whole slew of things that sometimes stick around for months.

Like the weekend-long singing workshop I hemmed and hawed over since I found out about it in August.

Yes, I should go, I kept telling myself. But I hadn’t done any serious choral singing since my bout with dysphonia a few years ago. And even though I’d recovered most of my singing ability after a year of voice lessons, I still didn’t trust myself to be able to sustain my part in a chorus, or to be able to sing consistently for more than a few minutes.

What if I just start croaking and can’t sing at all? What if I don’t like it? What if my raspy voice brings everyone down? How am I going to be able to sing for a whole weekend when sometimes I can’t even sing for twenty minutes? The questions streamed through my mind.

Still, I didn’t delete the tab. Even after conflicting events would have provided an easy excuse not to go. It was No Kings Day on Saturday. And on Sunday our immigration justice affinity group had been invited to do our short street theater style performance amplifying stories about people in Massachusetts who had been been abducted by ICE as part of a local church service. I just kept being non-committal about all of these options until a few days before the workshop, when I signed up. Just so I wouldn’t talk myself out of it.

Long story short: The workshop was fantastic.

On Friday evening and all day Saturday we learned nine songs. In five different languages. On Sunday we performed them.

Were they perfect? Of course not. But one of the workshop leaders said, Don’t think of any concert as a performance; think of it as a party. 

Photo: Shel Horowitz

And while perfection is always an illusion even when there’s way more time to polish, according to my partner and other acquaintances in the audience–as well as my own discerning ears–the songs we performed were totally pleasing to listen to.

And I was happily surprised how well my voice, buoyed by a large thermos of tea, held up. Even more fun was the challenge of learning parts quickly and the novelty of singing tenor instead of alto for many of the selections. And wonderful to be in a group of strong singers who were absolutely chill about the experience. And with encouraging leaders who said things like, don’t worry if you can’t reach that note, just mouth it and trust that your neighbor can do it.  

I’ve been telling myself for over a year that I want to go “chorus shopping” but I’ll admit I’m picky about singing experiences. Choruses where parts are too easy or where everyone sings in unison tend to bore me after a while, especially when everything is pitched way higher than is comfortable for my new older-age voice. And I’m also realistic about recognizing my singing limitations, so I’ve shied away from harder and more demanding choruses. But this experience was perfect in every way.

I’m so glad I went for it.

Of course, one never knows. It could have turned out not to be as good as it was. I could have hated all the songs, or felt out of my league, or bored, or my voice could have tanked on the first night. So the experience brings up the question in all of us of when we might or might not choose to take a plunge into an unknown outcome. While there’s no clear set of variables to make a decision, I’m thinking about applying what I’ll call a “joy ratio.” If this does turn out the way I want, how much joy will it bring me? I can ask myself. And if the answer is a large amount of joy–I literally felt clouds of stress lifting off me, and (key litmus test) I stopped thinking about all the other things I had to do, then risking the outcome is absolutely worth it.

So, (in the words of Arlo) if you find yourself in a similar situation, you also might want to consider the joy ratio. And if it looks to be large, then take the plunge and go for it.

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Mirror, Mirror on the Wall…

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When I was around 6, I never felt that any of the images I saw in the mirror, twirling around in my powder blue party dress, school bound in my navy blue jumper with the gold buttons, or lounging in my light cotton pants and Danskin turtle-necks was really me. Other children in my class looked like themselves–in and out of the mirror–but I could barely recognize myself as a body with a face and curls and skinny limbs. Who was that apparition that stared back at me? It didn’t look anything like the way I envisioned myself. What did I–whoever I was–really look like? When I ran the “me card” in my mind, there was no face or body. “Me” was a wispy, invisible thing rooted in my brain’s fuzz: airy and intangible. And even after decades of body-grounding practices, that little germ of me is still that flighty, fuzzy thing, nearly impossible to see.

So, for this reason, I’ve always been wary of mirrors, or any item like video or audio recorders, that attempts to cast some aspect of myself back at me. It’s hard for me to watch images of myself in motion or listen to myself speak. When I taught my classes on Public Speaking, I told my students that while recording themselves could be helpful in noting areas they could improve on, it would be better not to record if they didn’t have the stomach for stepping out of their own self-perceptions and seeing themselves as others saw them.

Over the years, I’ve grown more immune to this schism in self-perception. Now, when I look into a mirror, I have an expectation of what I’m going to see, and the resulting reflection doesn’t surprise me, even as my aging body is becoming more angular, my hair slowly more gray. I can laugh when I see interviews of myself using my hands when I talk, and enjoy listening to myself reading poems. While I still don’t like my voice, which seems to be growing grainier and more old-ladyish by the minute, its New Yorker inflections continuing to underly my roots despite 40 years out of the homeland, I can appreciate my expressiveness as well as the echoes of my family legacy–poignant inflections that sound so much like my mother and grandmother.

But last night, I took a big step into the void between self-perception and reality. I recorded myself singing.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I completely lost my ability to sing without croaking a few years ago, and it took a year of lessons before I could get my voice back. This felt like a big investment because didn’t have a strong solo voice that felt worth preserving. But I missed being able to sing in choruses or community gatherings so much, it felt essential to my mental health. One of the most fun things about voice lessons was practicing solo songs, so since then, I try to devote a couple of evenings a week to doing vocal exercises and singing along to Karaoke tracks or accompanying myself on the piano. It’s a blast!

Truth be told, when I think of myself as a singer, I’m kind of like that picture of a cat who looks in the mirror and sees a lion. At least, that’s what the wishy part of me wants to see. Mirror, mirror on the wall, whose the fairest singer of them all? I knew that recording myself might quickly put a pin in my inflated self-perception, but I felt that it was finally time to do what many public speakers do: listen to themselves with minimal self-deprecating judgment, but a clear focus on what they can improve.

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So I turned on my cellphone recorder and hit play, totally prepared to delete the recordings if they were too painful to listen to.

What did I hear? Yes, my grainy, New York, old lady voice. But good breath control and good vibrato. On pitch nearly all the time with just a few flat notes I could work on.

Did I sound like someone I’d want to listen to on Spotify? No. Could I sing competently in a group, or lead a song if I wanted to? Absolutely.

And that’s what I used to tell my public speaking students. You may never speak like Martin Luther King, but that’s not the point. You can get to a place where you feel more competent, more confident, and hopefully begin to like what you’re doing.

Truth: I did delete the recordings after I listened to them. But not because I was ashamed. I think I just wanted to hold onto the illusion of the cat seeing the lion in the mirror. Better than the little girl who couldn’t see herself, even when she was dancing.

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Re-Claiming Voice

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A few years ago, I started to lose my singing voice. It was a long, slow process where first occasionally, and then more and more often, I’d find myself in mid-song and unable to reach the next set of notes, my voice unraveling into some gravelly, raspy shadow of itself.

When the issue first started, I could usually get some semblance of my voice back by drinking some water and singing more softly, but it got to the point where I could barely get through a line without croaking. And while I’ve never been a diva singer or even a karaoke regular, singing has always been extremely important to me. I mourned the loss of my ability to sing as an inevitable consequence of aging, exacerbated by vocal disuse (I’d abandoned weekly singing in various choruses when the pandemic started in 2020) and felt so sad that I’d ever again be able to feel the ecstasy and musical rush I got from singing in harmony with others.

I tried to console myself with reminders to feel grateful that compared to all the aging ailments I could have, this one didn’t significantly threaten my health or functionality, but I couldn’t quite let go of the grief. Mental health is also important, and while it’s not my “art,” the way writing might be, singing is a key piece in my creative and emotional expression toolkit that keeps me balanced and happy.

For more than a year, I didn’t do anything other than complain about my loss. Then, I did something that felt really risky: I took voice lessons. I’d never had a voice lesson in my life, because I never really considered myself a singer. But I thought if I could just take a few lessons, I’d learn to do some exercises that might help restore at least some of my voice, kind of like vocal PT.

Of course, it wasn’t that simple–or that quick–but a year later, I have nearly my entire voice back–including some notes that have always been hard to reach. It’s such a thrill to practice with karaoke sound tracks on YouTube. And last week, for the first time in years, I went to a community sing, and instead of feeling frustrated and shut down, I was euphoric.

In addition to now thinking about re-joining a chorus sometime soon, I’m also thinking about the metaphor of finding voice. We writers talk all the time about the importance of establishing a credible and consistent voice, and how that voice functions to engage a reader and drive a piece forward. But voice does more than that. Writer Meg Rosoff says, voice is “about finding out who you are.” In addition, she makes the following three important points.

  1. You need confidence and self-knowledge to speak in your own Voice.
  2. The only real block to writing truthfully is being unable to access what is in your head and heart.
  3. A distinctive voice will not just help you write well. It will help you do anything at all well. (https://www.megrosoff.co.uk/blog/2011/11/14/how-to-find-a-voice)

Not singing, but one of the first times I publicly used my voice, reading poetry at age 22 at Eric’s Backroom in New York City, Photo by Lew Holzman

I’m thinking about this third point as I consider another aspect of voice: the need to raise our collective voices against injustice. And I hope that this mini-miracle of re-claiming my literal voice will help me believe in the much bigger miracle: that our voices matter and can–and will–make a difference, whether we use them for activism, writing, or singing.

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