take your cathedral with you

If you are like me, and wandered through a church or cathedral, you may have just hummed a little to see what the acoustics were like in different corners and nooks, just to see!

I often tell singers who work with me that they need to take their cathedral with them. What do I mean?

Your body is your cathedral. It is the place your voice resides and finds its acoustic values. If you get curious to discover how your breath feels, where the voice can vibrate - in every nook and cranny - and what it feels like sensationally - and then how the pulley system of physical energy and support keep it all buoyant, you never have to worry about the room you are singing in.

Some rooms are dry and dead, some rooms are live and have flexibility, some rooms are too live and echo-y.

What about YOUR rooms? Have you explored enough and do you stay curious to continue to explore in order to discover what is possible in that body with that voice?

Resonance, just like vibration itself, is in motion. We can geek out and find out Hz and all that, but suffice it to say that EVERYTHING vibrates. Everything and every body has resonance and vibration.

As singers and actors, we intensify that resonance and vibration. If the body is resonating, just by BEING, when the breath and vibration begin to resonate within it and bounce around, that intensity builds! The body shapes the sound. The sound projects because the body has shaped it fully.

The discovery of resonance and power and intensity and dynamic is within the body - within your cathedral - not in the outer room you are singing in.

Your ear can lie to you. Trying to listen is impossible in order to create a consistency of vibratory effect. This is why I always ask a singer. “what did that FEEL like?”. If we can describe and activate the physical sensation fully, we are more successful in replicating it over and over. This allows us to trust our own bodies. Notice I didn’t say our ears. This is why many singers are able to “find the pitch” in their bodies - not because they have perfect pitch, but because they know how a certain pitch FEELS physically.

When we continue to discover the sensation of our voice and our breath, we can replicate that in any exterior room - from a dry, dead audition space to a recording studio to a live recital hall with a sweet spot to a musty theatre!

Of course the dry, dead space will not feel as easy as the live space - BUT if we trust what we feel, we will reproduce what we know to be true and balanced and free in our bodies. The people in the room will receive that intensity and vibration even if it’s not coming back to us.

So when you hear “sing to the back of the house” or “sing for the room you are in” - remember:

You sing to fill YOUR cathedral. Once that cathedral is full, it will be heard and felt.

Take your cathedral with you. Trust it. Trust the sensation of being in it. Recognize it. Claim it. There is only one you and only one cathedral that belongs to you. The voice and the body belong together. You are creating sympatico and structure and balance and nuance every time you sing.

Explore all the rooms and walls and floors and nooks and crannies. Hum into them so they let you know what they do and feel it all!

with fondness & fierceness,