Voice

Sound is naught but broken air: and
every speech that is uttered, aloud or
privily, good or ill, is in substance nothing
but air.
Geoffrey Chaucer (1340–1400)


Currently Reading:
http://assets.booklocker.com/pdfs/3026s.pdf


Tonight I´ll be singing and playing the ukelele in front of a room full of staff and guests for the indoor campfire. Thankfully I´ll be one of between 3 and 5 people singing, and there will be some guitars, so there´s less pressure.

I haven´t sung in public in a performance setting since I dropped out of the Kalamazoo Children´s Choir in fifth grade.

Maybe this is the world´s way of telling me to get over myself and my secret fear of singing in front of people.

There was a need for people to perform since most of the usual ¨band¨ members are out of town this week. I can harmonize. Not particularly well, but I can do it. Apparently none of the other girls on staff feel comfortable harmonizing, so here goes nothing.





Even before this all came up, I´d been thinking about voice especially after a series of conversations with a guest here a few weeks ago. The role of voice in communication, in determining what story is passed down as history, in teaching and correcting, how a person´s voice changes in different languages, in singing, in laughing, in yelling, in whispering, and the role and power of rhetoric in society. (I just began reading The Praise of Folly by Erasmus.) She´s a retired speech language pathologist who also worked teaching English as a Second Language for some time. She left me her copy of A People´s History of the United States by Zinn after I asked her about it and expressed interest. Fascinating woman. Here´s an idea of its content from the back cover:

¨There is an underside to every age about which history does not often speak, because history is written from records left by the privileged.¨ - Howard Zinn



For today I´ll just be focusing on the physical voice. Practice is at 4. Performance is at 7:30. Songs include but are not limited to Wagon Wheel, I´ll Fly Away, Angel from Montgomery, She´ll Be Coming Around the Mountain with segway into You are my Sunshine, and Ghost Riders in the Sky.