The Human Nature of the Singing Voice

After going through a few books in the library I came across the book, ‘The Human Nature of the Singing Voice- Exploring a holistic basis for sound teaching and learning’ by Peter T Harrison. To me the work ‘holistic’ made me jump to the conclusion of a more all natural method, which is something I believe to be a bit controversial and also I regard the word ‘natural’ is overused when training the voice. Therefore this would be something in a different direction to which I have been trained and taught, so immediately I thought this book would be a good source of literature to critic. The Chapter ‘Trial and Error’ was the one in which I was immediately drawn to, and to my surprise the majority of what is written in this chapter I agree with.

Harrison writes, ‘the emotional state of the singer has a direct impact on his ability to vocalise.' (Harrison;2006)

This is something which I strongly connected with as I always used to think of myself as 'Sophie the singer', identifying myself as a singer all the time. So what happens when you loose your voice, due to illness or anything else, i.e. nerves? When I lost my upper register last year for three months, I felt that I had lost apart of myself and my identity. It effected my emotional state and I became a more withdrawn character. After talking to my vocal coach he gave me a new prospective of thinking about myself and my voice as separate elements- that it wasn't me that was unable to sing- it was just my instrument at fault. If a guitarists string breaks or goes out of tune, its purely the instrument at fault and it does not make him any less of a musician, this was the way to which I needed to view the situation.  From this I've learnt that my emotional state did have an effect on my voice, that is why I have learnt to refer to myself and 'the voice' as separate elements, then if anything does go wrong with it, its not me but the instrument 'the voice' and my emotional state therefore has no effect.