363 Days

A voice teacher I knew many years ago once said, "you have about two days per year, when the voice is just soaring, everything feels right and is open, and you just open your mouth and SING. For the other 363 days you have vocal technique." I do love that quote, as I think it does sum up nicely one of the major challenges of being a vocalist. As far as I know, the voice is the only instrument that is synonymous with the human body. There is no separation, no "filter" or other tool that we need to study (although of course it helps tremendously to study, say, piano as a vocalist, but that's fodder for a whole nother blog). Now I don't know about you, but my body is definitely not a machine. It feels different every day, depending on amount of sleep (or lack thereof), the weather, what I ate, my mood, my workout regimen etc. There is the rare occasion when I start to sing and everything simply flows. It's HEAVEN. I don't want THAT to end, and I feel like I can sing forever, which, of course, I can't. So I continue to study vocal technique, to practice (albeit by far not enough!!!) and to prepare myself for every single one of those 363 days, none of them the same, each one of them with it's very own challenge posed to me: "Now, can you sing through THAT?"